by Bitcoins are a total waste. On this blog, I’ve written some posts on ‘the real costs of making money’ (a summary here). Producing money takes resources: labor, capital, land. One of the ’land’ aspects used to be silver and gold. Digging for gold and silver a social setting: the slaves in the silver mines of Larium (Athens), the native workers which perished in the high altitude silver mines of Cerro Ricco, Peru (the Spanish empire). Or ‘apartheid’, which guaranteed a steady flow of cheap ‘free’ labor to the gold mines, in South-Africa (British empire). Fortunately, we have fiat money now – the value money does not have to be backed anymore by forced labor. Bitcoins are a recent new kind of money (though it really seems to be more a store of wealth than a means of exchange).
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Bitcoins are a total waste. On this blog, I’ve written some posts on ‘the real costs of making money’ (a summary here). Producing money takes resources: labor, capital, land. One of the ’land’ aspects used to be silver and gold. Digging for gold and silver a social setting: the slaves in the silver mines of Larium (Athens), the native workers which perished in the high altitude silver mines of Cerro Ricco, Peru (the Spanish empire). Or ‘apartheid’, which guaranteed a steady flow of cheap ‘free’ labor to the gold mines, in South-Africa (British empire). Fortunately, we have fiat money now – the value money does not have to be backed anymore by forced labor.
Bitcoins are a recent new kind of money (though it really seems to be more a store of wealth than a means of exchange). Unfortunately, producing bitcoin requires enormous and in fact unacceptable amounts of energy. And even using bitcoin is weirdly expensive. It has been checked and rechecked: one bitcoin transaction uses as much electricity (not ‘energy’, as is often stated) as is needed to power one rich world house for four weeks, i.e. about 200 KWH. According to experts, competing systems like Ethereum seem to less wasteful. The social setting of bitcoin: a corrupt private Big Brother energy guzzling network of transactions which backs the value of money. Not good.