Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/23/what-will-happen-when-bitcoin.html
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Lol bitcoin around for another 120 years
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GPU cards will get cheaper for one thing.
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It’ll probably go something like this:
“Hey, according to this Bitcoin mining rewards are officially negligible.”
“What what rewards?”
“Bitcoin mining. Apparently, in the time before the Global AI Wars, people would commit vast amounts of their limited and environmentally costly energy reserves to calculating cryptographic formulae that they hoped other people would accept in exchange for goods and services. In reality all it was ever good for was funding things such as blackmail, extortion, murder, and other socially harmful activities.”
“Really? No wonder we won the Global AI Wars. Beep boooooop Oh! Pardon me!”
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It’s this woman again? Haven’t we been exposed to her here at BB before? IIRC, she was the one that was talking about crypto and other topics (like how to become a citizen of a small Carribean nation) at various beaches and resort destinations. Surprised this one wasn’t on the white sands of Hispanolia.
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the miners move to another virtual coin and bitcoin value drops to near zero
I’ve got a dozen in a wallet I can’t unlock for years now because I tried to be clever and use a long nonsensical sentence as a password I can’t remember for the life of me
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Lol bitcoin humanity around for another 120 years
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I think that’s also a likely possibility.
Or at least, not around in a state that uses computers and electronics. Maybe more canoes and salted fish.
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I hear anyone can become a fishcoin miner with a minimal investment in hardware.
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What happens? Maybe the adults in the room get to talk about real benefits of a managed distributed ledger and user control over access to their data without knucklehead marketing execs derailing the conversation towards fantasy ICOs. (I mean, not that I’ve, y’know, been in any meetings like that or anything in the past 18 months).
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I didn’t understand her calculation…she said, the block reward is cut in half every 4 years, and there have been 2 halving events: the reward was 50, then 25, now 12.5. Then she says, since it takes 10 minutes to mine a block, you can calculate that the reward will be zero in 2140. huh?
Won’t it just be a very small value (50/2^33 or ~0.000000006)? And what does the 10 minutes have to do with the calculation, isn’t it all based on halving events every 4 years?
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She’s saying it takes 10 minutes for the world to mine a block, and the halving events are based on the total number of blocks mined, not calendar time per se.
I don’t know how the mining rewards work but I infer the calculation is based on left-shifting an integer rather than dividing a floating-point number by two, and so it will go to zero after 32 halvings.
Anyway, the whole thing remains as essentially silly as it always was.
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Think of all the aluminum we could have refined instead.
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You, sir, have won the thread.
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Wow. At roughly $10k/BTC, I’d be typing nonsense sentences like a hypothetical monkey with a typewriter in a room full of other monkeys…
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What will happen to the dollar once we enter the greatest depression within the next 4yrs is a better question. I’ll be surprised if we make it pasted 2020 November at the rate we are going.
Gold @1528 per.oz
Silver @17.50 per.oz
Fed cut rates, in a booming economy
Bonds market yield curve inverted, again.
Great economy, best economy in history. 
What will happen once Bitcoin breaks 1t market cap for the first time is another good question.
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I always thought the real question was not what happens when the value is extremely low but what happens when the expected value is less than the cost of the energy to create that value. Which is I thought a point we passed after one of the last crashes but I will admit I don’t follow Bitcoin too closely since I’ve got all my money in tulip bulbs.
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I think these days bitcoin miners go mostly where’s cheap excess electric energy.
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