Love it!

It looks like madness but it isn't.

All those machines "working" all day and no work being done. Even when work is done (finding a block) it's not work work, it's virtual work.

It is possible somewhat, the cost overtime of power production is decreasing thanks to the revolutionary renewable energy sources and a more safe nuclear energy, I think that the power generated annually will not overtake everything that we do. With renewable energy, I think that the price of mining will go down, not to mention that the mines are getting closer to the sources which drastically change the amount of money spent on power. The only reason that it becomes possible scenario is that each blocks gets progressively harder to mine which could be solved via quantum computing.

It's amazing what friend say about mining and the use of electricity for mining is of course very special if that happens, but we know that not all will be interested in bitcoin mining. because maybe also the risk of mining is not easy and it must be taken into account in all aspects before you really want to mine.

The cost of mining approaches the value of the mined bitcoins, regardless of the efficiency of the miners or the cost of the energy generation. That's just the economics of mining due to the self-adjusting difficulty and the incentives. So, when the value of a bitcoin goes up, so will the cost of mining it.

So what you are saying is that no matter how affordable the energy for mining is, it will not affect the cost of mining. I do agree with you regarding the difficulty of mining as the blocks gets more hard to mine and we are also reaching a computing plateau.

If we can't fight the apocalypse scenario energy wise, do you think that we can defeat it by breaking through the computing plateau, one promising future technology is quantum computing. Having a faster computing speed means that blocks are mined faster.

The halving will take care of that, it will be nearly impossible for it to reach that level before 2024, at which point it will need to grow again by 2x and 2x every 4 years. But since you're talking in a hypothetical scenario there is something else to be noted, not only is this energy consumption depends on the price but also on the available gear that could mine.

Assuming last month's numbers, and rounding them pretty good we were doing around 125 exahash at 10k/coin, taking the best gear available on the market and you need 1.1 million of them.  Now for 8 million a piece, you would need around 1 billion in mining gear, which will take ages to manufacture, and as the profitability goes down so will the incentive to produce gear to the limit, again not doable in this small interval.


And again theoretically over a long period, it can be done.
According to IEA, the increased production of electricity in non-OECD averaged 5% per year, and we're talking about 80% of the world population here, with China, India , Russia , Brazil, and many more, who have enough potential to drive the growth up.  


It doesn't matter with what you mine or how energy efficient that is!!!
It's a matter of what you can afford to pay in electricity regarding what you get in profit.
An S19pro does 110th/s while an S3 had 0.4 Th/s , that's a 300x increase in hashing power with just barely 10x in power consumption, from around  0.8J/GH to 0.03J/GH. Did overall power consumption drop? No!

 

Hihi, if we assume that everything that needs to happen in order for the scenario to take place will, of course, the outcome will be that, but there are some more points of fault for it to become reality and two of them are based on money.

If bitcoin does reach 8 million in this 4 year period, then we're looking at a needed influx of nearly 8 billion a day that needs to be bought from the markets in order for miners to pay their bills, will that be possible? It's an enormous sum of money! But let's say even this is possible. Then something better kicks in, the law of offer and demand.

Once mining becomes so profitable that it starts burning GWs of energy, we're going to see the usual outcome of it, the rise in prices, just as it happened with oil! High demand, high prices, low demand, cheap oil. Consumers might be able to cope with a 25-30 increase in electric energy costs (only electric, not oil/gas/etc) but for miners, this will mean a 25% hit in their spending budget so just with an adjustment of prices we've shed 25% of the possible consumption and saved the world, yet again!

And there is one more thing, a lot of people are angry when they read on their bill all the sums for cogeneration, green certificates, etc, think what will happen if the prices double because of bitcoin mining! Not quite the thing I want to see happening!

Not a singular case and it is highly possible more will start even now, well before 100k as a doubling in price means a doubling in income and finally a breath of fresh air for miners. Even with the last rise in diff and the current one (approx 9%) we will still be below the middle October hashrate when we were at 10k.

But there is also a different thing happening in the US, where a lot of energy is produced by private entities, you can't force them to stop supplying miners, if miners want to build their own powerplants, solar panels fields, or wind turbines there is little you can do , and this will once more push the doomsday scenario a few steps back.


They don't need to ban bitcoin itself, nor do they have to ban mining.

It's way simpler to avoid all the drama by simply hitting large to medium facilities with extra tariffs, in the EU for example, we had this in some countries for decades, it taxes extra energy depending on what you're using it for (heavy industry, retail commerce, transportation)  so they could simply slap taxes on them rather than hunting them down which will have the same effect. Let others deal with it.

Banning them would also lead to cases like this, where people hide their gear in their own homes:
Russian Hospitalized After Bitcoin Mining Farm Sets Apartment on Fire