- Joined
- Jul 7, 2003
- Location
- New Hampshire, USA.
I've been hearing about Bitcoin for a few weeks, and finally put in the effort to research what it's doing. It's essentially a decentralized "bank" where all the distributed clients crunch hashes to verify the "bank's" transactions of Bitcoin currency (BTC), and rewards the client that verifies the transaction with BTC (which in turn can be used for other monetary transactions, requiring further hash verifications).
It's not quite a personal printing press, though. It sounds like the difficulty of verifying hashes scales with the gross output of the clients. So with increasing popularity, "mining" BTC becomes less lucrative. There's probably more benefit in actually using the currency rather than generating it. Nonetheless, I think it's fascinating and want to see what the future holds for the project (especially with the negative press fiat currency and fractional-reserve banking has been receiving hyukhyukhuk).
I'm also curious to see what others' thoughts are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
http://www.bitcoin.org/
It's not quite a personal printing press, though. It sounds like the difficulty of verifying hashes scales with the gross output of the clients. So with increasing popularity, "mining" BTC becomes less lucrative. There's probably more benefit in actually using the currency rather than generating it. Nonetheless, I think it's fascinating and want to see what the future holds for the project (especially with the negative press fiat currency and fractional-reserve banking has been receiving hyukhyukhuk).
I'm also curious to see what others' thoughts are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
http://www.bitcoin.org/