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Trump's Economic Era
The amount of electricity it takes to run the
mining computers is so expensive that miners seek
locations with inexpensive renewable energy. Iceland is
expected to use more energy mining virtual currencies
than it uses to power its homes. Chelan County in
Washington State uses more electricity for miners than
it uses in its 50 hospitals.
Bitcoin is open-source and copyright free and is
accessible to everyone; its backbone is a blockchain
program—a public ledger on the internet of all Bitcoin
transactions. A volunteer army of developers has made
Bitcoin secure. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)
lists a Bitcoin price index (NYXBT). NYXBT will
represent the daily US dollar value of one Bitcoin at 4
pm (BST) daily. Selling digital coins online is
becoming big business. Ethereum raised $12 million in
just 10 minutes in April of 2017!
A decentralized monetary system based on bits
and bytes can be viable with enough support. Physical
currencies are tokens that represent a shared standard of
value by keeping track of who owes whom—virtual
currencies can do the same. Society determines the
economic value by the currency’s usefulness and its
level of scarcity.
A book on the subject of virtual money is The Age
of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are
Challenging the Global Economic Order, by Paul
Vigna and Michael J. Casey, St. Martin’s Press, 2015.
In their book, the authors answer the question “Why
should anyone care about Bitcoin?”
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