You describe the chip supply food-fight as occurring between miners and gamers, but actually, GPUs are used to train deep networks for almost any application you can think of. Have you seen , say from NVIDIA, any breakdown of where the world's supply of GPUs is going? I seriously doubt that gamers are still such a big component.
Wait I thought there is a hard cap on the number of bitcoins that can be mined, and that we are nearing the end. Does energy intensiveness remain a problem once there’s no more BTC to mine?
It isn't just a storage scaling issue. Blockchain also consumes huge amounts of network bandwidth and a lot of CPU cycles.
It's probably the least efficient mode of communication created in my lifetime.
To steal a Q&A from Vint Cerf...
Q. Do I need blockchain?
A. No.
You're not only replicating transactions and storing them on ledgers around the globe, you're also sending those transactions to all those servers around the planet.
Let's think about other secure transaction systems that use disparate databases but rely on verified peers .... like .... oh credit cards.
Visa, alone, processes 1700 transactions per second on average. Now raise that 1700 by some exponent equal to the number of nodes in your block-chain universe.
Exponential functions are going to bite a bunch of networks, gateways and switches hard. Fall down, go boom.
Nope, doesn't fly for networks either. Networks and storage don't scale. And all the CPU cycles involved in processing the encryption is the smallest problem in that you just need enough power to run a couple European countries to make it to scale.
I'm not that nervous about the energy consumption issue since it is a self correcting problem. Miners and others using bitcoins are going to get tired at some point of the loss from buying all this energy to keep their assets going and are either going to move to other assets or find solutions like discussed above.
I am wondering what you think of the macroeconomic impact of having a widely circulated deflationary coin? This is what makes me a bit nervous.
I wonder if crypto assets could potentially displace productive investment on an economy wide scale.
This is not self correcting. This is potentially a prisoner's dilemma, a bad Nash equilibrium where the incentives are to keep the vicious cycle going as long as possible because the first to leave the cycle are disadvantaged.
This is mostly a worry if a lot of companies do like Tesla and jump on the band wagon. I see parallels with this dynamic and the causes of the great depression in the 1930s when businesses switched to hoarding gold tied currency instead of producing.
Now I'm not sure that cryptocoins without being jacked up by central banks (like gold was during the great depression) are a powerful enough force to cause the type of havoc that gold did.
But then again, the potentially stronger network/memetic effects of cryptocoins, along with the amplification factor from markets being synchronized through instant global communications nowadays might make them dangerous to the economy even without central bank involvement. We saw how much people got hypnotized during the Gamestop episode. I don't think unsophisticated investors' hoarding is enough to cause problems but it is a bit unsettling that Tesla and other companies are starting to hoard (it would also be worrisome if companies widely moved to add billions in gold to their balance sheet but it seems the lessons have been learned in the 1930s with gold).
In theory, if central banks stay stimulative enough through all this, you can maintain growth in both productive businesses and crypto. As long as these central banks don't flinch at the sight of what may look like crypto bubbles and bubble pops. But central banks might flinch.
If Tesla is just an isolated case of bitcoin fever we should be in the clear. If this is the start of a long term trend for businesses, I can imagine a scenario where businesses add more and more Bitcoins to their balance sheet over some years which makes the price gradually go up and outperform the rest of the asset markets. After years of prices going up, businesses will over-weight their portfolio with it. Banks and financial institutions get in on the fun and eventually load up too. Now it's 2029 and we have lots of organisations with political power having incentives to keep this going and they also now have arguments that it's a new fundamental technological part of the financial system and it's systemically dangerous to let it become unstable. I can see it right now. If cryptocoins become widespread, there will be articles in the press about how they are an integral part of the financial infrastructure, an evolution of technology and the government and central bank should play a role in insuring their stability. If a consensus forms around these ideas, smarter voices could be drowned.
So instead of fixing the problem, the central banks cave, and against expert advice, try to stabilize and prop up cryptocoins when corrections seem imminent. In doing so they severely destabilize the rest of the economy, just like the 1930s with gold.
I can see a non zero probability of the bitcoin fever spreading: individual speculators -> large businesses -> financial institutions -> government, then: great depression II -> WWIII -> sticks and stones.
We had a brush with catastrophe when goldbug Judy Shelton almost made it to the federal reserve. What if, in a few years, the cryptobugs start infiltrating?
Appreciate your article, however I would like to point out a few mistakes you made in your reasoning. You state that Bitcoin cannot be sustained on long term on stranded energy because:
a) there is a limited amount of stranded energy that is available (at least currently).
b) Bitcoin network energy use linearly (or above linearly) grows with the BTC price.
c) BTC price will grow infinitely
So because BTC price goes to infinity in future (c) -> BTC energy use goes to infinity (in future) (b) -> infinite energy > limited stranded energy (a) -> BTC network cannot be sustained ecologically
Excuse me for the formalization, but it's easier to show it this way:
c) You wrote: "Yes, it’s good to look around for stranded electricity, but if Bitcoin’s price appreciates at anything like the rate of recent years, the simple numerical inadequacy of that approach will make itself known." It's obvious that there is only a limited amount of capital that is willing to go into crypto, so the price of the bitcoin HAS an upper limit.
b) You wrote: "But for Bitcoin, the resource cost of storage theoretically increases as a more-or-less linear function of price." This is patently UNTRUE. The resource usage is linear with the real-world value of BTC rewards handed out by the system because that is the value that can be spent by miners on electricity. It is indeed nicely follows the BTC price linearly until the reward adjustment event, when it falls EXPONENTIALLY in a half every 4 years. Even on the diagram you included, there is a sharp drop of BTC energy use in the second half of 2016 when it drops from around 20TWh to around 8TWh and that coincides nicely with the reward adjustment of 2016. So energy use is linearly increasing with BTC's purchasing power and EXPONENTIALLY decreases with time + increases linearly with the transnational utility of the network (coming from the transaction fees). Stating that something is linearly growing when it has an exponentially decreasing component is a a big estimation error. At some point the exponential decrease will overwhelm the average price increase (which is admittedly bigger now) and from that point the energy use will actually decrease...
a) You are saying that energy suppliers have only a limited amount of stranded energy that could be used (true) but you are projecting this into the future. While in future we will still have limits we may have a totally different energy structure. If everything goes according to plan the world has to go 80% renewable and 20% nuclear to get carbon free by time (unless we get fusion working on scale). Now it's clear that 20% baseload will not be enough, so we must massively overbuild the renewable part. We can use the extra energy for short or long term storage, hydrogen creation, desalination but I feel, there will be enough leftover here and there to power a single proof of work network (however this last thing is just my feeling)
When the stranded energy resources are all soaked up and BTC mining becomes a significant % of the total global energy budget, it will also become a financial way to proliferate new energy infrastructure such as small scale thorium reactors, where demand will never map 100% to the level of production abundance, and where some mining capacity makes sense. Thus any municipality can have some financial sovereignty. They can also securitize those reactors and raise money on the very same blockchain that mining secures. It's a great answer to this whole debate.
At some point (soon?), don't ESG and NGO folks start putting pressure on companies that use/accept Bitcoin? Could there be anti-Bitcoin protests, as there are protests of cutting forests for toilet paper? That has the potential to reverse the recent adoption wave, or slow it down, and put downward pressure on prices.
Govtts,besides PRC,face an existential threat from Bitcoin and Cryptos ! It is not that it rivals the USD - that is nonsense.The threat to PRC has evaporated,as COVID has busted banks and economies all over the world,and PRC is relative much better.Therefore,there is NO INCENTIVE for Chinese to BUY BTC,besides speculation - for which the door to Macau is open - as the casino profits - then come back to PRC !
The REAL BTC threat is that it BYPASSES THE banking system ! It is not that the banks will collapse and people will withdraw their money from the banks - and take a red eye to BTC ! That also,is not likely in the short term.
The threat is that trade and commerce will BYPASS THE BANKING SYSTEM !
If A sells to B in POS store or online or by a wire transfer - the money goes to his bank - irrespective of FX chosen.Cash can be hoarded,of course, but up to a limit
Once the money hits the banks - then the trail is set ! EVEN IF THE PAYER IS NOT TRACEABLE - the recipient is screwed .Besides FATF - he comes in the Direct and Indirect tax net ! It is this tax net which feeds the corrupt government and politicians.
So in a trade through BTC or other CrC (Crypto Coin),the Govtt loses the entire revenue on that supply chain and value chain - FOREVER - and that will catalyse more and more of such trades.In fact it will start a BTC supply chain - with its tech platforms - wherein manufacturing upto a limit - will NOT PAY ANY TAXES TO the government.
The advantage to the buyer of the goods is that ,he get the items free of VAT or taxes - so it is 10-20 % cheaper,and he has anonymity of payment (if not of purchase)
AND THEN,THIS WILL BANKRUPT THE STATE AND THE BANKS (AS ALL THIS LIQUIDITY WILL EXIT THE BANKS AND WILL ALSO DESTROY BANK SOLVENCY AND THE MONETARY POLICY OF THE FED -AS INTEREST RATES AND CREDIT POLICY,WILL NO LONGER BE A LEVER FOR ANY ECONOMIC DECISIONS AND OUTCOMES !
That is the EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO THE WORLD AND ESPECIALLY TO THE "USA".
Take the case for India - the Bad assets are USD 400 Billion USD and COVID has aided the banks in hiding more !
It is CERTAIN THAT THE GOI WILL DEMONETISE BANK DEPOSITS ACROSS THE BOARD TO OFFSET THE LOAN LOSSES !
Y WILL PEOPLE PUT MONEY IN BANKS ? The same is the story in most parts of the world.
BTC supply comes from LOW COST POWER NATIONS
BTC demand comes from INEVITABLE DEMAND WHICH IS EXPECTED from BUSTED NATIONS LIKE INDIA - AND SPECUALTORS IN THE US/EU PUNTING ON IT
BTC THREAT COMES FROM THE USA and EU - the existential threat ! BTC is not a threat to PRC !
AND THAT IS WHAT MAKES IT A PERFECT INVESTMENT BET ! dindooohindoo
COULD IT BE THAT THE US AND EU ARE USING BTC TO TRAP INVESTORS,INFLATE THE BALLOON AND THEN BLOW IT UP ? THAT WILL WIPE OUT THE SPECULATIVE LIQUIDITY IN THE ECONOMIES - AND THE WEST CAN DO A FALSE FLAG - LINK THE MONEY TO CRYPTOS - AND THEN USE THAT TO BLOW IT UP !
When you design server software (software that's running in the cloud and has to be scalable and fast) the rule of thumb is, network is slow, CPU is fast. The problem is that blockchain was designed to use CPU to slow things down for verification purposes rather than using network. Because nerds are nerdy, they'd rather solve this problem using funner calculations (lol protein folding). Physics has given us a natural speed limit (light) we should use that instead of looping warehouses of GPUs.
Describing the whole of bitcoin cost comparably with gold needs to seen reasonably. The persons around the world holding gold reserves needs people with guns, armored trucks, security cameras. Hell just the upkeep with the large protective facilities the gold is sitting in goes overlooked. Thats just to hold the product. Mining gold is destructive and invasive to the planet. The higher gold prices goes, the deeper people will dig, and mountains will be moved. Not so much with crypto.
Proof-of-Work is a good model for decentralized money. We don't need Proof-of-Stake. The problem with Bitcoin mining is unbounded energy and resource use. No payment adoption means Bitcoin remains a speculation. We don't have infinite energy for the hyperbitcoinization experiment. We need to find a way to "cap" it. The solution is to drive payment adoption.
One way to gauge the quality of a financial asset is by how ardent and defensive its advocates are.
With, say, Amazon stock, that level is low. This tells you that holders of Amazon stock are not much worried about popular sentiment towards it. That's because the value of Amazon stock is supported by a solid business that has a long record of steadily growing however much people might gripe about it. There are risks to the underlying business, but bad sentiment is not a big risk: it would only raise cost of capital somewhat for a while, and somewhat dent ability to respond to larger investment opportunities.
With crypto, that same level is very high. That's because crypto's value depends entirely on popular sentiment. Crypto generates zero income: its only source of income is sales of "coin" investment assets to new buyers. When investment in these assets is greater than divestment plus maintenance costs, the value of the crypto coins goes up. When investment in these assets is less than divestment plus maintenance costs, the value of crypto goes down.
It's completely unpredictable how long crypto's rise can continue and how much higher it can go before there are persistently too few new buyers to cover maintenance costs. But it's 100% predictable that that is coming eventually, and from that point it will be very hard to re-juice popular sentiment.
Carbon-taxation and the like are also a risk for crypto, but one miners will probably continue to avoid by staying in backward countries.
You describe the chip supply food-fight as occurring between miners and gamers, but actually, GPUs are used to train deep networks for almost any application you can think of. Have you seen , say from NVIDIA, any breakdown of where the world's supply of GPUs is going? I seriously doubt that gamers are still such a big component.
Wait I thought there is a hard cap on the number of bitcoins that can be mined, and that we are nearing the end. Does energy intensiveness remain a problem once there’s no more BTC to mine?
It isn't just a storage scaling issue. Blockchain also consumes huge amounts of network bandwidth and a lot of CPU cycles.
It's probably the least efficient mode of communication created in my lifetime.
To steal a Q&A from Vint Cerf...
Q. Do I need blockchain?
A. No.
You're not only replicating transactions and storing them on ledgers around the globe, you're also sending those transactions to all those servers around the planet.
Let's think about other secure transaction systems that use disparate databases but rely on verified peers .... like .... oh credit cards.
Visa, alone, processes 1700 transactions per second on average. Now raise that 1700 by some exponent equal to the number of nodes in your block-chain universe.
Exponential functions are going to bite a bunch of networks, gateways and switches hard. Fall down, go boom.
Nope, doesn't fly for networks either. Networks and storage don't scale. And all the CPU cycles involved in processing the encryption is the smallest problem in that you just need enough power to run a couple European countries to make it to scale.
I'm not that nervous about the energy consumption issue since it is a self correcting problem. Miners and others using bitcoins are going to get tired at some point of the loss from buying all this energy to keep their assets going and are either going to move to other assets or find solutions like discussed above.
I am wondering what you think of the macroeconomic impact of having a widely circulated deflationary coin? This is what makes me a bit nervous.
I wonder if crypto assets could potentially displace productive investment on an economy wide scale.
This is not self correcting. This is potentially a prisoner's dilemma, a bad Nash equilibrium where the incentives are to keep the vicious cycle going as long as possible because the first to leave the cycle are disadvantaged.
This is mostly a worry if a lot of companies do like Tesla and jump on the band wagon. I see parallels with this dynamic and the causes of the great depression in the 1930s when businesses switched to hoarding gold tied currency instead of producing.
Now I'm not sure that cryptocoins without being jacked up by central banks (like gold was during the great depression) are a powerful enough force to cause the type of havoc that gold did.
But then again, the potentially stronger network/memetic effects of cryptocoins, along with the amplification factor from markets being synchronized through instant global communications nowadays might make them dangerous to the economy even without central bank involvement. We saw how much people got hypnotized during the Gamestop episode. I don't think unsophisticated investors' hoarding is enough to cause problems but it is a bit unsettling that Tesla and other companies are starting to hoard (it would also be worrisome if companies widely moved to add billions in gold to their balance sheet but it seems the lessons have been learned in the 1930s with gold).
In theory, if central banks stay stimulative enough through all this, you can maintain growth in both productive businesses and crypto. As long as these central banks don't flinch at the sight of what may look like crypto bubbles and bubble pops. But central banks might flinch.
If Tesla is just an isolated case of bitcoin fever we should be in the clear. If this is the start of a long term trend for businesses, I can imagine a scenario where businesses add more and more Bitcoins to their balance sheet over some years which makes the price gradually go up and outperform the rest of the asset markets. After years of prices going up, businesses will over-weight their portfolio with it. Banks and financial institutions get in on the fun and eventually load up too. Now it's 2029 and we have lots of organisations with political power having incentives to keep this going and they also now have arguments that it's a new fundamental technological part of the financial system and it's systemically dangerous to let it become unstable. I can see it right now. If cryptocoins become widespread, there will be articles in the press about how they are an integral part of the financial infrastructure, an evolution of technology and the government and central bank should play a role in insuring their stability. If a consensus forms around these ideas, smarter voices could be drowned.
So instead of fixing the problem, the central banks cave, and against expert advice, try to stabilize and prop up cryptocoins when corrections seem imminent. In doing so they severely destabilize the rest of the economy, just like the 1930s with gold.
I can see a non zero probability of the bitcoin fever spreading: individual speculators -> large businesses -> financial institutions -> government, then: great depression II -> WWIII -> sticks and stones.
We had a brush with catastrophe when goldbug Judy Shelton almost made it to the federal reserve. What if, in a few years, the cryptobugs start infiltrating?
Appreciate your article, however I would like to point out a few mistakes you made in your reasoning. You state that Bitcoin cannot be sustained on long term on stranded energy because:
a) there is a limited amount of stranded energy that is available (at least currently).
b) Bitcoin network energy use linearly (or above linearly) grows with the BTC price.
c) BTC price will grow infinitely
So because BTC price goes to infinity in future (c) -> BTC energy use goes to infinity (in future) (b) -> infinite energy > limited stranded energy (a) -> BTC network cannot be sustained ecologically
Excuse me for the formalization, but it's easier to show it this way:
c) You wrote: "Yes, it’s good to look around for stranded electricity, but if Bitcoin’s price appreciates at anything like the rate of recent years, the simple numerical inadequacy of that approach will make itself known." It's obvious that there is only a limited amount of capital that is willing to go into crypto, so the price of the bitcoin HAS an upper limit.
b) You wrote: "But for Bitcoin, the resource cost of storage theoretically increases as a more-or-less linear function of price." This is patently UNTRUE. The resource usage is linear with the real-world value of BTC rewards handed out by the system because that is the value that can be spent by miners on electricity. It is indeed nicely follows the BTC price linearly until the reward adjustment event, when it falls EXPONENTIALLY in a half every 4 years. Even on the diagram you included, there is a sharp drop of BTC energy use in the second half of 2016 when it drops from around 20TWh to around 8TWh and that coincides nicely with the reward adjustment of 2016. So energy use is linearly increasing with BTC's purchasing power and EXPONENTIALLY decreases with time + increases linearly with the transnational utility of the network (coming from the transaction fees). Stating that something is linearly growing when it has an exponentially decreasing component is a a big estimation error. At some point the exponential decrease will overwhelm the average price increase (which is admittedly bigger now) and from that point the energy use will actually decrease...
a) You are saying that energy suppliers have only a limited amount of stranded energy that could be used (true) but you are projecting this into the future. While in future we will still have limits we may have a totally different energy structure. If everything goes according to plan the world has to go 80% renewable and 20% nuclear to get carbon free by time (unless we get fusion working on scale). Now it's clear that 20% baseload will not be enough, so we must massively overbuild the renewable part. We can use the extra energy for short or long term storage, hydrogen creation, desalination but I feel, there will be enough leftover here and there to power a single proof of work network (however this last thing is just my feeling)
When the stranded energy resources are all soaked up and BTC mining becomes a significant % of the total global energy budget, it will also become a financial way to proliferate new energy infrastructure such as small scale thorium reactors, where demand will never map 100% to the level of production abundance, and where some mining capacity makes sense. Thus any municipality can have some financial sovereignty. They can also securitize those reactors and raise money on the very same blockchain that mining secures. It's a great answer to this whole debate.
Good piece.
At some point (soon?), don't ESG and NGO folks start putting pressure on companies that use/accept Bitcoin? Could there be anti-Bitcoin protests, as there are protests of cutting forests for toilet paper? That has the potential to reverse the recent adoption wave, or slow it down, and put downward pressure on prices.
Govtts,besides PRC,face an existential threat from Bitcoin and Cryptos ! It is not that it rivals the USD - that is nonsense.The threat to PRC has evaporated,as COVID has busted banks and economies all over the world,and PRC is relative much better.Therefore,there is NO INCENTIVE for Chinese to BUY BTC,besides speculation - for which the door to Macau is open - as the casino profits - then come back to PRC !
The REAL BTC threat is that it BYPASSES THE banking system ! It is not that the banks will collapse and people will withdraw their money from the banks - and take a red eye to BTC ! That also,is not likely in the short term.
The threat is that trade and commerce will BYPASS THE BANKING SYSTEM !
If A sells to B in POS store or online or by a wire transfer - the money goes to his bank - irrespective of FX chosen.Cash can be hoarded,of course, but up to a limit
Once the money hits the banks - then the trail is set ! EVEN IF THE PAYER IS NOT TRACEABLE - the recipient is screwed .Besides FATF - he comes in the Direct and Indirect tax net ! It is this tax net which feeds the corrupt government and politicians.
So in a trade through BTC or other CrC (Crypto Coin),the Govtt loses the entire revenue on that supply chain and value chain - FOREVER - and that will catalyse more and more of such trades.In fact it will start a BTC supply chain - with its tech platforms - wherein manufacturing upto a limit - will NOT PAY ANY TAXES TO the government.
The advantage to the buyer of the goods is that ,he get the items free of VAT or taxes - so it is 10-20 % cheaper,and he has anonymity of payment (if not of purchase)
AND THEN,THIS WILL BANKRUPT THE STATE AND THE BANKS (AS ALL THIS LIQUIDITY WILL EXIT THE BANKS AND WILL ALSO DESTROY BANK SOLVENCY AND THE MONETARY POLICY OF THE FED -AS INTEREST RATES AND CREDIT POLICY,WILL NO LONGER BE A LEVER FOR ANY ECONOMIC DECISIONS AND OUTCOMES !
That is the EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO THE WORLD AND ESPECIALLY TO THE "USA".
Take the case for India - the Bad assets are USD 400 Billion USD and COVID has aided the banks in hiding more !
It is CERTAIN THAT THE GOI WILL DEMONETISE BANK DEPOSITS ACROSS THE BOARD TO OFFSET THE LOAN LOSSES !
Y WILL PEOPLE PUT MONEY IN BANKS ? The same is the story in most parts of the world.
BTC supply comes from LOW COST POWER NATIONS
BTC demand comes from INEVITABLE DEMAND WHICH IS EXPECTED from BUSTED NATIONS LIKE INDIA - AND SPECUALTORS IN THE US/EU PUNTING ON IT
BTC THREAT COMES FROM THE USA and EU - the existential threat ! BTC is not a threat to PRC !
AND THAT IS WHAT MAKES IT A PERFECT INVESTMENT BET ! dindooohindoo
COULD IT BE THAT THE US AND EU ARE USING BTC TO TRAP INVESTORS,INFLATE THE BALLOON AND THEN BLOW IT UP ? THAT WILL WIPE OUT THE SPECULATIVE LIQUIDITY IN THE ECONOMIES - AND THE WEST CAN DO A FALSE FLAG - LINK THE MONEY TO CRYPTOS - AND THEN USE THAT TO BLOW IT UP !
When you design server software (software that's running in the cloud and has to be scalable and fast) the rule of thumb is, network is slow, CPU is fast. The problem is that blockchain was designed to use CPU to slow things down for verification purposes rather than using network. Because nerds are nerdy, they'd rather solve this problem using funner calculations (lol protein folding). Physics has given us a natural speed limit (light) we should use that instead of looping warehouses of GPUs.
The resource cost of home ownership includes property taxes, which are supposed to depend on the price of housing...
Describing the whole of bitcoin cost comparably with gold needs to seen reasonably. The persons around the world holding gold reserves needs people with guns, armored trucks, security cameras. Hell just the upkeep with the large protective facilities the gold is sitting in goes overlooked. Thats just to hold the product. Mining gold is destructive and invasive to the planet. The higher gold prices goes, the deeper people will dig, and mountains will be moved. Not so much with crypto.
Proof-of-Work is a good model for decentralized money. We don't need Proof-of-Stake. The problem with Bitcoin mining is unbounded energy and resource use. No payment adoption means Bitcoin remains a speculation. We don't have infinite energy for the hyperbitcoinization experiment. We need to find a way to "cap" it. The solution is to drive payment adoption.
Bitcoin will crash just as it did in 2017 but I doubt price of GPU will go down
Noahbjection to that pun!
One way to gauge the quality of a financial asset is by how ardent and defensive its advocates are.
With, say, Amazon stock, that level is low. This tells you that holders of Amazon stock are not much worried about popular sentiment towards it. That's because the value of Amazon stock is supported by a solid business that has a long record of steadily growing however much people might gripe about it. There are risks to the underlying business, but bad sentiment is not a big risk: it would only raise cost of capital somewhat for a while, and somewhat dent ability to respond to larger investment opportunities.
With crypto, that same level is very high. That's because crypto's value depends entirely on popular sentiment. Crypto generates zero income: its only source of income is sales of "coin" investment assets to new buyers. When investment in these assets is greater than divestment plus maintenance costs, the value of the crypto coins goes up. When investment in these assets is less than divestment plus maintenance costs, the value of crypto goes down.
It's completely unpredictable how long crypto's rise can continue and how much higher it can go before there are persistently too few new buyers to cover maintenance costs. But it's 100% predictable that that is coming eventually, and from that point it will be very hard to re-juice popular sentiment.
Carbon-taxation and the like are also a risk for crypto, but one miners will probably continue to avoid by staying in backward countries.
"if the price of houses goes up, people put more resources into homebuilding."
... If you make it legal to do so.