Edit: Don't the mining costs basically exponentially increase as the supply of bitcoin runs out as it's an exponential decay? Being bounded by an exponential function isn't a good sign.
The difficulty of solving a problem to generate coins is dynamically and automatically adjusted such that it takes about 10 minutes. What this means is that if you had a total of 800 nuclear reactors dedicated to exclusively powering ASIC systems to mine Bitcoins it'd take, on average, just as long as it would if your total electricity consumption was the equivalent of one guy running a low power laptop using a hand crank or bike generator.
So all the electricity consumption represents is demand. As demand increases for bitcoin, so does this price. When the price goes up this means you can afford to pay more for electricity and still show a profit. When demand goes down for bitcoin you need to pay less and less for electricity to maintain profitability.
What will happen when no new coins are being generated is that the reward for each block mined will decrease. This will mean you receive less money for mining a block and thus can not afford to pay as much for energy and remain profitable. The net effect being that we'll see a decline in energy usage as miners running on thinner margins are pushed out of profitability.
The dynamic balancing is actually quite a clever design.
That Bitcoin are probably little more than coal-fired Beanie Babies likely does contribute to message board attention.
Bitcoin cannot generate copycat coins(on the BTC blockchain). They are rare numbers.
Bitcoin is not fiat, it’s a commodity. It’s not decentralized at all and there are a handful of people thus could destroy it at any time.
Sounds a lot like beanie babies the more I think about it.
Uh you might want to check that.
51% attacks in Bitcoin are not a real risk for two reasons. The first is that it'd be completely illogical. If there were a group of miners able to work together to generate the resources sufficient to obtain a 51% attack on a major coin, they'd already be printing massive amounts of money completely legitimately. If they started trying to use that to do things like double spend, that'd ruin all of this because of the second point.
Bitcoin is decentralized. And if one branch becomes broken because of something like a 51% attack, it is trivial to fork it and go. Bitcoin Cash being the obvious example of this, and that was over something that lacked a unanimous consensus - nobody is going to want to stay on a fork that's been compromised.
There's no technical limitation on how many bitcoin can be produced either, only the network consensus that a limited number will be produced. It's built into the software and unlikely to change, but it isn't fundamental, it's part of the consensus.
Yeah but then you need to start saying things like:
Well Walmart MIGHT start building tanks. Its unlikely to happen, but it isnt fundamental, its part of business.
It's also quite inefficient and even if it was chosen with some rationale basis, the idea of burning energy for years in the hope of providing a high enough bar to prevent a single tsunami of effort over the a brief period of time, less than a few hours and only required to match it, is one of the dumbest security ideas I've ever heard.
I'm not against cryptocurrency, not do I think it will fail in concept, but I very much hope that PoS proves viable and will succeed this utter waste.
Also, I imagine a lot of people do indeed think that Bitcoin is imaginary or nonproductive. Arstechnica makes money off of readers viewing their articles, so content that validates an opinion or strikes controversy generally does well.
How is it free after the initial smelting to transfer?
Moving physical gold around is very expensive.
I only enjoy the irony that some people will go from posting about climate change and go right over checking their bitcoin value.