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Friday, January 10, 2014

Tech Water cooler swag: Bitcoin mining?

Posted By on Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 11:23 AM

The crypto-currency Bitcoin, which has skyrocketed in value over the last two quarters, has developed a teratoma called mining and ooh, is it futuristically weird. From Bloomberg Businessweek:


As with an actual precious metal, Bitcoins are in limited supply - they must be "mined." Unlike with precious metals, this mining is done purely by computer. Miners set their machines to run a series of complex calculations that tally up and certify all the transactions of other Bitcoin holders around the world. If the miner's computers complete these calculations and solve a complex mathematical puzzle before anyone else, he earns about 25 Bitcoins as payment. It's a nice haul: With the price of each Bitcoin nosing up near $1,000, that's $25,000 for 10 minutes or so of work. For the moment at least, miners are the rare grunts who can also get rich.









So, can you get rich? Yes, technically, but you have to be willing to donate a lot of time and brain power into it to do so. For the rest of us, the answer is basically no. But wait, it gets weirder! Enter Kanye West's crypto-currency, Coinye West. 'Ye is not happy about it, mind you, which makes it even weirder. The Internet birthed its own Coinye, and Kanye is mad, likely because he isn't profiting on the parodied use of his likeness.



Since Yahoo malware recently infected as many as 2 million computers through its ad servers making them all Bitcoin slaves, it's frightening to think about Franken-Coinye West miners reeking havoc on the Internet. Yikes! The  developments in the area of crypto currency are sure to be interesting as things progress.



Do you own Bitcoin(s) and/or mine them in Charlotte? I'd love to hear from you!

For more commentary, follow me on Twitter @dbirdy, for more photos peep my Flickr and to see a bunch of random and fun travel videos, subscribe to my YouTube channel!



Zero, zilch, none and no part of this post is sponsored by any of the above mentioned company or companies, nor would I ever present such a thing.



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