Comment by ajross
18 hours ago
"stop"
(Obviously the equipment doesn't go away. You can start it again. But if you can't make a buck doing something, you won't do it.)
18 hours ago
"stop"
(Obviously the equipment doesn't go away. You can start it again. But if you can't make a buck doing something, you won't do it.)
But I mean, their bitcoins are not going away, their wallets are still there, their bitcoins also right? I thought bitcoin mining was proportionally hard to the number of already mined bitcoins, not the number of people mining?
I probably should look this up in wikipedia first.
It's a common misunderstanding that mining just gets harder and harder as time goes by and more coins are minted. It's often misreported that way. But in fact, the difficulty is dynamic and adjusts itself to keep minting at the predetermined rate regardless of the number of participants. Mining has gotten harder on long timelines, but only because more computing power has been added.
Doesn’t that contradict the Wikipedia article?
> Miners who successfully create a new block with a valid nonce can collect transaction fees from the included transactions and a fixed reward in bitcoins. To claim this reward, a special transaction called a coinbase is included in the block, with the miner as the payee. All bitcoins in existence have been created through this type of transaction. This reward is halved every 210,000 blocks until ₿21 million have been issued in total, which is expected to occur around the year 2140. Afterward, miners will only earn from transaction fees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin (emphasis mine)
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