Bitcoin Forum

What would happen with bitcoin, if (i'm talking in a SiFi way) the humans find a way to use free energy or can earn unlimited energy with a new way.
I know it's unreal, but im just interested in what would happen with a cryptonetwork like bitcoin, if miners can run without any costs.

 :)

 Bitcoin mining companies would increase the price of their miners proportionally to make ROI take an infinite amount of time plus 1 year and extreme global warming would ensue.  Oh, until the apocalypse, the rest of the world's standard of living would improve immensely due to cheaper, more plentiful food and an abundance of fresh water so they would use their disposable income to buy rather than mine Bitcoin.  Not the Bitcoin miners though, they're die-hards!  Their standard of living declines as their homes become a lot warmer and a tad noisier and their lives get a whole lot busier as they strive to keep up with Bitcoin difficulty increases by installing more and more Bitcoin mining devices.

 Final answer.

Those who are renting a place with electricity included in rent already effectively have "free" electricity, albeit definitely not unlimited. (Truly unlimited is physically impossible.) Even then, while it definitely shifts things in favor of mining using cheap, old hardware, altcoin mining looks even more attractive.

According to the 1st law of thermodynamics, all energy is finite. Therefore we will NEVER have unlimited energy.
But hypothetically speaking, there would be catastrophic impacts everywhere, Bitcoin would be the last thing to think about.

If energy were free difficulty would almost exponentially increase as long as miners are cranked out fast enough. In that sort of world we could see difficulty doubling in less than a week. However this is incredibly improbable and practically impossible; you can't just get infinite amounts of energy for nothing.

Putting aside how terrible everything in the world would be considering that most of our energy comes from non-renewable sources, mining would continue to be almost equally profitable to now.

The difficulty naturally adjusts to make mining barely profitable - if it's unprofitable, the number of miners decreases and the difficulty adjusts to make it profitable again.  Therefore, if electricity were free, far more miners and far more computing power would be dedicated to the network for essentially no reason and it would be a giant vacuum for machinery all over the world (as it already is, simply because of how limitless the current PoW system is), which would eventually even out and only rise along with Moore's Law.

In a hypothetical (and impossible) world where electricity is free and unlimited everywhere, there would be no incentive to sell miners since they would always be making profit. The supply of used, cheap miners would then be virtually non existent and just getting into the game ends up being a big investment. The hashrate ends up being mostly owned by a few rich investors, not a very good outcome.

In a slightly more realistic world where electricity is free everywhere (but not unlimited), nobody would sell older miners until the limits are reached and they are forced to remove the least efficient ones in order to free up capacity for new miners. The supply of used miners would be scarce and the demand very high, again keeping most of the hashrate with the rich investors, just a little more spread out.

And in the real world we actually have now, the mix of areas with electricity costs ranging from relatively high to "free" makes for a good "trickle down" market for miners. Maybe it's a good thing new miners are noisy and expensive so those with free electricity don't kill the profits of those who don't?

Since it is universal truth that we can't​ generate free energy .
So nothing will happen as you are thinking .
second thing , suppose it became truth , then everyone will invest to buy miners and will start Mining without any problem , so in that case a problem arise against the value of the bitcoin , the value of the bitcoin will get down , Because after the numbers of the miners enter in mining business, the mining will be more ( supply more than what we have the demand) .
So it is more better for us that we need to give lot of electricity to the miners .
but here it it will happen then we will not face problem of confirmation ;)

If energy did not cost anything anymore I would stop mining with Antminers which do dissipate a lot of heat and noise power. I would go with different mining boards computers with 3-4 graphics card per computer. Noise and heat would be less than an Antminer and I would be making profit although a little bit less than an Antminer.

I live in a cold county so I can add Antminers too and keep them in the basement, no heat and noise would bother me this way. In other words if we had free energy is the best situation for all miners, die hard ones or not.

No, as I pointed out there would still be a limited supply of Bitcoin to mine so the difficulty would even out - since miners still break, there would be an incentive to buy them as they would have to mine more Bitcoin than the amount of money that they cost and even if they did they would require maintenance so companies would still sell them, just like how right now companies sell them and people who buy them make profit.

It's hard enough to get a decent price on a miner that is unprofitable for most people simply because of the less than 1% (just guessing) who are able to make a profit with them. Just imagine if the potential demand was 100X more...

in that scenario, if the energy was still limited, then bitcoin mining would not be far more fierce because the problem about the limited energy source. however, if we had it unlimited, then the blockchain would get more competitors in it depending the source supply for creating ASICs. if the mining would no longer cost anything, as well, would discourage people to create power efficient processors, which would not be good.

Let's forget that at that point we would become something close to gods by ignoring the laws of the universe...case in which we won't give a damn about mining or bitcoin or earth itself.

Even in that case there would still be a lot of costs. Big mining farms require personal, space, and real investment.
 It would be a chance for hobby mining to put a real dent in their business.



No, the law refers to a closed or isolated system , the universe itself is not bound by this rule.

There were countries that offered free energy to its citizens. If I remember correctly Iraq used to do it before the US took over. Who knows, maybe it would be a miners haven today if the invasion didn't happen.
If energy were freely available, the market would regulate itself. The cost of mining would go down and with it the price of Bitcoin. We'd have more people mining, more computing power supporting the network. It's not difficult to imagine how it would work out.

i think maybe its a good news for miner because they can run their hardware miners for free and with unlimited hardware as long as they can buy the hardware. they don't have to thinking to pay the fee so they can still mining and collect the coins. i think this will make difficulty of the coins will be increase and we need more hashrate to collect big amount of the coins.

what is good news for miners?
Where talking about "if" , not that is happening anywhere on this planet.



There is no such thing as free. Is just that somebody else is paying for it.
And in most cases it's a small amount , not enough to power even a s9.

not much because chinese already have nearly free electricity with a cost of 0.05 or lower even 0.03, having zero won't cut roi much, would just allow for more room to add more antminers s9 to stay competitive

also peopel tend to forget that consumption is not related to electricity alone, when you consume more you spend more in cooling and psu, they need to find a way to make more efficient miners not just for electricity cost

There would be no electricity cost to calculate but there would still be a production cost on the units so the price would be set to either a fixed rate based on the supply of miners available and supply or cap which then in reverse determines supply. Since companies may not be able to produce enough each unit available would get a premium added to estimated future revenues.

definitely many people both professional and amateur bitcoinist will go into mining and by so doing bitcoin mining will be more than demands for it and this invariably affect bitcoin price. Demands is what create pump in asset price. Bitcoin is increasing in price today because mining is difficult because of energy and if energy became free then bitcoin will full everyone wallet.

Are you talking about electricity(energy)?. Energy is always 'free'. But development and infrastructure cost make us to pay. But nothing is impossible, once you can think about something, must be a way to make it done. We don't have plane until early 1900. We don't have touch screen 1-2 decade ago.IMHO If no power usage for mining. That will be a good news for miner and maybe a revolution for cryptoworld.