Bitcoins

https://pics.me.me/john-cena-laughing-19985692.png

is p much how I feel about that

good lord

ive a fella works beside me keeps telling me his e-purse is worth 3 million spends the rest of his time complaining he cant get a loan to cover his kitchen extension

i was giving him the benefit of the doubt for a long time due to a language barrier issue but ive decided hes quite the most stupid human ive seen earn a midrange salary

Just realized I've met Gerald Cotten lol

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/researcher-counts-the-reasons-he-wants-cryptocurrency-burned-with-fire/

nicholas weaver not mincing words here

so, nothing about the environmental consequences?

there was a clip on Click, the bbc's weekly technology thing, on a bitcoin farm in iceland (20,000 desktops) that was burning 1M euros in energy costs a month (despite being in iceland and using lots of passive cooling). this was deemed ok by the owner because it was mining "millions" in bitcoin a day.

15:50 here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0b0bk8t/click-mining-for-money

(actually he does mention the waste. but that wasn't reflected in the headings.)

At least Iceland is 100% renewable thanks to all the geothermal power plants. This is very much the exception.

For anyone interested in the Quadriga disaster / why things so frequently go wrong in the crypto space generally, some very smart people and I dive into the story and some of the more conspiratorial angles making the rounds here.

For anyone interested in the Quadriga disaster / why things so frequently go wrong in the crypto space generally, some very smart people and I dive into the story and some of the more conspiratorial angles making the rounds here🕸.

hmm I'll have to look into that

I heard more about this story today but not at liberty to discuss it :/

"We are now spending more electricity mining bitcoin than is produced by all the worlds solar panels combined. So we have eliminated all the progress that we made on green energy, just through bitcoin use."https://t.co/IrhMTMtWrR

— Mike Perham (@mperham) February 22, 2019

the electricity drain from cryptocurrency IS a big problem, but the quote doesn't appear in the NYT op-ed that the tweet links to. deep in the comments to the tweet, someone mentions that actually the quote came from this article (https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/2/22/18188562/climate-change-david-wallace-wells-the-uninhabitable-earth), but it's not in there either. someone else thinks it was in the vox piece, but was deleted:

Very interesting - it seems like they deleted the quote without mention. Thanks @internetarchive: https://t.co/Jz5sGOol86 pic.twitter.com/qSyg0czZmm

— Michel Rauchs (@mrauchs) February 23, 2019

and someone ELSE thinks that the error originated from a conflation between gigawatts and gigawatt-hours, two very different units of electricity usage.

to sum up, arrrrrgh

*chef finger kisses*

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47454528

"died in India" ie ran off with all these hipster crypto-fucks money. He's probably sleeping on Lord Lucan's couch.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/5971/production/_105479822_hi044540818.jpg

this picture of a real bitcoin tickles me

what a shocking plot twist, who could have foreseen that someone involved in crypto would be a scammer

If anyone's reading this who didn't foresee that, I have some real estate that you might be interested in...

sorry all my money's tied up in a really exciting iraqi dinar/blockchain opportunity right now

Unlike some other people, I am fairly convinced Cotten is dead. Likeliest story is that one of his even shadier business partners managed to take advantage of a window of opportunity when he fell ill.

you have to hand it to The Men of Bitcoin, you get none of these shenanigans with boring old government-backed currencies

bitcoin?

shitcoin morelike

"shitcoin" is already a widely used term for all non-BTC coins

try harder bg, I know you can

that sounds right to me. you don't have to fake your own death to steal crypto, you can just "lose" the "key"

bitcoin more like

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8b/02/83/8b0283b5a45efb3b8ae1c61174193162.jpg

"shitcoin" is already a widely used term for all non-BTC coins

try harder bg, I know you can

fuck, owned by the bitcoin community

er... ungoodcoin morelike

sir, please leave

this picture of a real bitcoin tickles me

In Dark Web We Trust

"died in India" ie ran off with all these hipster crypto-fucks money. He's probably sleeping on Lord Lucan's couch.

― just another country (snoball), Tuesday, March 5, 2019 5:25 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

jesus, the word hipsters is abused all over the place but using it to refer to crypto neckbeards takes the cake

yeah I have met a shit ton of crypto people and there isn't a single one who remotely qualifies for that title. completely different set of subcultural cues at work. they're basically just nerds and libertarians (and tech-libertarians)

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/19/asia/thai-sea-home-us-bitcoin-trader-scli-intl/index.html

^^^US bitcoin trader and girlfriend could face death penalty over Thai 'seastead'

the seastead looks like crap btw

Related Article: Dog found swimming 135 miles off the coast of Thailand

things continue to go well
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/26/bitfinex_fraud_claims/

the hilarious legal fall of a man who needs to keep claiming he's satoshi nakamoto:

What does it look like when the world's most impossibly arrogant douchebag wanders into the vipers nest that is a US federal courtroom? It's not good. But it's funny.https://t.co/M4CFG1SAE1

— The ALAB Podcast Series (@ALABSeries) September 9, 2019

Should try and read the O'Hagan piece on Satoshi

i remember it being readable without being elucidatory lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaMJi1_1tkA

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/03/18/opera-browser-users-buy-bitcoin-apple-pay/

catering to people who have enough money to fool around with bitcoin investing seems like a way to rake in some of their MSM (Main Stream Money).

I bought a bitcoin back when they were cheap but I'm not even sure how to sell it or if my paper wallet still works. I probably should have tried to sell it a long time ago.

more on my good friend, noted philanthropist gerald cotten

The Quadriga cryptocurrency exchange that saw millions of dollars disappear just as its founder died was a "fraud" and Ponzi scheme, according to the Ontario Securities Commission.

The regulator said Thursday that Vancouver-based Quadriga's late founder Gerald Cotten committed fraud by opening accounts under aliases and crediting himself with fictitious currency and crypto asset balances, which he traded with unsuspecting clients.

Cotten, the OSC said in a new report, ran into a shortfall in assets available to satisfy client withdrawals when the price of the crypto assets changed. He started running a Ponzi scheme that covered the shortfall with other clients' deposits, the agency determined.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/osc-quadriga-gerald-cotten-1.5607990

are you ready for an imaginary stock market for celebrities that trades in character-specific cryptocurrency that is (and i cannot stress this enough) totally not a scam?
https://bitclout.com/

What can happen when you give people the ability to speculate on a person’s reputation? We can’t know for sure, but one of the features that has emerged is what we call “buy and retweet.” Ordinarily, retweeting someone gives you nothing. If that person becomes a superstar because you boosted them, you’ll be lucky if they even remember your name in a few years. In contrast, with BitClout you can buy someone’s coin and then retweet them,
which makes it so that you’re not only along for the ride financially if they blow up, but you also get bragging rights. Imagine the difference between being able to say “I retweeted her early on” vs being able to say “I bought her coin when it was $0.50 and now it’s $500-- and by the way I’ve done this hundreds of times, and I can prove it because my track record is on the blockchain.” The latter is clearly a very different game. Moreover, it’s not just a famous person’s game. If you know someone with a lot of clout, or if you know someone who knows someone, you can buy a coin and send it to someone else so that they can buy and retweet them. And thus the incentives go many layers deep. The interesting thing about this mechanic is that it wasn’t even something consciously designed into the product. It exists as an “emergent” phenomenon off of the core creator coin mechanic. What other dynamics could exist that we haven’t yet thought of?

One thing I've never really understood about bitcoin mining: what are these "complex hashing puzzles" that are all ostensibly unique and how are they derived in order to ultimately be solved by the mining process? Does the solving of these puzzles have some sort of ancillary benefit beyond creating unique tokens... (e.g. mathematicians/scientists)? Is there a difference between the type of puzzles that are solved by various bitcoin marketplaces? Is an Ethereum puzzle the same sort of hash problem as a Dogecoin puzzle or whatever? Or are they all competing for the same resource of difficult hash puzzles? What prevents one vendor from tokenizing the result of the same puzzle another has solved?

I don't know the other currencies, but at least for bitcoin, it's not really a variety of puzzles. It's just the same puzzle over and over again with different inputs, and increasing level of difficulty. The inputs to the puzzle are the new transactions that people wish to transact and the history of previous transactions. So the puzzle is kind of an inexhaustible resource. The solutions to these puzzles are of no interest to anyone outside the realm of bitcoin.

sigh

the “world” is going to have a layer of speculation over everything soon, right? A value on absolutely everything? This feels like an onslaught, completely unregulated

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/china-advances-its-war-on-bitcoin-cracks-down-on-mining/

Thank you, President Xi.

I saw a Tesla with LOVE BTC vanity plates yesterday, bet it’s been a rough fortnight for them.