PwC analyst: 98% of Bitcoin miners never generate a block

Alex de Vries, a blockchain expert at PwC and founder of Digiconomist, said that 98% of Bitcoin mining machines have never produced a block in their average lifespan of 1.5 years.

De Vries said on Twitter that there are currently about 4 million mining machines in active use, and the Bitcoin network has produced a total of 75,000 blocks in 1.5 years, which means that less than 2% of mining machines have produced a block verifying a Bitcoin transaction in their lifetime. The remaining 98% have never produced a block.

He also said in an interview with TheBlock, "Of course, the life cycle of different mining machines will be different, but from a historical perspective, the development of Bitcoin mining machines follows Koomey's Law (computing power doubles every 1.5 years), so if we look at Bitmain's IPO data, we will find that they have sold more than 4 million Antminer S9 mining machines in the past few years. So this is a very reasonable data."

He also said that mining pools are essentially just about increasing hashing power and distributing block rewards among the people in the pool. "They bundle and distribute the work, but it doesn't change anything, and ultimately only one such device 'wins' every 10 minutes."

He also expressed concerns about the energy consumption of the proof-of-work mechanism, which he considered “a serious problem in terms of economic sustainability.”

Regarding the proof-of-stake consensus method, he believes that "it will reduce energy demand by about 99.9%." Although this is not the final solution, it is a step in the right direction towards creating something truly sustainable.

Image source: pixabay

AuthorLiang CHE

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