[chbot] Bitcoin etc.

[Mark Atherton]

Just discovered this 
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/01/18/bitcoin-mania/

"By the end of 2016, a single mining facility in China was using over 
half the estimated power used by all of Google’s data centres worldwide 
at the time"

"estimates that it costs his company around $400 in electricity alone to 
mine each bitcoin. That’s because bitcoin mining is not only 
computationally intensive, it is energy-intensive. By one estimate, the 
power consumption of bitcoin mining now exceeds that of Ireland and is 
growing so exponentially that it will surpass that of the entire United 
States by July 2019"

Please, somebody shoot these numbers down, this is completely nuts...

- Mark