Quote:
Originally Posted by rickroll
serious question, if all industrial miners decided to stop and it wasn't financially viable so there were no replacements, you'd get an occasional guy who mines with their old PC but that's about it, would the ecosystem collapse?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'ecosystem collapse' but if a large % of hash power went offline and no one else really mined, I think price would go down substantially. I think hash rate is very correlated with price.
It would also take forever for an old PC to mine, so no new blocks wound be generated. In that sense, yes it would collapse.
There's data out there on the current cost to generate per bitcoin, given various electricity costs, but I think it's around $20k (don't quote me - haven't looked in a while) so miners are still making good money. I also don't think that takes into account the fees generated on top of the coinbase reward, and fees have been quite good lately. At least they were for a week or so after halving. May have calmed down a bit