Bulldozer00's Blog

Fervent anti-bitcoiners have a bottomless cache of reasons for wanting Bitcoin to fail. One of their favorite fear-mongering strategies is to warn of “the impending ecological catastrophe” that they think will engulf the world if Bitcoin succeeds on a global scale.

In order for bitcoins to be created, they, like gold, need to be “mined“. However, unlike the physical mining required to unearth gold, virtual mining is required to “unearth” bitcoins. Virtual mining for bitcoins requires a large amount of electricity because Bitcoin miners race against each other using a computationally dense hashing algorithm to validate transactions and add a verified block to the immutable blockchain.

For its contributory work in helping to keep the blockchain secure, the winning miner of a block is rewarded with a spanking brand new batch of bitcoins (currently set to 25 bitcoins per block). After each block is added to the blockchain, the race to add the next block of transactions commences.

Unlike newly mined physical gold which require a costly post-mining process to bring the booty to market, newly minted virtual bitcoins can be used immediately – to pay a miner’s electrical bills, for example.

When asked about the cost of Bitcoin mining back in 2010, Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto had this to say:

What most people new to bitcoin fail to understand (but the banksters with a vested interested in maintaining the status quo do understand) is summarized nicely in Satoshi’s last two sentences:

The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used. Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste.