So many people who don't understand Bitcoin spending time and money on Bitcoin.
It is a REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION of a theoretical crypto currency - that people then decided worked well enough and would run with it.
Bitcoin relies on a blockchain file that is steadily increasing in size as people mine more blocks.
It's already several gigabytes.
- Which doesn't seem so bad when you consider storage is relatively cheap now.
-- However, this size increase is accelerating as more processing power is devoted to mining.
- It also generates network traffic to synchronize mining efforts
-- Which is also increasing as more people use Bitcoin
These increases will never level off, and will jump in rate drastically if a majority of people ever start relying on Bitcoin.
ALSO, Bitcoin is in the control of whoever is leading the mining efforts [http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/]. This theoretically is the majority of active miners, due to how difficult it is for a small percentage of nodes to take the lead.
However, there is now specialized Bitcoin mining hardware [https://www.google.com/search?q=ASIC+bitcoin] that can mine at such a rate as to trivialize any non specialized hardware. This means that Bitcoin is now or will soon be *entirely* in the hands of the relatively few people with this specialized hardware.
Also also, all of this mining by people with more money and greed then brains has a significant environmental and resource impact. Mining runs computers as fast as possible ALL THE TIME, consuming both electricity and network bandwidth (which is electricity from other non mining computers).
This is already adding up to a noticeable footprint, and most people aren't even participating yet.
In short, supporting bitcoin on a non-academic level is not only throwing away your time and money, but is also actively degrading the environment at fairly aggressive rate.
There are people who made money. They were early adopters with a lot of mining hardware. They already cashed out or established their lead. Anyone entering the market now is only giving them money.
At best you can do margin trading to take advantage of other suckers in a highly volatile exchange.
(without actually returning to the mean at the end)
It is a REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION of a theoretical crypto currency - that people then decided worked well enough and would run with it.
Bitcoin relies on a blockchain file that is steadily increasing in size as people mine more blocks.
It's already several gigabytes.
- Which doesn't seem so bad when you consider storage is relatively cheap now.
-- However, this size increase is accelerating as more processing power is devoted to mining.
- It also generates network traffic to synchronize mining efforts
-- Which is also increasing as more people use Bitcoin
These increases will never level off, and will jump in rate drastically if a majority of people ever start relying on Bitcoin.
ALSO, Bitcoin is in the control of whoever is leading the mining efforts [http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/]. This theoretically is the majority of active miners, due to how difficult it is for a small percentage of nodes to take the lead.
However, there is now specialized Bitcoin mining hardware [https://www.google.com/search?q=ASIC+bitcoin] that can mine at such a rate as to trivialize any non specialized hardware. This means that Bitcoin is now or will soon be *entirely* in the hands of the relatively few people with this specialized hardware.
Also also, all of this mining by people with more money and greed then brains has a significant environmental and resource impact. Mining runs computers as fast as possible ALL THE TIME, consuming both electricity and network bandwidth (which is electricity from other non mining computers).
This is already adding up to a noticeable footprint, and most people aren't even participating yet.
In short, supporting bitcoin on a non-academic level is not only throwing away your time and money, but is also actively degrading the environment at fairly aggressive rate.
There are people who made money. They were early adopters with a lot of mining hardware. They already cashed out or established their lead. Anyone entering the market now is only giving them money.
At best you can do margin trading to take advantage of other suckers in a highly volatile exchange.
(without actually returning to the mean at the end)