“Yeah, count me out of any currency whose genesis is WASTE.
We now place value on wasted computational cycles. How novel”.
I have not a clue of what you speak of but I’m sure it’s brilliant./s
“Yeah, count me out of any currency whose genesis is WASTE. We now place value on wasted computational cycles. How novel”.
I have not a clue of what you speak of but I’m sure it’s brilliant./s
You have to spend (waste) a lot of electric power to compute one Bitcoin. This energy is a complete waste, since there is no other use of the calculated number. As the cost of one Bitcoin is roughly tied to the cost of energy that it takes to produce, miners are not supposed to get rich on mining (they still can, but that requires advanced hardware and cheap power, like in Iceland.)
In comparison, mining of gold is also expensive; but the gold is useful in other ways. Paper money is not useful for anything other than money - but it is very cheap. Bitcoin combines the two worst aspects of those: it is expensive to mine, and is not usable for anything else.
In the modern world most of the money in circulation are purely electronic; they have zero cost, and as such they require no effort (or waste) to generate. The other side of this advantage is unconstrained generation of new money. Bitcoin, as it has no government oversight, had to demand some "proof of work" before a coin is minted. This is logical for a hobby currency, but it is wasteful for a worldwide monetary system. Right now there are gigawatts of power consumed by Bitcoin servers, miners, and other equipment, with no obvious advantage to anyone (outside of the hobby value.) Well, I have to take that back - whoever stole the money of Mt. Gox's users definitely benefited from the process :-)
The prior poster is spot on. Bitcoin is generated through complete waste. At least I can use gold as a paperweight or a dollar bill to wipe my arse. I can’t do either with Bitcoin. It has zero intrinsic value and was made by wasting electricity and computational cycles. I can’t transact with them without a medium of transaction which requires more waste.
It is worse than a fiat currency. It doesn’t have zero value. It has negative value.