It's going to be so much fun when bitcoin goes to zero. Its own black hole! $1.5 trillion in dismay [so far] is a significant ding for a lot of people. bitcoin is eating the world ... super blackhole ... So far, all bitcoin has done is add value to US$ as people sell bitcoin in exchange for said evil-doers' cash cow. People have disappeared umpty giga$bucks beyond the event horizon into the bitcoin black hole.
Financial Relativity Theory is the name of the game. MMT aka Modern Money Theory aka Magic Money Tree is so last century with doomed aficianados. Bitcoin is not a means of escape. It's a trap. Not a deliberate trap but more a naturally occurring trap aka made with good intention with the end destination planned to be Utopia but as we know, what are good intentions and Utopia can turn out to be paving stones to Hell, not Utopia. The Devil works in swindling deceptive ways. Many a young man has thought he has entered heaven in a marriage to a lovely lady, only to find in a year or 20 that he has made a very very grave mistake, which can involve actual graves, maybe his own. Financial ruin a normal result.
I wonder how much of the $1.1 trillion bitcoin value and $2 trillion total crypto, is actual US$ paid to somebody else, and how much is just a rising number with negligible transactions involving actual payment to somebody else. For all I know it's a just a few million$ being traded which is levitating all the other bitcoins. Hmmm, I know about half the bitcoins have been mined in the last few years so that's a LOT of electricity which is a real cost. I wonder what the actual energy cost per mined bitcoin is right now. I guess it must be somewhere about $10,000. I will ask Google who should know.
Google said Regardless of the number of miners, it still takes 10 minutes to mine one Bitcoin. At 600 seconds (10 minutes), all else being equal it will take 72,000 GW (or 72 Terawatts) of power to mine a Bitcoin using the average power usage provided by ASIC miners.
72,000 gigawatts is not a unit of energy. Maybe that's the power required to run for 10 minutes. Surely it's not so much!!! My original primary criticism of bitcoin was absurd energy cost and mathematical madness of inefficiency and entropy creation which are NOT desirable in existence.
Another quote A paper from 2018 from the Oak Ridge Institute in Ohio found that one dollar’s worth of bitcoin took 17 megajoules of energy, more than double the amount of energy it took to mine one dollar’s worth of copper, gold and platinum. Another study from the UK published last year said that computer power required to mine Bitcoin quadrupled in 2019 compared with the year before, and that mining has had an influence in prices in some power and utility markets.
I would rather have an ounce of gold than half the equivalent in bitcoin. And then power consumption quadrupled in 2019!!! So it must have gone nuts in 2020. And 2021.
It is fascinating that so many swarms of "experts" think bitcoin has a future when just that is considered, let alone the other problems. Such as how long it takes, lack of security, inconvenience.
Mqurice |
