Cryptocurrency Collapse
blog.dshr.org
blog.dshr.org
Mining 1 BTC cost way less than 1 BTC during the bubble. So, to compete, miners built out big.
The hash rate changes approximately every two weeks. But capital expenditure — building and deploying single-purpose mining hardware — has a rather longer lead time.
The price just crashed, and the hash rate is now dropping off sharply. So everyone’s getting squeezed — the cost of mining 1 BTC is circling 1 BTC, like it was in the doldrums of 2014-2015.
F2Pool founder Mao Shixing estimates 600,000 Bitcoin mining machines shut down in the last two weeks — mostly older, less efficient machines. ... The interview with Mao Shixing gives us numbers for how cheap Chinese power actually is. Summer prices are around 2.9 cents per kilowatt-hour. We’re coming into winter, and it’s more like 4.3 c/kWh.
The current worldwide hash rate is 45×1018 hashes per second. If everyone is running an Ebang E-10 (which they’re not — most mining is less efficient), at 0.092 joules per gigahash — then in summer, that’s about $2750 a bitcoin for the electricity alone.
Around now, it’s getting to … around $4000 to mine a bitcoin.
There are startups like Golem [1] that are working on tackling this market, but it seems like they're starting with a small set of verticals, none of which are applicable to anything I need.