An eyebrow-raising story just published on ZDNet Australia made me realise I'd never commented on Bitcoin here before!
The story
Written by Luke Hopewell less than an hour ago:
The ABC has caught one of its own trying to mine Bitcoins using its infrastructure.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) looked set to become a haven for Bitcoin virtual currency mining last year, after a so-called "miner" placed a piece of code in the production environment, which could have potentially netted to thousands of dollars. The ABC's security systems, however, had other plans.
I thought Bitcoin was an interesting concept when it first came out, but I had reservations. I wasn't alone; while it clearly appealed to certain Libertarian minded people eager to escape the clutches of taxation and runaway government defecits that could devalue "real" money, there were those who claimed it would fail for the same reason every other online currency has. Such a discussion is beyond the scope of this post!
I like to say I'm a reformed Libertarian!
No, for me the concern was about energy. To introduce scarcity into a system of abundance, Bitcoins are manufactured through a computationally intensive and complex program. Referred to as "mining", people would be awarded at random for their efforts. Well no, people with more powerful and more expensive setups are statistically more likely to be awarded stuff, and those who can't afford them wouldn't. Libertarianism in a nutshell ;).
The problem for me is, while the Bitcoins mined with this program are virtual, their impact is real. Thousands of CPU hours burning real energy most likely produced from dirty fossil fuels created this stuff. If you're going to run a program on your computer 24/7, the least you could do would be to have it do something useful, like finding cures for diseases. If that doesn't rock your boat, spare the planet your extra energy use and put your machine on standby when not using it!
Which brings us back full circle to this article in ZDNet. This worker at the ABC, a government owned company and therefore owned by Australians like me, were using our computers and money to power them to generate Bitcoins for themselves. To me, that goes beyond what we'd normally describe as misuse of property.
I'll be interested to read the outcome of this investigation as more details emerge.
" If you're going to run a program on your computer 24/7, the least you could do would be to have it do something useful, "
a) It *is* doing something useful. It's securing the network and processing transactions.
b) Mining has well and truly moved away from CPUs - even the graphics-card method is now becoming old-hat. Chips called FPGAs are now all the rage for bitcoin mining and these are very electrically efficient in comparison. In future specialised chips called ASICs which are even more efficient will be the go, so the entry barrier is more and more becoming hardware costs rather than electricity used in operation.
c) It's arguable that the energy used is a small price to pay for securing such a globally useful system. Compared to the energy expended in transporting,securing and managing physical cash and/or gold as well as general bank computing and branch operations - it's not such an inefficient mechanism.
"Useful" in the context of people using it for their transactions. Given the exchange rate with the US dollar of late, that's highly debatable.
" If you're going to run a program on your computer 24/7, the least you could do would be to have it do something useful, "
Do you know how much the servers from all the banks around the world are working! way harder than bitcoin.
Bitcoin is one of the most important concepts to brake us away from a dept based money system.
If I have 10 dollars in my pocket, someone in Australia (or the world these days) owes that $10 to a bank because all money these days is created as dept!
If I have a bitcoin no one else owes that to anyone. This is important! Very very important!
I'm going to assume that was a question. A redundant one at that, because we're discussing Bitcoin, not banks.
I'm going to assume you meant break, not brake. And if you honestly think this is the case, I have a bridge to nowhere to sell you.
Is it really too much to ask for people to check their spelling before posting comments?
It has also suffered rapid devaluation, therefore rendering any arguments as to its utility utterly moot in my opinion.
When it's stable, and accepted as a method of payment by anyone other than early adopters, it'll be worth a further look. For now, it's nothing more than a CPU intensive cryptographic curiosity. My argument was better uses could be found for those CPU hours.
[...] previous Bitcoin post drew some ire from those saying it was a viable alternative to the broken financial system. From [...]