Bitcoin Forum

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/10/01/el-salvador-just-started-mining-bitcoin-with-volcanoes-for-the-first-time-ever-and-theyve-already-made-269.html

This I think is the beginning of the fall of bitcoin profitability in mining.  Governments notoriously participate in activities that are ultimately not profitable.  With all the power they need and no real need to be profitable, this might drive difficulty too high.  But also hardware sellers should benefit as hardware prices should rise too.

Thoughts?

Some are starting, some are stopping... I think we are all limited by the same thing : ASICS are going to be more and more difficult to find and buy. So IMO, if they stay out of production, difficulty won't be > 45 T

El Salvador is doing nothing new with it's Bitcoin mining, it already gets 23% of it's power from geothermal sources so the 'volcano' power isn't going to make much difference.

As for the network hash rate 'staying' at  46 Exxahash: dream on. It'll be over 200 by January once the 5nm mining rigs come online.

He has mined 400$ in two days and from the glimpse at the installed gear those are S9s, so he has around 50-60 miners maximum, if he had more he would have come with far more tweets and screenshots and quoting the hashrate but it's clear he has no intention of doing that.
Taking into account what the director of the company says, quoting the MW ar the Berlin powerplant at 100$ there is no way for mining to become unprofitable because of this alone, furthermore, I'm willing to bet his entire mining operations won't reach even 1% of the hashrate 6 months from now on.


He said 45T, that's difficulty and in hashrate it would be over 300exa, also, TMSC has canceled the orders for the wafers in August.

Yeah, sorry for the mixup. Shouldn't post when drunk.

As for TSMC cancelling orders, see this :

https://wccftech.com/tsmc-faces-order-cutback-from-major-5nm-and-7nm-customers-report/.

I'm not privvy to TSMC'c policies but if they did cancel 5nm orders then it doesn't say a lot for their customer service. The chip shortage won't last forever, and many companies have long memories.

The only company that TSMC has canceled orders from is Huawei and that is due to Huawei being a (Chinese) state run company. EUV technology developed by American and European companies is required for the 7, 5, and lower nodes. Due to Huawei's involvement with the Chinese military they are being shut out from those nodes. The article you link states that it is TSMC's customers Apple and MediaTek cancelled/scaled back their orders - not the other way around.

Bit of confusion here. Stompix said that TSMC had cancelled orders for 5nm mining chips in August.

I posted the article that reported TSMC customers cancelling or preparing to cancel existing orders for 5 and 7nm. There's nothing I could find on the web about TSMC cancelling customer orders. I've worked a good portion of my life in the semiconductor industry, and the only way I've seen a manufacturer cancel orders is if :

a) The customer owes a lot of money or is about to go under

b) Their factory suffers a major fire

c) A single sourced supplier stops manufacturing a key process element or machine spares

d) The customer design has breached a third party's patent/IP

e) The customer design has breached US/EU technology export rules

Perhaps there are other circumstances at work here?

As I said above, TSMC canceling orders from Huawei is due to Western governments blocking usage of the cutting-edge nodes for Huawei chips. So, the reason is 'e' https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/tsmc-shrugsoff-huawei-ban-andshowswhos-king/2020/07/16/87078ade-c74a-11ea-a825-8722004e4150_story.html

Nothing to do with Huawei, it is something between TSMC and Bitmain the issue has been long in the press, don't know what the cause is, an article quotes Bitmain complaining about  rise in price (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/bitmain-confirms-price-hikes-at-tsmc) for chips but they did cancel one of the batches (https://techtaiwan.com/20210628/bitcoin-mining-rig-bitmain-tsmc/). Of course, that doesn't mean they have done so with all but still, they will not make gear at the pace and price previously thought.

LE: Fixed the links.

That link dinna work. This does https://forkast.news/headlines/crypto-mining-rig-giant-bitmain-confirms-tsmc-chip-price-jump/ but all it says is that yes, TSMC has raised their prices by 20% - and not just for Bitmain. And still nothing about TSMC cancelling of any BM orders although considering BM still has S19's in stock, I can certainly see BM reducing their order for new chips.

Bitmain could get rid of all of their chip stocks tomorrow if they reduced the price of their kit (and still make a killing).

The second one is stating that:

The quote  is repeated through multiple newspapers, most of them focused on Asia and Taiwan 1 (https://min.news/en/economy/3e5f94f04ac68014d913345c01ce652b.html) , 2 (https://www.asiantechpress.com/tsmc-to-lost-300-million-due-to-bitcoin-mining-ban.html) so something happened.

Maybe I have phrased this wrong as it probably implied TSMC cutting ties with Bitmain while maybe simply Bitmain didn't ant that many chips but at least we trust the reports a 20k wafers order is gone. Also, totally possible that they have too many on stock and not enough orders, so it might have nothing to do with either price capacity or anything else but in the end, the result is fewer miners produced, putting a 300exa further and further away.

Sure It can become unprofitable, well at least a huuuuuge roi drag.  I mean if governments are willing to spend $600 on a hammer what's stopping from paying $10k for an s9.  If governments who are not bottom line driven get into the game then they can raise the price of all existing and new hardware (more demand than supply) and price out home miners and even large pools.  This honestly scares me

Seriously gone off topic here and drifted smack into the realm of my Diff speculation thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5307087.msg58117589#msg58117589). Care to continue there?

Good idea.

The geothermal energy should have been used elsewhere like for homes.

Bitcoin shouldn't monopolize energy sources that could be used elsewhere.

Also, what would happen if there is a recession? The government can't really increase the supply of Bitcoin above 21 million, making a spending plan impossible.

What about the fact that there are whales who own more bitcoin than the government, what would happen if the whales dump it?

And this is assuming that El Salvador is actually using bona fide Bitcoin rather than a Chivo token that happens to be backed.

Anything that is profit worthy will steal those energy sources.  Imagine they really start mining like crazy.  Probably a long shot since they would probably just want to buy and hold bitcoin instead of mining the decreasing rewards.  I don't know I just never imagined a government itself would step into the mining realm.  They won't be the last one to do it to.

LOL 13 post count posts.
You should read your previous posts, you seem to have written the opposite things in some of them :)

I am glad that mining is in law in Salvador
so mining in this country will be easy :P

I don't get this comment.  What about mining is a law in El Salvador, and how would that make it easier.  I was only commenting that governed entities mining can do so at a loss and continue essentially weeding out the general public.  Is there a law about inning in ES?

Its not the only government doing it but other countries have been more discreet. The news here is them being open about it.
And yes, they are buying and holding, but a little mining won't hurt either.

President Bukele shared on Twitter a video of containers containing bitcoin mining equipment being installed at an energy facility in the woods.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele announced that the country has successfully mined a small part of the virtual currency bitcoin using energy from a volcano.
A completely renewable, untapped source of energy has been put to work strictly for the sake of bitcoin. Bitcoin is the biggest accelerator for renewable energy development in history
The breakthrough comes just weeks after El Salvador became the first country to declare bitcoin as legal tender.

Do we know how many EH they've deployed? I think theres already such a bottle neck on hash that it's going to take a hardware acquisition miracle for these small countries to actually push up the difficulty