What not a lot of people know is that Bitcoin mining on any kind of scale takes power, electricity. China in its efforts to quash Bitcoin which have so far not been that successful has now said that banks can regulate the amount of power that Bitcoin miners can use. In fact, banks cannot regulate it but they can put pressure on local authorities to regulate the power (we may freeze your bank account if you don’t stop the Miners).

So what is China afraid of? Well, the same thing the Austrailian banks are afraid of. Losing control of trade. Can you imagine a world where anyone, anywhere could simply and at low-cost trade? That is part of the vision of Bitcoin. To remove money from banks and authorities, take it out of a structure of debt and interest. So it’s no wonder the banks and governments quake in their boots when they finally realise what they are dealing with.

In a way, it would be better to propagate the myth that Bitcoin doesn’t exist, or is just a bubble, or is not a threat. Then they would leave us alone to mine and build cryptocurrency to the point where it cannot be stopped, I wonder if it’s too late for that already.

I have seen Solar powered Bitcoin mines and maybe China is the ideal place for this. If we can power our mining without needing power from the authorities, there is very little they can do about the mining we are doing.

Of course, the ideal place to build a mine is in a power station. As I heard a wise Ethiopian once say “if you want to hide a tree, put it in a forest”. Put it like this – if everyone just mined a little bit then no one would ever know. Centralising bitcoin mining is generally a bad plan because it puts too much power into one branch of the network. However, rest assured that to have enough power to control the network, you would need about half the world’s computing power.

Bitcoin mining is about mathematical problems and freedom. Long live Bitcoin.

(image with thanks to The Digital Artist)