Bitcoins

[o]

Did anybody get into this? feel like i missed out on millions haha.

A lot of you are pretty tech savvy and im sure cass knows a bit about economics; do you have any confidence in the knockoffs like Litecoin, Namecoin, Feathercoin etc?

It also seems like a pretty ridiculous system to get into without dropping some bank account info. Lot of people seem pretty paranoid about security and what not.

I followed this tutorial to get into it using paypal (which none of the big sites seems to allow)

http://www.coinqa.org/buy-litecoins-wit ... edit-card/

Bought 100 dollars worth of bitcoins which was like .08 of a bitcoin after transfer fees and all that BS. Don't really care if I lose all my money I just wanted to do it for fun.

[Fledermaus]

Did Zeut convince you?

[Cassiel]

Never got into it. The current headlines about $1000+ bitcoin prices are misleading, as getting bitcoin out of the exchanges is horrifically slow and converting bitcoin directly to USD is problematic. Some people have definitely won the lottery, though.

Litecoin is clearly in second place. It's technically very interesting -- scrypt is awesome -- and its value right now is much less driven by speculation than bitcoin's. When the value of bitcoin crashes again, as it inevitably will, litecoin may crash with it, or it may shoot up as people flock to it as a safer version of bitcoin.

Of course, other than toy investments, park your money in index funds. Everything else is a crapshoot.

[Kaz]

Bitcoin is dumb for a variety of reasons, but even if you disagree with those, the fact remains that it cannot scale. It's currently capped at 10 transactions per second.. or is it even less than that? That's not enough for a small city, let alone a country or the whole planet like bitcoiners like to imagine.

If you increase the block size to accommodate, say, the average transaction volume of Visa, the blockchain will balloon out of control. If you reduce the mining time so people won't have to wait ~10 minutes or more (in increments of ~10 minutes) for their transactions to process, the nodes on slower connections won't be able to keep up and will cause the network to fork endlessly.

Decentralized currency cannot work on a reasonably usable scale. Maybe in the future, in an era of global unlimited speed, bandwidth and storage capacity, but not in the foreseeable future.

[RageAgainstVoid]

feel like i missed out on millions haha.

[gandalf37]

My friend for black friday bought like 15 video cards to set up a bit coin farm type operation. He's sinking a ton of money into equipment, but with just his one computer apparently he has made $7500 dollars so far so idk.

I told him there is no way bitcoin's value can sustain these levels for very long, but he thinks that he can make enough money before it crashes to justify his massive equipment purchases.

If he makes an excessive amount of money I will be slightly jealous since he asked me to go in on it with him lol.

[o]

Was looking to buy PPC when it was down at 5 usd, but the only way to get money onto the site is through BTC and i have to wait to withdraw from another site. While waiting it went up to 9 usd sigh

[Vladimer]

Bitcoin is indeed stupid. As stated, a decentralized currency will not work. Even if they do somehow in a magic way make it work? You'd be better off betting against the banks with forex. See: losing.

[Cassiel]

My friend for black friday bought like 15 video cards to set up a bit coin farm type operation. He's sinking a ton of money into equipment, but with just his one computer apparently he has made $7500 dollars so far so idk.

Mining BTC with GPUs isn't profitable unless you get free electricity. That's why people have such hard-ons for the ASICs.

I told him there is no way bitcoin's value can sustain these levels for very long, but he thinks that he can make enough money before it crashes to justify his massive equipment purchases.

Maybe. There's a little bit of elasticity as the difficulty catches up to the inflated price. Ultimately though higher prices drive more mining, which increases the difficulty, which increases the power cost, which makes mining with GPUs unprofitable again.

[smellibear]

It's gonna be esperanto all over again in no time I'm sure.

[RageAgainstVoid]

Kio estas tio? Now that's a funny hook. Also, something about Botnets.

[Cassiel]

Is that Herr Doktor?

[smellibear]

Yeah it's me, my old account hasn't worked for a while and I kept intending to email someone about it or just make a new one but never got around to it. And then I did.

[Zeuter]

I'd make a joke about you popping up in a topic about money, but..

[Cassiel]

Yeah it's me, my old account hasn't worked for a while and I kept intending to email someone about it or just make a new one but never got around to it. And then I did.

I guess this old phpBB doesn't have password reset. I can send you a temp one at the old AOL or the new gmail address, if any fucks are given.

[RageAgainstVoid]

Ava is a keeper.

[RageAgainstVoid]

Alright then, I say it.

WTF @ Cass' post count.

[Merlin]

gg bitcoin, wp China.

[Zeuter]

Dogecoin is the new fad.

[Merlin]

Wow.

[Kaz]

I love how dogecoin is making bitcoin true believers apoplectic.