Bitcoin Unsustainable? - An opinion, looking for other opinions

[Space_Dandy]

Crypto mining seems unsustainable to me. To start with, Bitcoin mining uses more electricity than some countries, about 1% of the world's electricity. This is a net loss game, as there are so many scrambling to win those free bitcoins that most lose out. It's like gambling, except the house is the electric company. That means most crypto miners will lose more money through investment in their rigs and in power bills than they will win in mined bitcoin, many of them stand to lose quite a bit. I just don't see this situation persisting. Crypto mining is still new to a lot of people, many are jumping on the bandwagon late, but after the novelty wears off in a few years I'm not optimistic about where Bitcoin will be. I think it's only downhill from here.

But I could be wrong, maybe there's something I'm missing, just looking for opinions and conversation about it.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

Assuming crypto isn't legislated out of existence, Bitcoin will probably eventually be supplanted by a technically superior competitor like Ethereum or Monero, which are much less power hungry.

 

[BONE_Buddy]

Everything is unsustainable. Eventually everything will fall to entropy in the end.

 

[I am vomit]

How long until we see giant solar panel farms that are just for crypto miners?

 

[shameful existence]

Educate yourself, thanks.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I actually wondered about it, what happens when the cost of producing a bitcoin is higher than its worth? Wouldn't that mean that there will never be another bitcoin printed?

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

I actually wondered about it, what happens when the cost of producing a bitcoin is higher than its worth? Wouldn't that mean that there will never be another bitcoin printed?

The number of Bitcoins mined is designed to cap out eventually, so yes. Bitcoin, specifically. Some other crypto works differently in this regard.

 

[Harbinger of Kali Yuga]

It's so stupid. The second bitcoin is a serious threat to the dollar it'll be legislated into irrelevance.

 

[CryoRevival #SJ-112]

Assuming crypto isn't legislated out of existence, Bitcoin will probably eventually be supplanted by a technically superior competitor like Ethereum or Monero, which are much less power hungry.

Won't be Monero, it's already banned in like half the OECD.

 

[TheBigZee]

It's so stupid. The second bitcoin is a serious threat to the dollar it'll be legislated into irrelevance.

It's never going to be a serious threat to the dollar. The US government has been so hands off because it's made the job of the alphabet agencies that much easier.

 

[Harbinger of Kali Yuga]

It's never going to be a serious threat to the dollar. The US government has been so hands off because it's made the job of the alphabet agencies that much easier.

I doubt it will because crypto is largely a speculation frenzy like beanie babies and tulips--it's just lasted longer than most-- but if it does, then it'll be regulated to hell. The government does not want monetary policy interfered with and they definitely don't want tax evasion. The government hasn't regulated bitcoin because it hasn't needed to.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

I actually wondered about it, what happens when the cost of producing a bitcoin is higher than its worth? Wouldn't that mean that there will never be another bitcoin printed?

That’s one of my concerns as well. How will people be rewarded to keep track of Bitcoin transactions when the mining is complete?

 

[Knight of the Rope]

That’s one of my concerns as well. How will people be rewarded to keep track of Bitcoin transactions when the mining is complete?

Transaction fees. At the moment miners get two forms of compensation for validating a block and adding it to the blockchain:

1. The mining reward that is newly minted coins (i.e. a "fictitious" transaction that they can write to themselves to get the newly minted coins).
2. Transaction fees associated with each bitcoin transaction to incentivize the miners to add them to the latest block. (i.e. as the answer to "Which bitcoin transactions get processed first?" Since the miners want the largest compensation possible for processing transactions, of course they're going to prioritize the transactions that have the biggest fee associated with them because they get the total of all the fees if they validate the block.)

So once the mining reward (1.) stops, blocks will still be validated and added to the chain: the miners just won't be able to mint new coins by writing fictitious transactions to themselves. So naturally, to make the effort worth it, transaction fees (2.) will increase to balance it out.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

That’s one of my concerns as well. How will people be rewarded to keep track of Bitcoin transactions when the mining is complete?

In general I still have no idea how crypto is supposed to replace fed currency if there is constant deflation rather than the controlled inflation that drives the economy forward.

 

[The Ugly One]

Actual monetary use of Bitcoin accounts for a hilariously small percentage of total use. The rest of it is just greater-fool "investing." The only way it becomes sustainable is for the online casinos to completely implode and for the handful of legitimate use cases to dominate.

 

[Serin Spaghetti]

True, and the more mining that is done, the more power is needed to "Secure" the Network. That and Bitcoin is pretty old tech in comparison to the new coins or chains. When you zoom out on Bitcoin, sure it is the most valued thing in our history, but it lacks in some places. Satoshi was an old head when it came to coding, he was smart, but he probably wasn't very efficient though (Especially when he leaves some other things he forgot to add to the white paper, silly dude). I think somewhere in the code there was suppose to be some sort of gambling mechanism if I remember. Anyway, my opinion is yes, mining will become unsustainable to those with a hardcore PC in the future. If Bitcoin demands more power, you would need those factory looking GPU farms people placed in the middle of butt fuck nowhere. But, just like you said you're just spending your energy to mine Bitcoin, only to give it back to the Electric Companies, in a way Bitcoin is sort of hurting itself. And if you wanna be Eco-friendly about it, then it's not good at that either, when we know POS works just as good, if not better than POW.
Edit: ETH is still POW but will become POS with ETH 2.0 coming out. Sure it'll be more Eco-friendly but, you're still gonna spend a shit ton on fees, till 2023.

Hasn't Bitcoin changed purposes since it's inception, wasn't it like P2P Cash, then Programmable Money, now it's Digital Gold?

 

[Grog]

If the cost of mining Bitcoin becomes too much for some guy to maintain a mining farm and he stops, then the rest of the miners earn more, because the amount that is released as a reward for mining blocks is fixed. It simply gets distributed among the miners depending on how much computing power they're contributing.
Also, the miners kind of establish the price floor for Bitcoin because they're the ones who are pumping new coins into the market to begin with. If the cost of mining Bitcoin increases, then so does the price of Bitcoin over time. Actually isn't that what happened in Q4 of 2020, when inflation made the price skyrocket?

 

[feedtheoctopus]

Lol remember when El Salvador started accepting bitcoin as legal tender and their economy immediately went into fucking freefall?

 

[Stoneheart]

It's so stupid. The second bitcoin is a serious threat to the dollar it'll be legislated into irrelevance.

that will never happen, they will go for other crypto, but not for bitcoin. the Feds and the CCP control to much of it. the cia would go apeshit if a couple of billion of their stored dark money goes away...

 

[Harbinger of Kali Yuga]

Is there anyone on the Farms that literally believes that bitcoin will never crash and it'll just keep going up? I just want to see if anyone here is that stupid.