Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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In some sense that's true, but missing the point. The amount of energy worth buying to mine crypto is exactly equal to the value of the crypto mined. What we should expect to see[1] is that the value of "Proof-of-Work ETH" (which is still a functioning blockchain[2], just like Ethereum Classic is) will drop as attention is focused on PoS ETH. And so energy devoted to it will drop in tandem.

It's also true that there are second order effects, like for example all the mining hardware dedicated to ETH needs to find a new home, which will depress prices for new mining hardware for "chains that are hardware-compatible with old ETH", and thus probably support their prices a bit.

[1] And do, I think. IIRC there was a stat rolling around a few months back showing electrical grid usage dropping due to the crypto crash, but can't remember where it was or how reliable the source seemed.

[2] Though AFAICT no one is tracking exchange rates for it yet, so your guess is as good as mine as to its value.

> The amount of energy worth buying to mine crypto is exactly equal to the value of the crypto mined

This is a bit trickier. If they have equipment already then it changes situation.

Cost of computing hashes includes mostly energy and hardware.

As long as it can pay for operating costs, they will continue to do this, even if buying electronics for that is no longer profitable

(unless selling equipment is more profitable)

> like for example all the mining hardware dedicated to ETH needs to find a new home

https://minerstat.com/coin/ETC/network-hashrate and https://minerstat.com/coin/ETC/difficulty

A blockchain compatible with old ETH is old ETH... the classic one.

> The amount of energy worth buying to mine crypto is exactly equal to the value of the crypto mined.

That's like saying a stock price is directly proportional to the p/e ratio. Things have both intrinsic and extrinsic value. You are only considering the intrinsic value. In reality, people mine stuff at a loss all the time because they think it might be work more later, i.e. speculation.

Why would they mine it at a loss relative to the market when they could just buy it at whatever the current market price is, if they think it's going to go up in the future?

If nobody mines the coin dies. I can imagine people mine to keep coins alive. Probably bounce money between wallets for the same reason.

> I can imagine people mine to keep coins alive.

I don't think that's a solid argument. Some coins were structured such that there would be a finite supply (21M in the case of bitcoin IIRC). The health of a coin seems to me to be its transaction volume, and somewhat related its ability to be directly exchanged for physical goods or services.

So back to a previous user's suggestion: instead of buying energy to mine coins at a loss, one could instead buy the coins at a lower price which seems on many levels to make more sense than to continue mining.

There's a whole wasteland of people mining to keep coins alive. But not very many people. If ten people are running one graphics card each, out of nostalgia or just in case it catches a rocket to the moon, this is no environmental catastrophe, any more than a personal Minecraft server is.

> If nobody mines the coin dies.

Exactly! Which is why we expect the energy expended on mining PoWETH to drop to zero as the coin dies due to lack of interest, which was the upthread point you were arguing against.

I think their argument against this is that while that's the logical conclusion, trusting crypto to follow any sort of logic is not that reliable.

It's possible to justify reasons to continue. Bad reasons. But how many miners care?

I don't understand your point. If you want to speculate on crypto you can hand a credit card to Coinbase at near-zero cost, you don't need to buy mining hardware to do it. If miners are buying electricity to speculate, they're making stupendously bad decisions. They should sell that hardware and buy crypto; their leverage will be much higher and their costs will be vastly lower.

No, mining is economic activity, not investment. You pay stuff to get stuff. Whether you then invest your profits in crypto has nothing to do with where you got them.

True, and yet nearly every original bitcoin millionaire became one specifically because they decided to mine something that was worthless at the time. Sometimes you don't have money, but you have a GPU and someone else is paying for your electricity. I understand that doesn't describe most mining these days, but the point still stands: people will speculate at a loss.

Again, you're confusing "mining" (economic activity that produces new coins and fees that happen to be measured in BTC) with "investment" (acquiring BTC via any means with the intent to hold).

They are not the same concept, in fact they're completely orthogonal. You don't mine to get coins for investment, because you can get coins much (MUCH!) more cheaply via other means. You mine to get income in the present.

And yet, people did and do.

Overpaying for an investment doesn't make it NOT an investment. You're just saying that arbitrarily.

Wouldn’t you have better luck speculating if you just used your money to buy the coins directly, instead of buying GPUs and then paying more than the cost of the coin in electricity to mine it?

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