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Bitcoin will burn up the planet

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 9:46 am
by ttf_robcat2075
Not from The Onion...


One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week

QuoteAn index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.

This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.

Bitcoin will burn up the planet

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 11:44 am
by ttf_Burgerbob
The bitcoin market has completely destroyed the consumer market for high end video cards (usually reserved for computer gaming). Miners will buy cards, use them until they are basically destroyed, then dump them on the used market. Manufacturers are trying to clamp down on the practice.

Bitcoin will burn up the planet

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 12:57 pm
by ttf_MrPillow
In 2010 some friends and I decided we should invest in BitCoin because it might eventually get huge. We decided not to. I've been dead inside ever since.

Bitcoin will burn up the planet

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 2:16 pm
by ttf_Graham Martin
Watch out for Bitcoin scams of which there are many. "To claim your Bitcoin prize etc., click here". Image

Bitcoin will burn up the planet

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 2:23 pm
by ttf_MrPillow
Are they from the Nigerian Prince?

Bitcoin will burn up the planet

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 4:59 pm
by ttf_robcat2075
Sometimes police look at people's electric bills to figure out who might be growing pot with a houseful of grow lights.

One day they're going to do a raid, shoot the place up, and find out it's a bunch of graphics cards and no pot.





Bitcoin will burn up the planet

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 5:03 pm
by ttf_BGuttman
Can you enlighten me a little?  What's mining for Bitcoin?  I thought you had to buy them in order to spend them.

Bitcoin will burn up the planet

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 5:06 pm
by ttf_MrPillow
Bitcoins are created, or "mined", by decrypting computer code using extensive processing power. Once a new Bitcoin is mined, it can then be sold into the marketplace.

Bitcoin will burn up the planet

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 5:35 pm
by ttf_robcat2075
Quote from: BGuttman on Nov 11, 2017, 05:03PMCan you enlighten me a little?  What's mining for Bitcoin?  I thought you had to buy them in order to spend them.

The mining isn't just busy work, it's doing the work of digital verifying and processing the transactions that happen around the world.

A tiny fraction of a new bitcoin is your reward for doing that work.



Bitcoin will burn up the planet

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 6:45 pm
by ttf_Matt K
Bitcoin is essentially a distributed ledger system.  A "Bitcoin" is akin to a dollar. You can have a fraction of a dollar or multiple dollars, etc.  When you give someone n amount of bitcoin, you are performing a transaction similar to how you would with a bank. Except instead of telling the bank, you put a puzzle piece to solve on a network and the first computer to figure out that puzzle "wins" and gets a part of the transaction.  So the big difference between this and a normal financial transaction is that anybody with a powerful enough computer can verify your purchase.

Why is this better than a bank? Well, in some ways it is not. The most obvious being that it isn't a real currency. At least it isn't viewed that way yet.  The big advantage though, is that financial institutions spend a great amount of resource to guard many people's money.  So, for example, your money is pooled with thousands of others and if there was a breach, a potential attacker could have complete control over many people's money.  With Bitcoin, security is distributed and having a computer solve the puzzle "incorrectly" in such a way that it looks like you spent money is impossible with the current amount of computational power. This is because there is a window in which any transaction can occur and multiple computers have to solve the puzzle the same way.  If there is disagreement between multiple computers, those transactions effectively become cancelled.  So you should wait until it becomes permanent (approximately 60 minutes) at which point the computerational power required to reverse the transaction may well actually burn up the planet.

The "mining" is what I mentioned in the first paragraph; its verifying the transactions.  Different currencies handle it in different ways. Ether, for example, allows you to specify how much 'gas' you give the transaction. If speed is important, you can pay a higher transaction cost, which will draw more computers to compete to verify your transaction, and it gets done faster vs. if you put no costs into it. Other currencies have fixed amoutns per any transactions.  One of the things that contributes to confusion is that there are currently more than one bitcoin in existence after a "fork" (software upgrade) earlier this year that resulted in BitCoin Classic BitCoin Cash.  There was going to be another fork in the near future, but it was canceled.

As far as Bitcoin burning up all these resources, I doubt that it will happen like that. That assumes that computers won't get more efficient and that people don't have unlimited resources!  Heck for that matter, maybe we'll get some kind of sustainable renewable energy to power it if the costs of a Bitcoin are that high to run parallel ASIC machines.

Bitcoin will burn up the planet

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 8:31 pm
by ttf_BillO
I just wish I had bought a $1000 of them when they were $0.008.

Sigh!

Bitcoin will burn up the planet

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 8:31 pm
by ttf_BillO
I just wish I had bought a $1000 of them when they were $0.008.

Sigh!