You might have been neglecting the miraculous outcome of bitcoin for a long time now mainly because bitcoin seems to complicated but if you really have interest in the upcoming future where the world will actually move beyond fossil fuel, I think it is time we start paying more attention to this now.
Mainly last week the price of bitcoin have increasing whereby a single bitcoin reaches $10,000 thereby breaking the record for the first time, while presently the price of bitcoin is already moving higher to $15,000. What surprised me most was that at the beginning of this year bitcoin was at $1,000.
If you have invested in bitcoin earlier and brought it in 2011 when it was still $100 your investment should have hit almost $6 million presently. When bitcoin did not have value back then, there were news that most people do treat their friends on lunch and thereby making payment in bitcoin without knowing what the future might be, might have realized now that they should have paid in cash back then and hold onto their bitcoin.
The sudden rise is very stunning even though it was not intended to be an investment instrument, it was pictured to serve as an option for money, a secure decentralized means of transferring values around the globe. The funniest thing is that they might not have thought about the amount of energy suck behind bitcoin computer network might become one day. The ability to acquire a rapid transition away for fossil fuel is been slow down by bitcoin which might just be the beginning.
Derek Thompson calls bitcoin an “ingenious and potentially transformative technology” that the entire economy could be built on — the currency equivalent of the internet.
Digital transactions do come with an actual world price, the enormous growth of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin has bring into been a requirement for computer power. As bitcoin rise up, the computer math problems must be solved to produce more bitcoins (mining) get more complicated. Presently every bitcoin transaction need the same energy needed to power more than 10 houses in U.S daily and this have make miners to keeping installing more computers.
In few months to now, the electricity needed by the network will beginning to outmatch what is available thereby requiring new generating plant for more energy, some efforts are been made underway to rectify the way the bitcoin network process transactions with the aim that one day it will require less electricity to produce new coins.
It is sure that the energy charge of bitcoin transactions will draw away the improvement from rectifying the world and decreasing global carbon emissions, which might have already occur but the question is by how much?