Blockchain Bubble or Revolution: The Future of Bitcoin, Blockchains, and Cryptocurrencies

Inflation happens when the growth in the money supply outpaces the growth of the economy’s GDP (the

top 15 pools mine about 95% of all Bitcoin blocks.[383]

The popular pickaxe theory argues that it’s hard to get rich by participating in the latest technological craze — but it’s very profitable to sell equipment to those who are. While it’s unlikely that you’d get lucky enough to hit gold, it’s a sure bet that a lot of people will be trying to cash in on the fad, and they’re very eager to buy equipment... See more

But the Bitcoin world has been trending more and more toward centralization in recent years. A few major players are gobbling up parts of Bitcoin’s essential infrastructure, and it’s getting harder for an individual (especially one who’s not rich) to have a say on the future of the currency.

Chinese pools control over 80% of the Bitcoin network’s hash rate and thus mine 80% of the world’s bitcoins,

villagers’ shared memory of past payments.

Bitmain never reached the magic 51% (or, rather, 50% + 1 hash per second) benchmark, but GHash was above it for a few days.[391] To calm the community’s nerves, the GHash CIO swore to never mount a 51% attack[392] and pledged to cap GHash’s market share to 40% going forward.[393]

The University of Cambridge estimates that Bitcoin’s annual energy consumption skyrocketed from about 6 terawatt-hours (roughly the annual power consumption of Luxembourg) in 2017 to over 80 terawatt-hours (roughly the annual power consumption of Finland) in 2020.

In July 2016, the pro-fork activists were tired of the debate and decided to hard fork the Ethereum blockchain, creating a new version of the currency that returned stolen money to investors. This new version, confusingly, kept the original name Ethereum. The anti-fork group continued to recognize the original, unaltered blockchain as the official ... See more