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Is Bitcoin an environmental disaster? Recent reports claim Bitcoin mining draws as much power as 31k American homes. We bust the FUD.
It seems obvious to us, but lets face it, people just don’t get it. It’s early days for bitcoin, calling the last weeks events “the end of bitcoin” is just straight up FUD and we’ll break it down.
Plus why those of you worried about deflation just aren’t seeing the big picture, the important new bitcoin loving merchants, and Litecoin could save us all.
All that and so much more!
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We’re proud to announce you can now find true love with Bitcoin by using OKCupid! This is one more step forward for bringing Bitcoin to the masses – one date at a time.
Blockchain.info, a site that tracks data on Bitcoin mining, estimates that in just the last 24 hours, miners used about $147,000 of electricity just to run their hardware, assuming an average price of 15 cents per kilowatt hour … That’s enough to power roughly 31,000 U.S. homes, or about half a Large Hadron Collider.
No more so than the wastefulness of mining gold out of the ground, melting it down and shaping it into bars, and then putting it back underground again. Not to mention the building of big fancy buildings, the waste of energy printing and minting all the various fiat currencies, the transportation thereof in armored cars by no less than two security guards for each who could probably be doing something more productive, etc.
As far as mediums of exchange go, Bitcoin is actually quite economical of resources, compared to others.
New bitcoins are generated, or \”mined,\” when computers succeed at solving increasingly complex equations. Bloomberg recently described this mining process as an \”environmental disaster\” because of the energy required to power the machines working on the problems.
The bitcoin mining process incentivizes people to be as efficient as possible and use as little power as possible to create bitcoins and to validate the transactions. The more efficient you are, less you spend on electricity and the more profitable you\’ll be. In the future, I expect to see bitcoin mining in places where electricity is free or cheap. You could put solar array in the Arizona desert attached to bitcoin miners and instead of trying to ship that electricity all over world, you could ship Bitcoin all over the world. The output of bitcoin mining is heat. You\’ll see bitcoin mining happening in places where people need heat anyway. I could imagine bitcoin heaters that, in addition to generating heat, generate bitcoin.
There are just over 2 quadrillion maximum possible atomic units in the bitcoin design.
Comparing 1 BTC to 1 Dollar is a bit disingenuous. We subconsciously make this connection in our minds when watching markets and a BTC’s price relative to the dollar, but in terms of money supply, ~21 million total bitcoins isn’t quite what it seems. 1 BTC = 100,000,000 Satoshis (A Satoshi is the smallest unit of measurement within bitcoin).
In the future, with further adoption, we (potentially) won’t be thinking of exchanging in whole bitcoins, but in tiny fractions of bitcoins (bitcents, millibitcoins, microbitcoins). In normal inflationary currencies, the number of currency units in existence consistently increases, supposedly to match the demand for these units and prevent the value from increasing. Bitcoin scales by dividing bitcoins into tiny fractions, not by increasing the total supply. Other mainstream currencies don’t have the capacity to divide to this degree, nor would there be any need to since the smaller units would consistently lose purchasing power.
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Do other Crypto currencies like LTC and PPs act as a new type of inflation to bitcoin? IE, while there are a set number of bitcoins, they are going to be numerous general purpose crypto-monies.
There has been demand for a Bitcoin donation option for some time already. We had delayed that option because we couldn\’t really use Bitcoins per se – I still do not know about any place where plane tickets are for sale, and these are our biggest expenses overall.
But there are finally some reliable exchanges popping up, which are located in countries where the responsible treasuries regulate them like any other exchange (i.e. not the Cayman Isles 🙂
More recently I chose to delay adding the address due to the current Bitcoin hype, with prices well over USD 200 – I didn\’t want GIMP to appear like an opportunist who\’s just after quick money.
Bitcoinary a peer to peer exchange and reputation system. Trade Bitcoins with trusted people.
— Litecoin —
Mattias Writes:
Hi Chris and Drew!
I just started mining bitcoin and litecoin, both on CPU, and
I have found that you can mine bitcoin and the system will
run just as smooth as if you did not mine, while litecoin will
make you system very jaggedy. Therefore I\’m mining litecoin
when I am not using my computer and bitcoin when I am
using my computer.
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