Bitcoin Can Drop 50% and China Miners Will Still Make Money
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This is assuming $0.05 per kWh (which is a rate available to many miners outside of China, eg. Gigawatt Mining in Washington State pays $0.028 per kWh,) and a miner efficiency of 0.1 joule per gigahash (such as the popular Bitmain Antminer S9). The break even point is calculated with:
j_over_gh × cost_per_kwh / 3.6e6 (joules per kWh) / reward × (2^32 × diff) / 1e9
The parameter are: j_over_gh = 0.1, cost_per_kwh = 0.05, reward = 12.5 BTC per block, diff = 1931136454487.72. (This ignores transaction fees which have pushed the average block reward from 12.5 to around 17 BTC over the last few weeks, so the true break even point is even lower, around 1 BTC = $680).
I am occasionally interviewed by journalists who write about Bitcoin mining and they often get many details wrong. This one is no exception—Dan Murtaugh should have contacted me :)
Where are you getting the USD1500 price tag, I've just done a quick search and I only found a bunch of S9 Miners (Bitmain Antminer S9) advertised for over USD6000 on Amazon.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMining/comments/7jg14f/one_o...
the same analogy applies here, BitCoin mining is quite profitable, however hardware business is more reliable and in demand.
I'd post my calculations but I don't have it here at work!
19 × 14e12 × 3600 × 24 × 365 / (2^32 × 1931e9) = 1.01
“But $trainer, you mean I really have to report the $80 dinner I was treated to in Shanghai?” You bet. If you operate a startup that does deals internationally and aren’t training your team from a risk management standpoint, the legal downside is huge if a government decides to look at you. Start with the Bribery Act of 2010, the FCPA, and so on.
Has this happened before? It sounds bizarre and Googling gave me nothing.
“Streetlight consumption translates into profits for electricity producers, distributors and the state, he said. The profits of electricity distribution companies are paid out ‘in dividends to the local municipalities that own shares in them, and in salaries and stipends to the local politicians who sit on their oversight boards,’ he explained.“
There is a dramatic acceleration of corruption after you get outside of that general top 30-40 group. Your statement is an equivocation, when in actuality the level of corruption often varies dramatically from nation to nation. Saying every country has corruption is meaningless as such.
https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percept...
This would also give those mining altcoins a nice market to convert their coins to btc and subsequently cash out.
I guess the question is, if bitcoin drops, will everything drop? Or will spreading your stake around the altcoin minefiled be enough to protect against huge losses?
Miners and mining hardware makers don’t actually care for bitcoin from a philosophical point of view, so they have no incentive to use it as a currency. It’s literally just a means to an end for creating value to them. If they were growing tulips instead, you’d see them investing in farming techniques just as happily.
There were some rather unamused comments at the time from miners who got their first experience of Bitcoin Cash by having to use it to buy from Bitmain, questioning whether it was always this terrible given that all its very vocal boosters had been claiming it was the fast option compared to Bitcoin. (The usual response was to argue that the block speed varied between a minute per block and the hour+ one and they were just unlucky - which technically it did, it's just most of the time it was in slow mode and the brief fast intervals were days apart.)
Commodity futures only work when you produce a consistent amount.
I haven't looked too closely at how difficulty adjusted after previous order of magnitude efficiency gains, but the risk is certainly there.
Neither does the energy exporter. They get money.
People can exchange it for more energy, but you haven't reduced energy generation.
Germany's power grid is well-connected to its neighbours. During peak production of renewable energy, it is "exported" to France, Poland, Austria etc. These neighbours have a different mix of production and can easily scale down power production from fossil fuels.
[0]:in quotes, because trade within the EU isn't technically export/import
This will spurt R&D efforts in renewable energy once there is parity with mining chips.
So I guess China thinks that bitcoin will ultimately be worth half what it is now.
>> So I guess China thinks that bitcoin will ultimately be worth half what it is now.
The best BTC ASIC miners on the open market are all sold out and backordered for months, and better ones keep being developed every six months. This means that, no, literally it's not possible to bring more miners online at a faster rate since they aren't openly available for purchase, and miners are still running older hardware since those miners are not yet -$EV(power) but they don't yet have enough money to purchase the new miners (which aren't readily available anyway).
It's not a perfectly competitive market. It's supply constrained.
But in that case, why don't ASIC manufacturers sell to the highest bidder and let mining companies bid up prices?
If the barrier to entry is in ASIC manufacturing, why don't the manufacturers capture the excess profit, instead of the miners?
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-mining-company-...
It seems to me that bitcoin mining should be about as purely economic a business as there is. It's not like their clients would not abolish the ASIC manufacturers as soon as their hardware is no longer cost effective.
The military-industrial complex:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
I disagree. While yes there were still proxy wars for the last 50 years, there has been no all out world war. Considering that for the 500 years before WW2 there was wars nearly every 20 years between major powers, this is an improvement.
That's what people in Europe thought after WW1, yet WW2 happened. I hope this time you're right.
If North Korea didn't have nukes, you bet we would have invaded them by now.
Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is a scant 35 miles from the North Korean border, and North Korea has an unknown amount of conventional artillery pointed at South Korea, enough to kill millions of South Koreans.
If the US were to invade North Korea, Seoul, and the surrounding areas would be obliterated.
That North Korea now has nuclear weapons changes things a bit, but the nukes weren't previously the thing holding the US back from invading North Korea.
The Korean war was an absolute disaster for all involved. Three years and a million dead people for nothing (or less than nothing if you consider the amount of sheer destruction). I think that has been the main rationale for avoiding another war in Korea since then.
The "perfect" time to do it would have been in the 90s when China was still poor enough to ignore and Russia was still self-combusting. Things are different now. Compare Russia's non-response to the destruction of Yugoslavia to their direct role in Syria, both diplomatically (red line etc) and militarily.
I think killing Gaddafi was NATO's biggest disaster in a long time (if not the worst so far). It was a clear example to DPRK that they must have a capable ICBM. It was also the last straw for Putin which spurred him onto more aggressive actions like taking Crimea and using "fake news" farms.
Since then, they have limited war to insurgencies, rebel groups, and other mostly internal conflicts.
You think North Korea (or China for that matter) would've stayed within their borders without nuclear powers following their every move?
There are many questions about that, many people hold the opinion that the nuclear weapons did not in fact end the war.
Whether or not that is true, I do not pretend to have the expertise to say, however saying there is no question is flat out wrong and ignoring the debate.
The Empire of Japan was willing to die fighting a dominant superpower for every blade of grass, but a second superpower (one hurt far worse in the European theatre) suddenly tipped the imaginary balance?
There's an argument for the A-bomb being effective but unnecessary to the end the war; but this article's view that it had nothing to do with it is seriously by no honest historian.
Because the atomic bomb had not yet been invented.
I'd venture to say that the majority of human effort today is spent on useless things. Consumerism is the base of our entire economic system, Bitcoin mining doesn't seem all that different to me.
For the moment it’s only the most gigantic and cpu intensive distributed number increment algorithm.
Bitcoin also offers the very real value of enabling monetary transactions without government involvement. That’s a huge deal to some of us who value individual liberty and/or live under corrupt regimes.
We could do worse than Bitcoin. Diamonds, for example…
[edit 2: disclosure: I have no stake in either :p ]
So yeah, there's a huge amount of R&D and competition to get the best stuff out there. And Bitmain dominates.
You're right that Bitmain dominates ASIC Bitcoin miners, but why? Surely there are more than enough capable engineers to design ASIC miners in the US and some VC's willing to fund them, or is there something I'm missing? Manufacturing costs would be high in the US, but it's not like foreign manufacturing is an unknown concept to US based companies.
My impression is there's a significant amount in the investing class who see Bitcoin as a hyped bubble. Sure, there's Peter Thiels, but there's also people like Warren Buffett who won't touch it with a ten foot pole at the moment. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/10/bitcoin-a...).
You don't need ASICs per se for general blockchain technology... the main advantage of ASICs are speed of mining, something that probably won't be needed as much once the general mania pops one way or another. So an ASIC mining chip seems to me fairly vulnerable. For instance, if you just spent a million making a lot of ASIC mining chips, news like China possibly starting to crack down on mining (https://www.ft.com/content/adfe7858-f4f9-11e7-88f7-5465a6ce1...) would probably not make you happy.
I completely agree as of 2018, but Bitcoin has been around for almost 10 years now and has seen "real" returns for the past 4 or 5 years. I suppose my question should be restated as "Did Bitmain take a gamble and it paid off?" I still find it strange that not a single prominent US based BTC miner manufacturer has hit the scene.
I would say that Bitmain was a huge gamble in the early days since the ASICs depreciate very fast and thus any delay in developing them can be fatal. But after selling eight generations of hardware at very high margins they can probably coast now.
None of them produced anything. CoinTerra was the only that didn't close as a result of charges related to fraudulent activity. Not to be a jerk, but that's not what I was asking. You provided supporting evidence to my claim.
>I would say that Bitmain was a huge gamble in the early days since the ASICs depreciate very fast and thus any delay in developing them can be fatal. But after selling eight generations of hardware at very high margins they can probably coast now.
That's more in line with what I asked. I'm not in disagreement, but rather looking for any research into why the mining market currently stands this way.
With net worth of $2.6 billion Peter Thiel could lose $26 million and make it back with a 1% fluctuation of the market.
Other people less so.
>Just a hunch: No-one in the industry with the means to do anything about it thinks the trend is sustainable enough to invest in a 6mo-1yr setup followed by another year before profit?
Manufacturing costs in the US wouldn't just be high, they would be impossible to actually get done. MOQ on something like this in American factories wouldn't be in the 100-500 range, probably not even 1,000. American factories are extremely non-agile, non-risk taking, and generally do not serve startups very well.
BTC being over $10k is a very new thing, too. The insane mining profits at a 1MB blocksize + $10k+ price may not last and is a new signal. It takes a lot of time, effort, luck, and perseverance - and Jihan is a formidable enemy. Sometimes it's best to just avoid a high-risk area where many, many others failed.
I think 21.co got AH financing on the idea of building a "miner for the masses" https://www.coindesk.com/21-intel-bitcoin-mining-strategy/ but they pivoted since then.
They could probably provide a more informed comment.
-Chinese reverse engineering and lax IP laws aren't actually that lax; Westerners just pretend it is.
-Bitmain isn't a US corporation, it is Chinese.
-The owner of Bitmain is Jihan Wu.
Whoa, thanks for calling out my biases O_O
> lax IP laws aren't actually that lax
I thought one of the big initiatives for the TPP was to enforce US IP in Asia?
...
Even if it was, how is this relevant to Bitmain, run by Jihan Wu, who is not American?
Sorry, but you can't assume that what theoretically holds in a long term stable equilibrium of a perfect idealised market holds at every moment in a fast moving dynamic real world market.
Because the price spike is so recent, the headline is true for nearly any mining setup that existed even shortly prior to the spike.
Besides, it increases equally for all miners, so a rig that existed on Nov 1st and was profitable would still be profitable now at Nov 1st exchange rate and today's difficulty. Only the rate of profit/day would change.
This makes no sense economically, but it seems like the difficulty is controlled by how much equipment Bitmain decides to manufacture and the profitability is controlled by how much Bitmain decides to charge.
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-quietly-orders-closing-of...
Bitmain seems to be the only serious game in town, and spooling up a chip run isn't quick, even for someone like Intel, AMD, or the dozens of other chip makers (TI, microchip, etc). This gives them something of a headstart.
I wonder how long they can stay ahead of the other chip makers.
"You have hundreds, sometimes thousands of servers out there. All trying to get to the Algo!"
Nicely tried, my friend. Nicely tried.
---
Yeah.... but I won't!
Please everyone, keep logjamming the transaction/second throughput to drive up the relative scarcity!
Ah, whatever, it's more or less monopoly money anyway.
To maximize profit, they utilize hydroelectric power plants built on Yangtze river. Not the ones like Three Gorges Dam, but those small/micro plants (<10MW installed capacity). Most of those plants are owned by local governments or private companies. Usually, State Grid -- which is obviously owned by the state -- would purchase their power output but during rainy seasons, there is just too much electricity that State Grid wouldn't buy it all.
That's when miners came and built datacenters close to the power plants, made deals with the power plant owners to buy the power that State Grid didn't want. It's a win-win for everyone: power plants get extra cash, miners get cheap electricity.
And when it comes to dry season (starting October), miners ship their mining rig to Xinjiang or Gansu, where wind turbines are having a similar situation.
I want to believe it but this sounds too convenient to be true. It sounds more like propaganda invented to cover up the massive waste of energy. Do you have any sources to back it up?
Also, most dams don't produce more electricity during high level seasons. They generally produce a fixed amount with a constant flow to the generators and then the only thing that changes is the spillways being used during the wet season.
Some sources:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-chinas-...
His latest mine is still under construction, between a hydroelectric power plant and the concrete shell of a disused power transmission station, between Kongyu and the city of Kangding.
As China’s economy boomed, private companies set up hydroelectric plants in western Sichuan; then, as the economy slowed, they found themselves unable to sell to the national grid, elbowed out of the market by more politically powerful state-owned firms.
“It took a lot of money to build the plants, but it doesn’t cost that much to maintain them,” said HaoBTC’s Mu. “So it makes sense for them to sell the power to anyone willing to buy, even at a low rate.”
Also:
https://news.bitcoin.com/brief-glimpse-lives-chinese-bitcoin...