---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Thomas Greco <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 8:58 AM Subject: Bitcoin To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> Michel, Here's a post from the Open Collective Skype chat about Bitcoin. [05:43:48 PM] permaworld: Does anyone have information or experiences with BitCoin http://bitcoin.org ..... a new peer2peer open source digital currency? If so, what do you think of it? [05:55:27 PM] Arthur Brock: Bitcoin has gotten a lot of things right about decentralization and intrinsic integrity built into the structure of the data itself. [05:56:04 PM] Arthur Brock: However, they've confused issuance of currency with creation of value and are still building for artificial scarcity. [05:58:06 PM] Arthur Brock: It currently takes about 113 days of 100% CPU use to "mine" a bitcoin. You pay for $25 of electricity to generate a coin worth about $18. If the world switches to using bitcoin as a primary currency we can deplete our oil supplies just generating the electricity required issue them. They seem to be trying to simulate gold mining and using Bitcoin as "virtual gold." If they think that scarcity is the requisite feature for a workable currency, then they're way out of bounds. Hope all is well with you, Tom -- Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] Mobile phone: 520-820-0575 Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Blogs: Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop. -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens