While Bitcoin mining may not be labor intensive, it diverts time, energy and capital from other, more productive activities that economists say could fuel faster growth.
"It appears that much of our evolving digital infrastructure is devoted to activities, like the proliferation of cybercoins, that are worse than frivolous," said James McAndrews, the former head of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Where is the next steam engine??
The driving notion behind bitcoin is the blockchain, naturally. And, naturally, it's spiffy spanking new. Well, not so much. Databases have been based on, and some are explicitly as datastores, append-only data files. Here's a famous one. Current RDBMS keep their data in immutable transaction logs. As you might expect, that's just a blockchain. Zebra skips the nicety of writing out to user-facing tables/files, and just keeps the log. Blockchain is nothing more. The use of cryptokeys as pointers is a minor tweek.
As mentioned here a few times. The Asymptote of Progress© forces the Marie Antoinette Class into odd places. On the one hand, there's risk averse Treasuries. On the other, all manner of MeToo Corps and crazy shit.
The problem with keeping only the translog as the datastore is that processing is a royal pain.
But Bitcoin remains so hard to use that a major Bitcoin conference in January had to stop accepting Bitcoin. It is, in practice, a speculative investment, like gold. And Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, said mining gold was a better use of resources, because even if it lost value, it could be used to fill teeth.
Oops!!!
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