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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum
GLD 368.29+0.6%Nov 7 4:00 PM EST

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To: Lazarus who wrote (137029)12/8/2017 1:03:59 PM
From: Elroy Jetson  Read Replies (1) of 217574
 
Bitcoin and blockchains are hopelessly inefficient. Currently each Bitcoin transaction requires enough electricity to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day! Just to power all of the computers which each have to update that transaction.

The current $7 to $15 charge for each Bitcoin transfer actually doesn't even come close to covering the cost of the total power used to update that transaction!

Even more electricity goes into Bitcoin "Mining" operations, totaling an estimated 31 terawatt-hours per year.

This is more electricity than 150 individual countries in the world use to power their entire productive economy.

Coinbank has now set-up a bank which can instantly transfer ownership of Bitcoins from one person to another, by not actually transferring the BitCoin ownership - But this requires you to initially transfer ownership of your BitCoins to Coinbank, and requires you to trust Coinbank to be a safe custodian of your BitCoin value.

A number of similar major BitCoin banks have already failed such as Mt Gox in Japan after losing at the time $450 million in BitCoins allegedly due to theft. At current value that would have been loss would have been $15 billion- en.wikipedia.org

The IRS now won a lawsuit requiring CoinBank and other BitCoin banks to report all transactions and soon issue 1099 reports to the IRS for each one.

Some say in time cheaper more energy-efficient computers will reduce this cost, but this lower cost will attract more miners creating more BitCoins and each of these increased numbers of miners will also have to update each BitCoin transaction.
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