10 years ago
8
Bitcoin under pressure
Virtual currency: It is mathematically elegant, increasingly popular and highly controversial. Bitcoin’s success is putting it under growing strain.
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http://www.economist.com
Additional Contributions:
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+10Submitted 10 years ago by Splitfish
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+6Submitted 10 years ago by EXP64
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+3Submitted 10 years ago by drunkenninja
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+3Submitted 10 years ago by bradd
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+2Submitted 10 years ago by drunkenninja
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This article sounds incredibly biased against bitcoin. It clearly has it's risks and complications, but no need to strike fear into people.
So with the success bitcoin has recently had, it seems like a good idea to start mining coins, as it basically creates free money, is there a reason that this would not be worth doing now that the value of bitcoin has increased so much, or does it just make the idea all the more appetising?
It's a lot harder to mine them than a year or two ago. Now you need expensive hardware and even then it's hardly worth it.
Yes, basically we are at a point where regular, e.g. home PC, hardware consumes so much power that the cost of the electricity needed for the computationally demanding mining process is higher than the value of the bitcoins that are earned from the mining. To make mining worthwhile, you need an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) doing the job, as they offer some margin between value of coins earned and cost of electricity.
A good option is to join a pool, but even that is hardly worthwhile now.
Yep, and lets not forget risky.
There was a time when people were making thousands of bitcoins a day running bitcoin mining software on their laptops. Those days are definitely over.
I'm starting to understand bitcoin a lot better after reading so much about it