Dallas Mavericks owner and ‘Shark Tank’ host Mark Cuban noted that Bitcoin miners will be affected by the halving, but he is more interested in the potential impact of AI.
When asked about the significance of Bitcoin halving, Cuban told The Block: “It’s just going to make it harder for miners to get paid.” With half-life mining rewards From 6.25 BTC
-1.75%
At 3.125 BTC, this cuts miner profits by almost half.
“But the really interesting question related to halving is the GPU market,” Cuban said. “Miners need more power. There is unprecedented demand from AI for GPUs. Will that distort the economics of mining? Not just from a cost perspective, but would it be a better business to use those GPUs to train models? ?”
This does not directly affect Bitcoin miners, who mine using ASIC machines, which are not suited to the general computing required by AI. However, this may still affect people who use GPUs to mine other cryptocurrencies.
This is not to say that Bitcoin miners are unaffected by the growth of AI. Rather, they tried to accept it.
Bitcoin miners scale with AI
Over the past year or so, companies like Xive and Hive Digital Technologies have turned to AI as a way to complement their core mining businesses. But Mike Ho, Hut 8 Corp’s chief strategy officer, said Bitcoin miners are having a hard time finding a foothold there.
“Few miners are successful because it is not a complementary pivot and it is certainly not as easy as you think. The requirements for mining infrastructure are lower and cheaper, and unlike AI, mining is a linear business with no customers,” Ho told The Block.
He added that uptime requirements for AI are very high and networking requires a lot of fiber connections and complex engineering to optimize many GPUs working together.
Ho expects competition to increase in the future based on the trajectory of demand for energy and data centers. But he argued it was still early days because it would take a long time to commercialize land that was previously only suitable for services such as mining.
In the meantime, miners will be hoping that the Bitcoin price remains high for profits to bounce back. Typically, Bitcoin’s price has risen since past halvings, which has helped keep miner profits growing and the Bitcoin hash rate rising, but this is not guaranteed. Cuban himself said, “I have no idea what the price is going to be.”
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