What do you think of Bitcoin?

Post Reply New Topic

i am no expert, but it is public knowledge that bitcoin does calculations at a terrific clip, much more intensely than does youtube. the pace of these calculations or numeric operations must be using lots of electricity because local power utilities are beginning to protest at these power hogs and starting to limit the number of these bitcoin operations within their zones of service. Alex de Vries, a bitcoin specialist at PwC, estimates that the current global power consumption for the servers that run bitcoin's software is a minimum of 2.55 gigawatts (GW), which amounts to energy consumption of 22 terawatt-hours (TWh) per year—almost the same as Ireland. the following link explains why so much energy is involved with bitcoin-
https://www.economist.com/the-economist ... uch-energy

One of the main reasons for the surge in the share price of Nvidia a couple of years ago was said to be the huge increase in demand for its powerful graphics processors to create bitcoins.

Gosh!

i wish i had the kind of mercenary smarts to have become a bitcoin stakeholder. that seems like rocket science to me.

I don't know the first thing about Bitcoin. You all hafta educate me on...the first thing about it.

I thought it was just folks doing a new kind of arbitrage- something like what they've done for centuries- which is trading old fashioned money currencies issued by different countries against each other to make money for themselves- that with maybe a little bit of the monetized chain letter effect as well.

And apparently it IS that too, but the main thing is this other thing I don't understand in the economist article- that you have to "solve a puzzle" to get bitcoinage? Does that mean that you - as a human- have to solve something like a jigsaw puzzle to get at it ( in competition with other humans using their human noggins?)? Or does that mean that your computer has to solve something for you (and compete against other computers) to crack the safe?

I think the 'puzzles' are complex mathematical equations. 'Solving' them apparently requires a vast amount of processing power and thus electricity usage.

i don't grok how that can form the basis of a quasi-monetary system.

I'm not really sure how the value of our official money is determined, when it can be produced in unlimited quantities with a few keystrokes by our Central Banks. Presumably the argument is that it's 'backed' by the total value of a nation's assets and economic production (GDP). So bitcoin is maybe thought to be backed by the work and resources that went into producing it?

Sounds dodgy to me, but some very shrewd people seem to believe in it.

i sorta remember a money guy named john kenneth galbraith, who said “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.” they literally summon it from thin air.

So humans , with computers, use their computers to solve "puzzles" (way more complex than what a human could solve) in order for the the human owners of the computers to get at an allotment of bitcoin money if their computers solve these problems. Basically they are inviting you to hack into them - as long as its an honest hack.

Then ,, after your computer picks the lock to get the bitcoin, then the fun for the humans begins. Which is speculation: trying to make money trading in bitcoin to earn real dollars from the bitcoin?

I think that I have it.

scam

a few people seem to be making money off of this. exceptionally lucky and/or smart.

I don't recall if I posted in this thread or not and I can't be bothered to look. At the peak of the bitcoin craze as much as 1% of the world's electricity needs were spent on crypto currency mining. What a f*****g waste. I was thrilled when the price of bitcoin collapsed so I could finally upgrade my 8 year old computer as the prices(especially video cards) were once again reasonable.

...but now the price is back on a tear, it seems.

I believe that cryptocurrency is totally the same as every other thing in the market - for every "fool" that looses money there is someone who makes money. It's up to you to choose who you are or just stay aside. I personally make money on trading on [url=https://[/url] . I am not a risky person, I'm just trying to keep myself informed and "in game"

Last edited by B19 on 13 Nov 2019, 6:24 am, edited 1 time in total.: spammer

if one is hyperintelligent, this is just one more way to beat the system available to such. for the rest of us, it is echelons beyond reality.