Jesse, it's great to see big, mainstream media write about Bitcoin. Especially if it's with an open, positive approach focusing on the innovative and revolutionary side of it. Rather than presenting it as mere "virtual money" (as if it being purely digital would make it any less real than euros or dollars of which 99% also exist only digital), or "created by unknown hackers" (as if it matters who made it, now that it's fully open source and publicly available, provably running completely decentralized), as some other badly informed journalists managed to do. Or B.S. like "Bitcoin has been hacked several times" (as if they'd say that the euro or dollar has been hacked when a bank gets robbed - only some independent 3rd party websites got hacked, Bitcoin itself was never compromised in any way).
However, it'd be great if you can also focus on other aspects of Bitcoin than mining. Thing is, this whole mining stuff is
not at all what Bitcoin is about. It's about taking the power and control over our money away from banks (with all their greed and corruption) and bringing it back to the people. Truly free (as in freedom of speech), global, easy to use, safe & secure money that can be used to directly pay anyone in the world. Without depending on (or being controlled by) any bank, government or other authority. This revolutionary novelty could truly change the way we think about money, our world wide economy, and its potential impact on our world is incredible. It's sometimes called "disruptive technology" (in a good way).
Mining is only a construction to enforce the creation of new bitcoins being fair and equally (in terms of effort that people put into it) distributed. And more importantly, to do so fully automatically and decentralized, without someone deciding who gets what. So mining is essentially just a small, technical detail of Bitcoin. In fact people wouldn't need to know about mining at all (let alone participate in it) in order to have or use Bitcoin.
Anyway, just wanted to point it out, to put things in perspective. Looking forward to your article and I hope you'll write more on Bitcoin after that. It's interesting inspiring stuff
