2 Comments

  1. Very interesting article.
    Just another thought: you can use any mining equipment profitability calculator to verify this:
    Take the latest AntMiner S9i ($889) with 14 TH/s computing power. Ceterus paribus, you can expect to mine your first (!) Bitcoin after more than 40 years (!). That’s way too long for an individual with a single machine (since you have to pay electricity monthly, and so many things will change in the meantime, like difficulty, Bitcoin price, block reward, total hashing power). So you would have to purchase at least 40 x 12 = 480 of those miners to expect to mine, on average, one Bitcoin per month (or join a mining pool, with fees eating away at your profits). Few individuals will be will to make such an investment.
    So we can see there is a certain danger of centralization of mining power also from that perspective.

    • Paul Amery

      Hi Alex, thanks for the comment and the interesting calculation. I suppose if there’s any trend towards decentralisation of mining it will only be among large-scale industrial players. Unless you have access to energy at a near-zero cost, as some people reportedly had in Venezuela for a while…or if a state actor does it to obtain a way around sanctions.

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