Bitcoins and Other Crypto-currencies

I've been looking into this with some amount of interest, but I don't know enough about it to do it effectively. Buy low and sell high and all that, but I'd most likely wait too long and watch it crash all around me. Or back the wrong cryptographic horse that ultimately turns out to be a bucket for me to cry in.

Can you sell them back for a proper currency?

Falsey wrote:Ive seen a few of the ASIC miners, and besides being in short supply, they make an unholy racket and kick out proper heat.

But aren't they still the most energy efficient miners?

I believe so, for the home anyway

Dual wrote:Can you sell them back for a proper currency?

Yes, and they're currently being bought like crazy by the Chinese as a way for them.to.get money out of the country as China has limits on how much they can send out. So they are buying them and then selling them to other chinese people and taking the real money they made and putting them in bank accounts outside China.

Looking up bitcoin mining. What the strawberry float am I reading. :dread:

Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but won't the amount of coins mined increase as computers become ever more powerful?

No, because the more coins there are the more difficult it becomes to mine them

It's an interesting way to restrict the supply of currency and stop runaway inflation. I'm not sure it's the most sensible way, but it's interesting.

E-Gold used to be a common online currency, not sure what happened to it.

I was surprised to see the price of Bitcoins continue to rocket even after the story hit BBC last week. That's usually a sign that the n00bs are already in and the bubble is close to bursting. Apparently not though. It will be very interesting to see what happens now but there's no way that the majority of its current value is based on anything other than speculation as the benefits of owning/using the currency aren't that great no matter what business you're in.

PostRe: Bitcoins and Other Crypto-currencies by GM » Sun Dec 01, 2013 2:05 pm

Please listen to the people telling you not to invest in this mess.

Even if that guy with the £4m or whatever in buttcoins found his hard drive, he'd never be able to cash out more than a few thousand at a time without selling to hundreds of buyers directly or getting cosy with one of the clear as mud 'trusts' or exchanges.

FWIW the amount a bitcoin mining rig will cost you in parts, power and cooling (mummy strawberry floaters are gigantic) will completely destroy any profit you get from the coins themselves.

That doesn't stop people doing things like this for our entertainment though:

They were talking about bitcoins a few weeks ago in the US congress...

http://thehill.com/blogs/regwatch/legis ... h-congress

I don't know if the price is going to stay as high as it is now, I'm hoping for a correction at which point I will probably buy a few, but if it does survive this is going to change the world.

The whole Wiki-leaks affair showed why something like this is necessary. Just a quick reminder for those who don't remember Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Paypal all stopped allowing transactions to Wiki-Leaks in order to try and starve them of funds, and the result was people started donating using bitcoins. As online currency and transactions become more and more prevalent you can imagine the sort of power these corporations will have if they have the power to decide who you can give your money to. Bitcoins offer an alternative by being totally decentralized.

As for them not having any real intrinsic value, "real money" doesn't exactly have a real value either, it just has a stamp that says legal tender which you hope means that it represents some small amount of gold the government actually has in its reserves.

Real money does have real value. I can readily exchange it for goods and services. It is backed up by my country. It has literal material worth in physical value.

GM wrote:FWIW the amount a bitcoin mining rig will cost you in parts, power and cooling (mummy strawberry floaters are gigantic) will completely destroy any profit you get from the coins themselves.

Not true at all. The director of the company where I work has been mining bitcoins all year. I don't know exactly how many he has or how much money he has made, but I do know that he paid for all of his mining equipment from the profits of finding bitcoins. He has enough equipment that he doesn't need to join a pool with anyone, and he runs a data centre so he knows his stuff when it comes to power usage and wouldn't be doing it if there was no money in it.

Falsey wrote:Real money does have real value. I can readily exchange it for goods and services. It is backed up by my country. It has literal material worth in physical value.

It depends what you mean by 'real value'. It has the real value everyone agrees it has. It definitely doesn't have material worth in physical value at all. Every coin and piece of paper is worth substantially more than the raw materials it's made with.

It has the value that everyone agrees it has. Luckily for us, our 'real money' is agreed on by pretty much everyone in the world and is, in theory, backed up by some limited assets. But that's still just collateral to help everyone agree on what it's worth.

It still doesn't mean that a ten pound note or whatever actually has any inherent value. It's worth ten pounds and is validly exchanged for ten pounds worth of goods and services because everyone agrees it's worth ten pounds. If the government collapsed and it's backing fell apart then it would just a bit of paper, as has been seen in many countries whose economies have collapsed.

So this happened

Yesterday, ESPN's College Gameday picked up footage of a fan holding a sign that said "Hi Mom send Bitcoin" (using the Bitcoin symbol), then a QR code for a Bitcoin address. The fan, who identified himself on Reddit as BItcoinPitcher2, said he expected maybe a few people would scan the code and send money and wasn't even sure the code would work. Instead, a check of the address shows about 22.4 bitcoins in the wallet, or around $22,000 as of this writing. As one Redditor points out, it's always possible this was one person sending money to himself, but there's so far no sign the account was artificially seeded.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/1/51639 ... enthusiast

PostRe: Bitcoins and Other Crypto-currencies by GM » Mon Dec 02, 2013 2:24 pm

satriales wrote:Not true at all. The director of the company where I work has been mining bitcoins all year. I don't know exactly how many he has or how much money he has made, but I do know that he paid for all of his mining equipment from the profits of finding bitcoins. He has enough equipment that he doesn't need to join a pool with anyone, and he runs a data centre so he knows his stuff when it comes to power usage and wouldn't be doing it if there was no money in it.

Exception =/= rule.

I'd love to know more about this. Does he have air conditioning? That's one advantage he'd have over most of the country, but he probably wouldn't factor that in to his mining power usage. Is this thing even in his home? Because you pretty much have to sacrifice an entire room to a mining rig with the heat it blows out if you're going for any kind of volume.

It's not impossible or anything, it's just incredibly unlikely since the later you get into mining, the harder it is to generate new coins. It was designed to work with an average computer, never really intended for people to hook hundreds of AMD graphics cards together, but those people have made it worthless to mine on a 'normal' machine now.

If he's been doing it since the beginning of the year then he's experienced at least one market collapse in April where the thing dropped more than 50% of its value in hours. I'd have thought that was enough of a warning to put anyone sane off.

Unless he's the guy that designed one of those bitcoin mining Trojans and he's outsourcing all his mining, in which case all the power to him. :lol:

One thing all this has made me wonder is how many Bitcoins are involved in money laundering and stuff. Given the anonymity of it, I'm sure it's very attractive and one of the reasons it took off in the first place was buying drugs and other illicit materials off the Silk Road and co.

tl;dr hope your next wages aren't in buttcoins

http://www.newstatesman.com/future-proo ... -real-time

£60m in Bitcoins has just been nabbed. This article is written by ProSlo I believe.

Legit dosh

Website

GM wrote:Even if that guy with the £4m or whatever in buttcoins found his hard drive, he'd never be able to cash out more than a few thousand at a time without selling to hundreds of buyers directly or getting cosy with one of the clear as mud 'trusts' or exchanges.

Lets say you have Bitcoins wallet that is now worth a lot and you want to sell them to make a profit. How do you sell them? What is the monetary limit on the amount you sell? I'm just wondering if it's worth experimenting with Litecoin.

Bitcoins and Other Crypto-currencies

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