Facebook seeks support for its cryptocurrency and has already won over Visa and Uber
Facebook’s upcoming cryptocurrency is gradually gaining support from other companies. According to the Wall Street Journal, the technology giant has already reached agreements with more than a dozen companies. These alliances will support the digital currency that sports the internal codename GlobalCoin. Each of them will invest approximately $10 million in the project and become a member of the management consortium.
According to cryptocurrency expert Gerrick Hileman, the launch of GlobalCoin will be one of the most critical events in the history of cryptocurrencies. Facebook plans to introduce and circulate this digital currency as soon as next year. Its main purpose will be to create a secure and affordable payment method for its users; and regardless of whether they have a credit or debit card. According to experts, this would help retailers in particular who would not have to share profits with credit card providers.
The company announced the launch of the new cryptocurrency last December. It said it has been monitoring the digital currency situation since late 2017 and expects GlobalCoin to be a stable currency that will operate within the company’s messaging infrastructure.
GlobalCoin is not the first experience of the social networking company with digital currencies. In the past, it introduced Facebook Credits. These enabled users to make in-app and gaming purchases on the social network. Due to lack of user response, Facebook eventually ended the project.
Cryptocurrencies and the environment: What activists forget
Environmental activists try to convince us through the mass media that Bitcoin is a catalyst for global warming and other ecological disasters. Is it so?
Will the operation of the Bitcoin network with an increasing number of users be unsustainable in the long term? Will Bitcoin mining compare to oil production? Is Bitcoin Outdated? Will other currency that requires a fraction of the energy consumed by Bitcoin replace it?
Even global adoption of Bitcoin will not cause an ecological disaster
Bitcoin power consumption is not directly dependent on transaction size or number. This means that power consumption does not have to change even if the number of Bitcoin users multiplies arbitrarily. It doesn’t matter if someone sends 0.001 or 100 Bitcoins, the transaction consumes the same energy. Energy consumption depends on the number of miners in the network.
The number of Bitcoin users is growing exponentially, but the number of miners is changing much more slowly, and this trend is unlikely to change for economic reasons. Today, Bitcoin mining is a professional industry because it is not possible to mine on personal computers; the use of dedicated hardware devices is now the only feasible option for BTC mining.
Miners operate for profit, which naturally forces them to reduce costs and thus maximize efficiency, which leads them to act environmentally.
Oil production and Bitcoin production are not equal
When calculating the impact of Bitcoin mining, environmental activists often do not take into account energy sources. It is very disadvantageous for factories and shops to reside in depopulated areas where the cost of electricity is low, and therefore, they often opt for the cheapest and normally less eco-friendly sources of electricity. However, unlike factories, Bitcoin mining sites do not require hundreds or thousands of people to operate. Data centers are therefore built close to both economically and environmentally efficient energy sources.
Examples of these sources are: solar, geothermal, and hydraulic power. In particular, water resources produce excess electricity at night, so the cost of any energy that would be generated anyway is either very low or even free. Moreover, if such a center is located in a cold climate, the costs of electricity consumed for cooling mining facilities diminish (here, rather than ecological altruism from miners, the energy savings come from economic intentions).
The increasing annual production of natural gas also rose the waste energy generated during its extraction. It is very advantageous for miners to use this waste energy. And as it happens, Upstream Data is dedicated to the efficient use of waste energy and is building data centers right at the sites of natural gas extraction around the world. It is unreasonable, uneconomical, and unecological to build factories or houses for the use of waste heat in any mining location. Building data centers that require less human intervention is, therefore, the ideal solution.
If You would like to learn about Facebook’s new cryptocurrency, read this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libra_(digital_currency)
