Bitcoin mining efficiency and Botnets

[Bill Stewart]

At 03:16 AM 10/15/2013, coderman wrote:
>On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Cathal Garvey
><cathalgarvey at cathalgarvey.me> wrote:
> > People focus too much on the "profit" miners make, and not the
> > verifiability and anarchism they are supposed to be providing to the
> > bitcoin network.
>
>this is why it is useful to run a bitcoind and contribute to the
>network, even if you do not mine.

Anarchism's a great thing, but if you're trying to run an actual economy,
you need to make it workable for economic reasons, not just ideological ones.
Now that mining takes actual work and non-trivial amounts of electricity,
and there are enough bitcoins on the market that you can just buy them,
people are only going to do it if they can make a profit.

(If the market gets big enough that there aren't enough bitcoins
circulating to meet demand, the price goes up,
and maybe mining becomes profitable again.)