76 comments as of now. This will be good

From a basic labor theory of value perspective, bitcoin requires labor to produce because mining it requires massive amounts of compute power. This computer power is supplied using GPUs and electricity, both of which require labor to produce.

If you use this calculator, and enter the values 67 TH/s (tera hashes per second, the rate at which you are mining), 2680 watts for electricity consumption rate, and 5 cents per kilo watt hour as prices, you will see

4.25 USD revenue per day 3.22 USD cost per day Profit rate = 32.0%

To make the values of the the hash rate and energy consumption rate realistic, I consulted the specs of the machine antminer S17, which is aparantly a machine used in the bitcoin mining world (I ain’t into crypto mining). The cost of electricty comes from Kazakhstan, which has cheap electricty and substantial mining operations.

So basically, at the current price of bitcoin can support a gross profit rate of 32% for the people who produce bitcoin, assuming you keep all the profit (no taxes, interest, rent), have no employees or maintainable costs. This is the price currently settled at based on the technological conditions and level of competition.

It is nothing too crazy of a price, and the rapid growth of price in bitcoin is due to how the currency was designed. Basically, once a certain number of bitcoin have been mined, the bitcoin generation rate per mined block halves. This forces an exponential rise in the difficulty of mining bitcoin, and therefore an exponential rise in its price.

Most probably, if bitcoin was designed to have a constant difficulty of producing, its price wouldn’t have increased at all.

Biased, politicised science is real science. Not the platonic ideal you have in your head.

That didn’t feel like science so much as politics and I get why some would be against that.

Respectfully, this is a weak sauce excuse, and a completely unscientific attitude. Scientists do not establish arbitrary barriers between different fields.

These kinds of statements 99% of the time come from people who don’t even do science, and whose understanding of science consists of “take down data points, analyse data points, be neutral” (paraphrasing your comment).

In reality, scientific names are usually given to honor specific people. The idea that the community just gives names to people who discovered things is simply ignorant of history. There are literally cases of people purchasing name recognition. There are also cases of people being honored by having their name on a phenomena they didn’t even discover, or a unit they did not create (typical for units, which are standardised by committees and not named after people in the standardisation committee)