What's a bitcoin worth and what gives it it's value? If you ask this to the average crypto enthusiast that question they will probably answer it with an other question, "How does gold get it's value?", then explain, "Gold get's it's value from the market, it's worth what everyone agrees it is.", and while that's true, it's not really answering the question, but rather circling around it.
Gold is mined; and in order to mine you need to own land lucky enough to contain gold. Then you need to purchase equipment to remove it from the ground. The product you remove has to be refined, smelted, and stored; all the while using fossil fuels and man hours; these things go into finding the price of gold.
Bitcoin, like gold, gains this intrinsic like value from the work that the miners preform as well as from the investment it requires to get started mining. So what is the production cost of a bitcoin and how does it compare to gold, let's take a look
Gold has a mining "cash cost" of around $800 per oz. and cost around $1270 or 1.6 times production cost. "Cash cost" does not count off site cost, taxes, or depreciation, so it's more comparable to the electric cost of mining a bitcoin. To mine one coin in a pool it will cost around $600 in electricity; that's 4.6 times or 3.33 times depending on when you looked at the price.
So does that mean that bitcoin is overvalued even at $2000? Probably not when you consider the "all in cash cost". All things considered, it cost a mining company over $1000 to produce an oz. of gold. That only puts it at a 20 something percent mark up; much smaller margin than the 160% from the previous example; but when you consider that most miners will never recoup the initial cost of their mining rigs before they become obsolete. Do to the rising difficulty mining rigs get outdated fast and electricity cost begin to out weigh their mining revenue. If you are running the top of the line mining rig and paying ten cents per kilowatt hour, bitcoin would have to be worth close to $2800 for you to ever see a profit and even at that rate it would take almost 2 years of mining to earn less than $300.
So if anything I think this comparison is saying that even a 3k bitcoin is cheap, but this is only one of many ways to look at how one might go about putting a value on bitcoin and i'll discuss some more in the future.
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