[jstanley]

> Bitcoin is not inexpensive. The cost of mining is actually quite substantial just in terms of the electricity bill.

As you point out, this is on purpose. And the cost of mining bears almost no relation whatsoever to the cost of using Bitcoin.

[fpgaminer]

It probably does. I mean, we pay miners 12.5 BTC to verify ~1800 transactions. It's not like that BTC is free. When new BTC are created, it devalues existing BTC.

Put another way, the miners will sell that 12.5 BTC on the market. Selling on the market puts a downward pressure on the price.

Another way still: If the market cap for Bitcoin remained constant, then it's obvious to see that for every block reward generated, the price per bitcoin goes down.

I don't think it's unreasonable to think that that means we're paying miners $16.5k USD per block, which would be about $9.22/transaction. Plus transaction fees. It's probably just hard to see that because the market cap for Bitcoin keeps increasing faster than Bitcoin's natural inflation. Basically, investors in Bitcoin are paying the transaction cost right now.

[jstanley]

I think we're confusing 2 different costs here.

My parent was talking about Bitcoin costing a lot of money (overall) because of the amount "wasted" on mining. While this is true, it doesn't affect the costs for sending transactions. Causality actually runs in the other direction here: as transaction fees increase, more mining revenue is available, so more is spent on mining.

High transaction cost leads to high mining cost, not the other way around.

You point out that much of the value that is given to miners comes through devaluing everybody else's coins. That's true too, but also doesn't affect the cost of sending a transaction. This cost is borne in proportion to the amount of BTC you hold, rather than the amount of transactions you send.