Given that it’s no longer profitable to mine, this should come to a close relatively soon.
There was an article claiming that making the rounds a week or two back, but it was highly misleading and didn’t understand the technology. Bitcoin automatically adjusts its difficulty so that it’s just barely profitable to mine, if it becomes unprofitable then it readjust again in short order to fix that.
Well, that’s a bummer. I don’t care about the space (other than disliking it), so when someone says something that’s inaccurate, I need someone like you to tell me if they’re wrong.
It can be a thankless role sometimes, a lot of people are very personally invested in hating cryptocurrency. Often they don’t want accuracy, they just want to hear that something bad happened to crypto. So when I come in with an “um, actually” I become the villain. :)
Not the villain today. Thanks!
How? Is bitcoin indexing very local power provider in every region to adapt difficulty to power pricing?
Texas is a private grid that has far more pricing fluctuations than larger grids.
No, it bases its difficulty adjustment on the rate at which blocks are produced. They are supposed to be produced once every ten minutes, on average. If the time between blocks goes above that then difficulty is too high and it’s adjusted downward, and the reverse if the blocks are being generated more quickly than that on average.
Then no, bitcoin is not able to keep it’s difficulty low enough to maintain profitability in regions with volatile/high power pricing. If there’s a heat wave or ice storm in Texas, the power pricing spikes due to higher demand.
Bitcoin, sure. They’ll just mine whatever they can.
