So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million to 1!
If the current price of a bitcoin is $132, then obviously the cost of generating new coins is greater than or equal to $132, is it not? Otherwise, no one would buy bitcoins, they would just mine them.
There are economies of scale involved. Cheaper hardware (like a gaming GPU) costs more electricity, but can be purchased off the shelf. Custom ASIC hardware is dramatically more energy-efficient, but you need a pretty significant investment to get started. When that economy of scale is maxxed out, there are further optimizations to be tackled like superconducting electronics, quantum computing, thinsat arrays, and so forth.
If the current price of a bitcoin is $132, then obviously the cost of generating new coins is greater than or equal to $132, is it not? Otherwise, no one would buy bitcoins, they would just mine them.
There are economies of scale involved. Cheaper hardware (like a gaming GPU) costs more electricity, but can be purchased off the shelf. Custom ASIC hardware is dramatically more energy-efficient, but you need a pretty significant investment to get started. When that economy of scale is maxxed out, there are further optimizations to be tackled like superconducting electronics, quantum computing, thinsat arrays, and so forth.