If you’re like me, you’ve probably been ignoring the bitcoin
phenomenon for years — because it seemed too complex, far-fetched, or
maybe even too libertarian. But if you have any interest in a future
where the world moves beyond fossil fuels, you and I should both start
paying attention now.
Last week, the value of a single bitcoin broke the $10,000 barrier
for the first time. Over the weekend, the price nearly hit $12,000. At
the beginning of this year, it was less than $1,000.
If you had bought $100 in bitcoin back in 2011, your investment would be worth
nearly $4 million today. All over the internet there are stories of
people who treated their friends to lunch a few years ago and, as a
novelty, paid with bitcoin.
Those same people are now realizing that if they’d just paid in cash
and held onto their digital currency, they’d now have enough money to
buy a house.
That sort of precipitous rise is stunning, of course, but bitcoin
wasn’t intended to be an investment instrument. Its creators envisioned
it as a replacement for money itself — a decentralized, secure,
anonymous method for transferring value between people.
But what they might not have accounted for is how much of an energy
suck the computer network behind bitcoin could one day become. Simply
put, bitcoin is slowing the effort to achieve a rapid transition away
from fossil fuels. What’s more, this is just the beginning. Given its
rapidly growing climate footprint, bitcoin is a malignant development,
and it’s getting worse.
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Source: Grist
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