Is Bitcoin Better than Gold? Part One: Transaction Costs and Centralization
In many ways, gold and Bitcoin are similar. They are both scarce; gold is scarce by nature and Bitcoin has scarcity coded into its protocol. Gold and Bitcoin are divisible; gold can be melted into small coins or even shaved into tiny flecks. Each bitcoin is divisible by eight decimal places. They are both fungible; each ounce of gold is interchangeable with the next, and all bitcoins are interchangeable with one another. Gold and Bitcoin are also very different in many respects. Gold is physical, Bitcoin is digital. Gold relies on banks for safekeeping and payments, Bitcoin is stored on a....
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Parsing the history of money, stock-to-flow ratio transaction costs and other critical metrics demonstrates that bitcoin will replace gold. The post Pass The Baton Already: Why Bitcoin Is Poised To Replace Gold appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.
Bitcoin is changing the way internet works. Brave, the new browser uses bitcoin to allow its users have more control over their information while creating a win-win situation for everyone. Bitcoin is the revolution the citizens of the world have been waiting for. The perfect digital currency that will allow them to break free from the shackles of the financial system they have become part of. Bitcoin is as much a boon to the virtual world as it is to the real world. Micropayments are just one small part of the problem addressed by the digital currency and this solution has the potential to....
At the crux of the block-size limit debate in Bitcoin is an argument between scaling and securing the network. Although raising the block-size limit would allow more transactions to be processed in each block, it could also limit the ability for individuals in some parts of the world to run a full node or participate in the mining process. This problem would arise due to the increased costs of processing a greater number of transactions every 10 minutes as a full node. Blockstream co-founder and President Adam Back recently discussed the security vs. scalability debate on an episode of....
Hass McCook is a chartered engineer and freshly minted Oxford MBA. He has been researching bitcoin over the past several months and recently joined the Lifeboat Foundation's New Money Systems advisory board. This article is the second in a series on bitcoin's sustainability. Having previously examined the cost of bitcoin mining, here McCook seeks to quantify the economic and environmental factors involved in mining gold. Gold has been used for millennia as a means to project and protect wealth. As the data below indicates, 52% of all gold ever mined is used for jewellery and palatial....
Neucoin recently released a white paper arguing that Proof of Stake (PoS) is superior to Bitcoin’s high costs, mining centralization, and ever-increasing costs of bitcoin mining hardware. Neucoin’s white paper also highlights the scalability of PoS vs. PoW. The paper argues that PoW transactions need to increase 100 times in order to maintain the current incentive for bitcoin mining. “We designed NeuCoin’s high PoS rates to reward all the early investors: they enable the development of NeuCoin’s first utility and as such are the cryptocurrency’s most valuable supporters!One of the most....