A bitcoin death spiral is inevitable

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So what is this 'bitcoin death spiral' about? This spiral will occur if the price of mining gets too high for the rewards the miners receives to compensate these costs. What will happen first is that miners will need to sell their bitcoin, because they need real fiat money to pay their bills, they can't pay their bills using bitcoin or other funny money (stablecoins). This will increase the supply of bitcoin, lowering the price, making it even harder to become profitable again.

The most inefficient miners will quit first. The difficulty is adjusted downward, and people start loosing trust in bitcoin, lowering the price even further. This will ensure that the next layer of miners will stop mining as it is no longer profitable, the difficulty will again go down, and the trust in bitcoin will decline even further. This will occur until most of the miners quit, making it that only the largest parties survive with one that will have more than 50% of the mining power, and trust in bitcoin will disappear completely. Mining will cease, no more transactions can be processed, or they can by small miners, but the difficulty will then be so low that manipulation is all too easy, effectively making bitcoin worthless.

I hope this description will give you some insight in what we are talking about. Although, it could be that this will even go faster, if due to the halving, most or even all miners could start loosing money mining, and miners want to earn money not lose it.

So now we know what we are talking about. There are a few ingredients that are important, these are:

Sure, this death spiral could happen without a halving event, but the halving will probably be the time that initiates this death spiral.

So, I have read that "There is no “mining cost price floor”" and "This is because of difficulty adjustment.". Lets look at that argument.

As I already said, the mining difficulty will be lowered. But as the most efficient miners will keep on running the longest (also because they have the most costly hardware), this difficulty will not be lowered that much initially, as the most efficient miners already had the greatest chance to find the correct 'salt', due to their hash power (see: PoW is insane for some insight into PoW). A small decrease in difficulty will not alleviate the pain, and the most inefficient miners where only small competition, so finding the correct hash and the reward will only increase slightly. If the difficulty drops further, this will effect the trust people have in bitcoin, lowering the price and thus the reward.

Then it is also said "smaller players fill in the gap and take the place of bigger players". As we know, only the most efficient miners will survive, initially. There is no way that 'small players' can compete, the costs of hardware and energy consumption will be an obstacle for 'small players'. And I also read something about "mines at home on his GPU", this is just unbelievable nonsense. If this is required to process transactions, the difficulty has dropped below a point that the bitcoin blockchain is secure. As I have stated in my main article "or mining will fall below a threshold so that the blockchain can be manipulated", not taking this threshold into account is just utter stupidity.

So only the largest and most efficient miners will survive, and these miners already have a high stake in the total mining power. This will lead to the biggest miner having more than 50% of the mining power, something that will effect trust in bitcoin greatly.

So, miners can increase the transaction fees, to get more income. This is true, but there is a limitation on the amount of transactions the bitcoin block can hold, changing this could increase distrust, and could lead to a fork, and there is a limit to what bitcoin buyers (especially new ones) will be willing to pay. Also people will start to distrust bitcoin if transaction fees get too high. And remember bitcoin always needs more money, as it is a negative sum game.

What if the bitcoin prices always rise more than the costs of creating bitcoin? As mentioned in 'Bitcoin is fueled by distrust' it is a myth that bitcoin prices will always rise. Also the bitcoin community will eventually run out of fools to buy bitcoin. A lot of fools already learned their lesson in the bitcoin winter of 2022 when they lost more than 50%. Also with a greater interest of the SEC it will become harder to manipulate the bitcoin price (for example: generate unbacked stablecoins to buy bitcoin to artificially raise the bitcoin price).

So when will this happen? Well, I have mentioned 3 important ingredients. First, the price of bitcoin must be low compared to the costs of mining, the cost of mining being the second important ingredient. Then a halving event occurs that instantaneously reduces the income of miners in halve, ingredient number 3. This will probably trigger the 'bitcoin death spiral', although a sudden fall in exchange value, when the price of bitcoin is somewhere in the range of the break-even point, can also trigger it. I wonder what will happen if the SEC rejects the spot bitcoin ETF funds, that could also be a trigger. The perfect storm would be a rejection around the halving date.

Personally I see all the right ingredients for a 'bitcoin death spiral' happening at the moment, so if the exchange value of bitcoin stays about the same, about $30,000, then I foresee the 'bitcoin death spiral' starting around next halving in 2024. As I think the most inefficient miners will already start to sell off their bitcoin, as they know that it will be over for them after next halving, there will be a price pressure the coming months. Could I be wrong about this? Sure, energy prices could considerably get lower (don't think so) or the bitcoin price could surge (although I think that will trigger a great sell off). I am interested to see what will happen with bitcoin the coming year, and if I analyzed the situation correctly. Only time can tell...