[2016-07-11]Bitcoin miners face fight for survival as new supply halves

[vanburen]

KEFLAVIK: Marco Streng is a miner, though he does not carry a pick around his base in south-western Iceland. Instead, he keeps tens of thousands of computers running 24 hours a day in fierce competition with others across the globe to earn bitcoins.

In the world of the web-based digital currency, it is not central banks that add new money to the system, but rather computers like Streng's which are awarded fresh bitcoins in return for processing blocks of the latest bitcoin transactions.


http://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2016/07/11/bitcoin-miners-face-fight-for-survival-as-new-supply-halves/

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[Dekker3D]

This is why bitcoin mining is a failing investment adventure. It was only profitable until around S4 and S5 era of Bitmain. After that, new miners keep on popping out every few months.

[Kprawn]

" Because the bitcoin miners operate autonomously, it is hard to track their numbers and size. But in terms of computing capacity it was estimated earlier this year that the network is 43,000 times

more powerful than the world's top 500 supercomputers combined. " That is a very strong network indeed... just a pity, nobody has figured out a way to use all the idle power in the Xbox consoles to

mine some sort of gaming coin.  I mean to say, with the Xbox One coming out at Peak Throughput of 1.31 TFLOPS and a relatively cheap price.. something could obviously be done with all that

wasted energy? A gaming Alt coin.. 

[InvoKing]

Fight for survival... Nice description 

2 things that I found interesting in this article :

1/ '' the prospect of new supply halving has already helped drive bitcoin up over 50% this year, which should help ease the pain.''
True unless most of the small / medium miners gonna close the business by now

2/ '' they hope the number of bitcoin transactions will have grown sufficiently to mean that the small fees paid by users will make up enough of their income to smooth out the profit cut.''
This only thing will keep mining profitable after 4-8 years