Topic: Bitcoin Will Eat the World (Read 351 times)

Mutiny is always at hand in a setup like this. And besides, humans are always there to find a loophole. Not like bitcoin is an limitless source to begin with. This is if the the supplier of energy was able to keep up with this. Plus thid would happen fast because companies ars etoher gonna ride the wave that is bitcoin and would cause for the supply of bitcoin to deplete even faster.

Well, the production should meet only with the amount needed. If the world currently producing 26 PWH of electricity every year that is because the world just needed such amount, -- producers will not go beyond it for it may just go to waste and if the OP's assumption really comes, then electric companies will be prepared to meet it's requirements aside from the regular amount of electricity for the other industries and household consumption. Though it may happen in the future one thing I am pretty sure of is that it will never happen in this lifetime.

This is also a very good scenario for Bitcoin becoming a common and scarce currency.
And not only is electricity prices affected, but the whole world has to access the internet every day to earn more income. When electricity bills go up and the demand for the internet is also soaring, won't technology corporations take ownership of the world?
Based on the high demand for internet usage, carriers will therefore also increase network usage fees and take the initiative in all the rules they have set, even they may force users.

When this happens, the ones that's going to be benefited by this are those countries that have cheap electricity rates like those in the middle east. By their natural gas production just like in Qatar and a net exported of energy, they have the most cheap electricity rate in the world which is an ideal place to put a mining company in order to adopt the continuous Bitcoin revolution that will eventually surprise the whole world.

We may not know when this will happen but seeing it in the future happening is not imposible anymore.

By first bitcoin would eat the fiat and render it worthless and all the fiat billionaire are rendered pointless since they have no coiner but fiat garbage, and bitcoiner shine like the rare Pokemon, next everything that backed by fiat also come to worthless, that include your favourite pizza, you can’t measure with how many pizza you can purchase with one satoshi anymore by the time, because the worthlessness fiat has eat all the fiat billionaire accumulated wealth and hence their products too.

Basically the risk refer to by you is the electricity consumption involved in the mining of Bitcoin. The fact still remain that there is much use of electricity in the mining of Bitcoin  but if this technology get into global adoption there will be more companies which will be more interested in providing electricity for this purpose. There are possibility of we seeing a better way of managing this risk for our good IMO.

I won't go further this line of your post since in any apocalyptic scenario as, world wouldn't gather power just to dedicate it to mine bitcoin. What would be the purpose?

Besides transacting bitcoin isn't helpful in any damn scenario in this world. (Apocalyptic).

If they needed one energy to produce another and if bitcoin goes as far as eating the world then they will simply produce another technology with much smarter use of energy.

I mean why one would keep using a tech if it's getting over their heads? We are intelligent species, if did invent the bitcoin then we could do more than that if such apocalyptic scenario stumbles upon us.

This is a broad thought about bicoin, maybe this could have happened if this bitcoin made many new miners do this, because in terms of mining the biggest problem is electricity and must have a large electric power. We know that electricity comes from nature and this is true if bitcoin can eat the world. this is not nonsense but reality

Not a singular case and it is highly possible more will start even now, well before 100k as a doubling in price means a doubling in income and finally a breath of fresh air for miners. Even with the last rise in diff and the current one (approx 9%) we will still be below the middle October hashrate when we were at 10k.

But there is also a different thing happening in the US, where a lot of energy is produced by private entities, you can't force them to stop supplying miners, if miners want to build their own powerplants, solar panels fields, or wind turbines there is little you can do , and this will once more push the doomsday scenario a few steps back.


They don't need to ban bitcoin itself, nor do they have to ban mining.

It's way simpler to avoid all the drama by simply hitting large to medium facilities with extra tariffs, in the EU for example, we had this in some countries for decades, it taxes extra energy depending on what you're using it for (heavy industry, retail commerce, transportation)  so they could simply slap taxes on them rather than hunting them down which will have the same effect. Let others deal with it.

Banning them would also lead to cases like this, where people hide their gear in their own homes:
Russian Hospitalized After Bitcoin Mining Farm Sets Apartment on Fire

The government won't allow anything close to this to happen. I remember reading news a few years ago about some place (NYC?) kicking out the miners, because they were disrupting the local electricity grid. If we will somehow get to the point were Bitcoin mining would start negatively affect the entire population, even by simply causing a noticeable increase in people's electric bills, no government will have a problem with simply banning Bitcoin. And I know that Bitcoin "can not be banned because it's decentralized", but if Bitcoin is illegal, there's no way it will ever cost $8 million, so the problem will solve itself.

Hihi, if we assume that everything that needs to happen in order for the scenario to take place will, of course, the outcome will be that, but there are some more points of fault for it to become reality and two of them are based on money.

If bitcoin does reach 8 million in this 4 year period, then we're looking at a needed influx of nearly 8 billion a day that needs to be bought from the markets in order for miners to pay their bills, will that be possible? It's an enormous sum of money! But let's say even this is possible. Then something better kicks in, the law of offer and demand.

Once mining becomes so profitable that it starts burning GWs of energy, we're going to see the usual outcome of it, the rise in prices, just as it happened with oil! High demand, high prices, low demand, cheap oil. Consumers might be able to cope with a 25-30 increase in electric energy costs (only electric, not oil/gas/etc) but for miners, this will mean a 25% hit in their spending budget so just with an adjustment of prices we've shed 25% of the possible consumption and saved the world, yet again!

And there is one more thing, a lot of people are angry when they read on their bill all the sums for cogeneration, green certificates, etc, think what will happen if the prices double because of bitcoin mining! Not quite the thing I want to see happening!

Possibly, however the price has been rising much faster than the subsidy has been halving. That's a good point about the equipment. It could take a long time to manufacture all of that mining equipment. But, lets assume it is achievable in a shorter time span.

The halving will take care of that, it will be nearly impossible for it to reach that level before 2024, at which point it will need to grow again by 2x and 2x every 4 years. But since you're talking in a hypothetical scenario there is something else to be noted, not only is this energy consumption depends on the price but also on the available gear that could mine.

Assuming last month's numbers, and rounding them pretty good we were doing around 125 exahash at 10k/coin, taking the best gear available on the market and you need 1.1 million of them.  Now for 8 million a piece, you would need around 1 billion in mining gear, which will take ages to manufacture, and as the profitability goes down so will the incentive to produce gear to the limit, again not doable in this small interval.


And again theoretically over a long period, it can be done.
According to IEA, the increased production of electricity in non-OECD averaged 5% per year, and we're talking about 80% of the world population here, with China, India , Russia , Brazil, and many more, who have enough potential to drive the growth up.  


It doesn't matter with what you mine or how energy efficient that is!!!
It's a matter of what you can afford to pay in electricity regarding what you get in profit.
An S19pro does 110th/s while an S3 had 0.4 Th/s , that's a 300x increase in hashing power with just barely 10x in power consumption, from around  0.8J/GH to 0.03J/GH. Did overall power consumption drop? No!

 

With Bitcoin price rising (and falling) in cycles, there will be moments miners go out of business. It has happened before too (in 2015, I think).
All in all I expect that starting with some point there will be a balance between miners, bitcoin price and electricity (consumption and price) and the chance will be bigger that miners shut down than Bitcoin price rise more.

The price will be decided by free market, more or less. Food and important things may have special prices decided by the governments.

If we can't fight the apocalypse scenario energy wise, do you think that we can defeat it by breaking through the computing plateau, one promising future technology is quantum computing. Having a faster computing speed means that blocks are mined faster.

It doesn't matter who mines the bitcoins. As long as the value of the bitcoins being mined is greater than the value of the energy used to mine them, miners will increase their energy usage.

That is correct.

So what you are saying is that no matter how affordable the energy for mining is, it will not affect the cost of mining. I do agree with you regarding the difficulty of mining as the blocks gets more hard to mine and we are also reaching a computing plateau.

It seems that the only way out is to increase energy production faster than the value of a bitcoin.

The cost of mining approaches the value of the mined bitcoins, regardless of the efficiency of the miners or the cost of the energy generation. That's just the economics of mining due to the self-adjusting difficulty and the incentives. So, when the value of a bitcoin goes up, so will the cost of mining it.

If the value of the bitcoins being mined is X, then the value of the energy used to mine them will approach X, regardless of the difficulty or the cost of the energy. I agree that the price will probably have to be much higher because people will probably value other things (like food).

But, that also means that everything will become more expensive because you would have compete with miners for the energy to produce other things.

How would you determine that price?