r/Buttcoin • u/AmericanScream • 2d ago
As Seen On (crypto) TV Today's r-bitcoin front page c0pe: "Is ThIs NoRmAl?"
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u/loquacious HRNNNGGGGG! 2d ago
Dear coiners: Yes, this kind of e-waste is normal. This is one of the many wasteful things we've been yelling about for well over ten years.
And this is a SMALL amount of e-waste.
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u/DoxxThis1 2d ago edited 2d ago
Miner consolidation is inevitable. Capitalism, race to the bottom, no anti-trust regulation, etc. Eventually one entity with access to cheap electricity, probably Chinese, will outcompete the others and win the majority of mined blocks. Best part, they won’t have to announce to the world when they’ve achieved 51% or 75% of total hash capacity. This entity will then be able to unilaterally decide which transactions make it to the chain. So DeCeNtRaLiZeD, few understand.
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u/PainRack 2d ago
Wasn't there a period in time where there was like 4 mining pools which controlled 75% of the hash? This was pre China crackdown so no idea what it's like now.
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u/SisterOfBattIe using multiple slurp juices on a single ape since 2022 1d ago
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u/DoxxThis1 1d ago
That’s 63% disclosed, so far, and no way of knowing how independent the three are, now or in the future. An entity acquiring majority control will keep it a secret until they can pull off a major heist at an opportune time of their choosing.
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u/AmericanScream 1d ago
That’s 63% disclosed, so far, and no way of knowing how independent the three are
Very good point.
Same with the exchanges. People argue the price is legit because x different exchanges are all in the same range, but we know every time a CEX goes belly up, and we get a glimpse under the hood, that they're colluding with other crypto exchanges, moving liquidity around.
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u/mercuryy 2d ago
It's either that, only the ones with the lowest cost prevail and the rest gets pushed out, or the ones in danger of being pushed out band together and create a fork that has no coins limit or reward halvings.
Things will get spicy in one way or another in the future.
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u/MiningDave Ponzi Schemer 1d ago
10s of thousands of of dollars of e-waste there.
Surprised, usually when businesses go bankrupt the companies that do the shutdown work take everything.
Over a decade ago I remember laughing when a business in the office building I worked in shutdown and the company doing the bankruptcy work were loading some broken folding metal chairs into the scrap bin. When I asked, the guy basically pointed out that there were worth $0.02 to $0.03 a pound and that not taking that $0.20 scrap metal chair amounted to fiduciary irresponsibility. As he put it, no not going to came back for them if they don't fit in the metal recycling bin but if you are there and have room you take it.
That was when I got into metal recycling and e-waste recycling. Never had paid attention to how much you could really get out of it.
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u/VisKopen 2d ago
I was surprised by the amount of reasonable posts in that thread. I thought all normal people were banned from that sub ages ago.
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u/Melodic-Mechanic9125 2d ago
I am curious who can still afford to mine with the cost of electricity nowadays that ai consumes everything that is available and the btc price stuck below 100 k $.
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u/SisterOfBattIe using multiple slurp juices on a single ape since 2022 1d ago
cheapest electricity is stolen electricity.
Texas give subsidized rates by taxpayers and pay bitcoiners to shut down when grid is unstable.
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u/Mecha_Magpie 2d ago
The difficulty target for bitcoin mining is supposed to self-adjust to the actual hash rate of the network, when the cost of a hash goes up mining a block doesn't require as many zeroes at the end. It's pretty clever, but the intended result is exactly this, just piles of electronics discarded in a field. Satoshi either didn't think this through our more likely considered it an acceptable cost of having a slow payment processor with pretend money and no chargebacks.
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u/MyNameIsRay 1d ago
I don't think there's any way anyone could have predicted ASICs replacing PC's as the hardware used to mine.
If it stayed on PC's, then each upgrade results in used hardware going to the secondhand market, rather than being discarded as trash.
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u/itsmehutters 1d ago
We had a company next to our office that was a mining farm. They closed right after the price went from 20k to 6k. Industrial electricity in my country is way more expensive, so we were surprised they aren't trying to just mine from someone's house, like other guys.
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u/GozerDestructor 2d ago
Nature is healing ❤️