"Miners break even at $6,925 at China’s top power price." It is my understanding that they don't pay top power price but rather they locate in areas where local electricity is abundant and cheap.
Has this happened before? It sounds bizarre and Googling gave me nothing.
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...
“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.“
“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.
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.
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?