With the advent of Bitcoin came industries that were never foreseen, and one of the prominent ones is the mining industry. Undermining Satoshi Nakamoto’s rule of ‘one CPU, one vote,’ the mining of the largest cryptocurrency has been completely overtaken by ASIC miners. Since its inception, there has been a divided sentiment surrounding whether ASIC mining is, in reality, good or not, not just for this particular cryptocurrency, but also other proof-of-work based cryptocurrencies in the market.
The topic of Bitcoin and ASIC mining was recently discussed by Andreas Antonopoulos, the author of Mastering Bitcoin, in a Q&A session on YouTube. Speaking about how the king coin has never fallen victim to a 51 percent attack since its launch, the author stated that that contributes to “how the security of a large ASIC based proof-of-work network works.” To one of the constant dissents with regard to ASIC mining on a large scale, which is a “waste of money,” he stated that these people “do not understand the security equation.”
He said,
“It is not a waste of money, it is money that is being well-spent and invested by miners in order to buy us all the most robust system of immutability, security, and protection against double-spend that has ever been invented. “
Subsequently, Antonopoulos spoke about whether Satoshi Nakamoto had anticipated if electricity consumption would be an important factor in the mining industry, considering that computational power was much lower in 2008 in comparison to this date. He also spoke about whether or not Nakamoto foresaw ASICs having enough power to make the mining calculation.
On this topic, he stated that Nakamoto, in fact, did not foresee “the very rapid competitive development of mining” to an extent where specialized chips and giant industrial/ mining manufacturing facilities, along with the “intense competition.” The author went on to state,
“Then again, Satoshi Nakamoto didn’t predict the success of Bitcoin to this extent and you’ve got to realise that the development of ASICs, the electricity consumption, all of these things are part of the incredible security that the cryptocurrency space has developed, especially Bitcoin and it’s one of those things that makes Bitcoin robust.”
He added,
“The fact that ASICs and electricity consumption developed in such a rapid way is because it is actually profitable to deliver immense security to Bitcoin economy because the Bitcoin economy has grown tremendously and that security is being rewarded by users. It’s a really simple development of market forces.”
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