The company plans to keep mining as it reaches a deal with its lenders, who harbor most of the debt:
The cryptocurrency industry takes another big hit—one of the largest publicly traded Bitcoin miners, Core Scientific, has filed for bankruptcy. The miner reportedly still plans to mine cryptocurrency as it pays off its debts.
CNBC reported late last night of the company's decision to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Texas early this morning. While this may sound like a huge nail in the miner's coffin, Core Scientific is allegedly still earning money, just not enough to pay off its debts. CNBC says that the company has no plans to liquidate, but has reportedly reached a deal with some of its lenders, who hold most of the company's debts. Core Scientific mines Bitcoin at its plants in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Texas, according to the company's website.
[...] According to an article from CoinDesk, which cites the company's filing in the Southern District of Texas, Core Scientific holds an estimated $1 billion to $10 billion in liabilities with anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 creditors. The miner's assets total anywhere from $1 billion to $10 billion.
With the magnitude (and uncertainty) of the liabilities here, I can say that the economics behind the digital economy continues to perplex me. --hubie
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday December 26, @10:01AM (1 child)
Now imagine the magnitude of uncertainty coming when someone inevitably invents next generation quantum computers backed cryptocurrencies...
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 27, @01:28AM
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday December 26, @10:21AM (4 children)
Bitcoin economics = Number go up. When you make your number go up more than someone else's number goes up, you win. Since there's no practical limit to the vranyo, you can make your number go up to anything you want while the other person playing the vranyo game is busy pushing their numbers towards infinity as fast as they can. As long as everyone's numbers keep going up, everyone keeps winning.
Occasionally though the vranyo fails, which is obviously what's happened here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26, @11:59AM (3 children)
> vranyo
Thanks for the Russian vocabulary lesson.
But I don't think it's necessary, we already have a good word for lies about "everything going up" which is Ponzi.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday December 26, @12:12PM
I'd argue that cryptocurrencies and related stuff are more a pump-and-dump than a Ponzi scheme, whereas vranyo is mechanism-neutral.
Also it's a cool term, like schadenfreude or elan where you have to resort to another language because there's no equivalent in English.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday December 26, @05:42PM (1 child)
...perpetual growth, what our market must do in a Capitalist world for it to continue succeeding.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 26, @06:04PM
(Score: 2) by crm114 on Monday December 26, @06:39PM (2 children)
Had an interesting conversation with a corporate level accountant the other evening.
Her question was... So this bitcoin thing? What is the value, other than kWh turned into wasted energy and CO2?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday December 26, @11:16PM
The basic ideas, of currency that is not controlled by a national government or other interested party, and of using cryptography for the required scarcity and security, are sound.
But, and this should go without saying, anything involving money is mercilessly tested by swindlers, cheaters, hustlers, con artists, and thieves of every sort. I should like copyright replaced by a crowdfunding or other public patronage system. I think the biggest hurdle, bigger even than the resistance of the entrenched interests, is making such a system proof against cheating. Pots of money to be handed out to deserving artists and scientists would be huge, huge targets for thieves.
Electronic voting has similar problems. If it wasn't for having to guard against cheating, it'd be ridiculously easy to move elections entirely online. Even merely protecting anonymity is relatively easy compared to preventing cheating. Visit an official voting website, authenticate, and vote!
The early days of computing, before the first spam email and the first viruses in the wild, have a lot of overly trusting naivety in the designs of systems. Things such as telnet sending passwords over the network in the clear, the /etc/password file holding everyone's passwords in clear text, and less obvious stuff such as early LANs and OSes not having safeguards against mere bugs, never mind maliciously designed software. Indeed, the onus was on coders not to write bad code that would cause starvation of resources, crash the OS, trash memory used by other programs, hang the computer, or other such problems.
Perhaps cryptocurrency so far has had about the same amount of success as crowdfunding. There have been many successful transactions, but these systems have come nowhere close to replacing their predecessors. We've had the least success in taking elections digital.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 27, @12:57AM
The value is validating ledger transactions in an objective manner, free from government/organizational interference. People pay a lot of money for trustworthy transactions, so there is a lot of value being generated.
Compare the cost of a bitcoin transaction vs a wire, especially to less developed countries, and factoring in the time taken and chance of being blocked, frozen, reversed, confiscated, and/or taxed by either government.
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