At a standard electricity rate of $0.12 per kWh, mining one Bitcoin costs $6100.
That said, the recent drop in market prices is cause for concern. Lower Bitcoin prices make it less profitable to mine. Lower profitability results in less miners and the miners that remain are typically large-scale operations that can keep costs down.
I'm not too concerned. Hash rate is responding to the price decrease in a pretty orderly fashion. On the last adjustment, difficulty dropped 7.39%. On the next adjustment, difficulty is slated to drop another 7.60% so far. If price keeps dropping, it'll keep getting cheaper to mine. It's funny how these articles always talk about profitability like it's based on a static price level. |
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What does this convey for money laundering, ICOs or anything where bitcoin and other cryptocoins are used illegally as defined by the government? Does this also imply that securities laws on ICOs are unenforceable? What are the regulators pursuing if the pursued did not issue or own anything that can be legally defined as real property? We don't know if their legal analysis is correct. The authors also claim the analysis likely applies in jurisdictions other than England and Wales but they aren't actually sure. We should probably take this with a grain of salt. I'm not very familiar with legal matters outside the US. But in the US, federal judges have already ruled that Bitcoin is money, and I don't think that's been challenged. Under US securities laws, I'm not sure that a security needs to be tangible property, so this analysis may not apply at all. Even if the law doesn't assert that digital tokens can be possessed, whether ICO tokens are issued or whether they're securities is another question. The US courts and the SEC, IRS and CFTC all seem to believe cryptocurrencies fall under their jurisdiction.  |
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BitPay is an absolute disgrace to this ecosystem. Instead of making it easier to use Bitcoin for average joes, they made it a whole lot more complicated. They also require an additional fee if you want to use their service to pay with Bitcoin, which is ridiculous. They can easily avoid the generally higher legacy fees by going full Segwit, but that's not what sugar daddies Roger and Jihan are interested in. Shame on them.
I don't take anything that these muppets say seriously. Bye bye BitPay, welcome any service adopting Segwit and LN.
I'd be happy to see other services take over, but unfortunately I rarely see merchants using anyone but Bitpay. I bought from two smaller sites who used Coingate or Coinpayments this year, but Bitpay mostly has the market locked down. On top of charging a "network fee" for BTC at next-block rates, they also started discouraging RBF. Instead of the normal "payment confirming" page, invoices paid with RBF now forward to a page that warns of delay, suggests you stop using RBF and doesn't automatically update once paid. Bitpay is so annoying with their passive aggressive behavior... |
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Wright may have claimed that he was Satoshi but both he and Ver are disruptive sources as far as Bitcoin is concerned.
They are both attention seekers
So the pertinent question becomes: Why are we giving them both so much attention? And I don't just mean this thread, but countless others as well. Based on nothing more than the fact that we've heard their names mentioned in the media. What is it that leads us to keep talking about these two people? Why does everyone naturally assume that they're even worth talking about? Because the recent crash coincided with the BCH fork, and Wright's claims about selling BTC to fund his hash rate war. People are always looking for an explanation for big price moves. Instead of just accepting that a bunch of coins were dumped, they need to find something -- or someone -- to attribute it to. Timing the selloffs right while piggybacking on the hash rate war narrative probably helped to encourage more panic. Now lots of market participants are thinking like this: He talked the talk, now he is walking the walk. With paper thin orderbooks a whale like him could very well trigger a crash like that (he says that too btw.)
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"cryptocurrency will end very badly" Maybe the oracle was right all along. Guess a guy worth 88 billion knows what he is talking about.
Is it already over? I've been through this before -- back in 2014 or so. Almost everyone agreed that the Bitcoin bubbled had popped forever and it was destined to be nothing more than a niche currency for geeks. Fast forward to now, the price is 20x higher. From a long term perspective, Bitcoin continues to grow in adoption and legitimacy by virtually all metrics. Buffet may end up being right, but we're a long ways off from proving it. |
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But the one thing I DON'T understand is: Why it is a problem that there are less mining power. Blockchain difficulty will adjust itself and it will work just as efficiently with smaller hashrate, a new block will still be found once every 10 minutes on average. The current headlines make it sound like the whole blockchain will stop working if hashrate will decrease. As if it would become impossible to handle the current amount of transactions with less miners  It's not really a problem at all. The protocol adjusts itself to market conditions. If unprofitable miners are forced to shut down because of low prices, difficulty will just adjust downward and the network will run normally. It's not an issue for users. A lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea of hash rate decline. I think that's just because it's been trending upwards for so long. The only real danger is if the vast majority of mining power is shut down at once -- rendering the network unable to adjust difficulty. That's really unlikely, but theoretically possible. |
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One of my recent clients is a Blending service for Bitcoin. I've been wondering at the role of blenders and why Satoshi did not make Bitcoin completely anonymous like Monero or Zcash or maybe that was his plan as the project evolved. Perhaps the developers he handed over to did not realize that an anomymous Bitcoin would have been closer to cash the way a premier crypto that should replace fiat should be. Granted, this will favour criminals in a way (the way they gravitate towards Monero) but it would have made Bitcoin the perfect instrument for value transfer.
One reason might be that Bitcoin's primary intent wasn't privacy -- it was trustlessness. There is something intuitively attractive about a completely transparent and predictable supply with regard to money. Satoshi also may not have known how to design or code an anonymous protocol like Monero. |
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It seems we all know that Satoshi nakamoto left the bitcointalk like forever. What if satoshi nakamoto is here in bitcointalk forum until now but in different account and watching the forum as time goes by?
What would you do?
What do you think?
My answer is i'll ask satoshi nakamoto for improvements if there are needed to improve about bitcoin or bitcoin related.
What do you guys think?
Satoshi's contribution was more about the original design than anything else like code, politics, etc. I think Bitcoin outgrew him a long time ago. It's better that he's gone -- we don't have authority figures in Bitcoin like we do in Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin or EOS with Daniel Larimer. I think Bitcoin was developed by the Fed or the IMF, and they just invented a fancy name to use as a coat hanger.
Why would the Fed or IMF want to do that? |
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I figured something like this might be happening behind the scenes after Bitfinex and Tether were subpoenaed late last year by the CFTC. Phil Potter's resignation a few months back was also slightly alarming.
Given that the DOJ is involved, and the investigation has been going on for a year or more now, I'd be wary of trading on Bitfinex or holding USDT. They may be gearing up to seize domains and assets. Also, as a separate matter going back years, I think Bitfinex may also be exposed to unlicensed money transmission charges.
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Prices have been on a constant decline ever since this year began. There's been FUD all over the place, and governments have been cracking down on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In addition, there have been several hacks which have also contributed to the decline in the value of the whole cryptocurrency market. As such, many people have lost their faith in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general, as they've lost a lot of money. This has all happened before -- FUD, hacks and all. After the 2011 run, the price dropped by 94%. After the 2013 run, the price dropped by 87%. So far this time, price has dropped nearly 80%. Not too bad. The highs are epic and the lows are gut wrenching. This is the same Bitcoin market I've always known. Grab some popcorn and try to enjoy the ride. Stop worrying about the price so much! |
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The funding address wasn't used until 2018. This has nothing to do with Satoshi from the looks of it. The receiving address hasn't been swept, so it's probably not an exchange. This is probably just a large holder or exchange moving around some coins. I don't see any reason to believe they're being dumped. Supposedly, Craig Wright -- or maybe more accurately, his backers like Calvin Ayre -- are selling lots of BTC to fund their BCH hash war. It's hard to know how much truth there is to that. |
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Although ETH is traded against many altcoins, it isn't really a currency. It's a platform. And as noted, it is also a hard fork of the original Ethereum, with ETC being the original. According to that rationale, Ethereum Classic isn't the original network either -- the original network is dead. The Homestead hard fork took place in March 2016, well before the DAO fork. Ethereum Classic has also had multiple hard forks since the DAO fork occurred. All of these hard forks somehow dilute the confidence in BTC. I can't quite explain it, but that's what it feels like.
The fact is, no one can stop people from hard forking Bitcoin. We're talking about permissionless, decentralized protocols. It just takes time for the market to realize how little value most (or all) of the forks have. That's the free market for ya. |
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Heres what I mean.
Has the bitcoin network gotten stronger over the past year? I would say yes there is high hashpower than last year, theres been a lot of bug fixes,
Are more people using bitcoin than last year?
There have been a number of big moves for bitcoin this year, Lightning network and the world overall is more aware of bitcoin. Are there any more big bitcoin news events that happened this year.
Negative news is the price but its not all about the price sometimes.
The first sidechains have come online -- RSK and Liquid. you are correct about the hashrate increasing which has made the network that much stronger but i don't know what "bug fix" you are talking about. there has been no bugs in bitcoin protocol to be fixed to make it stronger! however, there has been some bugs in some wallet applications and implementation like they always are which were fixed like always. i wouldn't say that made bitcoin stronger!
Well, there was a pretty serious bug in the last several releases of the reference implementation (run by most of the network) that was fixed a couple months ago. It could have been used to inflate the Bitcoin supply: This week’s major bitcoin bug was even worse than developers initially let on.
The bug originally rocked the bitcoin world when it was reported the vulnerability could be used to shut down a chunk of the network.
While this sounded bad enough for many, it turns out developers for Bitcoin Core kept a second, bigger part of the bug a secret. As disclosed through an official Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) report, an attacker could have actually used it to create new bitcoin – above the 21 million hard-cap of coin creation – thereby inflating the supply and devaluing current bitcoins. |
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Their dev team is excellent, but the business side and everything related to banking and withdrawals is atrocious. If they ever turn into a reliable exchange, i might return. Until then i'll watch from the sidelines.
The banking is totally out of their hands and always will be unless they buy their own bank, which'll be instantly shunned. If I were them I would've become crypto only a long time back. Still a ton of money to be made and vastly less head aches too. It's fiat that causes all the problems. That's not entirely true, given that Shapeshift and IDEX are now enforcing KYC, and 1Broker and EtherDelta got charged by the US government.  Going altcoin-only might have killed their market share too. It's hard to compare to altcoin exchanges like Binance because those exchanges all piggybacked on USDT liquidity. Bitfinex never really had that opportunity -- they're the bank. Without fiat and USDT markets, I think Bitfinex and exchanges like Binance and Bittrex would be much less liquid and much less profitable. |
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For years we have listened to the bullshit about decentralised money and how the people will have control of their money with Bitcoin. Well what a lot of shit that ended up being. It is obvious that Bitcoin is not decentralised and a few miners or whatever can completely destroy this innovation. I am sick of listening to those self absorbed arrogant rich nerds that should never be in the position that they are with the Bitcoin Cash hardfork. I know this is BCH but it is screwing up everything. I don't really give a crap whether Roger Ver's vission or Craig Wrights vision is correct - all I know is that there selfish tweets and playing so called nerd hardball about moving Bitcoin hashrate to BCH and deliberately forcing the Bitcoin price down to 1000 USD to prove a point is absolute insanity. It proves to me that decentralization is a myth and having these kind of people lead us to the future is nothing less than a nightmare and the possible end for Bitcoin and all crypto. What a wasted chance all of this is ending up to be!
What makes you think these guys could force the price down to $1,000? It's not like Wright has access to Satoshi coins or anything.  I think you're giving this BCH drama way too much credit. They're not leading Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general. They're just drama queens and megalomaniacs. Let them mine at a loss -- one side or the other will give up. And as usual, Bitcoin will keep moving along like nothing ever happened. |
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It's called manipulation by large mining farms & big players via centralised exchanges. Nothing more.
Do you have any kind of evidence to back your claim? Apart from common sense, logic, the sheer volume of trades, 23 years of trading experience & the fact that every single centralized exchange took part - no I don't. The numbers speak for themselves, they are the "evidence", always have been & continue to be. You could be right though - maybe it was hundreds of thousands of mini players who all cashed in their 2 satoshi at the same time across all the centralized exchanges in a worldwide coordinated dump by.........nah. That doesn't mean the dump was coordinated across exchanges. If price drops on a couple exchanges, others will follow because of the expectation of arbitrage. Arbitragers won't give you the chance to sell above $6,000 when other exchanges are trading far below. Why would they? How do the numbers speak for themselves? Common sense just says that someone dumped a lot of coins, and the market followed. I've seen plenty of times where it didn't work out that way and the market immediately rebounded. This time, people were ready to sell. |
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Didn't know Nicholas Merten before reading this article, but I am surprised on how he related the past and current significant events on cryptocurrencies and then leap out on a prediction that cryptocurrencies will replace Fiat. That's because he's not an "expert" at all. He's a self-styled "blockchain and crypto enthusiast" with a Youtube channel. I scrolled through his Twitter to see if I could find some more elaboration on this idea. I couldn't find much. For some reason, he thinks "cryptocurrency replacing fiat money" is just a natural progression from "institutional speculation." As long as governments and central banks exist, I don't see it happening. There's also a large disconnect between "speculative asset" and "currency" and I'm not sure how it's all going to play out. I see cryptocurrencies taking some market share from fiat currencies, but not replacing them. |
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It's called manipulation by large mining farms & big players via centralised exchanges. Nothing more.
Are you saying large miners are selling the market down to squeeze smaller miners out of business? There's some logic to that, since miners with smaller capitalization will shut down much quicker due to losses. But that's a really dangerous game they'd be playing -- they'd be threatening their own profitability at the same time. I'm guessing that's not what's actually happening. |
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@squatter. Agreed,however there are IPOs created to scam some people. Remember the technology bubble? There were many internet startups that did not have positive earnings that were approved in filing for IPOs. Most of those IPOs are similar in the cryptospace's ICOs. They are all promises but no product.
You don’t need positive earnings to justify an IPO. In the tech bubble, the prevailing attitude among startups and investors was “branding and market share now, profit will come later.” That doesn’t make them all scams. It was just a time of reckless investment. There’s nothing inherently wrong with raising capital to fund an operation — even one built on a shaky business model. Investment always carries risk. Caveat emptor. |
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This is one of the reasons Bitmain rushed its IPO filings. There's only so much potential investment capital that will flow into mining company IPOs. Between competing with Bitmain for the same pool of money, and the declining price of Bitcoin, it's not looking good for Canaan. An IPO is only another way to scam and collect money from the investors hehehe. Corrupt regulators can be bribed by companies to approve false filings of cash flow, assets and liabilities, and other information.
This is the same as an ICO, however in a regulated environment.
There are plenty of legitimate IPOs. I wouldn't liken them to scams. The whole point of investing (for seed investors and such) is to eventually exit with good profits, whether through an IPO or a private share sale. |
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