This is probably symptomatic of the continually increasing energy usage of Bitcoin, the Red Queen principal is at play. Fossil fuels are becoming harder to extract, so expect energy costs to continue to rise over the long term.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
You seem to have good understanding of the technical aspects of crypto. What I am wondering, is what would happen when all the cloudminers would agree amongst each other to limit the global hashrate power. Would that reduce mining of bitcoin blocks? Or would this have no effect at all at the amount of bitcoins mined daily? Or in other words, would 1 pc be enough for mining btc in stead of mining farms that consume more than a continent of electrical power?
The way it works is the difficulty of finding the next batch of blocks automatically adjusts itself, this is how blocks are mined every 10 minutes. If the 'block time' gets shorter than 10 minutes the hashing problem is made harder so it takes longer to find the answer, if the block time gets longer than 10 minutes the hash problem is made easier so blocks are found more quickly.
So you can increase the amount of hashing power x1000 or reduce it x1000 and you will still get the same number of blocks, and that equals the same number of Bitcoin issued per day.
This is why Bitcoin is so wasteful to mine, because you keep throwing more energy at the system just to keep the status-quo. Think of the first 100 blocks, they were mined by a small group on 10 year old CPUs.
If you could get an agreement on limiting hash rate there would be the same number of Bitcoin issued, but it only takes one group to break the agreement and try to steal more blocks for it to fall apart.
Thanks a lot for this answer. Only found it today.