Posted on 06/14/2018 7:42:24 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
As Dave Ramsey recommends - Don’t get into anything you don’t understand.
We could change it to waving your hands in the air.
That is the same net effect of ‘mining’ bitcoins.
That is the thing that always bugged me. You are giving value to people sitting on a stationary bicycle expending effort, producing nothing except sweat.
Bitcoin is a silly concept. Nothing to contain a numeric value requires that much computational power. Nothing. It’s overkill beyond belief.
It’s like getting change at a fast food restaurant that computing the result takes a super computer.
...with the cryptocurrency growing as rapidly as it does at the moment.
It’s not growing. It’s lost a lot of value.
For perspective, replace “Bitcoin” with “Internet” and replace the amount of energy as a percentage with the 2% of the total worlds energy production because that is the amount of electricity consumed by data centers.
Much hand wringing over nothing.
The FUD in this article is strong. Nothing ever grows exponentially over long time periods. The energy expended secures the network from human corruption/interference. This is the cost of eliminating corruption. Context is also needed. What is the equivalent energy expenditure and other costs needed to run the global financial infrastructure? Include buildings, transportation, electricity, fuel, salaries, legal costs....
Yes, that's true. For example, sometimes things suffer a catastrophic collapse. Other times, they may just slowly fade into irrelevancy.
Regards.
Sometimes they reach an equilibrium and stabilize.
Or they crash like tulips did in the 1600s. lol
Unless the ‘miners’ find a way to produce the electricity needed to run their operation.
This may be one way to do this:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-shatner-bitcoin-solar-panels-illinois-20180613-story.html
For bitcoin, I think the energy consumption will level off as the block reward declines, with the block reward eventually going to zero. The miners are then paid by transaction fees only. Only the most efficient miners will survive in this environment and these factors will ultimately limit the energy consumption. The projections of this author are stupid.
Bitcoin is a better money, whether people want to admit this or not or realize this or not. People won’t have a choice in the matter, just like gold displaced seashells and notched sticks as money. The market will force bitcoin on people. It won’t happen right away. It will take awhile. But it will happen.
If I had a bitcoin for every time I’ve read or heard the tulip analogy I’d be a billionaire.
“We could change it to waving your hands in the air.”
that would certainly save lots of electricity, as well as having a minor exercise benefit to boot ...
“For perspective, replace Bitcoin with Internet and replace the amount of energy as a percentage with the 2% of the total worlds energy production because that is the amount of electricity consumed by data centers.”
that’s actually a very good analogy because everyone knows that the Internet is as useless as Bitcoin ...
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