Why doesn't the US Mint just build a nuclear reactor next to the NSA, have them mine bitcoin with their supercomputers, and then back the USD with BTC?
            MAGA           Â
🤔
Comments (10)
sorted by:
🤔
Couldn't the US Mint just electronically create new US Bitcoins for commerce...then you can eliminate the needless expediture of a power plant and electricity.
In the end it's the same? Right?
Bingo, a national digital currency. Skip government involvement, pre-programmed inflation to whatever makes sense for a national currency instead of a limited supply, distribute the chain across local wallets and use a ASIC resistant mining algorithm, each node would mine and act as a wallet. Hence a fully decentralized coin and chain.
Then add support for alternative protocols such as Bluetooth and WiFi to make it truly peer to peer, then encrypt transactions like Monero to preserve privacy, keep it open source and finally build ATM's so that you can print paper wallets easily, and verify them either digitally or physically.
"Bingo, a national digital currency. Skip government involvement...."
If you want a digital currently without government involvement (and various governments are definitely "involved" in BTC), then you might as well angle on an international currency.
Why would it want to back the USD with something half-owned by China?
75% of energy used for mining bitcoin is excess power plants and renewable
Can someone please explain to me the concept of bitcoin mining?
Im under the impression that it involves computers running an useless algorithm for countless hours...wasting electricity and processing power to what?
How is this better than fiat money...which is only colorful printed paper...?
It's simple: you buy BTC right now while it's being pumped (because now is when you're hearing about it), then watch it fall off a cliff.
--That's how it works.
BTC trades like a bio-tech stock: buy at some insane top, be upside-down for years, then maybe it goes up again...you hope.
Mining is the process of verifying transactions, instead of having one central authority checking: 1. if you have enough balance in your wallet, 2. if you're allowed to send, 3. if it's within office hours... you know the usual checks involved when dealing with digital currency. Bitcoin and other cryptos use mining, which is essentially the process where you try to solve a complex mathematical problem with the use of hashing (programming term).
This is supposed to take a certain amount of time per block, which introduces the difficulty: a value that determines how many hashes on average needs to be solved before the next block is solved. You don't need to waste the same amount of electricity as a whole small country to mine Bitcoin, you could do all the mining on a 3W raspberry pi computer.
The only reason all mining isn't only made on one single computer is because the block reward is 6.25BTC/10min. That's $2'100'000 per hour. And since anyone can mine, wouldn't you also start to mine with your 3W RPI computer for a profit of $1'050'000 per hour? See how this works, it's decentralized verification of transactions, which means no censorship, no "office hours". Pay anyone you want at any time.
Greed is the reason for the high hashrate, everyone want a piece of the cake. If "the environment" matters that much to you then maybe Ethereum or Monero is more relevant, those use ethash, X11, scrypt and other algorithms than SHA256, the fine thing with the alternative algorithms is that they need more memory then raw computation power, which means they consume less energy.
https://decrypt.co/62338/satoshi-nakamotos-view-on-bitcoins-energy-consumption-resurfaces
the Federal Reserve could purchase btc instead of treasury bonds... same effect