Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Bitcoin: How the Internet Created Its Own Currency

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

The story of Bitcoin is an interesting one, even if (as I believe) the artificial currency is unlikely to live a long life. In one of Mashable's better articles, Bitcoin is described from both a technical and historical perspective. "Coins are generated using a process called mining. Think of mining as a lottery. Computers connected to the network (known as miners) aim to find the solution to a certain mathematical problem. If they successfully solve the problem, a new block is created. Until December 2012, the value of each block is 50 BTC (Bitcoins). Every four years, the value of solving a block is halved." Bitcoin is probably the greatest testament to the idea that an economy can be built to be structurally fair by design. That, utltimately, will also be why it fails: because it will be unfair, and there will be no way to fix that.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 25, 2024 08:33 a.m.

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