Do not panic?
I’ve written about bitcoin in the recent past and it’s come up again. I know I do not like it for all it’s features as they are technically, ethically, morally, financially… sketchy.
As a point of reference I recommend watching The Paradigm of Money. It’s an interesting film that tells the viewer that …
So I watched, with great interest, the chapter on bitcoin. Since up until that point they had been negative on all things economic, banking and stocks I was expecting them to hate crypto currency. Well they didn’t. The chapter was more of a VERY simple primer and said all sorts of supportive things.
The problem is that bitcoin is subject to the same manipulation. Just look at the index when trump took office and then when the US acknowledged COVID in March. The numbers clearly jumped. It’s also my guess that most of bitcoin’s cult are made up of GOP… but I could be wrong.
Then. When China dropped out and made bitcoin illegal the documented “difficulty factor” dropped only to slope up as they or others re-entered the marked. It’s that difficulty factor that the miners use to restrict the amount of work required to mine the coin and/or the ledger. It is some function of the number of mining computers and their estimate of work potential. The more computers the harder the problem to solve.
It takes 2.7 Quadrillion hashes calculated to generate a BTC.
and
The average time taken to mine a new bitcoin is 10 minutes,
There are over 1M miners.
around 91 terawatt-hours
This not the same as actual mining. Actual mining uses considerably less resources.