Bitcoin Forum

There are so many coin projects right now that it seems certain a great deal of these coins will not last or be successful.  As many of these coins require POW... what will happen when so many coins go dead?  Resources used, money spent on electricity and gear will all be for naught.  Is this the 'bubble' people refer to?  I think it's very likely to be.  It happens all the time in economics.  Anytime there is a glut of resources disproportionately allocated the bubble inevitably collapses.

We have already had tastes of this.  in 2014 people pretty much turned off many cards as the air was let out of crypto after Mt Gox.  Some people sourced highly efficient GPUs like the Nvidia 750Gtx.  Many bitcoin ASICS shutdown.  rinse and repeat... we get the same thing in 2018 after a peak in 2017 and a mad dash to acquire 2x priced GPUs old/new... anything goes/went.  And just as fast the tables have turned and we see 1080ti's trading hands int the 350-Euro range. 

There are beacons of hope from places like Mineority and other enthusiastic GPU miners... could keep the hope alive too.

I've been a proponent and predictor for vast improvements to GPU mining.  For the most part, I still see this happening.  But I also see the bubble...  I think there will be a realization that many of the efforts put towards POW will be lost on dead coins. 

I don't know if this is the crypto bubble people talk about, but I can tell you that I know the feeling. I have had my fair share of GPU mining that was wasted for nothing. I don't regret the electricity costs, which were not that substantial, nor do I regret the gear, because I already had it. What I regret the most is the time spent mining these shitcoins, the time that could have been spent much better. I also think we haven't yet seen the real bubble bursting.

The average life span of a crypto currency is 1.5y so, a lot of them will fail during this time period.

The "magic" is to try to weed though the clutter and select the ones that will have higher chances of survival otherwise, like you said, the resources available to you will be wasted.

I personally don't regret the time & resources I spent mining altcoins even if they weren't successful in the end because that contributed to improving my knowledge in this field.

bubble has nothing to do with PoW and mining though. bubble is all about the price. we say something is in a bubble when the price of it is higher than its intrinsic value. for example bitcoin was in a bubble when it was worth $20k so it needed to come down.
for nearly all the altcoins since they have no real value apart from their speculative value, they are all considered in bubbles. some of them in bigger bubbles since they are completely useless. as price of them drop their mining doesn't have to die, people will still mine them because of the way mining and difficulty works. ONLY a part of the miners will leave and the rest will remain. this part may be the majority since most people are mining pumping altcoins not the other way around.

Yep, totally agree on many points.  "the bubble" can include many factors just as the housing collapse could be attributed to various historical legislation, risky lending, crooked bankers/investors/gamblers...etc. 

Time lost is the big one and the reason due diligence for research is so important.  But even when we do our own research, there is no guarantee that the bright flame of seemingly energetic devs won't burn out. 

Regarding "bubble", I agree price is important but also see this concept as being more complicated and involving a huge emotional component across the community rather the community be miners, developers, coders, equipment vendors, VPS outlets, pool operators, exchange ops... the list goes on.  I don't see bitcoin coming down from $20K as the exposure of a bubble.  I'm used to the dot-com bubble or the realestate bubble which caused massive calamity by serisously disrupting retirement savings.  Sure there were probably a few people who bet the farm on bitcoin at $20K... hopefully they can hold on until it goes back to those levels because it will, in my opinion... but I don't see it on the same scale as the dot-com or realestate bubble. 

I was in a particularly pensive and frustrated mood when I made the OP above as I'm sure a lot of people are in this ongoing churning and boredom of recent crypto market price/volume.  My opinion is we witnessed some mini-bubbles in terms of crypto as a whole.  Like, there hasn't been a huge crypto bubble burst and we will definitely know when it happens again.  In my opinion it already happened around 2014 after Mt Gox, lack of any good coin projects, and the resulting several-year decline of consistent POW profit.

I think the average life span is an interesting statement.  A lot of the coins in my consciousness have been around for nearly 5 or more years but I constantly see coins in coinmarketcap that I've never even heard of.  

Totally agree about the "magic".  It really is like magic when you finally realize a coin you have been interested in indeed turns out to be relevant and successful.  My aim when choosing a coin is to answer if what they are doing is something that I would pay money for or if it is relevant for business operations.  Crypto is creating a lot of business value and there are many "holes to be filled" now that various things like VPS hosting are more important than ever.  Now, think about this... not just NVidia (stock)... not just Bitmain (IPO coming) or Xilnix (stock)... it's not just these guys getting more business, profit, and of course likely higher stock prices... it is also the infrastructure that goes into data centers.  Yes, more profit for the Cisco's, Palo Alto's, HP, Dell, etc etc etc.    OH... well... uhh... this also sounds like the perfect build up of that bubble too!  Because once all these resources go into it... there will be many projects that simply fizzle out.  Will it be enough of a bubble to be memorable?  Do people still recall the dot-com bubble?  Was the dot-com bubble really all that important since we have moved on?  Yes, of course to those people who lost retirement savings.

Yes, the learning experience here is truly exciting.  I find myself learning things from the architecture of CPU/GPU/MOBO to some basic Linux commands, VBS, and some other stuff and of course I realize I really want to learn something better like a programming language or 6.. lol right... in my dreams

For the moment PoW, ASIC or GPU driven, has been proven to be quite safe, yet also quite expensive to maintain. Until PoS is more used and tested, we should rely on it.

People waste electricity and resources everyday by huge amounts worldwide, i don't think that is the biggest issue.

I also don't think that it is a "bubble", at least with the main ones. It is a matter of knowing how to choose and of course, the more options outside the more confused people gets. This should make things more interesting.

Lost of GPU mining won't happen so soon, not until some other technology appears that replace it.

I think at the moment pow mining for even the solid coins like btc and eth is also on the decline due to low prices of these coins, mining has not been profitable at the moment, i hope it will change and prices will soar soon and investors will start seding profit again.

More than a waste of time has been a way to learn through trial/error. Knowing that a shitcoin not only it don´t shows utility for its ecosystem and that its success only depends on inflated expectations and marketing. they also present an absolute lack of security in their protocols and, if it does not offer security, it presents an important disadvantage in other currencies.

Even thought they are still listed on exchanges or coinmarketcap, that doesn't mean the project is still active.

Take a look at DIMECOIN: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dimecoin/ this project was started in 2013 (so about 4.5y old), is still listed on exchanges and has some low volumes per day, but the announcement thread was abandoned: [ANN] [DIME] Dimecoin | Many Coins | Step Reward | CPU mining (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=382164.0) by the owners and the last commit on the project was on Dec 31st, 2013: https://github.com/dimecoinproject/dimecoin/commits/master

It's clear that this coin has been dead for a lot of time now, probably it has died sooner than the 1.5y average. What still amazes me is that it's still being traded, even though the volumes are extremely low.