I’ve been keeping an eye on Bitcoin for a while. Pretty much every time a story about it crosses my radar these days, I kick myself for not just starting a Bitcoin mining client running on my machine the first time I heard about it, back when it was easy to mine buttloads of BTC.
I briefly thought about trying to hop into the new generation of ASIC-based mining hardware, but estimating the ship time on the currently available boxes and eyeing some online calculators that factored in the expected rise in difficulty of mining, the cost of electricity, and loose estimates of Bitcoin price rises, made me decide that’s not worth it unless I sink like $5k into the project. Which would theoretically give me about $14k back but I really don’t feel like taking that risk right now.
So instead I went to Coinbase and bought 4BTC. My plan is to follow the traditional draconic investment plan: put it in my hoard and sit on it. We’ll see what happens. I’m at a financial point where I can easily afford betting $500 on the chance that life really is turning into a Bruce Sterling novel.
And I think I need to figure out a way to let people pay for Rita via BTC. It seems appropriate to pay for a comic book full of half-assed cryptography references with a currency based on wasting electricity to perform very complicated calculations.