Government approved vapour.

Excellent question, and a frightening one really when you understand that the concept of money is based on faith. The faith is a belief that these small metal and paper tokens will still be exchangable for usable goods on demand once you yourself have accepted ownership of them.. and even more so when you realise that a record of your ownership of these tokens recorded in electronic memory by a third party will be recognised as such.

So how does this differ from the Bitcoin you ask?

It differs in that, unlike a government supported currency, there is no universal acceptance of the Bitcoin worth.

If you were selling your house, would you accept payment in Bitcoin when other currencies were available? If the answer is no, then I think you have answered your own question.

Us$15200 today.

Well put.


True and made me laugh!

Thinking of going in ?

Never....I'm one for a small wager, but this to me is a folly.

I heard quite an interesting piece on the radio the other day, talking about the environmental impact of Bitcoin. The premise is that the amount of electrical energy it takes to run the supercomputer clusters that are doing the algorithms to mine these things is just enormous. A lot of the mining is taking place in China, where that electrical energy is supplied by coal-fired power stations. The guys making real money out of the Bitcoin mining game are in Iceland (where there's a couple of mines powered by geothermal electrical generation) and in Quebec where cheap over-capacity hydro is available - there's at least one co-located with an aluminium smelting operation on the cote nord. And as the available number of new bitcoins to mine is cut by half every four years, the amount of computing power required will roughly double in the same time frame, so the energy consumption to produce the "raw" currency will not go down any time soon.

It is also enormously expensive, in energy cost and therefore also in dollar cost, to process every transaction with Bitcoin. Because it involves the whole blockchain in a mutual certification process, it's orders-of-magnitude more costly to process (hundreds of dollars, against the few cents for Interac or Visa etc) so it's only cost effective in the long term to use Bitcoin for very large transactions.

My view? It's all a house of cards. I certainly won't be buying into the myth.

Really? The power to run the computers that 'mine' the algorithms is significant enough to be a concern? It just sounds so far fetched, and aimed at adding another layer of mythology to the scheme. Google and Facebook seem to operate their vast computer farms without environmental concerns.

Yes, really.

https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-...keeps-growing/

https://e27.co/alarming-environmenta...ning-20171128/

How mining bitcoin is 'killing the planet'

I know you're making it up, but I simply don't believe it. Sometimes these stories come out in dodgy research and end up getting amplified in the mainstream press. I'm no engineer, so I may be wrong, but it sounds implausible to me.

Do I really believe this? If true how is it funded? Is the value of the new bitcoins enough to pay the energy consumed?

I don't claim to know anything about Bitcoin mining, but looking at it logically, would you spend an ever increasing amount of real money to mine bitcoins when you've no idea what the real value of the coins mined will be? I've no doubt they are being mined but I suspect the costs of doing so aren't accurately reflected by these stories.

I'm sorry, I think that reporters and editors peddling these stories probably know as much on the subject as I do and perhaps they should be questioning rather than simply repeating stories. I'd like to see some factual numbers, attributed to reputable people and organisations, instead of simply publishing hearsay.

I really don't think the facts are in dispute. Take a look, for example, of a couple of the videos on this company's web page https://www.genesis-mining.com/datacenters - these are the guys that build the datacentres that run the bitcoin mines/farms: what takes the power is not just the servers themselves but the vast amount of energy to cool the rooms they operate in. I think the general public vastly underestimates the scale and sophistication of these outfits.

Here, for example, is a video produced by a middling Quebec-based bitcoin farm. Near the beginning is a caption boasting of the 10 megawatt facility. That's about the equivalent consumption of 6,000 North American households. For one farm. One smallish farm. You do the rest of the math...

Any company that thinks it's worthwhile to produce such a self-congratulatory video ("we use sustainable energy") strikes me as having to work hard to defend its reputation against valid criticism - but maybe it's just that my cynical mind (as a former PR practitioner and current marketing person) is too jaded for the naive environmentalists operating bitcoin farms...

Hmmm.. I've had a read around and I suspect that the stories are true. One I read suggested that a year or two ago bitcoin mining was profitable when the price was less than $300 and we know what it is today.
I had a quick calculation and the quoted 31TWh/year total use is about equivalent to a sustained output of 3500MW or about 4.5percent of the UK total generating capacity (of course this was a year or two ago).
A lot, but this is dispersed worldwide, and with the bitcoin value at today's price of about 15k then I begin to understand the rapid rise in installed mining capacity and it's impact.
As a comparison, Facebook recently announced that it'll buy 200MW from a new windfarm in Nebraska to operate one of it's data centers so these places do soak up power.

Glad to have been of service!