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by imtringued 1951 days ago
>If bitcoins price continues to rise, miners will be greatly incentivized to further decrease power costs.

That's not how bitcoin works. The price of bitcoin is the budget you can spend on mining a single coin. If the price is higher, you can afford to run more miners. If the cost of electricity goes down, you can afford to run more miners. If the efficiency goes up, you can afford to run more miners. Running more miners increases the mining difficulty and you are back where you started.

If Bitcoin is worth $50k people will destroy $50k of energy to acquire Bitcoin.

2 comments

If bitcoin is worth $50k, people will destroy MORE than $50k of energy to acquire bitcoin, using resources that are subsidized either intentionally or unintentionally.
Miners are motivated by profit, if your cost of electricity is lower, your profit is higher. I’m not sure why you are trying to obfuscate that simple fact.
Miners are motivated by simple profit calculation, not R&D into energy generation. R&D has an unbounded capital risk, while bitcoin is a (relatively simple) statistical calculation of energy-cost which is a bounded cost (at any given time, within a range). Not a single bitcoin MINER is "greatly incentivized to further decrease power cost".
There are industries in much better positions to revolutionize energy production than bitcoin miners. In fact, there basically a single industry that doesn't have this incentive.