If nothing else, bitcoin has made me aware of how bad the tech journalism is in general.
Go reasonably deep into something, anything, and than read a news article about it. Sobering experience.
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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Title doesn't match the text
one Bitcoin trades for around $94,000
$137,000 in electricity for small-scale operations to mine
optimal cost for mining a bitcoin at around $82,000
So really it should just say "mining bitcoin only profitable at scale in areas with cheap electricity" which has always been true to a degree
It's self-adjusting isn't it? The more people mining, the smaller share of the pie you get? It isn't very meaningful then to say how a particular electricity price compares to the Bitcoin price for profitability. That isn't much of a metric for the strength of the network. I feel like a better measure would be something like, the bitcoin marketcap divided by current hash rate; how much computing power is available to protect the network relative to how much value it is protecting. I'm kind of skeptical they will be able to keep that one up given that block rewards are going to decline and stop entirely to assure the 21 million, and actual use of Bitcoin for transactions is discouraged so potential fee revenue is limited.
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These are US electricity prices. Where in the US? They don't say. There are miners in the US who get their electricity for "free" ie they generate it from waste heat or waste gas. So this is de facto a cherry picked number.
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Most bitcoiners believe that the value of bitcoin will continue to rise in the future as it has for the past 14 years. A $137K bitcoin today could be an insane bargain in several years. Also "untainted" coins - Coins that haven't passed through other wallets yet - Generally trade at a slight premium as there is lower risk of them being confiscated by governments in the future for having passed through the hands illegalized owners.
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No shit bitcoin is concentrated in a few holders. It's money, under capitalism. The author conflates communist-style distribution of value with the decentralized administration of the network itself. This is like saying that Lemmy isn't decentralized because the majority of posts come from 1% of users. There's no way that rhentorical switchup was accidental, that is a misleading and disingenuous writing choice.
I'm as happy as anyone to criticize bitcoin, but this is trashy clickbait.
For your second point, in that scenario it's more valuable to turn your rig off and just buy it then.
Yeah, if you're actually paying that much and untouched coins are of no benefit to you then you'd probably pull the plug. Any rational miner in the US still chugging away right now is obviously not losing money according to their business plan or they'd shut off.
zooming in further*
Mining is a speculation om future value, always has been.
Womp womp
Yeah but at least it's holding its value, unlike USD right now.
Edit: You crypto haters are so fucking annoying. Check the price if you don't believe me.