[P2P-F] Fwd: Bitcoin's ecological impact is disastrous

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Thomas Greco <thg at mindspring.com>
Date: Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 8:58 AM
Subject: Bitcoin
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


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.
thg at mindspring.com
Mobile phone: 520-820-0575
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