this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Yeah, generally miners will set up in places with cheap electricity. And excluding places like Azerbaijan, those sources are generally renewables.
Yeah. Right now, the cost of a Bitcoin transaction is around $65 US. That price includes all of the expenditures that the miners have made on resources (electricity, water, rental costs for the space they're using, hardware depreciation, etc.), as well as whatever bit of profits it takes to keep miners in business. That puts a cap on whatever environmental impact the transaction is having.
So if it costs $65 for a transaction then why isn't that the transaction fee? people would be loaing money if cost is more than the fees
Bitcoin is inflationary, it's generating new Bitcoin with every block and issuing that to the miners. That new Bitcoin combines with the transaction fees to pay the miners.
Bitcoin is deflationary. There is a hard limit on the total number of bitcoins that will ever exist. Every so often, the reward for mining a block is halved. Eventually there will be effectively zero reward for mining at all.
Maybe in the long run. However, when you want to actually calculate how much each transaction costs, you need to account for the fact that right now Bitcoin is inflationary. It won't stop issuing new tokens until around 2140 AD, assuming no hard forks happen to modify that issuance strategy in the meantime.
So mining is the bulk cost not the transactions. because my last bitcoin fee was like $10 or something
Yes. If you're wanting to know how many resources mining a transaction takes, that's the value you need to look at. The block reward effectively goes into subsidizing the transaction fees that are being paid.