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Comment by hbosch | Hacker News Reader

At what point (BTC-USD price) does the mining mini-industry start becoming unprofitable? With the large scale investments in massive climate-controlled datacenters crammed with ASICs anchoring the world's biggest mining pools, there must at some point be a negative ROI. If the price passes that threshold, would we potentially see many of these mining operations scaling way down or packing it in and retiring? Selling off equipment? I'd love to know.

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The only thing that matters is if mining brings in more money than it costs to operate.

Sunken costs (buildings, hardware) are just that - sunken. Just like the shale oil industry where people were predicting that drilling would stop after ROI became negative, but that didn't happen, it's still better to lose 60% than to lose 80% of your investment.

I want reasonably priced GPUs for machine learning, so I'm hoping GPU miners will flood the market to liquidate their assets (most can probably get back their much of their sunken costs if they sell now) rather than risk mining it when the price looks like it could go even lower.

Then you likely want to see a crash in the price of Etherium. GPU mining for Bitcoin hasn't been profitable in quite a while.

Yep, Etherium is down 50% from peak as well :-)

Shale has considerable startup and wind-down costs.

Mining really doesn't.

Has to drop to a third of what it currently is at according to https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Climate controlled datacenters? From what I've seen, these things tend to be run in sheds, even if the floorspace is measured in acres. https://qz.com/1055126/photos-china-has-one-of-worlds-larges...

Depends what the cost of electricity is, how efficient machines are and network hashrate (directly influences difficulty).

By my calculations prices could go down to 3kCAD and it would be breakeven for me in Quebec. That is not factoring difficulty drop as many might stop mining altogether.

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