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Bitcoin 'Miners' Face Fight For Survival As New Supply Halves (reuters.com)
SpzToid quotes a report from Reuters: On Saturday, the reward for [bitcoin] miners will be slashed in half. Written into bitcoin's code when it was invented in 2008 was a rule dictating that the prize would be halved every four years, in a step designed to keep a lid on bitcoin inflation. From around 1700 GMT on Saturday, instead of 25 bitcoins up for grabs globally every 10 minutes, worth around $16,000 at the current rate BTC=BTSP, there will be just 12.5. That means only the mining companies with the leanest operations will survive the ensuing profit hit. "The most important thing is to be the most efficient miner," said Streng, the 26-year-old co-founder of German firm Genesis Mining, which has "mining farms" in Canada, the United States and eastern Europe, as well as in Iceland. "When the others drop out, that means that they leave the market and give you a bigger share of the pie."
Bitcoin is bullshit.
Libertarians love Bitcoin because it pushes the same buttons as their gold fetish and it doesn't look like a "Fiat currency". If libertarians are in favor of it, there's probably something fundamentally wrong with it, just like the happy horseshit idea of libertarianism itself.
Bitcoin depends on artificial scarcity for value- never a good thing.
Mining Bitcoin has a carbon footprint from hell (as they get more computationally expensive to generate, electricity consumption soars).
Bitcoin mining software is now being distributed as malware because using someone else's computer to mine BitCoins is easier than buying a farm of your own mining hardware.
Bitcoin violates Gresham's law: Stolen electricity will drive out honest mining. (So the greatest benefits accrue to the most ruthless criminals.)