Just four months ago, Dimon called bitcoin a “fraud” and threatened to fire any of his traders caught trading the cryptocurrency on the company’s dime. “Someone is going to get killed,” he warned. Dimon even went so far to mock his own child, saying at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha conference, “My daughter bought bitcoin, it went up and now she thinks she’s a genius.” Since then, bitcoin has more than quadrupled, a return so lucrative that most traders would gladly go short their souls and take a punch in the jaw from their CEO as he escorted them out the door if they could get a glimpse of it. Thus, Jamie…
Opinion: Bitcoin’s environmental woes may not be so bad after all
People who are usually up in arms about stuff are up in arms over bitcoin. Specifically, over the huge amount of energy used to process transactions and keep the blockchain going. In early December, environmental news site The Grist published a story by Eric Holthaus. “Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future,” warns the headline which also infers there’s some kind of a clean-energy future to begin with. Paragraph after paragraph paints a grim image of the years to come, where bitcoin miners will guzzle more energy than evil capitalist America by next year and then suck the entire planet’s energy the year after like space aliens or something. The…
