[everfree]

Bitcoin is not currently mined by "people", it is mined by large specialized companies with razor-thin margins in warehouses with access to bulk ASIC purchase agreements and incredibly cheap electricity.

The last time a "person" was able to mine Bitcoin at breakeven was around 2017 or so. Maybe 2020 or 2022, if you threw the dice on buying ASICs from shady companies, hired an electrician to install a new circuit, then filled your home office with 10,000W of equipment.

In contrast to stake as an individual, you don't need special access to electricity or agreements or anything. Just buy tokens and run them on a mini-PC that costs less than a grand. The minimums are low due to DVT.

> Try that with slashing and stake lockups

I don't see how slashing is relevant to the conversation.

As for lockups, it's much easier to wait a few days for stake to unlock than to try to sell a bitcoin mining ASIC. It's also less counterparty risk and a much more liquid market.

[proxynoproxy]

https://bitaxe.org/ I guess all those plebs are just imagining mining sats at the edge. Mining isn’t just farms. And farms are not pools. You are regurgitating ETH propaganda that doesn’t match reality.

what you are missing is that PoS coins are printed from nothing. The original sin. From nothing. Worth nothing. PoS is a Ponzi to dump worthless tokens on you. You can’t escape that.

PoS trends to zero. I can’t believe we are still arguing this with >2T market cap for BTC and ETH has actually shrunk since it moved to PoS. It’s going in the wrong direction…

[everfree]

One bitaxe costs $145 and runs at about 400GH/s. That's $0.02 per day in gross revenue, before electricity expenditure. It breaks even at $0.05 per kWh, which is an electricity rate so cheap it's impossible to get most places in the world. Mining 20 sats per day - which are worth a tenth of a cent each - is completely meaningless.

Even if you could somehow get completely free electricity, you need to buy 1700 bitaxes at a cost of $240,000 to earn a modest $1k per month, or 5% annual return initially, which dwindles quickly as ASIC technology improves year-over-year. You never reach breakeven.

So the bitaxe is a novelty item. Economically viable mining is indeed just farms now.

> what you are missing is that PoS coins are printed from nothing.

Satoshi's coins were printed from running some lines of C he wrote on a desktop computer. That's just as "nothing".

> The original sin. From nothing. Worth nothing.

That's not how economics works. See my other reply about how software also comes "from nothing" but is obviously not worth nothing. All intellectual property comes "from nothing", but intellectual property powers the modern economy.

> PoS trends to zero.

Opinion.

> I can’t believe we are still arguing this with >2T market cap for BTC and ETH has actually shrunk since it moved to PoS. It’s going in the wrong direction…

Cherry-picked timeline.

[proxynoproxy]

Cherry-picked timeline… It’s reality dude! It’s the timeline that reflects reality in 2025.

Of course if you imagine a reality where ETH PoS was the best and the coin was worth $100k/ETH post merge you could say that. But that’s fantasy. It’s worth less per unit than when it was POW.

[everfree]

This subthread is about mining pools and I made my argument about bitaxe. You didn't address it at all.

[proxynoproxy]

Satoshi spent real resources to mine, yes they were negligible at the time, but it was real resources. I recall genesis block took 6 days of hashing at difficulty 1. Vitalik just hit print.

BitAxe is a toy, yes. But my point was that people are mining sats. You just don’t see the value in the hardware and energy outlay for integrity. That’s the disconnect. PoS has no real world binding, and so must rely on humans for integrity. Bitcoin… offers an alternative. ETH PoS is more of the same. I don’t trust humans, you trust them too much.

[everfree]

> I recall genesis block took 6 days of hashing at difficulty 1.

The genesis block (0) was hard-coded. Block 1 was mined 6 days later, but Satoshi wasn't hashing that whole time, he was just waiting.

Every block after the genesis block itself was subject to the difficulty adjustment process, including Block 1. So technically we know that Bitcoin is actually pre-mined by at least one block, since if anybody else knew about Bitcoin back then, it's certain they wouldn't have waited 6 days to mine Block 1 like Satoshi did.

> You just don’t see the value in the hardware and energy outlay for integrity.

To equal 10% of the current Bitcoin network hashrate (a good ballpark figure for having "enough to matter" when it comes to defending PoW consensus), you would need 2.5 million of these units, plus 2.5 million people willing to pay $145 and $52/yr in electricity to run them 24/7 next to their wifi routers, to earn $0.02 per day. Plus, of course, fiddle with the units every few months/years when they stop mining for whatever reason, like your partner changed the wifi password or a fan goes out.

How many people do you know who would want to take up that deal? It's not just me - nobody sees that value. Nobody wants to donate $200 to create an insignificant, marginal contribution to Bitcoin's theoretical security properties and earn $0.02 per day.

It's a lot more alluring to earn a real return on whatever ETH you're already holding by doing the exact same thing on Ethereum without needing to buy specialized mining hardware.

> PoS has no real world binding, and so must rely on humans for integrity.

Can you be more specific? Ethereum doesn't rely on humans for integrity any more than Bitcoin does. Conversely, Bitcoin doesn't rely on humans any less. Both protocols are nothing more than a set of rules that everyone agrees on, and everyone can collectively agree to change at any time.

> I don’t trust humans, you trust them too much.

You trust the CEOs of large mining farms that grow more and more concentrated year after year through economies of scale. You also trust that governments won't execute a single warrant to take over their country's largest centralized mining operation whenever it's convenient for them.

I trust a large set of of geographically distributed stakers. They can't grow any larger than they currently are, because staking has no economy of scale, and they can't be seized by governments, because it would require them to execute tens of thousands of warrants on tens of thousands of physical locations.