3992

I think it is technically possible yes to change the bitcoin code on the main network to use a different consensus mechanism to maintain the ledger. But I don’t think it will ever happen, as the small number of people you need to agree to make this change also have a huge vested interest in it staying the way it is (as it includes large scale bitcoin mining operations).

At this stage, the best hope is for ETH to overtake BTC in the future as the most popular cryptocurrency. Or for governments to, you know, start doing their jobs and taxing BTC transactions because they burned fossil fuels to make them (also true for many other economic activities - we need a carbon tax!).

3993

Still incredible to think that ~0.3% of total energy demand across the world just switched off yesterday with no tangible difference or costs to anyone. It really demonstrates the waste that is PoW.

3994

I’ve said it before, I firmly believe that even if cryptocurrency is here to stay, bitcoin will die. It’s just super duper bad, in lots of ways, not just PoW. It has no redeeming features except being first.

3995

So, apparently all the ETH miners are still mining, they’re just mining different coins. But good news, they’re making a lot less money doing it, so maybe they’ll get out:

The reward for mining an Ethereum Classic block about 24 hours ago was ETC 0.0186484, or about 70 cents, but a check in the past hour found that’s tumbled to just ETC 0.00030658, or about 11 cents, according to data from Minerstat. Similarly, RVN miners could earn RVN 30.28478584, or $1.77 per block 24 hours ago, and in the past hour, that’s dropped to just RVN 0.82968431, or about 5 cents.

“As suspected, too many ETH miners switched over to ETC,” Ethan Vera, chief operations officer of mining services firm Luxor Technologies, tweeted on Thursday.

3996

To be fair to bitcoin, it is one of the few cryptos left with any shred of decentralisation to its name. Most of the other top 100 coins are 100% centralised. It’s too bad the benefits of having a slightly-decentralised currency is overwhelmed by the immense costs.

An influx of new miners into a PoW chain just means less $ per miner. However, your quote is a little incomplete as it doesn’t take into account the frequency of blocks or the probability of receiving a block reward for a given piece of hardware.

Check out this site, you can input a GPU and it will tell you expected profit per day for mining different PoW coins:

Back in the crypto bull market early to mid 2021, I was mining ETH on a 3090 and getting approx $20 USD a day doing it (I have 100% renewable electricity in my house, so try not to hold it against me!). Nowadays, I see you’d get less than a $1. There’s no way that’s better than the electricity cost required to generate it.

3997

Here is what happened to Ethereum POW, the fork of ETH that happened at the merge to keep the PoW version going. As expected, the price tanked -70% as soon as people could start selling:

3998

So what you’re saying is that now is the best time to buy?

4000

Red Notice? That movie sucked! The Fugitive is a better movie.

4001
4002

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4003

Gibson’s gotta be pissed.

4004

Fun times

4005

This is relevant to my interests.

4006

Lol, what? So what’s next? If you sell stock using an app on your phone Apple wants 30%?

4007
4008

“executives and their friends quietly hoarded the majority of wealth at the project’s inception.” has become boilerplate language for articles written about cryptocurrency projects. Is it possible to name a single crypto project that hasn’t resulted in this, other than Dogecoin?

4009

Derpcoin. ;)

4010

I was going to say, Helium seemed like the only crypto asset that made sense. Set up a router, get paid to maintain it. Allows IOT devices to connect, only uses a fraction of your data.

Seemed like a win-win, a fun way to help increase network connectivity and earn some cash for dong so.

They did a whole presentation about how they did the crypto thing, not because they wanted to make money, but because they HAD to, as adoption rates for their network were so low.

It appears that was a lie. They did it to make money. I suppose I should have expected their story of altruism to be false, but they kind of sold it as a “side project” that they did as a hobby, not as some large money making scheme.

4011

It’s the lure of easy money, it’s got a very strong appeal.

4012

Like, it would totally be fine if the founders made some money off of this great idea. But they sold it as a necessity to switch to a blockchain and cryptocurrency to expand their network. We only did crypto as a last resort etc. They just said nice things, and then did the same dirty shit every other new crypto coin does.