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Wouldn’t you know it! I converted my entire portfolio of magic beans into Bitcoin last year. I’m doomed!

Stop selling picks and shovels than

Bitcoin: A currency with nothing backing it created by magicians with computers. See also United States Dollar.

This was inevitable, as Bitcoin is designed to end like this. There is a pool of 21 million coins, all spread in a huge digital "hole in the ground, filled with sand." Initially it was easy to pick the coins off the top (the so-called "difficulty" setting was low.) But as more and more coins are mined, new miners have to dig deeper and sift through more and more "sand" in order to find one coin. This results in increase of costs of mining. However coins are traded not at the cost of manufacture today, but at some other price that reflects demand for them. Today the demand is low, but the cost of mining is high - so why to mine, wasting energy? It's not even profitable - and say what you want, Bitcoin is no longer a research project; it's a commercial operation.

If other miners choose to stop mining, the bitcoin network will stop functioning, as miners are essential elements of it. Here is what the FAQ says:

Absolutely! Even before the creation of coins ends, the use of transaction fees will likely make creating new blocks more valuable from the fees than the new coins being created. When coin generation ends, what will sustain the ability to use bitcoins will be these fees entirely. There will be blocks generated after block #6,929,999, assuming that people are still using bitcoins at that time.

In other words, Bitcoin creators wanted to charge money for each and every payment done through the Bitcoin network. In exchange for those fees the miners would continue to waste energy. But how many people do you see around who'd want to pay fees for the privilege of paying in electronic cash? Bitcoin supporters continually use examples of "cheap" money transfer from the USA to China - but the vast majority of transactions are local. I barely remember when I bought something from China, and I used PayPal for that.

If mining stops, then bitcoin stops. This will drop its value, and the process will be then self-sustaining. You still can use Bitcoin, as long as there is still someone who generates enough blocks to include your transaction into. Maybe it will revert to the status of experimental currency; but most likely it will disappear altogether, killed by its own design flaws.

I finally made a smart investment. I do NOT own any bitcoins.

Calling Mt. Gaaak.

Anyone have change of a Bitcoin?