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posted by martyb on Monday December 03 2018, @01:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-goes-up... dept.

Bitcoin just ended its worst-performing month in seven years in terms of month-over-month price declines. While this is comparing rate of fall and not absolute values, the world of economics is run on rate.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency began November at an average price across exchanges of $6,341, but as of 0:00 UTC on December 1 is trading at just $3,964, according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index.

As it stands, the near $2,400 drop in bitcoin’s price has created a -37.4 percent monthly performance, which is its worst on record since August 2011, when it fell from roughly $8 to $4.80 to print a -40 percent monthly loss.

This may have some good impact for PC gamers:

Bitcoin miners hit hard by the cryptocurrency’s crash may be throwing in the towel.

The Bitcoin network’s hash rate, one way of gauging the computing power dedicated to mining the digital currency, dropped about 24 percent from an all-time high at the end of August through Nov. 24, according to Blockchain.com. While the decline may have partially resulted from miners switching to other cryptocurrencies, JPMorgan Chase & Co. says some in the industry are losing money after Bitcoin’s price tumbled.

A big miner shakeout could be bad news for chipmakers including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Nvidia Corp. who supply the industry, along with mining-rig designers like Bitmain Technologies Ltd. that are pursuing initial public offerings.


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 03 2018, @03:13AM (3 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 03 2018, @03:13AM (#769049) Journal

    Unless you mined your coins by pedaling on your exercise bicycle, you still have to pay with hard fiat cash for the energy.

    The good news is, in case you mined some bitcoins** by using your exercise bike, you should be the winner for the next Tour de France.

    ** currently, at 556 kWh/transaction [digiconomist.net]

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @11:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @11:40AM (#769118)

    Perfection Mekanik
    Aero Dynamik
    Materiel et Technik
    Aero Dynamik
    Condition et Physik
    Aero Dynamik
    Position et Taktik
    Aero Dynamik

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @04:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @04:06PM (#769173)

    Not if you hid your miner at work.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @05:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @05:50PM (#770745)

    So your expended power costs was rolled into your heating bill and costing you nill over running a big resistive load to keep you warm.

    Having said that, it hasn't been enjoyable to do that since 2013 which was the last time Bitcoin could be mined with a GPU and earn anything by the end of winter. And many of the alternative coins either are dead ends, or require gpu resources that are not cost effective, since you needed either VRAM, a newer OpenCL standard, or other features to mine. Fine if you upgrade GPUs every 1-2 years, but if you got the right gpus between 2009 and 2011 and don't follow the bleeding edge of games, none of the newer GPUs offered a major GFLOP or TFLOP advantage for mining compared to their cost.