Bitcoins

this is interesting

I heard about this through the ~future of the internet~ thread. It is indeed interesting, but I still feel too unskooled in this matter to form an opinion about it.

I always think with things like this. If it can be invented, it can be hacked/messed about with. What makes this system so bulletproof?

Each Bitcoin has a unique serial number that's encrypted. If someone can break that encryption, they'd be able to generate counterfeit Bitcoins and the whole system would go down. So although there's no single server to hack, there's still a single point of vulnerability.

I think the bulletproofness is the encryption - for example the Enigma machine would have worked and not been broken if the people who used it hadn't had sloppy practices. In thi scase there cannot be sloppy practices because the practitioners are computers

Does anyone else imagine bitcoins looking like this?

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/9/2010/12/mario_coins.jpg

I know they don't really have a physical form.

There's a not-bad overview of some potential problems here http://www.quora.com/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-idea

http://www.sonicgear.org/ArcadeMachines/ArcadeCoin.jpg

yeah it seems like there are indeed million post forums on whether its a good idea or not but in the end time will tell. I have started mining some myself because its fun

Are you using a decent set of graphics cards? Mining on yr PC is going to cost way more in power than you'll make.

oh I've got that all figured out! real genius...

anyone here buy any acid w/ bitcoins yet

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/silkroad/

who is going to be the first major musician who charges bitcoins for a legal download

rush?

I believe in bitcoins

At the moment bitcoin value/rarity is supressed by spare computing cycles, which I'd rather see searching for ETs, folding proteins, or predicting climate change impacts (all distributed screensaver applications).

If we're going to have a currency backed by electricity, I'd suggest international trade settlement backed by aluminum. Its a useful material, ubitquitous in industry, and as bauxite is abundant and the major production cost is electricity for electrolytic smelting, its as close to frozen electricity as exists.

In either case, no nation/currency union would need acquire enough to back the entire economy, only enough to settle external trade imbalances and deter covert taxation through inflation.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/06/bitcoin-inside-the-encrypted-peer-to-peer-currency.ars

I have almost generated a bit dime so far - its taking forever

At the moment bitcoin value/rarity is supressed by spare computing cycles, which I'd rather see searching for ETs, folding proteins, or predicting climate change impacts (all distributed screensaver applications).

all those screensaver things are outreach tools rather than scientifically useful fwiw.

wow the value has gone way up lately - it was just 7$ a few weeks ago now like 28$!
at mtgox.com

bubble?

Does anyone else imagine bitcoins looking like this?
http://alansmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/bitcoin_logo.pnghttp://alansmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/bitcoin_logo.pnghttp://alansmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/bitcoin_logo.png

(in response to Abbott's earlier post)

(The answer being, yes they do look like that something from a Soviet era Russian Mario knock-off)

little broken link icons?

thinking this is going to be a HUGE deal for online gambling, since it's essentially non-taxable right?

little broken link icons?

That would be a Zelda knock-off...

I think the consensus seems to be that they will be made illegal at some point- so git 'em now!

1 - costs more electricity to generate than they're worth, which will only get worse because they're progressively halving Bitcoin production over time to top out at a maximum number of Bitcoins in 4 years.

2 - someone will crack this before then anyway (either by cracking the encryption method itself, or more likely by finding a weakness somewhere else in the system).

3 - banks will find a way to levy charges on turning Bitcoins back into real money.

4 - governments will find a way to tax this if it ever looks like being big.

"Tell me boy, is that the Chattanooga choo-choo an overheating GPU?"
"Yes I've got twenty nine."
"Well give me a Bitcoin dime."

Sometimes, when I see the price of a bitcoin today, I regret being broke as hell a month ago when I learned about them. But yeah, I probably agree with snoball in that this thing is bound to fail at some point. Also, I'm still having a hard time with this currency that can't buy anything (except drugs).
Also, is it just me or is it impossible to explain bitcoins to people without sounding kind of silly?

Seems that the only way to have made any money out of this was to be involved pretty much at the start.

without sounding kind of silly?

There's a real 'Jack & The Beanstalk' 'magic beans' feel to the whole thing, even more so than 'real' money ('I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of £5').

You could have made money by buying some when this thread was started, they were around 7-8$ iirc.

I think the question is 'how many people who would be immediately interested in buying some of these upon learning that they exist have already learned that they exist?'

like yeah on the one hand obv it's a bubble but crazy libertarian types don't have that many facebook friends, so I dunno, I'd buy some and keep em for a week

(if it were simple and I had money)

Aaand it's crossed the 30$ barrier on MtGox. Dammit, why didn't I even have 20 bucks to invest in this shit ^^

can you short bitcoins

lol

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?board=1.0

this is gonna be the place to be during the crash

since this thread was started I have got .07 btc - I can already see though that its getting harder to generate the coins

'The Ten Bitcoin Commandments' - Notorious BTC

http://www.gifbin.com/bin/6401703g69.gif

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=c354021f1f55a78b4eef48c4db9edc22&topic=13440.0

#1 - never let no-one know, how many coins you hold
#2 - never let 'em know the speed of your GPU
#3 - never trust B-T-C

life in the bitcoin mines

http://i.imgur.com/ieNK0.png

o jeez

hey mining is hard work - we need a union

buy some fuckin heroin w/ your bitcoins

you can! but I will invest them for my children's children

Balance: 0.07409062 BTC

Have fun staying poor

tfw the funniest tweets are like borderline gibberish and yet so sweet within: "unicorn nodes defi project rug pulls hours after launch"

Unicorn Nodes defi project rug pulls hours after launch

April 14, 2022https://t.co/HkAN5amdTG pic.twitter.com/Zq5GLU2aq8

— web3 is going just great (@web3isgreat) April 15, 2022

Unicorn nodes and rug pulls, a children’s tale

Hellbender is a good word

down about $4000 in the last 24 hours, cool currency you got there

I have .00001 or something left in Coinbase from the darknet market days and it bounces between $80 and $120 in value when I think to check in. I always feel like I should hold on to it at this point and hope BTC are worth a billion bucks one day rather than cash out for two tickets to a baseball game and four beers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/03/crypto-skeptics-growing/

first, if "crypto skeptics" and "crypto catastrophists", terms that this article uses thousands of times, are the primary terms of address for people fighting against crypto, then it's already over. once again, the fools will have won.

secondly,

Even the most dire crypto catastrophists say it is unlikely, at least at the moment, that a crash would bring much contagion to the broader economy. The S&P 500 has a market cap of $40 trillion, dwarfing crypto’s $1 trillion. But they say that doesn’t mean Americans shouldn’t be on guard for such spillover.

“The biggest fear is if it does get into the mainstream economy via retirement funds, it could start bringing other things in the system down with it, like with Fidelity,” said Gerard, noting that company’s plan likely to go into effect later this year that would allow participants to allocate as much as 20 percent of their 401(k) to crypto. “That’s why we have to stop it now.”

if fucking crypto causes a recession i will rip my fucking eyeballs out for good

401Ks, for all the money they have made people, also had the effect of getting hundreds of millions of people deeply embedded into american capitalism, depending on the continuing, never-ending exponential success for corporations, across our lifetimes and as far into the future as we can plan on.

jfc if you start getting a bunch of fools dumping their retirement accounts into fuuuuckin crypto? it's just all too plausible, you can see them do it already. and the only people who could possibly do something about this are all 134 years old

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/ny-passes-us-first-moratorium-on-reviving-fossil-fuel-plants-to-mine-crypto/

good to see some progress made on trying to contain the giant, completely unnecessary environmental disaster that cryptofucks decided to unleash on humanity, at the exact worse time, for no reason other than something about petrodollars and freedom.

unfortunately, it's only at a state level, and you know you can count on GOP-led statehouses across the country to look the other way on anything that has to do with climate change

proof of stake is definitely just around the corner, though, and it will be easy to implement that now that all the parasitic 2nd and 3rd order mining operations, from the equipment to the installation to the land to the assets to the loans to whatever, are knee deep in the rising shitjuice

June was a horrible month for me, and this has the been the worst year of my life. sorry for all the terrible posting, everywhere, on everything, and being intolerable in general.

some good news maybe. i very much hope that i have been wrong on proof of stake and that it will actually happen and make a difference. some news on that:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/the-merge-the-biggest-change-in-ethereum-history-explained/

In a few weeks, Ethereum is slated to undergo the most significant change in its seven-year history. Until now, the Ethereum blockchain has been secured using a method called "proof-of-work," which consumes more electricity than the entire nation of Belgium. Next month's switch to a new method called "proof-of-stake" is expected to cut Ethereum's energy consumption by a factor of 1,000.

supposedly to happen in mid-September.

Always interested in hearing about all the great improvements that will be happening Real Soon Now. No doubt the rollout into their distributed system will be flawless.

I guess this is the only ILE cryptocurrency thread?

there's another, but i got a poxy fule error when I try to link it?

it's on the front page but uses a cent and dollar sign for the C and S

I guess it's just as well no one around here cares. It's hard to avoid talk of FTX and SBF over on the bird site.

Yeah I was trying to find a good place to post about FTX - I guess this will do?
The FTX collapse is absolutely insane and astounding (although it's sad that lots of people got duped.)
Crypto skeptic Molly White's (creator of "Web3 Is Going Just Great") writeups are excellent - here's part 3 of her FTX coverage: https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-ftx-collapse-the-latest-revelations

Some highlights from it:
* The spreadsheet included an entry for “Hidden, poorly internally labled (sic) ‘fiat@’ account: -8 billion”. Apparently SBF wishes for us to believe that he somehow just misplaced an account representing eight billion dollars in liabilities. SBF also included an attempt at remorse in the balance sheet (as one does): “There were many things I wish I could do differently than I did…”

(I'm reminded of the Robin Williams joke about putting $50,000 on your tax form for "snacks".)

* The clean-up guy (who oversaw Enron's bankruptcy) John J. Ray III said: "Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented."

* The Debtors do not have an accounting department and outsource this function.

apparently it's impossible to link to the other thread here but it's right there on sna!

www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=60&threadid=94441#unread

correct, this is being discussed on the other thread, which has ASCII characters in the title that break the link

As much fun as it is to have the popcorn out in all of this, it's also extremely frustrating how bad a job regulators have done with respect to doing anything whatsoever to protect people in the crypto space. It's like they said "well it's an innovative, new kind of fraud, so we need to take a hands off approach and let the innovators innovate."

Ah - I see, thanks all! I'll have to start checking the Pickle board. I'll re-post to the thread there.

Does the link work if you give it a title?
The other bitcoin thread.

Yes it does. There you go.

ooh nice

$kill$ emil.y

€mil¥

https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/UK_Treasury_considering_plans_for_digital_pound,_economic_secretary_says?dpl_id=2963597

JUST IN: Crypto .com is shutting down its institutional exchange in the United States

— Milk Road (@MilkRoadDaily) June 9, 2023

I walked past a Bitcoin outlet yesterday. It looked like a tiny casino entrance and the carpet had bitcoin logos on it. I think it just had some kind of vending machine in it.

I don't really understand what the purpose is, to buy bitcoins with cash?

That was a big thing when the darknet drug markets were bigger - buy bitcoin for cash at an ATM or from someone directly, a bit more distance from the cops finding out you ordered those 4000 ecstasy pills.

I'd never seen one before but seems they're pretty common, just seems a weird way of drawing attention to yourself if you're wanting to do low level money laundering

On the site it tells you how much money is available to withdraw in each ATM (anywhere between €120 and €25000 depending on the machine)

the hardcore bitcoin dudes are so demented i don't think anything could happen that would get them to rethink it

Crypto 1.0 is dying….and the crypto-bros killed it #cryptocrash

But the core of the crypto idea is stronger than ever
"What if everyone created their own kind of money?"

Crypto 2.0 is inevitable… very old ideas, made new pic.twitter.com/sTjEbZTzne

— Chris Williams (@mr_moneychanger) June 10, 2023

When Prophecy Fails Web3 Edition

what if everyone created their own kind of money lmao

sounds bad

just putting it out there that my money will be worth at least 100x everyone else’s money, that’s the plan.

thats the way to do it

saw someone argue that crypto should be regulated not like finance but like gambling or collectables because its just some random bullshit anyway, which is kinda interesting

When the question is put like it was above, i.e., "What if everyone created their own money?," it becomes crystal clear how dumb the whole idea is.