Comment by shazzdeeds
4 years ago
Profit comes when their operating costs are less than the take home from any transaction fees and Coinbase rewards they’ve collected in the same period. It’s not a direct function of liquidity entering the system. It’s true that rising prices from new cash flow means more profit for miners, but that doesn’t imply the opposite. The price could stay constant for the next 100 years and miners that have found a way to remain profitable within that price point would be fine.
Miners have real expenses: electricity, depreciation, etc. Miners also generarte revenue, $45 million per day is a reasonable estimate [1]. This revenue is extracted from the Bitcoin system through both transaction fees and inflation (creating new Bitcoins), but these are sold in portion to pay real expenses, with presumably some profit.
We can estimate 300k transactions per day, which implies about $150 revenue per transaction. Miner revenue is your cost: it is what they extract from the Bitcoin system.
One Bitcoin transaction costs on the order of $150. It's really expensive.
1: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/miners-revenue
If the price stays constant for 100 years where is the money coming from to pay for those NVIDIA cards that the miners are using?