Assuming they are stating the actual reason, I presume too low of a transaction fee was attached to the transaction somehow, so it gets super deprioritized in the BTC network and no miners will get around to working on that chunk for a long while.
And they certainly do not want to be bagholding for everything else that happens in the meanwhile.
This is what’s going to cause the repeat of the Great Depression isn’t it, since we’re repeating everything else from a hundred years ago.
I bet there’s an embarrassing amount of Wall Street tied up in crypto.
Some mining machines have already fallen into negative profitability. Currently Bitcoin is close to dropping under $23,000. Oops, now it is under $23,000.
The stock market indices are mostly down 2-3% today also.
Timex
3430
I suspect that what we’re seeing is that the stock market’s volatility impacts the imaginary money in the crypto markets, but without any of the regulation or actual value that the real stock market has, the crypto market is much more susceptible to sudden collapses.
To alter an old saying, when the stock market sneezes, crypto catches a cold.
I don’t think that’s it.
From what I can tell, the pooling system that holds transactions until a new Bitcoin block is found is extremely high right now, which means there’s a ton of contention of people wanting to move Bitcoin from one wallet to another right now. That means fees are increasing due to congestion.
What seems to have happened based on hints they’ve stated, is that Binance has had a lot of activity lately (and withdrawls) and needs to move bitcoins from their cold wallet to their hot wallet. They attempted to do this, but the people that triggered the transaction picked a transaction fee that’s too low compared to all the other transaction fees out there.
What that means is that the transaction to replenish their hot wallet is stuck and either needs to be redone with a higher fee (which has it’s own issues) or waiting until the current transaction goes through as Bitcoin load goes through. Thus they are running low on funds on the hot wallet until the situation resolves.
Is a cold wallet essentially offline while a hot one is not and ready to trade?
If you bought $10000 worth of Ethereum when Matt Damon told you to during the Super Bowl, you would now have around $2900.
What happens if bitcoin value drops below the mining value (besides the environment breathing a sigh of relief)?
Thrag
3437
It rains (heavily) used video cards.
JoshL
3438
It just means transaction fees go up. Since the miners have to pay their electricity costs in actual money, they’ll need to get more bitcoin to pay the same electricity costs.
Aceris
3439
My udnerstanding is that if people start turning off uneconomic miners the complexity of the proof of work problem will automatically be reduced as the time-to-solve increases, with the payout remaining the same
JoshL
3440
Hm, that sounds right too actually. I’m not sure what triggers that, but yeah, that could happen.
You could get a cycle where fees and transaction times shoot up, so Bitcoin is less liquid, so people try and dump Bitcoin, price goes down, mining rigs get shut down, fees and transaction times go up…
Some of this is cushioned by big exchanges running lots of transactions internally, only using the Blockchain for settlement.
I… malcomreynoldsverklempt.gif
I’d say it has to be a joke, but I no longer know.
