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April 01, 2013, 05:38:46 PM |
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Whilst I don't understand much about mining myself, I think I can help you with some of your questions.
Because the bitcoin protocol is open source, and clients are available on most platforms, you can definitely mine bitcoins on any platform, including your macbook. Mining is quite computationally expensive however, so the only way to make more money than you put in is to obtain a dedicated mining rig, usually with efficient FPGA hardware, and you would then need to strip the OS down to focus purely on BTC (bitcoin) mining, which is only really possible on linux. So yes, if you want to make money, you need a linux machine, though a typical desktop will not suffice.
No, if BTC becomes the main currency it certainly won't mean that any group of people will start ruling the world. Mining only exists as a side product of BTC's inflationary model, and by 2140 it won't be worth mining at all (as all possible bitcoins will have been mined by then). If BTC becomes a major currency, then you will see a lot more user-friendly methods of manipulating bitcoins (though many do exists even now, Electrum, for example), and it will still be those in finance who will control the majority of the money.
And if electricity collapsed, we would have a lot more problems than just bitcoin mining. The entire modern-world infrastructure relies on electricity - we would be pushed back to the middle ages!
You don't really need to understand all the technical details behind bitcoins and how it works, but you do need to understand some stuff, like bitcoin addresses, transactions, security, etc, as otherwise you risk losing your money.
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