Will bitcoin mining eventually return to the masses when the reward dwindles?

[KonstantinosM]

I feel like that would be the best outcome. I don't expect solo-mining to make a return, but smaller pools with miners from all over the world.

I'm not as much interested in my thoughts, or having my thoughts read on the subject, feel free to reply without reading my full post.
 
The mining arms race that happened from CPUs to GPUs to ASICS took mining away from the regular person, and thus the distribution, which would have undoubtedly have been much wider and re-directed that cash flow to people who could afford a lot of power hungry specialized machines.

I believe that Satoshi himself much lamented how the arms race form CPU mining to GPU mining meant that bitcoin would be concentrated into fewer bigger miners.

Here's the quote:

The average total coins generated across the network per day stays the same.  Faster machines just get a larger share than slower machines.  If everyone bought faster machines, they wouldn't get more coins than before.

We should have a gentleman's agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network.  It's much easer to get new users up to speed if they don't have to worry about GPU drivers and compatibility.  It's nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now.

When the technological arms race finally comes to a close (with regards to high exponential increases in hash-power relative to electricity and hardware cost) will then the regular person be able to just set their regular pc to mining (through a pool, through their wallet of choice, maybe even supported in bitcoin-core)? Maybe with a specialized mining card or chip that will be a common feature in new phones or computers?

That's what I'm hoping for and betting on.

Maybe if bitcoin is successful it will allow regular people to collect money through lightning nodes and mining on their own hardware, perhaps even utilizing excess solar. That's kind of a Utopian dream compared to today's bitcoin mining reality.

I remember when I first got into bitcoin in 2012, I could even mine tiny amounts of bitcoin with my laptop's GPU, it was questionable whether it was worth the wear, although considering the price was at times below $10, and I'm using a different laptop with the previous one not suffering GPU damage from mining, I think my only regret should have bee not mining even more with it. (I eventually mined a little bit with an ASIC)

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[philipma1957]

This is a very interesting question.

in 2020 we go to 6.2500 coins

in 2023 we go to 3.1250 coins

in 2026 we go to 1.5625 coins

Does price just go up and up and up? If so then the big miners will stick around.

We already saw a large drop in price and  even a drop in difficulty  from Oct 2018 to April 2019  we finally  got to the all time high in difficulty last jump and this jump we are faltering with a small diff dip.

I think price of btc is the key.
I also think  people do not realize that btc actually has a real value, is it is a good tool for power plants to shunt their excess power production.

So that real value will always tend to keep btc price from truly crashing out.

 I am 62  I hope to live until at least 92.  Which would let me see the answer to your question.

[nofreecoins]

It mostly depends on the processing power of your cpu-gpu and the certainity of a power floor to cope with possible threats, as bitcoin grew bigger so grew the hate of the government between other organizations towards so it raised the requeriments of processing power, perhaps,
in a future with a nearly absolute adoption it would be possible.
But I find that a bit hard to happen since:
- The chain size and the little concern towards
- I see bitcoin as the main coin, which means that with usage unless proper attention only companies will afford to run a node, have a wallet and other very worrysome vulnerabilities for a safe and decentralized network.
It is most safe to say from my opinion that we are being driven towards this "dead end?" a bit of FUD I can see.
- As an example, ethereum shows how heavy and fast a chain can get compared with btc's with a slightly different possibility offered. I consider this to be a problem of most projects nowadays which obfuscates the real use case of bitcoin as coin and blockchain as utility for storing information.

Evolution of bitcoin depends on many factors, I will edit the post gradually.

I keep commenting that fees are too high for the huge block reward we have, we should have better ways to prevent chainspam.
The arrival of quantum on a usable and efficient scale will change the way bitcoin works and existence as long as there is enough adoption made when the transition is made and the efficiency, we already have trouble with consume now when using POW so it might be another way to try to tackle bitcoin in a future.

For now we are in a real need of POW, POS makes it very easy for wealthy institutions to take control, however eth might go ahead, I use CLAM since 2014 to check how POS method go, there is an amazing distribution for anyone that had funds in DOGE LTC or BTC addresses the 12th May 2014 get 27 usd per address.
It developed some nice features eth could have a look to if it ever moves onto POS.

[33bitcoin]

block reward isn't set in stone.  If enough people agree to agree to keep the reward high than that what will happen.  Bitcoin was created with loose guidelines that can be changed.

[davis196]

I don't expect small miners to return,or to resist the competition coming from the big miners.
Electricity prices will go up and we don't know what will happen if countries like China/USA/Russia decide to ban crypto mining totally.

[jackg]

I came up with a similar idea a while back just skimming the OP but it was putting chips into routers.

At the start of this year, I was looking at purchasing mining chips so I contacted BF who said that a 60GHs chip at 14nm would cost $2.50.

If cisco and netgear put 4 chips in every router (and charged you for it) and then solomined themselves with those then there will be a lot of profit to be had.

The maths
If we say there are 3 billion people on the internet and each of those share a router between 10 (300 million routers).

This would equate to around 72 exahashes and according to blockchain.com we're currently at 52 exahashes, so that works out quite well.

We're probably near the processing limit now at 7nm. I think that's close if not the actual limit of a computer chip size.


It seems people are more likely to buy a smartphone than a laptop, and if we have a peer to peer internet which I hope we do then this figure goes up somewhat to be the full 3billion people @ 180 exahashes with one chip per phone.

[shield132]

No of course, in any way there will be profit in mining, even smallest one means something for huge mining companies like Bitmain, Bitfury and etc. They get electricity in the most cheap prices (can confirm Bitfury has tax free zone and very cheap electricity).
So reward dwindle can only affect negatively to small miners and good reward can help huge companies to even grow.