peterktodd

Lolwut? Obviously mining is profitable enough that people keep doing it at bigger and bigger scales.

The claim that "mining is very unprofitable to destroy seignorage" is bizarre:

1) difficulty adjusts
2) transaction fees

If reward+fees is high, difficulty adjusts higher as more hashers are attracted and mining becomes less profitable. If reward+fees is lower, difficulty adjusts lower as hashers turn off their machines.

Either way, long term _profitability_ of mining operations depends on your costs relative to others, and how much extra business you can attract (e.g. with non-std transactions). MARA obviously has done very well on the latter.

In the long run taking away the block reward actually makes mining _more_ profitable for larger miners/pools: they can afford to play the most games with transaction selection and ordering. And they can do reorg attacks to steal fees from other miners. Smaller miners can't do this profitably as the overheads (and hash power) required to do this stuff is high. Your solo mining bitaxe is definitely not doing reorg attacks. We see this on Ethereum, where MEV has made the minimum investment to run a profitable pool has gotten to the tens of millions of dollars range. To be profitable, you basically need to be a high speed trading company.

The "influencers" in this space are remarkably clueless.