Minting Money With Megawatts

The cover article in the September 2016 issue of Proceedings of the IEEE.

Written by Sveinn Valfells and Jón Helgi Egilsson

Launched in January of 2009, Bitcoin is a rapidly growing peer-to-peer (P2P) online payment network with an annual transaction volume of $45.4 billion. The market cap of the bitcoin digital currency (BTC) is currently $10.2 billion.1 For comparison, PayPal, which was founded nine years before Bitcoin was launched, had payment volume of $282 billion in 2015 and a market cap of $45 billion at the end of last year. PayPal’s volume is still growing at an impressive 27% per annum, but the value and number of bitcoin transactions have, on average, more than doubled every year since inception, a strong indication that this new payment network is on a fast trajectory toward mainstream adoption,

Read the full article here:

Minting Money With Megawatts / Proceedings of the IEEE