ThePortForum.com

'I Promise To Pay The Bearer, On Demand, One Bottle Of Port'

There was a piece in The Telegraph today noting the declining usage of Bitcoin. This provoked the usual outpouring in the comments section from those foolish enough to have bought into the fad, now desperately trying to justify why Bitcoin is still the way forward..

But a currency backed by neither ingots of precious metal nor powerful governments was always going to be a bit dodgy.

But then, ingots of precious metal are prone to speculation, and powerful governments have a bad habit of spending money they havn't got.

So how about a currency backed by an everyday commodity whose value (given the difficulty of further mechanisation) is going to relate closely to the cost of manpower, where wages (if one factors out the billions of subsidence farmers) are probably near the global average?

Daft yes, but then, as Churchill observed about democracy:

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"

So it might just work...

To be fair to the bitcoiners, I think they thought this would be the radical way that they would bring about the end of capitalism after the speculative excesses of the recent past. How exactly you were supposed do that with a currency that is purely and exclusively a speculatively traded pseudo-commodity is beyond me, however!
Will the Porto be denominated in line with the rankings? In which case, will we start referring to Cruz Ruby as 'shrapnel'? Seems somehow fitting!
Also, would Julian be the only person who has seen a million pound note and drunk NN63?

Will the Porto be denominated in line with the rankings?

I think we would be talking standard ruby port, made in accordance with IVDP rules, exclusive of all sales taxes and duties, ex. Gaia.

djewesbury wrote:would Julian be the only person who has seen a million pound note and drunk NN63?

Merely seen? Actually held, dear fellow.

I was bored a few weeks ago, so I looked into BitCoin - I'd heard of it, but didn't really know what it was all about.
I was shocked.
I'm not talking about the underlying concept of BitCoin, but about the way new BitCoins are "mined".
I downloaded a bit of software that mines coins - there was a large warning that it may fry my computer.
OK.
So I stopped there - but I wondered why.

Without getting technical, mining BitCoins requires huge, as in massively huge, as in unbelievably huge amounts of CPU time.
OK.
So what's wrong with that?
It doesn't cost anything, does it?
Well, in fact, yes it does - huge, as in massively huge, as in unbelievably huge amounts of electricity.

BitCoin is portrayed as an "ether-only" currency - something that doesn't exist in real life, just in hyperspace.
Which may well be true.
But to make all those BitCoins, huge amounts of fuel is being used by computers around the globe to perform gazillions of calculations to create an "ether-only" coin.

There are a number of articles out there in hyperspace - this is just one of them...
http://pando.com/2013/12/16/bitcoin-has ... footprint/
In case you don't want to read the whole article, one statistic it quotes (spelling error it theirs) is...
"According to Blockchain.info the total electricity cost of all mining acticity conducted over the last 24 hours was $19,652,986.38, as the system consumed 131,019.91 megawatt hours. "

Just thought I'd chime in

There is a machine just a few yards away from me, in another room, that is used to network computers to mine Bitcoins. I know almost nothing about the whole process. Should I go and switch it off?

djewesbury wrote:There is a machine just a few yards away from me, in another room, that is used to network computers to mine Bitcoins. I know almost nothing about the whole process. Should I go and switch it off?

Yes.

Derek, thank you for volunteering to explain bitcoin to me..

djewesbury wrote:Derek, thank you for volunteering to explain bitcoin to me..

No problem. Most good quality modern invensions work just fine if you turn them off and then on again. Try it with Bitcoin and see what happens.

This is a Bitcoin mine.

It runs at approx 13 Gigahashes / second and in Germany it now consumes about €40 of electricity a month. It mines about €90 worth of Bitcoin in this time. In Brazil, where it is going to be relocated, electricity costs about 7c a unit compared to about 30c in Germany.
I now possess 0.005 of a Bitcoin, or about $3, and expect that if I hold onto it and let it appreciate it will pay for a case of Graham 85 in no time.