Topic: Do not mine only for profit, but to prevent that the network gets hacked (Read 101 times)

At this point, why would anyone try to do a 51% attack? It would require billions of dollars to get access to miners, which would give someone 51% of the network's mining hash rate. If someone invests billions of dollars into mining rigs, equipment, data centres and personnel, then why would someone attack and destroy a currency with a 2 Trillion dollars market cap? There are lots of billionaires with their own interests in the Bitcoin business, so I don't think anyone will let anyone to do 51% attack.

I agree with that. If we start mining Bitcoin, it will increase the mining difficulty and many miners will be forced to shut down their miners. Then only rich mining companies will be able to keep their miners on during unprofitability and this will be a huge threat of 51% attack to my mind.

I agree with the OP that mining nodes are done to prevent 51% attacks on the Bitcoin network. However, it is also important to realize that every time a mining node is done, it will get a reward in the form of Bitcoin, and this is a trigger for everyone to do mining as well as security, and I think this has been thought of long before by the Creator of Bitcoin. Even so, I hope that there will always be many people who can do this mining node, because we know that not everyone can do it.

If you read the article more carefully, he actually imply there are 16 mining pools (who mine at least a block) in 1000 blocks in 2022.


Let's not forget that hashrate (usually) increase over time and we see more efficient ASIC chip every few years. So if someone were to follow your idea, they need to buy ASIC every few years just to keep up.


This analogy would work better if you talk about securing Bitcoin wallet by buying hardware wallet or device only for managing Bitcoin.


For most miner, mining is business. I don't think they would bother do more than moving from pool with high hashrate percentage to low ones.

Your numbers are off buddy, sorry. You consider the percentage of bitcoin holdings a person should spend for mining, but you completely overlook that not everyone has access to the same costs of electricity.

You should absolutely not mine if it's not profitable, unless you're curious to learn how mining works. It is the design such that once a source of cheap electricity is found, it can be used to reduce profitability of other miners. Such is bitcoin. Altruism makes shitcoins.

well is btc headed towards the end?

some think so.

some do not.

2012  we dropped to 25 coins a block              50.000% of coins mined
2016. we dropped to 12.5 coins a block           75.000% of coins mined
2020  we dropped to  6.25 coins a block          87.500% of coins mined
2024  we dropped to  3.125 coins a block         93.750% of coins mined


2028  we will drop to 1.5625  coins a block        96.8750% of coins mined
2032 we will drop to  0.78125 coins a block       98.4375% of coins mined
2036 we will drop to  0.390625 coins a block      99.21875% of coins mined

we will know what's up by 2036 I think.

I didn't know that aside the profit making side of mining, it is also functions to discourage Bitcoin from crash. This has brought a small confusion in my mind.

There are 21 million Bitcoins created. Some have been mined, some are in the wallets of some people and some missing. What will happen when all the Bitcoin gets mined? Will the price crash or will the network crash? This is in the context of the OP.

This is a warning for those who mine for short term profit, and for those who provide online calculators to help them decide:

I have though of buying a small miner for my home, but I always fall into some "mining profitability" calculators that put me off.

I would like to provide a reminder that we mine not only to make short term gains, but also to prevent that the network gets a 51% attack and our bitcoin price goes to zero.

We see mining getting increasingly concentrated on few players. If you see https://christopherwolfram.com/projects/bitcoin-centralization/ site, until 2012, 1000 different miners produced consecutive 1000 blocks. Nowadays, we have 16 miners producing 1000 consecutive blocks. This is very alarming.

I was wondering how much mining power every BTC owner should have so that everyone can do their share of protecting the network.

Of course I cannot have the same THs as someone rich, but if everyone can have an amount proportional to their bitcoin market cap, this are a little more realistic.

Here are my calculations:

According to https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/hash-rate, the current hashrate is 800 M, and the hash rate in TH/s increases more or less linearly with BTC price in USD.

How much TH/s should everyone provide in order to secure a part of the network proportional to its stake?

With 21 M BTCs avaiable, if you own 0.1 BTC (10 000 USD as for now), your share of the total bitcoins is 0.1 / 21 M = 4.76e-9. The current hashrate is 800M TH/s, so you should have 4.76e-9 * 800M TH/s = 3.8 TH/s

As far as I know, the most energy efficient small home miner is Bitaxe Gamma (corrent me if am wrong) and costs 245 USD. Each has around 1.2 TH/s, so you would need 3 of them, or 745 USD, to protect your own share of BTCs (assuming everyone does the same).

745 USD is 7% of your BTC value (10 000 USD, or 0.1 BTC in this case). If USD price double, probably the total TH/s will also double, so you would need double the THs power to keep up. This means, 7% of your BTC USD value should be in a small but cost efficient miner. no matter at which price BTC is.

7%!

I really dont think most of people have 7% of their BTC value invested in a small miner, showing that actually most of people don't do enough to protect their investment.

This is like having a 10 000 USD bike, with no locker to protect it against thieves. Some people have even 100 000 USD bikes, or 1 000 000 USD bikes with no lockers!

I suggest we should disencourage people from seeing mining just as a profit tool, but as a tool to prevent BTC from crashing.

To the owner of online BTC profit calculators: please make clear that mining is not only for short term profit, but that is also to protect the network. The opportunity cost of not mining yourself is allowing the network to be attacked and everything going to zero.

And please add the fact that BTC will appreaciate if it keeps safe (it appeciates in average 77% per year since 2012), so please also include this discount rate at your calculations, for those to insist on short term profits.

Remember that gold storage got centralized because it was cheaper on the short run, and that fractional reserve banks got famous because it let you get some interest rate for doing it. This all lead to the centralized and corrupted fiat system we have now. Dont let the same happen to bitcoin! Try to have 7% of your BTC investment in the most energy efficient small miner you can have

PS: I searched for the most efficient miner in terms of energy consumption, but I could have come below the 7% value if I had a website which takes my energy cost, and automatically goes thru a list of miners and their prices and power efficiency, and gives me back the miner with the highest ROI for my needed THs. If someone knows such a calculator, please tell me