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Comment by rouxz | Hacker News Reader

How long until ASIC mining to become unprofitable?

Mining will never really be unprofitable, because the size of the pool will just regulate itself as needed. As the price falls, people running more efficient mining setups (read: cheaper electricity) will get a larger % of profits as others drop out.

Meaning the drop in value is a massive benefit to the planet as miners shut their setups down.

It's a great time to buy mining hardware and invest into renewables so you can mine like crazy during next ride up in 2024-2025.

Mining hardware becomes obsolete after 6 months because more efficient chips come in which every other miner has. So they all get e wasted constantly.

It’s a negative roi to mine on old hardware.

At some point this has to stop as bitcoin ASIC manufacturing reaches top tier of available technology. Not sure if this moment already came so it's risky, but at some point energy and energy generation hardware will dominate the cost of mining bitcoin.

This is less true now due to maturing of ASIC designs and the slowing of Moore's Law. N5-based miners could last for years.

Ah yes the magic invisible hand of the market

Miners have shut off; it's not hypothetical. Mining never seems to reach perfect equilibrium because of various time lags but the market does work.

Here's a 10-Q filing from a miner from yesterday[1]

They mined 1,047 bitcoin from July, Aug, Sept. Their cost of revenue for mining works out to $13.5k per coin. But that doesn't include the cost of the equipment they use (which, by value, is mainly the ASIC miners). If you add in the figure that they provide for equipment depreciation, it's an additional $25k per coin.

(Full disclosure: I'm short this stock)

[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1167419/0001...

Pretty hard to say since it depends on the price you pay for electricity. But you can just watch the difficulty adjusting to see when people have started to turn off miners

It is now; machines are being turned off as even the marginal(electricity) costs are now more than the return. Mining in case the price goes up doesn't make sense if you can just buy bitcoin for less than the electricity cost, of course.

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