Bitcoin Sinks to $41,000 Amid ‘Extreme Fear’
forbes.com
forbes.com
Doesn't look that decentralized and crisis-safe to me...
And according to the University of Cambridge, that has a bitcoin electricity consumption index tracker, they have a visualization of the countries contributing the most to the hashrate, and you can see China go down to basically zero in July 2021 and stay that way (see the 'Evolution of network hashrate' chart[2]).
[1] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/bitcoin-hash-rate-full-r...
Edit: This suggests that they are likely using VPNs and mining pools to do it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/18/chinas-underground-bitcoin-m...
> Although Beijing exiled its crypto miners in May and then doubled down on its mining ban in September and again in November, multiple sources tell CNBC that as much as 20% of all the world’s bitcoin miners remain in China.
Still, "most mining", has definitely been stopped.
So yeah, I believe that article that there could still be 20% of mining hiding somewhere within China and using VPNs.
But it definitely resulted in a big shift away from China, regardless.
Remember, for each block, only a single miner actually conducts the work of the network. Every other miner just throws away its work and starts trying the next block. There would be no difference in performance or network capacity if 99.9999% of miners went offline (so long as it didnt happen all at once, since difficulty doesnt adjust every block).
At what point do individuals catch on to this blatant manipulation/scam?
At what point does government step in and audit "stable coins" as securities which is exactly what they purport to be?
In other words, this could simply be the "dump" phase of the recurring "pump and dump" scam.
The futures market are an input into the commodity prices but rarely the biggest.
edit: here's the source I'm using to understand cme volume vs binance etc. https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/crypto-markets/futures/v... which shows binance is the highest volume, which is usdt as seen here: https://www.binance.com/en/futures
The comment I was responding too seemed to add meaning that I didn't read in the OPs comment. I may be wrong, but it was my intent to clarify based on my own reading.
Or by about 60% to drop below previous ATH from 2017
How is it possible in 2022 for Forbes to publish articles with words underlined in red squiggly lines?
18% of the worldwide mining capacity of Bitcoin is in Kazakhstan, plenty of other sources without spelling mistakes, such as CNN [1] have cited this.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/07/investing/bitcoin-mining-... [Warning: this link has a background video auto-play]
The next time it hits a dime, I won't hesitate.
The next time it hits that price, I won't hesitate.
looking forward to deeper technology discussions as tiktokers go back to working at McDonalds
What are transaction fees, still $20 USD average like they were in April?
Also, there is a backlog of transactions, so it can be days to get a transaction done.
Some currency.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
About $2 if you are in a rush, and yes potentially days if you use a lower transaction fee if you are not in a rush. you can always try and then replace the tx if you become rushed.
About 1/100th of that if you have a lightning channel open already, I think
Still skeptical about Bitcoin myself
I don't get all of the negativity HN has towards Bitcoin. This simple ability is so amazing and scifi to me.
Personally I could see bitcoin maybe getting there in a loooong time. But whilst the actual value of bitcoin is fluctuating this hard, the argument doesn't hold up. I also kinda like the argument: "Because taxes need to be payed, and are payed in fiat money, there will always be some basic demand and price for fiat money".
Not to mention, $2 wouldn't be nearly enough to cover credit card fees. Not sure how a 1-3% fee could possibly be efficient.
The only way I know of to send >$1m+ is wire transfers and they don’t work on weekends or to send to many countries, and they can take a day or more to clear.
Also, you the recipient needs to have a bank account and it needs to be in a jurisdiction that’s friendly with the US.
I found it to be very similar to ACH within the US
Investigating further, turns out many Europeans dont use SEPA between borders. They just send to their friends within the same country using the same major banks, which increases the probability that “Instant SEPA” is used under the hood, which is a good user experience
Ive found crypto to have greater guarantees of unimpeded arrival in that monetary union as well.
That's really a problem I'm facing about once or twice a week, and BTC has solved that for me, you're right.
> I don't get all of the negativity HN has towards Bitcoin. This simple ability is so amazing and scifi to me.
Well, maybe there's the HUGE impact of BTC on global energy usage, mostly generated from fossil fuels (of one kind or another) and that there's actually little benefit for anyone not doing shady business or scamming people.
The miners also did themselves a disservice by trying to keep their energy sources secret for several years, I know some of them in North America intentionally helped spread the energy misinformation just to slow others down from getting capital to build out their own sites.
But honestly all of this doesn't really matter as the oil and gas producers with the sites are the slowest ones to adopt. The ones already polluting for a century who are desperate for a solution are just slow to collaborate with the solution providers, the miners. They aren't stuck on carbon emissions as they have already made that their identity, they get that mining onsite reduces their carbon emissions even though other people ironically arent willing to understand that, the people running sites are just technophobes and computing luddites who dont get crypto, with a slight general concern about safety with adding more stuff to a dangerous site.
If all that mining capacity is sitting in Kazakhstan they will most probably not import energy from renewables in Norway or sth. like that. Their energy mix is/was 99% fossils in 2019 [0], they can't change it that quick.
Any country that subsidized electricity distorts the whole market there.
The best approach to this consternation about mining energy use is vigilance in ensuring miners use captured and renewable energy.
If there are subsidies or if governments get directly involved in trying to control the network that’s when it distorts the market forces. It’s sad that this discussion is currently limited to simply not being willing to accept that captured energy has always existed and is being utilized by miners as a significant energy source on the network. Energy that would only have been used to pollute the atmosphere but now is not.
Until you want to get local currency, at which point you have to get involved with a processor. And taxes. And everything else associated with currency movement.
its pretty clear there is a market and user story for a segment of the population that doesn't value reversibility
or $200m, who knows
1 BTC = 1 BTC still true though
These are 24/7 markets, so even extreme market volatility happens over 3 trading sessions compared to something like equities, making any single 1-20 minute time period not volatile at all
Many people also already own bitcoin, which is a major contributing reason as to why the price is what it is, they dont have to go buy bitcoin when they get ready to send it. They dont have to wait for exchanges to accept their dollars, they dont have to wait for exchanges to process a withdrawal, and they can also move unlimited amounts.
Even as a facetious joke, there are better ones
2) there is enough liquidity to convert $100mm in bitcoin to $100mm in dollars. I would expect intermediaries to take about 50 basis points or less in a combination of fees and slippage. percentage based compensation adds up, but its not different enough. But yes, there are intermediaries if that truly was your only point.
Recently fees have been around 1~10 sats/vB. ~40 sats/vB would be $2. Network fees are quite volatile, so we don't have to go back far in time to find that, though.
Source: I look at bitcoin fee graphs way too much. Also mempool.space
Looks like txn fees are less than $1 USD [1] today; certainly a lot lower than they were back in April. High priority transactions likely can be pushed to $2+ if you are in a rush to get your txn processed.
>>Also, there is a backlog of transactions, so it can be days to get a transaction done.
Backlog seems to be low at the moment.[2]
if miners aren't desperately competing to pay off their capital expenditure, then they abuse their market position much more quickly, finding another way to assume control over the production on the network, which discourages anyone else from competing
so of all the major working consensus models it has either boiled down to either capital for miners or capital for coins that limit this abuse/control, spurring enough confidence in the network to bring on other participants (whether you or any one person personally agrees with it)
keep searching for improvements and alternatives though
turns out that speculation drives innovation, which really translates into any interest at all
without the competitive pressure, people put their time and resources on other things
with high supply creation experiments in the crypto space, the demand never catches up as nobody wants to earn the currency or buy the currency
besides, the people who benefit the most from crypro (central and south America, Africa, etc) dont care about your investments, they only care it works.
"You had plenty of time to be an early adopter, enjoy being poor" isn't exactly the sort of governance of monetary policy that fills me with confidence.
Still doing research™
This is literally how every asset works. Early investors earn huge appreciation. Those speculative profits drive innovation. It's why we have a $500 billion venture capital industry that exists for the sole purpose of getting resources into the hands of innovators so they can grow new products and businesses.
That said, the "price" (in USD) is a function of supply and demand and is completely disconnected from this. The price of a BTC could drop to $1, and mining would still work fine.
only after the difficulty adjusts downward
which could be as long as 2016 blocks
Now please correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC the difficulty adjustment requires some blocks to get mined, so if the hash rate would drop extremely quickly, the duration needed to adjust to the lower hash rate could take a long time. However that would mean the potential block fees would be steadily increasing so maybe it would quickly fix itself (make mining those blocks more profitable).
The only extreme possibility would be a temporary denial of service if hashrate dropped too quickly, causing blocks to come extremely slowly until the network adjusted to match the current hashrate, resetting block time back to the target.
In such an extreme scenario, this could effectively pause commerce for months if nobody helped bring the hashrate back up until the adjustment.
There are many mitigations possible:
1. The remaining miners have newfound control of the network so could push in a difficulty adjustment algorithm change to something more modern and adaptive, restoring service immediately. This has been done on so many other smaller networks that it isnt experimental.
2. The remaining miners could do other things too like a one time sooner difficulty adjustment
There are a few networks experiencing this right now and addressing it in different ways. There are always a few real money cryptocurrency networks going through these growing pains so we can see all theoretical experiments happen extremely fast.
How does the author get 37% out of these numbers? Just another moron like 99% of people in this space.
They could've at least bothered getting the name of the country right...