Since it's not physical like gold or silver you don't need mining equipment, you should just be able to create infinite copies. So why does bitcoin need to be "mined" and why would mining it cost so much energy?

  • truth [they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Yes, but the other part of this is that after each transaction / coin production, the amount of computation needed to do the next one increases. So, even not adding additional mining capacity, it will continue to use more electricity-or, given that no capacity will be added but capacity has been reached, will continue to get slower and slower.

    This is the 'official' reason musk dropped bcoin

    • SerLava [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Yeah Musk dropped Bitcoin for his own reasons, but when that happened someone posted an amazing stat - if you bought a whole Tesla with Bitcoin, the mining time would increase the lifetime carbon emissions by like, 10x or something.