Don't forget about the $720M in "Mining Assets". I wouldn't be surprised if the true value were much lower than this, now that crypto prices have crashed.
The whole security of proof-of-work depends on "you can't beat the network", but when such a small fraction of available hardware is left in that particular network, what security does it have?
1) newer generations of bitcoin mining hardware are orders of magnitude more efficient so 3% of hardware isn't 3% of total SHA 256 computational capacity 2) 3% of hardware owned by miners is probably a GPU number. Eth is mined by GPUs, not ASICs.
Hope this helps!
That makes sense to me thanks!
Seems like people are going to take a large haircut on whatever they deposited and then maybe get back some incremental cash over time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-07/electric-...
My rates are 11-13 cents per kWh, the same as they’ve been for years. Our power is mostly hydro, with smaller amounts coming from nuclear and wind.
So no, that pithy question isn't particularly useful.
The miners will mine as long as it is profitable since they need to recoup the costs of specialized hardware somehow.
2) the hardware is going to become obsolete well b4fore 7 years (although I wonder how the semiconductor shortage is holding back custom mining hardware design and manufacturing? Maybe in 2029 people will still be using today's hardware? I seriously doubt that.)
3) I'm reasonably sure arbitrage pushes the cost of mining asymptotically close to the price of electricity to run it, so the margins are almost all whatever temporary, fraudulent, or criminal steps you can take to reduce your cost (or outright steal) the electricity.