You can make a meaningful amount of money off of someone’s PC if “meaningful” is measured against the $0.0001 per ad view you’d get, and you’re not paying for the input hardware or electricity.
As far as I know, all proof-of-work cryptocurrencies scale difficulty with the amount of processing power, so if there were any profits to be gained from commodity hardware, they would be temporary at best.
No one should mine Bitcoin. Anyone who understands math analysis at even a high-school level should have figured out pretty quickly that the blockchain was going to get absurdly long before ceasing to work at all once all possible bitcoins are mined. The way it’s built, Bitcoin is doomed to be a Ponzi scheme.
Once there’s no more bitcoins to mine, won’t everyone stop wasting money on running their mining rigs? At that point the currency will be unspendable.
This is a misunderstanding of what the blockchain actually is.
When there are no longer any more bitcoins to mine, the blockchain can still grow. The blockchain is not just the coins but also the transactions (well, not really, but you can think of it that way if it makes it easier). The theory goes that people will continue to ‘mine’, by which we mean continue to compute new blocks, because the transactions fees will make it profitable to do so.
So whoever calculates the transaction gets a % of the payment? Didn’t know that. Is that the case now or to be introduced later?
Man, you don’t want to end up like Beeks. Trapped in a cage wearing a female gorilla suit on a slow boat to Africa with a horny male gorilla! Seriously, just stay out of the FCOJ racket…
Oh, and that’s the same answer to the OP. Not only should the government not mine the stuff, I’m unconvinced that anyone should.
It’s not really a flat %, but, yes, they do get the transaction fees as well right now. And since it’s not a flat rate but one that can vary (and even be 0), miners are incentivized to prioritize the transactions which feature larger fees.
The assumption (and this naturally hasn’t been tested) is that in the future the fees will be sufficient motivation to keep mining absent any reward of new bitcoins.
This point helps in the broader definition of should. Obviously if it’s not economical on a per bitcoin basis then it shouldn’t happen. But even if some government agency was wasting money with computers on all the time and employees sitting around doing nothing and the additional cost of mining a bitcoin is less than its value it would still be a dead end in the long haul.
Going further, if the hypothetical magically included a guaranteed profit from the mining, then it’s a question of government influencing the economic system. It would be similar to using idle government workers to be Uber drivers in government vehicles. I doubt many people would be in favor of that.
Speaking of Ponzi schemes, there’s already plenty of questionable activity surrounding the cryptocurrency subculture.
For example, you can purchase some percentage of the next X hours of output of a bitcoin mining rig. The problem with this is that, even if they are really running a rig, and even if that rig is powerful enough to actually mine something, and even if they honestly payout what you are due by contract, you will almost certainly receive something worth less than you paid.
Then there are the ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) which are modeled off of stock IPOs. Someone creates code and a blockchain for a new cryptocurrency and then issues hype about what’s new and different about it and why it’ll be better and more profitable than existing coins.
Then they generate and sell an initial batch of coins to people who assume that they’ll be able to immediately flip them for a profit, leading to a bubble with people all hoping that they won’t be the last sucker in the chain.
How is that an obvious point? Correct me if I’m wrong on any of the following-
Florida legal standards of quality for citrus are higher than required by federal law.
Florida grows and exports an awful lot of citrus. ($800 million according to the Reason article above)
Given that, I’d think the obvious conclusion is that Florida needs a governmental agency to promote, regulate and safeguard citrus (from invasive pests, blights etc).
Unless you can prove that the DoCitrus costs more than it brings in, it isn’t a waste.