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cat doter posted:What the gently caress is this thing? I've looked at FAQs and watched that video, but I don't get it. Your CPU/GPU computes...something, and you get...pretend money? And people buy stuff with it? What the gently caress is the computation being used for? How the hell does it even work? Am I connecting to peers like a torrent program? Do I need to forward ports and poo poo? I don't get it. It's less like a currency and more like owning non-voting, non-dividend-paying stock in a company that doesn't do anything and doesn't actually exist. The computation part is actually a pretty neat way to control the quantity of the currency while simultaneously being able to run an Alienware computer building scam. The details are some kind of boring cryptography poo poo, but it's sort of like if the coins were actually prime numbers. The guy who invented it gets 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc, and now everybody's filling up their kitchens with number crunching farms trying to get at the next super-large number that takes forever to compute.
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Jun 3, 2011 15:54
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Archduke posted:A lot of people on here slept through their high school economics class, so don't take it too personally. Buying bitcoins is like buying child pornography futures. You buy them hoping that more people will use them for illegal purposes. It's simultaneously a legitimate investment and the shadiest thing imaginable.
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Jun 3, 2011 21:03
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DashingGentleman posted:The whole mining thing is like an analogy of the evils of capitalism. The rate of coin generation is constant, so the massive mining rig arms race is absolutely unnecessary, even if you somehow accept that bitcoins hold value. The processing power dedicated to mining could drop or rise a thousand fold tomorrow and it would have no bearing on the generation rate. All the miners could shut down all but one of their rigs tomorrow and agree to share the coins. But each individual wants a bigger slice and we get a hardware race where real-world scarce resources are wasted on an abstract currency completely disconnected from said resources. It's amazing. But this is even worse than capitalism because there is not even an illusion that people are rewarded by hard work and talent, and instead it's all about how wealthy you already are so that you can have a computer do the work for you.
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Jun 8, 2011 03:08
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I hope someday to have so much cool poo poo filling up my living room, kitchen, garage and basement that I decide that it is a good idea to put four high-end gaming PCs in my bedroom during an unseasonably hot spring.
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Jun 8, 2011 21:29
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ChubbyEmoBabe posted:Ok, I'll play: What if fairies poo poo gold dust? That's not true; you can buy cell phone cases with bitcoins. It is a robust economic ecology.
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Jun 9, 2011 22:40
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Patashu posted:A wallet has a public key. Only you have the private key. Said wallet has a publicly known amount of bitcoins in it, because of the public block chain that records -every- transaction ever. So what's stopping me from setting up a hundred accounts with a hundred different wallets on Silk Road and getting rich 'selling' 'drugs'?
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Jun 10, 2011 16:16
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Midorka posted:I don't get the hype. It seems very unstable and benefits only the early adopters. I believe today the price went from $30-$20-$25 in 24 hours, at least from what a friend told me. That's pretty ridiculous. Originally it was supposed to be a an e-currency that would be adopted by Ron Paulite conspiracy nuts in order to free themselves of the lizard aliens that control the monetary policy of real money, so the particular value of a coin was less important than how widespread its use became. However, it was hijacked by suburbanites with massive entitlement complexes who believe that their gaming rigs should translate directly to real wealth, and so bitcoin devolved into a speculation-oriented fake investment driven by raw enthusiasm for getting rich. (those two groups are the same exact people, by the way)
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Jun 11, 2011 02:08
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Angela Christine posted:Right, they aren't excellent at it. But if the CPU is not being used at all, wouldn't it be better to have a little extra hashing power? A small but variable amount of CPU power is needed to send the GPU those hashing problems and take care of the results. You certainly can run the old CPU-based mining program at the same time as the new GPU-based one, but the net result would probably be negative.
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Jun 11, 2011 03:13
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coolskillrex remix posted:If i did this video card hash thing are there buyers for bit coins or do i basically just get to trade them for drugs. Yeah but don't surprised if the drug dealer sends you a bottle full of bleach when he finds out that you bought a gallon of LSD for what turns out to be less than a dollar.
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Jun 12, 2011 00:09
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The politics board is a good candidate for Weekend Web, with such gems as "Fact: Taxation is Violent", "How Libertarianism Helps the Poor", and "The Gun is Civilization". However, don't think they forgot the final destination of techno-fetishism: singularitarianism.(reddit) posted:Consider the following: the surge of interest in Bitcoin mining is causing a massive growth in computing power across the globe. People from all walks of life are essentially building new super-computer clusters.
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Jun 12, 2011 03:50
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iSuck posted:I heard there was also the possibility of slim jims and pizza? Anyway, you can do all that and more with MMORPG money and items. In Torspeak, 'pizza' is code for drugs, and "slim jims" are child pornography. And you don't even want to know what cell phone cases are.
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Jun 12, 2011 05:36
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How to win at buttcoin: set up a new exchange and use fake transactions to fake high volume trading, thus supplanting mtgox as the dominant exchange. Control the price of coins indirectly by sending out fake ticker data using more fake transactions.
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Jun 13, 2011 00:03
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JawKnee posted:If it falls below $1 I'm gonna buy a bitcoin just to say I have one. And the trading volume is so low that if you put in a sell order for $0.000001 you'll skew the average and cause another panic!
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Jun 13, 2011 01:55
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:How long until the first bitcoin related suicide occurs? When the guy who bought 40 high-end video cards sets them all up in his non-air conditioned bedroom during a heat wave, I think that arguably counts as a suicide.
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Jun 13, 2011 04:22
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Pope Guilty posted:The guy who got heat stroke in his sleep and woke up in the hospital to a doctor telling him he had brain damage? Yeah but he only had a few computers there. We already know that none of them have any common sense, so somebody with even more computers will inevitably do the same thing and die. At what point do we just assume that this is effectively a suicide, rather than merely an accidental death?
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Jun 13, 2011 04:27
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Yeah I would actually memorize the wallet code if I had that much real money's worth in bitcoin, especially if I was too stupid to have backups.
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Jun 13, 2011 04:49
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Unguided posted:A government could easily seize bitcoins by walking up to your computer, opening up the bitcoin client and telling it to send the entire balance to a wallet they control. The best way to safeguard against this would be to do the same thing preemptively, have a computer hidden somewhere with a different wallet file. For example, you could rent a cheap VPS with some hosting company and have its sole purpose be to host the second wallet. Even better, you could rent a mini storage next to a wifi hotspot and then use it to store a cheap computer hooked up to a battery, then you can just transfer the coins over to that when the SWAT team rappels off your roof and through your window. Actually the mini storage company banned me after I put several dozen overclocked, caseless PCs in a unit, ran them 24/7 off of an extension cord, and somehow the unit burned down. 
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Jun 13, 2011 18:58
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rcman50166 posted:So what I have heard no one talk about (as far as I know, I skimmed through the entire thread over a period of a few days) is riding this for what it is worth. I agree that this market is volatile, but if someone actively bought and sold on it during each low and high point respectively (local maxes of 10-15 minutes or so), isn't there a bunch of money to be made? Are there any systems in place that prevent this? I feel like if you spent all day on this with enough money you could afford to not work. (not that I am saying this is absolutely a good idea or even feasible) There's nothing wrong with that idea at all except that you would need to know where the high and low points are in advance. If you think that bitcoins are going to oscillate in a predictable sine curve between $10 and $20 several times a day until the end of time, then there is no reason at all not to put your life savings into bitcoins and trade them instead of having a real job.
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Jun 13, 2011 19:04
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Your poison currency is filling up heaven with coal emissions.
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Jun 13, 2011 19:39
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OatmealRaisin posted:They'll all probably be fried from overclocking and poor cooling though The miners are actually quite conscientious about cooling, though, and often they will use a 'caseless' setup that frees the computer's components from the restriction of being in a metal box, thus improving air flow. 
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Jun 13, 2011 22:09
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Jombo posted:http://www.livebitcointicker.com/?rr=15&pl=20 When it hits -5 then I'm going all in. BUY BUY BUY
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Jun 14, 2011 16:47
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Malloreon posted:Now I wish I'd had the bright idea of putting a few hundred $ on mtgox and setting a buy order for $.01 Yeah there's no point doing it now, because the bitcoin market is a robust self-correcting system that will prevent this from happening again.
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Jun 19, 2011 20:21
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Should regulation be done by a self-interested private company, or by a democratically elected government that is responsible to the people who are affected by it? Help me out here, libertarians.
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Jun 20, 2011 00:22
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Wreckus posted:It's so cute that you believe this is how the world works No, it's how I think the world should work, or at least a better alternative than a corporate autocracy supported by an ideology (libertarianism) that thinks that it should be able to do whatever it wants simply because it isn't technically 'government'.
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Jun 20, 2011 00:26
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artard posted:He's not saying he wants LulzSec to build it, but to try to hack it to "prove" its secure But assuming it isn't secure (and it won't be because they're pledging ~$300 for the development of a security system for a stock exchange that's run by one guy), we're in a situation where a group of hackers called 'LulzSec' is getting access to quite a lot of money.
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Jun 20, 2011 00:43
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Fatkraken posted:I've just come back to the thread after the weekend and apparently something big happened? could someone summarise and tall me what page it kicks off? Password cracking is the new mining, and luckily enough it relies on the same equipment.
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Jun 20, 2011 01:09
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It starts with one person sending 432,077 to another, minus a 50,000 cut to someone else. The second account does the same thing, and so on and so on until there's no money left. Whatever's going on is shady, but only half a million bitcoins are actually involved.
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Jun 20, 2011 01:37
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TradeHill is on a marketing blitz to become the replacement for Gox Mountain, but nobody trusts them because they don't have the past performance of a trading card game trading company. The free market wins again!
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Jun 20, 2011 02:46
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Powered Descent posted:Kevin from Chicago, who bought FIVE MILLION DOLLARS worth of bitcoins yesterday for three thousand dollars. Yes but weren't those trades reverted anyway?
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Jun 20, 2011 19:22
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The sponsors of this show spent real money (or possibly real bitcoins) to give Kevin Day a platform for rationalizing how a rollback is a bad thing in the specific situation where it would hurt him. Did they get their money's worth?
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Jun 20, 2011 20:37
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Poor Kevin only withdrew 643 of the bitcoins that he bought from the hacker. Is not a man entitled to his self-interested exploitation of a situation?
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Jun 20, 2011 20:46
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theflyingorc posted:Am I right in guessing that there is absolutely no protection from MTGOX just taking everyone's bitcoins and putting them into their own wallet? Yes but the only thing you can do with bitcoins is to take them to MtGox and exchange them for real money, and once people stop trusting MtGox then the whole house of cards comes crashing down.
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Jun 20, 2011 21:20
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Iviv posted:How would one go about unironically sending bitcoins, as opposed to ironically sending them? Hey Iviv, code:
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Jun 20, 2011 23:06
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The best part is that the actual bitcoin system itself has been working perfectly this entire time, and the problems are all caused by the monopolies that unregulated systems naturally form.
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Jun 21, 2011 00:30
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Orange Sunshine posted:If Kevin is not the hacker, then why did the hacker sell all those coins for 1 cent each? If he is the hacker, then he's been caught. One way or another, this should be highly entertaining for all of us here. Selling the coins for 1 cent was a good idea because it drove down the price, making it possible for him to withdraw many coins and get around MtGox's withdraw limit. Everyone initially thought that the hacker simply had a second account with which to do this, but apparently Kevin happened to spontaneously decide to do what was most convenient for the hacker at the exact correct time.
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Jun 21, 2011 00:38
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The most notable thing to happen since the Mtgox hack is this:
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Jun 22, 2011 02:48
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demonachizer posted:I would like to propose that the reason the internet was invented was so that people could watch a phone vibrate itself off of the arm of a chair remotely. Satoshi actually mentioned this is the bitcoin whitepaper.
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Jun 22, 2011 17:47
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Captain Beans posted:How is the MTGOX hack going to end bitcoins? I thought they are all just moving over to this tradehill place? Tradehill crashes under normal usage circumstances and will absolutely not be able to cope with scaling up at all. MtGox genuinely does have more professionalism and reliability, as silly as that sounds. The currency is dead because its users decided it should be a commodity that should let them get rich on the credulousness of other users. Nobody should use it as a currency anymore because its value wildly fluctuates and the only reason for a merchant to accept bitcoins is to exchange them for real money, but the community is too incompetent and greedy to set up a reliable exchange.
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Jun 22, 2011 18:10
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Good Citizen posted:A huge amount of bitcoins are currently being held in MTgox's wallet that actually belong to their users. Nobody can pull their coins out of that exchange right now because the exchange is offline. As soon as those coins are released back into the market, it'll be like a bomb going off in the bitcoin 'economy'. Chances are that bitcoins will crash across all exchanges immediately after MTgox comes back online. That's OK though because MtGox will crash if a significant number of people do a significant number of trades or withdrawals. It's a self-correcting system! 
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Jun 22, 2011 18:27
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Gutcruncher posted:Haha, holy poo poo! There is NOTHING these people can do right! Nobody can be so inept and so many things without being an elaborate troll. This whole bitcoin thing is an elaborate anthropology experiment and Bruce is a paid actor.
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Jun 23, 2011 02:51
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