alt Hacker NewsI'm far from a crypto expert but aren't costs largely GPUs and electricity here?
Those are now being driven by massive AI demand and are likely to remain so for the forseeable future. So how would costs go down?
Replies
vardump • today at 3:23 PM
I don't think GPUs are competitive at all. You need specialized mining rigs with bitcoin mining specialized chips.
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rayiner • today at 3:41 PM
If costs stay high, then people will drop out of bitcoin mining, which will cause supply to go down and bitcoin prices to go up.
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The cost of finding a block goes down because it becomes less difficult.
The goal in proof of work is to find a block hash less than a given value. That value is determined by the network difficulty. The lower the value, the more difficult it is to find a block, and thus the more expensive it will be to mine.
Difficulty is adjusted once every two weeks to target an average block time of 10 minutes. If the average block time during the preceding 2 weeks is less than 10 minutes, it means that blocks were too easy to find (i.e. the difficulty was too low relative to total hash rate of the network). Conversely, if the average block time was greater than 10 minutes, the difficulty was too great.
This is how it the network has maintained a roughly 10 minute block time as the hash rate of the network has grown over the past 16 years. The difficulty (i.e. cost) of finding a block is constantly being adjusted.