Bitcoins

its about time this got the Taiwanese Animation treatment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVobjVZK6ho&noredirect=1

http://i.imgur.com/JFRz2QV.gif

Comments on this - http://valleywag.gawker.com/bitcoin-kingpin-admits-everyones-money-is-gone-1533315083 - are pure gold. (As is the line Funny, how these people only want anything to do with the government after they've fucked themselves over into another dimension.) My favorite:

Here's how Bitcoin works - you give your money to a beefy libertarian video game company executive in a foreign country (who speaks damn good Japanese for a Gaijin), he does some bullshit computer razzmataz, you tell all your friends "I'm free of Fiat Money - John Galt Rules!".....and then your money is gone.

OMG the "massive bitcoin boners" part

speculation!

anyway once you put your money in a bank it seems like its almost the same at a virtual currency - its just numbers in a database

numbers in a database with FDIC protection

oh yeah! (slaps forehead as bitcoins dissolve to thin air)

fiat numbers

disruption, innovation

its not much different I guess than the stock market - specualtion

yeah, but no one is claiming stocks as a new form of currency that will usher in a libertarian utopia

they should! "Can I buy a ham for three shares of Earthlink?"

YES

its pretty differnt than stocks

http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/28/investing/mt-gox-bankruptcy/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

xpost xpost - yes the irony is thick "we do not need the government to deal with money" --- "Oh wait - laws prevent crimes"

seems more like a commodity than stock or currency, with all the speculation, constrained supply, wild spikes in value, like a virtual equivalent to a precious metal like gold

I mean they even call it bitcoin mining

its a fiat commodity

my other car is a fiat Fiat

Currencies are speculated on too, and occasionally a currency has wide swings in value. Hence, bitcoin is what I call a shitty currency.

its an IDEA!

it's a fiscal Esperanto for the digital age!

it's an MMO auction house for IRL!

it's the future!

People with half a brain stopped using Mt.Gox nearly a year ago. We all moved to respectable exchanges such as Coinbase, Bitstamp, and CampBX who strive to be in line with regulators and are run by people who actually understand finance. It's also important for people to understand that Mt.Gox shutting down is about the same as some rural bank in North Dakota shutting down — it hardly affects the value of the currency in which it exchanged. BTC is still hovering arbound $550 and $750 and the blockchain shows there is a buying frenzy going on because, believe it or not, this is considered cheap at the moment.

http://www.coindesk.com/bank-stops-working-bitcoin-exchange-campbx-regulatory-uncertainty/

lol

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/15/5414610/bitstamp-restores-service-after-targeted-attack

The problems stem from a vulnerability known as "transaction malleability," which refers to an issue that would allow a user to alter transaction details to make it seem as if a transfer failed when it had actually succeeded. This week, Bitcoin core developer Jeff Garzik told The Verge that the issue is more widespread than the team initially realized. "It's mainly a nuisance," he said, "forcing everybody to stop and fix their website software and Bitcoin wallets."

I mean, if I were more cavalier about my spare money I could see throwing some into this just to see what would happen but given that until two weeks ago the whole process could be exploited by spoofing responses, it just feels like a fundamentally bad idea to view this as anything more than a crude gambling opportunity.

seems more like a commodity than stock or currency, with all the speculation, constrained supply, wild spikes in value, like a virtual equivalent to a precious metal like gold

I thought about doing some kind of discount on Magic cards for people who could prove they'd lost money on MTGOX but I decided it would offend the few possible customers who got the joke.

You should have done it anyway!

Can't even remotely relate bitcoins to stocks. I mean, stocks represent something tangible, defined, and regulated, like say a tiny percentage of the market cap of General Electric, a 100+ year old company that has consistently made profits. Bitcoins represent a "currency" that a vast majority of merchants won't accept, whose value fluctuates wildly on a whim, that is not backed by anything considered valuable, that is still growing in supply daily by random ppl willing to burn up gabs of electricity with overworked computers, that you could lose if your hard drive crashes.

this is a dumb question - but how is a bitcoin created? is there like a company that makes a bitcoin and puts it into circulation? or is the total number of bitcoins regulated?

its decentralized, theres a formula that controls their creation (they call the process mining lol), basically you run the mining program and then after a while u get some coins, you are m/l spending computer cycles on bitcoins, the more that are mined the more computer power it takes to mine new ones until eventually no more can be mined

the formula was written by an anonymous creator(s) and released into the wild now its just computers talking to computers

I thought the whole point of bitcoins was to be able to buy drugs on the silk road

if only

this is a dumb question - but how is a bitcoin created? is there like a company that makes a bitcoin and puts it into circulation? or is the total number of bitcoins regulated?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/50/NES_Super_Mario_Bros.png

Yes, the total number is predetermined though -- not "regulated" but built into the design

They come in a can, we're put there by a man, in a factory downtown

es, the total number is predetermined though -- not "regulated" but built into the design

― james franco tur(oll)ing test (Hurting 2), Friday, February 28, 2014 10:06 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's this aspect that makes the whole thing feel like a giant pyramid scheme to me. Those who first developed bitcoins or got in early could load up on the things for cheap, as the computer processing power and time to mine one was relatively small in the beginning. But anyone who wants bitcoins now must either pay a fortune on a real-money exchange or mine a new one, which now takes a roomful of powerful computers, air conditioning, and heat sinks.

In any case I'll start calling bitcoins "currency" only when the local grocery store, my dentist, the insurance company et al. atart accepting them as payment. Until then bitcoins are an overhyped (very) speculative investment, valuable only because lots of people currently value them. I suppose most of the Bitcoin crowd are too young to remember tulip leaves or beanie babies....

I don't really think tulips or beanie babies are a good analogy for whatever bitcoin is. Tulips and Beanie Babies never had any theory behind them beyond "this will be worth more tomorrow than it is today." Bitcoin is a really elaborate and clever, if highly flawed, experiment in virtual money. Yes, it's also being bought as a speculative item, but not everything speculated on is automatically the equivalent of Beanie Babies, which literally served no conceivable purpose.

I also don't really understand how "pyramid scheme" works as a metaphor.

the originators stand to make the most money (top of pyramid), and the suckers at the end (bottom of pyramid)

I'm a little surprised more noise isn't being made about the unsustainable nature of storing every transaction.

why is that unsustainable?

you can embed information in each transaction, turning the blockchain into a "permanent" distributed database. this has already caused a certain amount of problems by the kind of content people have stored, but it's not hard to anticipate a level of activity that esssentially outstrips the rate of however fast storage costs go down. I can pass fractions of bitcoins between two accounts a ton of times to encode an mp3, for example, abusing the system to be a wildly inefficient music library, forcing everyone to eat that cost.

I don't really think tulips or beanie babies are a good analogy for whatever bitcoin is. Tulips and Beanie Babies never had any theory behind them beyond "this will be worth more tomorrow than it is today." Bitcoin is a really elaborate and clever, if highly flawed, experiment in virtual money. Yes, it's also being bought as a speculative item, but not everything speculated on is automatically the equivalent of Beanie Babies, which literally served no conceivable purpose.

― james franco tur(oll)ing test (Hurting 2), Saturday, March 1, 2014 12:14 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

But a digital blockchain has a *purpose*? Yeah, I know all about how part of the virtual-currency push is "let's stop money from being controlled by governments or banks", but the same could be said for tree leaves or stuffed animals if much of civilization deemed them highly valuable and worthy of being used as payment for goods or services.

Shitcoins

the originators stand to make the most money (top of pyramid), and the suckers at the end (bottom of pyramid)

a pyramid scheme requires more than just that in to qualify as a pyramid scheme

call it a pyramid-shaped scheme

lol

http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/513334/141029668/stock-photo-pyramid-on-one-us-dollar-bill-banknote-detail-macro-shot-141029668.jpg

Krinkle8 ‏@Krinkle8 20h
Imagine a system where a man gives you a chuck-e-cheese token every hour you let your car idle. Realize that system exists and it's bitcoin

lol