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Bitcoin Mining Reward About To Halve
First time accepted submitter ASDFnz writes "The reward for successfully completing a block (also called mining) is about to halve from 50 bitcoins to 25. From the article: 'Bitcoin is built so that this reward is halved every 210,000 blocks solved. The idea is as bitcoin grows the transaction fees become the main part of the reward and the introduction of new bitcoins slows down to a trickle. This also means that there will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins in circulation.' You can watch the countdown here."
Yea it's too bad nobody ever though of that or else they might have made sure each one is divisible to eight decimal places or something.
A BitCoin can be divided up into 8 decimal digits. So one BitCoin contains 1 billion discrete units that can be used for transactions.
Gold has actual mechanical uses (electrical contacts.) It also has bauble value.
BitCoins have zero intrinsic value, and they require electric and Internet connectivity to be used. Gold requires a civilization level just a step above pure anarchy to be useful.
IMHO, it is sort of suspicious that there is this ramp where early adopters get these bonuses, and people hopping on late end up having to put a lot more resources in for the same coins... that combined with the value of the currency going up/down in insane swings, makes it useless as anything other than a novelty.