Use company machines? Total newb, just curious?

I want to believe in Bitcoin.

Obviously you don't understand it. I've spent maybe $4500 in power, and generated $450,000 in Bitcoins.

And you keep saying it's a bubble. Great. So I guess you should have sold at the top instead of the bottom. Again, you clearly don't understand that your time frame is what made it "not profitable." Because it sure as hell was profitable to me.

Just looked at MtGox and about made peepee in my pants. Last price $235. Pissed I bought silver with some of my stash when it was at $150. I think the miner is getting cranked to full tilt and current wallet is going into cold storage at this point.

Right now bitcoins are appreciating so rapidly that everyone is afraid to spend them b/c of fear that they will be worht twice as much next week.  THis volatility is at cross purposes to BC being good as a currency b/c discourages them from being spent on actual goods and services.  

Seems to me that this volatility is the biggest difficulty w/ BC, and probably the only way that the monied elite can discourage its adoption as a currency.  

Merely as a speculative commodity it is clearly retarded since it has no inherent value really, other than being able to escape dependence on banks w/ all teir fees and BS in makng transactions.

That's a pretty significant value...

Agreed, but the problem is ultimately that the Bitcoins needed to be made and released in timely manner, in quantities required to prevent up and down bidding.

Shoppers do not want a currency that is volatile, ( plenty of third world currencies for that )
Savers don't want something unproven that can collapse or is inflationary. ( the Fed's got that one covered in spades )
Only investors want something they can turn a quick buck with, if they're lucky. ( Wall Street )

The first one to come up with a stable digital currency will be the big winner.

Stability is a function of liquidity and market capitalization. There won't be swings measured in 2^x once there's $10b per month of commerce taking place in BTC.

An issuing authority is the *last* thing it needs. It would never have gotten this far.

I didn't say it need to be a central bank, just some form of algorithm based on velocity of money in the network's software.

Does gold qualify as an unstable currency under your terms? Mined like bitcoins and big strikes can reduce the value of your stash.

Comparing bitcoins to gold is silly.
You can't whip up some gold with a program.

Gold has far more uses than just exchange.
Even the Carlin Trend strike in Nevada didn't dent the price of gold appreciably.

The day someone creates a better digital currency, bitcoin is DOA.

The only thing wrong with gold is all the paper trading.
However, that's easy to deal with, don't buy paper gold.

I was just talking about this - I suspect there will be a competing currency that does this, eventually. Bitcoin isn't it - a large part of its appeal is that it is completely unregulated.

My computer mined I think 54 or 57 coins. Then the bottom fell out and made it not worth the juice.  I still kept it mining for weeks after that because I'm a tech retard.  

Then one day it locked up. Coins were trading at below breakeven point. Never backed up anything.

Here the computer sits.  In a box.  And not sure if I'll be able to recover one bit of info on it.

Only wallet I had was on it.  Passwords. Mining pools.  Everything bitcoin related.

I thought for sure I scammed myself into a scam at the time.  Boy, was I wrong. Never figured they would trade this high.

Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile

READING COMPREHENSION IS YOUR FRIEND IN THIS THREAD. SPECIFICALLY WHAT I DID TWO DAYS AGO.

I set up and started mining last night.  here are some of the links I used:

https://www.weusecoins.com/en/

https://www.weusecoins.com/en/getting-started

https://www.weusecoins.com/en/mining-guide

https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=3878.0

I have a nvidia GTX 680 which is great for graphics but sucks for mining.  Running about 107 Mhash/s which is kind of slow.  Just playing though.  I run my PC on all the time anyway.

This thing looks interesting and makes more sense for me than buying a $400 video card:

https://products.butterflylabs.com/homepage/5-gh-s-bitcoin-miner.html

It's pre-order for now.

Well aware of your bitcoin / silver swap.  I was answering SS109


Caps lock not needed.

go on...

yes, the inherant value of bitcoin is ONLY as an unemcumbered, free & cheap medium of exchange.  And since speculation driven volatility is at cross purposes with this I am afraid that manipulation by guys like George, Show the Nazis the hiding places, Soros could be used to disrupt bitcoin as a currency.   I am prone to suspect that all they could do is produce a temporarly distortion, but if they did that over and over again, possibly profiting all the way b/c they can hold so much that they can sort of drive spikes & dips and profit & unlimately undermine it.  I dunno.  Either this or the dreaded 51% hijack.  Probably either scenario are unfeasible.

I hope that crypto currencies will be analogous to how encryption tech grows at a exponentially higher rate than decryption technology, which works inherantly against the elite.  

Ultimately, I hope that this sort of a conept will indeed be a black swan event.  

Bit coins will hit some predetermined high number and half the total "currency" will be converted into hard cash in 1/10000th of a second. Anyone left holding them after that point will see the price move down to where it belongs in the blink of an eye, if I had to guess at a couple bucks each.

A couple people are going to make a couple hundred million dollars in real money and then the other 99.9% of owners will get screwed for their stupidity.

Read the number 1 scam in MMO history. This is exactly what will happen with bitcoins, except it will be real cash people lose instead of video game cash.

Link: http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-biggest-dick-moves-in-history-online-gaming_p2/

So you forgot that Bitcoins were gold?

No, I simply don't consider a digital anything ( or a promise to pay ) a replacement for Physical in your possession.

There's no central bank in Bitcoin, nobody can run away with the money.  Please find a better example.  (he did all that work and only got $170k?).  

There are scams and shysters and stupid people galore, but the technology is sound and a non-inflatable currency is obviously in demand.  Bitcoin may not last as the leader, but something will fill that role.  Even if the Bitcoin economy of buying and selling stuff doesn't develop any further than it has, BTC or a successor would still be used as a store of value like gold for people avoiding crashing fiat currencies.  Yes, it is artificial but also capped on supply, low exchange fees, no security costs, instantly transferrable, etc.

As for selling out, I heard today (can't find it now) that MtGox had open buy orders totaling more than the total number of Bitcoins in existence, i.e. if everyone sold out right now the price still wouldn't go to zero.  And that's just one exchange.  Better plan would be to sell off slowly, anyways.

There was a nice Ponzi scheme last summer, the ringleader Pirateat40 allegedly got away with approx. $400k in Bitcoins.  Worth $4.6mil at the moment.  But that's what you get when you trust a guy who uses a pirate avatar .  I put my play money of 14 BTC in and took 21 out after a few weeks, about 2 weeks before the end.

You apparently have zero understanding of how this works.

There is no depository. No one can "run off" with any money. You just picked a random "Internet money!!" topic that ended in tragedy and decided it applied - if doesn't.

There will be a correction - I don't know if it's tomorrow, or a year from now. I *do* know that hte price before this rise was an order of magnitude higher than "a couple of bucks", and see no reason it would fall below the trend established prior to the rise.

What OS?

You should send it to a data recovery company. Failing that, pop in an Ubuntu LiveCD and see if you can get it to boot and access the drive.

55 BTC is $12,870 at this very moment.

It's been "pre-order" for about 9 months.  Their first delivery target that they didn't meet was in something like September.  They have only just now gotten actual hardware in hand, and they've discovered that it's running a couple of orders of magnitude higher power draw and lower hash rate than they thought it would.

Bottom line?  They're a bunch of fucking retards who got a fuckton of pre-order money and built a product they had no fucking clue how to build.

The only ASIC on the market right now is made by Avalon.  Their price (sold out, but the price on the last batch of 100)?  88 Bitcoins.

Probably pays for itself in about two months though.

Anything digital can be hacked/regulated/controlled/confiscated/destroyed by the govt if they want it bad enough.
Tomac

$266.00 per Bitcoin.



 

I'm have a degree in applied mathematics, I wrote on my thesis on elliptic curve cryptography. I understand exactly how and why bitcoins work. I also understand exactly why it's a stupidly vulnerable system. No computer system is truly secure, and thus all you have to do is figure out how to hack in and change the difficulty of bitcoin mining, which would not be a very difficult project (and apparently wasn't when the first massive flaw was discovered in 2009).

Read this:

"The Difficulty Metric

The difficulty is the measure of how difficult it is to find a new block compared to the easiest it can ever be. It is recalculated every 2016 blocks to a value such that the previous 2016 blocks would have been generated in exactly two weeks had everyone been mining at this difficulty. This will yield, on average, one block every ten minutes. As more miners join, the rate of block creation will go up. As the rate of block generation goes up, the difficulty rises to compensate which will push the rate of block creation back down. Any blocks released by malicious miners that do not meet the required difficulty target will simply be rejected by everyone on the network and thus will be worthless. "

Write an equation that puts the code into the correct difficult metric, write a code that validates it and correctly applies whatever the unique identifier to each set of 2016 coins is. Bam bitcoins generated at the computational expense of rate of 1/trillionth of the traditional method. This has already happened, all that people are waiting on is a price high enough to sell off. Bit coins are no way more secure than hacking the pentagon, which has happened at least dozens of times, and I  would guess likely thousands.  If you dont understand how that equates to "running off with the money" I dont know how to help you. Sure, its unlikely you can collect all the bitcoins, but that has nothing to do with making them nearly worthless.

Ah but you're wrong.

You haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about, or how bitcoin works.

Sounds a lot like a closely held stock, if a significant holder decides to convert all their shares out today, the value will drop fast.

Like above, you have to wonder if a Soros type character is about to work a currency manipulation. And does the currency have the ability to stop trading in Bitcoins if it sees something developing?

You could turn the exchanges off, but you can't stop trading.  Mtgox has shut down trading when there were issues before, but that's only one (the largest at the moment) exchange.  Trading can still take place.

Ahhh, the beauty of ponzi schemes in action. Another sucker falls in which brings in 4 more, etc.

Exactly. wikileaks, you may understand the ECC stuff fine - awesome, that means you understand that Bitcoin isn't vulnerable to someone like the NSA throwing computing power at it to break the algorithms.

What you don't seem to understand is distributed systems.



Sure - on your PC. The heart of the system is the blockchain, which verifies transactions across the network. Each "block" is a bit like a page out of a ledger book, saying "hey, these transactions are accepted on the network". A block is generated whenever a key is found that meets the difficulty requirements. Once generated, the block is submitted to the network, and each node in the network checks the math. Your modified code will allow you to generate a block, but it will be rejected upon submission to the network because it will not satisfy the validity requirements of every other node, and therefore will not be confirmed. Meanwhile, other miners will submit valid blocks, and as soon as that happens, your block is not longer valid for acceptance at all - because part of how this works is that the signature of the previous block must be a component of the key for the next block.

In other words, hacking the Bitcoin protocol is exactly as easy as changing that piece of code on every mining PC in the network. Which is to say - freaking impossible as a "hack".

Now, it *is* possible to sneak in changes to the default client, which could be a huge deal. It is checked before it's released, and miners don't upgrade all at once, so that's mostly resolved at the moment. Also, many serious miners aren't using the standard Bitcoin implementation, but a custom implementation of the protocol itself - so they're immune to this sort of attack to begin with.



Let's examine this on its face. If this is the case, then compromising the Bitcoin protocol is trivial, and anyone with the technical skills you possess can do it, right? If one party has done it, then other parties almost certainly have. The first party to start a selloff would profit nearly completely, while subsequent selloffs would recieve no benefit. Therefore, upon proving a hack against the protocol, the only rational action would be to immediately sell off - because if you don't, someone else will and you'll miss out. Let's call this Outcome A.

Alternatively, I suppose one could believe that everyone involved in Bitcoin with your technical knowledge or greater is in collussion to allow the price to increase, that everyone else who joins also colludes with them, and that no malicious users exist. That's the only scenario that fits your assertions, so let's call that Outcome B.

Finally, the protocol itself is secure, and no one knows of a viable attach. This is Outcome C.

Now.. which do you think is more likely? Outcome A hasn't happened, so we're left with B and C. Either the network is secure, or there is a giant conspiracy that millions of Bitcoin users are too stupid to see.



Bullshit. Like your Eve Online analogy, this doesn't relate at all to the conversation at hand. You don't understand the technology. It doesn't work the way you think it does. Period.

God I hope someone tries that. It would be blatantly obvious, and would be an awesome opportunity to buy coins at a steep discount.

Damn, that sounds an awful lot like a personal attack.

Down to $200. Time to buy?

Correction, down to $120!!!!!

Even if the govt couldn't hack Bitcoin, they sure as hell could pass any number of laws (or use already-existing ambiguously-worded legislation) to regulate it, control it, confiscate it or outright ban it (in the interests of National Security, of course...).
Tomac

ETA: Looks like it's started already: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/us-regulator-bitcoin-exchanges-must-comply-with-money-laundering-laws/

Yep. All those things have been done to marijuana and cocaine. They're impossible to find, and worthless.

They want in on TrueCrypt.  The only way they are doing that right now is user error.

Lot of volatility today from 260 to 120 back to 180.

Gold and silver used to wash in and out of the US in waves in our early days.  The nature of free markets is volatility.  The information age has spend up transmission of events, which can both add too or reduce volatility depending on the mood.

Add the new and speculative nature of Bitcoin, and it'll be all over the place.

However, whether Bitcoin, LiteCoin, or a future derivative....digital currency is going to be big, it is going to be awesome, and it is going to be VERY difficult for .gov to do anything about in its final, successful incarnation.

Why will it be difficult for government to handle?

Because that is what the market wants.  There is nothing the government can do about it, especially in the digital age.

I'm starting to wonder how much of the total circulation is eventually going to be lost permanently due to data loss.  Fiat currencies can print new physical currencies; I suppose you can still lose precious metals (or something along those lines) but it doesn't simply vanish.

Curious how the bitcoin system is going to handle attrition losses of currency components over time.

It's already started: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/us-regulator-bitcoin-exchanges-must-comply-with-money-laundering-laws/
and: http://betanews.com/2013/04/05/hide-your-bitcoins-from-skype/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed+-+bn+-+Betanews+Full+Content+Feed+-+BN
Tomac

Increased valuation.  It can be broken down significantly, so as it valuates, it can be broken into smaller and smaller pieces.  Everyone is traded hundred dollar bills right now, when in a few years they might be trading pennies for the same USD valuation.

Or, the whole thing will fail when a better one gains acceptance.

Cool.  With the ease of attaining a VPN and other measures today, it is virtually impossible for the government to even KNOW I am dealing in bitcoins.

BTC showed major volatility today. In hindsight I think 2 things have become readily apparent...



1. BTC suffers inadequate trading infrastructure. When you have a day like today, the long wait time for a transaction to go through (up to 6 hrs!) is disturbing.



2. BTC is not exclusively in the hands of well-intentioned buyers. It is not immune to manipulation. Motherfuckers can and will short it.





I choose not to play this particular casino game. I got bigger problems with volatile equities. But if you do play BTC, try to play it safe.

The prices right now are largely meaningless. The combination of lag on the exchanges, a very thin order book, and the huge gap between buy and sell prices means literally one trade going through can change the price by 10% up or down.

Yeah - the US federal government stating that Bitcoin is to be considered a currency, and that existing regulation for foreign currency exchange should apply to Bitcoin exchanges operating in the US - that's a sign of a dying currency if I ever saw one.

Everyone know that once a currency gains recognition by the leading world power, it disappears in a puff of multi-colored smoke.

*poof*

Never said it was dying, just not immune to govt interference. Whether or not that govt interference ends up eventually killing it is another matter.
Tomac

You can't short Bitcoin, unless someone else is willing to go long on the other side. Otherwise, your analysis is correct. It's a young currency with an immature ecosystem of tools surrounding it.  The centralized exchange problem will be solved, and life will go on.

It's important to note as well - with all the major exchanges under attack and everyone with their nerves on edge, transactions are still being processed normally, and people are still buying and selling things for Bitcoin. An outside malicious entity has attacked our community with everything they've got, and the system itself is completely unphazed.