Question for #bitcoin, what will happen when ASIC mining becomes unprofitable?
Due to the SHA256 PoW of Bitcoin, ASICs were designed to mine Bitcoin more efficiently and now control basically 100% of the hashrate. I’ve calculated that due to recent halvings ASICs will soon no longer be able to break even and stay profitable.
What will happen to Bitcoin’s value after all the miners bail? Am I missing something?
#asknostr
At some point all miners will be profitable imo. https://video.nostr.build/47517f9b912dfad6a740bfbf54a51487b736f52477a51dbb533731840d5786db.mp4
Long explanation short—difficulty will drop until miner equilibrium is reached again. There will always be miners.
Bitcoin, and all blockchains employing Nakamoto consensus, are encumbered by the need (and cost) of continued block production, even as subsidies reduce and eventually goto zero. Even if there are no new transactions, participants of transactions in recent blocks are incentivized to ensure block production continues in order to avoid double spends via chain rewrites.
I’m more concerned with the outside perceived value of Bitcoin, how is that affected by a bunch of miners bailing? I guess we can’t truly know until it happens
Yep the difficulty adjusts downwards until enough profitable miners come back into the network. In theory you can mine using a pencil and paper!
ASICS will continue to become more efficient & ai will help as well
