Cost of mining 1 bitcoin is worth money
This ledger contains every transaction ever processed, allowing cost of mining 1 bitcoin is worth money user's computer to verify the validity of each transaction. Similarly, the value of bitcoins has risen over time and yet the size of the Bitcoin economy has also grown dramatically along with it. For Bitcoin to remain secure, enough people should keep using full node clients because they perform the task of validating and relaying transactions. Spending energy to secure and operate a payment system is hardly a waste.
Every user is free to determine at what point they consider a transaction sufficiently confirmed, but 6 confirmations is often considered to be as safe as waiting cost of mining 1 bitcoin is worth money months on a credit card transaction. Nobody owns the Bitcoin network much like no one owns the technology behind email. But if I can make a cursory conclusion here, it is that industrial mining is and will remain very profitable for some time. Once your transaction has been included in one block, it will continue to be buried under every block after it, which will exponentially consolidate this consensus and decrease the risk of a reversed transaction.
In other words, Bitcoin users have exclusive control over their funds and bitcoins cannot vanish just because they are virtual. Bitcoins can be divided up to 8 decimal places 0. However, security flaws have been found and fixed over time in various software implementations.
All of these methods are competitive and there is no guarantee of profit. However, quantum computers don't yet exist and probably won't for a while. Because both the value of the currency and the size of its economy started at zero inBitcoin is a counterexample to the theory showing that it must sometimes be wrong. This is how Bitcoin works for most users. How does mining help secure Bitcoin?
Won't Bitcoin fall in a deflationary spiral? An optimally efficient mining network is one that isn't actually consuming any extra energy. While developers are improving the software, they can't force a change in the Bitcoin protocol because all users are free to choose cost of mining 1 bitcoin is worth money software and version they use. Bitcoin mining has been designed to become more optimized over time with specialized hardware consuming less energy, and the operating costs of mining should continue to be proportional to demand. History is littered with currencies that failed and are no longer used, such as the German Mark during the Weimar Republic and, more recently, the Zimbabwean dollar.