This was my interview with Tom at Palisades Radio, during which I shared my Bitcoin Mining Ponzi Scheme presentation. I highly recommend it if you haven’t yet watched it. The Bitcoin Mining Industry is using the shareholder as a piggy bank to fund the Bitcoin Red Queen Syndrome.
This presentation was for Gold Members, but now Silver Members can also see the charts and graphics explained during my interview with Palisades Radio.
You can watch more of Tom’s Interviews here: Palisades Radio Gold.
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Great interview. Tom seems to be a very opened minded guy.
I happened to view light vehicle US sales for the past 15 years time and about 2017 was the high point at about 17 million and 2023 at about 15 million in sales. Could it be world peak oil? Of course the added complexity of the average vehicle along with increased insurance costs sure adds to the situation. My rear taillight assembly on my Ford Escape went out recently and the dealer wanted $900 to replace it. So I ordered one($300) and replaced it myself. Back in the day used to be what $20 bucks.
Excellent discussion on Current Topics. Steve / Tom get Fred Thiel (Marathon on the show). Steve you are brining much needed balance and perspective to the Crypto Space as well as the very real comparison between Mining in the traditional and digital ways. Much energy cost / consumption in all directions. Yes, in the medium term I think BTC Miners are counting on 120K / 150K price, needed to survive, but many will not.
So 2% of the electricity in US right now goes towards Bitcoin mining? In other words, 2% of the electricity supply goes towards producing something that doesn’t exist. Is that paradigm really going to survive as a store of value when we have rolling blackouts, EMP attacks, energy scarcity, or even just plain higher electricity prices? Durability is one of the core traits of real money and doesn’t need to be plugged in. Like when you stumble upon buried treasure and dig up the gold doubloons. Shout out to those who got into Bitcoin early and cash out at the top, but I would be very careful investing in this moving forward.
TD, cashing out of any digital currency can become a problem!
Steve,
I’ve been an IT engineer for 20 years now. I’m not buying your 90% in two years explanation. Yes, servers have a small amount of electronic failure per year that does increase year over year. Warranties are typically 3 or 4 years, but those systems will run fine for another 2-4 years, 5-8 year total. And they don’t get slower with age. Bitcoin mining is heavy GPU computational. As long as you keep those GPUs cool, they should run the same for the life of the system.
Thus I don’t buy a degraded hardware theory.
Is there something with the blockchain algorithm? Yes we have the halving. That means every 4 years they would need to double the hardware. That seems it would eventually be problematic. What if they only air cool the gpus?
This doesn’t make sense yet.
Please keep digging.
-Travis
Do we believe the depreciating numbers or not Travis?
Here’s a couple comments from the post of this on YouTube:
@martintheguitarist
2 days ago
He doesn’t understand IT. Bitcoin mining equipment depreciates so fast because hardware improves. Lots of computers can work for even 10 years. But when you use your hardware to mine bitcoins then it also matters what your competitors use. So once they use faster hardware you can mine less with your existing one.
@wasabiworthington6352
3 days ago
Steve talks like computers get tired and slow down and eventually stop in 3 years. Wrong. Computers can run for many years. So when the fleet is fully depreciated and still earning Bitcoin…big profits!
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@TheKuya28
3 days ago
Former basement miner here. Your equipment definitely loses efficiency. Even if you run them at low temps and optimal conditions. They’re running at 24/7. The silicon degrades over time. You don’t get the same performance at the start as you did after some time running the machines.
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@thesilveremir
3 days ago
@TheKuya28 I used to run a server in my basement as well. This was 2017-2021. I had a 8 Vega 64s in my server and everything you said is correct. Those Vega 64s lost so much performance in that 4 year time frame and I didn’t run them 24/7. The depreciation analysis in this interview is 100% spot on
From these people, it seems the hardware depreciates for two reasons:
1] New computers/CPU’s are faster, and faster is much more productive; aging
computers are not competitive in Bitcoin mining.
2] Aging computers/CPU’s and other components do age and slow down. I’m sure
Not every miner has state-of-the-art cooling technology, but that would
represent another significant initial and maintenance expense.