Under the Microscope: The Real Costs of a Dollar
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 third in a series on bitcoin's sustainability. Having previously examined the cost of gold production, here McCook looks at the sustainability of printing and minting physical currency. Money makes the world go round, and for the past several hundred years, paper currency and coins were the physical manifestation of money. Once upon a time, most paper currency in....
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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, the final instalment in his five-part series, evaluates the relative sustainability of the bitcoin network against the costs of gold production, the printing and minting of physical currency and the legacy banking system. Under the Microscope has aimed to cast a critical eye over the social, environmental and economic impacts of the way we currently transact and transfer wealth,....
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....
Let's begin with a short thought experiment. Put yourself into a world in which banks charge $20 to $50 to manage an international wire transfer, but hardly make a profit on it. Conceptualize a world in which banks delay domestic ACH transfers up to three days, in a large part to reduce fraud risk. Imagine a world in which taking on just one new customer necessitates the hiring of another employee. If you're a commercial bank, these problems are likely all too real and familiar to you. Your costs are continuously rising, but your clearing and compliance infrastructure hasn't changed. Well....
As a follow up to my piece "Why Bitcoin Value vs The U. S. Dollar Does Matter (And Never Will)", it is necessary to understand the fate of the U. S. Dollar is set in stone. The U. S. Dollar must collapse. Fait accompli. The average American is ignorant to this fact because: 1) An ignorant American consumer is the government's best customer. If Americans knew what was going on in the global economic markets, and what Washington ISN'T DOING to correct it, they'd storm the White House this evening! 2) The U. S. has not had an economic collapse in the last 80 years; so 95% of Americans don't....
Bitcoin has seen a prolonged fall in its US Dollar price. This has had a large affect on many sectors of the digital currency community and ecosystem. The value of less valuable altcoins has seen a corresponding tumble in value. The day-traders and short-term speculators are bailing out of the market en masse. And the cloud mining companies, who have tried to get in on Bitcoin over the last 18 months with "Cloud Mining," are feeling the pressure. Plus, there are issues with paying off large loans for computer equipment, hosting services, rent and location leasing costs, all while keeping....