Fortey January 10, 2018 Have you heard of the Bitcoin? It’s money that some cyborgs invented in 2009 and is as real as your popularity on Twitter. It’s also stupid valuable, at least for now, with one bitcoin coming in at around a bajillion dollars American. Maybe not that much, it keeps hovering between $10,000 – $20,000 as of the past month or so. Man, why don’t we all use those and be rich? Well, it’s a little trickier than all that and, even if you get your mitts on some BTC, as the kids call it, you may be in for more than you bargained for. 1. It’s Killing the Environment Easing you into the problem with bitcoin is its environmental impact. You’d figure a virtual currency made of ones and zeroes and mousefarts and the other sorts of things that power the internet wouldn’t leave much of a footprint, but you’d be wrong.
Bitcoins exist, so to speak, thanks to bitcoin mining. Because bitcoin is a libertarian dream currency, it’s decentralized. No government owns it or influences it. It’s out there in the open, a public system, that is maintained by miners. Miners basically run programs all the time that verify what the hell bitcoins are doing all over the world and, in turn, they earn new bitcoins for their work. They get paid because maintaining this massive network takes a lot of computer power, already surpassing the power used by 159 countries . All of these transactions need to be checked and verified all the time so no one scams the system since it’s virtual.
You can’t track the physical bitcoin and see who spent it where, so instead we trust that by putting it out where everyone can see it, everyone can verify who has it now and how many savory hams they just bought with it. The computer processing required to verify the bitcoin world is massively boring if you’re not a tech-minded person, and probably still if you are, but all you need to know is that it requires a ton of power.
You can’t even do it on a regular computer anymore, it’s just not powerful enough. And there are thousands of people doing it, 24/7. Each transaction, however, uses the same amount of power that a typical US household will use in about a week . That’s shithouse rat crazy. The bigger bitcoin gets, the more transactions processed, the bigger the calculations that miners have to do will get, the longer they’ll take to solve and the more power they’ll need.
Bitcoin will continue to require more and more power to use, which means more fossil fuel use, which means more pollution. In your effort to save up to buy a yacht you’ll kill the ocean so you can never sail the thing. Don’t think it’s that bad? At the current rate of power consumption, Bitcoin mining will use the amount of power the entire world currently uses by February 2020 .
2. It Costs a Ton of Money Just To Use It One thing that people universally hate when it comes to banking is talking to a human. Ugh. But also the damn transaction fees. A bank tells you it costs you money to take your money out of the bank and you just take it. We all take it.
And it’s aggravating as hell but whatever, it’s maybe a buck or so. We deal with it. It’s way harder to deal with when you’re talking bitcoin though, thanks to the growth of the currency actively screwing those who use it. Transaction fees with bitcoin have escalated to the point of being bewildering and unbelievable. One user on reddit made a post about wanting to sell 0.
3 bitcoin and being charged a transaction fee of 0.
08 BTC. Looks small when you read it like that, but that worked out to $1300 worth of BTC at the time. That’s crazier than grandpa on a mescaline bender. When bitcoin first showed up, part of the appeal was the ability to engage in fast, simple transactions all over the world.
Fees were typically miniscule, far less than fees associated with using your bank or a credit card. But the number of transactions – purchases with bitcoin that by definition have to be relatively tiny since one bitcoin is worth so much and maybe you just want to buy a ham sandwich for $3 – has worked against them.
The entire bitcoin infrastructure can’t handle the number of transactions. The demand is greater than the network’s ability to cope and this means you pay for the privilege of using bitcoin with transaction fees exploding to $20 or more for a single, simple transactions and more if you’re willing to pay to have a transaction processed more quickly. Businesses like Steam are no longer even accepting BTC because it’s so volatile when it comes to these fees, it’s just impossible to manage when you have to pay out the nose like that for simple transactions.
High end fees for single transactions right now can be around $70 and they’re likely to keep increasing. This has lead some to speculate that a crash is in the future for the currency, that it won’t be able to sustain itself in the face of skyhigh fees and the rug will be pulled out, dropping the value down to something closer to what a US dollar is worth in most of the rest of the world, so like $1000 or so. 3. Everything About It Is Shady and Weird Because of bitcoin being a non-centralized, regulation-free, anonymous super currency, it’s also prime grounds for all kinds of unsavory activity.
Anonymous, highly valuable currency is perfect for anyone who wants to buy anonymous, highly valuable illegal stuff. Like drugs, or child pornography, or robot sex dogs. The black market of the internet, which is like a regular flea market but with more nightmares and people saying “first!” under posts, has thrived on bitcoin which was frequently used in places like Silk Road when it existed and other unseemly locations where you could pick up some ecstasy or opium at a discount, and maybe some fake IDs, explosives or really thorough genome-sequence analysis.
That last one’s not even a joke, they do that . Now that bitcoin is more mainstream, it followed the evolution of slang from something only the cool kids used to something your parents say, it’s being used in more mundane ways, but its origins are mired in that black market, seedy, illicit reputation. This is a currency that, as a major selling point, let’s you commit illegal acts. It’s free from the restraints of things like a governing body, serial numbers, security measures, all the things that typical currency can use to help combat black market activity.
That’s a hard reputation to get past, and it will always be a part of the bitcoin economy because, even if you can buy all that stuff with Swiss Francs or a Canadian Loonie, bitcoin makes it easier. 4. It Has Massive Security Flaws In August, 2017, the New York Times ran an article about identity thieves who had hacked the phones of a very specific group of people. Their victims were all people who owned cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.
The hackers got control of their phone numbers, used it to change accounts, and drained their bitcoin wallets of hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions in some cases. Bitcoin, on some level, seems.
