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by petmon
1472 days ago
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The cost of a bitcoin transaction is not adequately captured by transaction fees. There's two alternative ways to look at it: 1. Divide miner revenue (fees + seignorage) by the number of transactions, yielding the total amount that miners extract. It was $34m today, with ~261k transactions, yielding a cost per transaction of $130. [1] 2. Estimate energy cost at 1,173 kWh per transaction [2]. If you assume cheap electricity at say $.09/kWh you get a cost of $105 per transaction in electricity alone, which ignores hardware capital costs, etc. Either way the cost is over $100 per transaction, and would be reflected in a falling value of BTC. But it may be masked if there's an influx of new money into the system. 1: https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_miners_revenue_per_da... 2: https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-electricity-consumpti... |
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If the creators had predicted its explosive growth, they would have chosen a faster rate of reward halving, more quickly bringing the transaction fees in line with the externalities.
Perhaps someone could create a "Bitcoin Green" fork which would simply speed up the reward halving to once a year instead of once every 4 years, since by now, everyone has heard of Bitcoin, and only large specialized operations can mine it profitably (thus the reason for its inflation has disappeared).