|
I think I have some understanding as to why bitcoins are valued the way they are. At first glance, I was puzzled by the entire thing, as I couldn't figure out why bitcoins would be selling for $10-$30, and not for $1 or $1000 or 1 cent. There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to why any particular price would be attached to them. But what occured to me is that the price of bitcoins is basically a function of the cost of mining them. Take the cost of high end graphics cards and other hardware needed, add in the cost of electricity, and you have the cost of mining bitcoins. Now add to that the expectation that this whole system is continuing to grow, which means whatever amount of bitcoins you're mining daily right now will shrink as time goes on and more people join in the mining. This makes bitcoins much more expensive to mine than they would appear to be at first glance. Now add to this the expectation that bitcoins will continue to go up in price, and price in some of this future price increase now as markets always do, and you get the current price of bitcoins. The reason for the tremendous volatility in the price is that there are so many unknowns involved in pricing in all these expected changes in the future. It seems to me that the entire system is based on the necessity for continued and fairly rapid growth, though. If there were no expectation that bitcoins were going to rise rapidly in price and that the number of miners was going to keep going up, then the current price would be only slightly over the cost of mining them today, which would be perhaps $1.50 or $2 per bitcoin (from what I've read). The disappearance of the potential large profits involved would cause many of the miners to give it up, which would drop the price even more. It's hard to know where the price would settle out at, $1, 50 cents, 25 cents? At some point, the price will stop rising and the number of people mining bitcoins will stop going up. At this point, what I've descibed above will happen; the market will stop pricing in growth and will realize that the price of these should equal only slightly more than the cost of producing them. This will cause the price to mostly collapse. The only way the price could fail to collapse is if bitcoins actually became accepted as a real curency. Right now, they're pretty much only being used for drug purchases, and as I understand it the silk road market involving these things is nowhere near large enough to support anywhere near the current pricing of bitcoins. 25 cents (or much less) a coin would be fine for the few hundred drug deals happening per day using bitcoins. So, this thing is gonna grow and grow and grow... until it collapses. What's utterly unpredictable is when the collapse is going to take place. It may happen suddenly one day or over the course of a week, or there may be a period of time when it becomes clear to everyone that the price has stopped going up, followed by the inevitable crash. But no bubble can grow forever.
|
| # ¿ Jun 13, 2011 04:40 |
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2013 04:53 |
|
|
Here's the biggest reason why Bitcoin isn't going to ever become a viable currency. There's nothing to stop anyone from creating Bytecoin or Ecoin or Bitdollar or Bitcoin 2. In fact, at this point it's almost a guarantee that someone out there is working on creating duplicates of this bitcoin system. When they do, you can guarantee that the duplicates will take off. Everyone involved in Bitcoin now wishes they had been one of the early adopters, back when anyone could mine 50 or 100 bitcoins per day using just their CPU. So any Bitcoin clone which is created will have people pouring into it wanting to be one of the early adopters. Soon there will be 2 Bitcoin type systems, then 3, 4, 5, 10, and so on. There is nothing stopping people from making an endless number of these things. Note that all of this is going to happen soon, assuming Bitcoin doesn't utterly collapse in the next few weeks or months. It will happen before bitcoin ever becomes accepted as a real currency. Every new bitcoin clone weakens the original, because the people mining it and trading in it are going to be taken from the same pool of people who are already dealing in bitcoins. Any legitimate merchant who might have been thinking of accepting bitcoins will look at this mess of 5 or 10 or 20 competing bitcoin clones and want nothing to do with it. The question I have is, does the bitcoin system last long enough for the clones to appear, or does it it collapse first?
|
| # ¿ Jun 13, 2011 21:39 |
|
|
Uglycat posted:This objection occurred to me early in the thread, and I was surprised I hadn't (yet) seen anybody propose it. It is possible that somehow bitcoin could end up being regarded as a global currency which has value, but I think it's very, very unlikely. In fact, I'd say that one of the bitcoin clones will be much more likely to succeed than the original, as they'll have the opportunity to fix whatever the first bitcoin has done wrong. Facebook learned from Myspace's example, google did it better than yahoo. If I were making a Bitcoin clone today, for example, I'd give the thing a max number of coins much higher than 21 million, perhaps in the neighborhood of a billion. A global currency with only 21 million units is not terribly useful, and the idea that people are going to be trading in fractions of a coin is not one that anyone is going to like. And a person mining bitcoins today on their home computer is probably making .1 coins per day, not very satisfying. Multiply the number of coins appearing per day by 50 and perhaps you have a better system. There are probably various ways of improving the system, which will become clear when the clones start coming out, each varying somewhat from the original. (Assuming bitcoin doesn't collapse first, of course)
|
| # ¿ Jun 13, 2011 22:10 |
|
|
Nenonen posted:In a normal ponzi scheme, the people who run it realize at some point that they have peaked and make a run with the money, or get caught. Some time after this even the true believers start to wake up. But since there's no one in the Bitcoin scheme to pull the plug or be laid with the responsibility, it will just keep booming and crashing for as long as there are people willing to put real money into the machine. In theory, assuming people don't wisen up (and some never will), it could continue for an eternity. It'd be like a perpetual Ponzi scheme. No, I don't think this is correct. Speculative bubbles, such as this one, can only exist so long as they're growing. Bubbles grow and grow and grow and grow, until they collapse. People are willing to pay $20 for a bitcoin today, because they think they'll be worth $50 or $100 or $1000 soon enough. When the bubble stops growing, and everyone realizes this, then people stop and think, "Ok, how should we really price these things? What are they really worth?" And then your tulip bulbs are only worth 25 cents and your house is only worth $160,000 instead of $400,000, and your bitcoin is worth... some number of pennies, whatever amount of value is needed to allow the silk road drug selling to continue.
|
| # ¿ Jun 13, 2011 22:26 |
|
|
Death Himself posted:Been reading more of their forums because I can't stay away. Where did you read this? From what I've read, nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, and his name is likely a pseudonym, and he stopped posting to the bitcoin forums 6 months ago.
|
| # ¿ Jun 14, 2011 21:41 |
|
|
The Bible posted:20 bitcoins. At the right time of day, that could be worth 600 dollars. For an hour of dubiously legal phone sex. That post was from January, back when Bitcoins were selling for 50 cents (or whatever it was then).
|
| # ¿ Jun 15, 2011 01:04 |
|
|
BondGamer posted:The next difficulty update is projected to make it almost 50% more difficult to mine coins. In other words, this thing is going to collapse very, very soon. The amount of processing power going into mining is increasing exponentially; after this next difficulty increase, the average person even with a typical gaming graphics card is going to require weeks to mine a single coin. By a few weeks from now, it will take months for a typical person to mine a single coin. The only way for this to be supported is if the price continues increasing exponentially, bitcoins have to be worth $100 a piece within weeks or this bubble bursts. On the other hand, at the peak of tulip mania, tulip bulbs were going for the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars, so who knows how high this bubble can get before it implodes?
|
| # ¿ Jun 15, 2011 03:23 |
|
|
Xel posted:There actually is, and now that the bitcoin difficulty went up it may actually be more profitable to mine them instead. Namecoin isn't actually a clone of bitcoin, it's some weird alternate DNS system which uses the bitcoin software to generate... somethingorother. I haven't been able to figure out exactly what it is, since every description I've found of it everywhere is very vague. Has anyone here figured out exactly what Namecoin is? I know that some of the bitcoin people are now mining for these namecoins, whatever they are.
|
| # ¿ Jun 15, 2011 20:56 |
|
|
Devian666 posted:It appears to be a DNS based on bitcoin technology. It just appears to be a way to access .bit sites. I don't understand how the Namecoin thing is possibly supposed to work. At least Bitcoin has some sort of pseudo-reasonable plan as to how it could become a global currency; the idea is that millions or billions of people all start running the software and the bitcoins are divided into 1/10000th or 1/100000th of a coin so that there are enough for everyone to use. How would the Namecoin thing take off? Already, with the current number of people mining them, a namecoin is "worth" about a dollar. With a few more months of exponential increase, they will be "worth" about $50, which is the most anyone would be willing to pay for a crappy nonstandard domain name (once you buy it, you only pay some small .01 coin fee a few times a year to maintain it). At that point, the price can't go up since domain name pricing is a known factor, which means no more people would ever want to start mining them. Which means that the few hundred or perhaps thousand people running the namecoin software will be the only ones ever running it. Which makes their domain names worthless.
|
| # ¿ Jun 15, 2011 21:53 |
|
|
Doody the Clown posted:Namecoins are exactly like bitcoins and can be split the same way. If a namecoin is worth $50 and you want to pay $5 for a domain, you pay 0.1 namecoins. Then who is determining how much a .bit domain name is worth? I was under the impression that 1 namecoin = 1 domain name. If it works differently, then how does it work? How are domain names being given out, if coins don't equal domain names?
|
| # ¿ Jun 15, 2011 22:08 |
|
|
Dave Inc. posted:So what's the end-game for this poo poo? Even if the price stabilizes for a significant amount of time, you still can't do anything with them aside from buy drugs/hookers. Oh, there are two possible endgames: 1. Bitcoin becomes a global currency accepted everywhere, with each coin worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and transactions done in thousandths of a bitcoin, or 2. The Bitcoin bubble eventually collapses, the value drops to nothing, thousands of high end graphics cards are dumped onto ebay all at the same time, while a handful of true believers continue to mine bitcoins that no one will ever again want. You make the call as to which is more likely.
|
| # ¿ Jun 16, 2011 11:20 |
|
|
Tasty and Delicious posted:You could buy at a significant discount in the dark pools. If you buy a large quantity, it's attractive to a seller because 1) they don't even know if there's enough buyers to sell at a given price anyway and 2) it's not directly going to drive the price down. Also, if you wanted to buy 10,000 bitcoins, and you tried putting that order through all at once, it would drive the market price up and you would end up paying 10% more (or whatever) for most of your coins.
|
| # ¿ Jun 16, 2011 17:44 |
|
|
uuugghhhhhhhh jr posted:Well, to answer "who actually buys them for that": Everybody does, right now anyway. That's why the graph is what it is. As I've stated before on here, I believe there is a reason why bitcoins are $20, and not, say, $2 or $2000. It's because the price of bitcoins is based on the cost of mining them. Take the cost of the hardware and electricity, add in the fact that your mining hardware is going to be producing fewer and fewer bitcoins over time, which makes mining more expensive than it initially appears to be. Now add in the expectation that bitcoins are going to go up in value, and price some of that future increase in now. End result = current cost of bitcoins. Since much of the above equation involves unknown variables, the cost fluctuates all over the place, but the market is aiming towards something which makes some sort of sense (forgetting for a moment that this entire thing is doomed to fail).
|
| # ¿ Jun 16, 2011 17:52 |
|
|
Tasty and Delicious posted:That would be nice if it were true but historically market value is based on psychology and not tangibles. The current price is based on what a small set of people think bitcoin will be worth in the future and nothing more. When has market value been based on nothing but psychology? What market could exist for long if it weren't in any way based on anything real? The stock market fluctuates all over the place, but ultimately stock prices are based on how much money the companies are earning. Gold is probably way overpriced today, at $1500 an ounce, but the price is based on the fact that it takes $500 an ounce or so to get it out of the ground. You aren't gonna see gold selling for $5 an ounce or $50,000 an ounce, no matter what odd psychological factors are going on. Bitcoin prices have been tracking the cost of producing them since the market for them first started. And if you want to see more evidence of this, look at the pricing of Namecoins. Namecoin is some weird alternate DNS system which is supposed to be funded using Namecoins, which are produced the same way Bitcoins are. They just started a few months ago, and when people wanted to know how to price them, they straightforwardly just looked at the amount of computer effort it took to produce them compared to the amount it takes to produce bitcoins, and set their value as that fraction of the value of bitcoins. The bitcoin bubble is different than the tulip bulb bubble, because the price doesn't just move up because everyone bids it up. It can't go TOO much above the price of producing them, or everyone realizes this makes no sense and the price drops. Or at least, that's how it appears to be working. If you've got a typical gaming computer, you're probably making a few dollars a day mining bitcoins, and that was true 1 month ago or 3 months ago or 6 months ago, if you immediately sold them.
|
| # ¿ Jun 16, 2011 18:25 |
|
|
uuugghhhhhhhh jr posted:I'm pretty sure the value of a bitcoin determines the cost of mining, not the other way around. It's a feedback loop, of course. People are mining bitcoins for whatever crazy reason, it costs money and time to do so, so they put a value on them. As more of them join in, they become more expensive to mine, so the price goes up. People see that the price keeps going up, they start projecting future price increases and they factor some of that in now and raise the price now, which makes bitcoin mining seem lucrative so more people start mining. Which makes mining more expensive, so the price of bitcoins needs to go up more, and so on.
|
| # ¿ Jun 16, 2011 18:44 |
|
|
The future of bitcoins, when they become a wonderous global currency: A few years from now, bitcoins will be worth a million dollars a piece. As there will be 10 million of them or so, this will provide 10 trillion dollars worth of currency for the people of the world to use, with transactions being done in 10000ths and 100000ths of a bitcoin. And mining will still go on! Because of the high value of bitcoins, a large percentage of the world's processing power will be going into bitcoin mining. Today, it takes roughly 1 kilowatt of continuous power to produce a bitcoin per day. In the future, mining a bitcoin will cost about $500,000 in electricity, which, at 10 cents per kilowatt hour, comes out to 5 million kilowatt hours, or about 200 megawatts of continous power. As 350 bitcoins will be mined per day, this means that bitcoin production will eat up 70 gigawatts of power, or roughly the entire electricity usage of the United Kingdom. Hopefully the price will stop going up at this point, since another 50 fold increase would eat up the entire world's electricity supply. If this does happen, though, it will be totally worth it in order to have a cool digital currency.
|
| # ¿ Jun 16, 2011 19:04 |
|
|
Midorka posted:Except it's not working like this at all so your logic is incredibly flawed. According to your logic then value should steadily be on the rise, which it's not. I explained this further on this very page, but I suppose I'll quote myself: "As I've stated before on here, I believe there is a reason why bitcoins are $20, and not, say, $2 or $2000. It's because the price of bitcoins is based on the cost of mining them. Take the cost of the hardware and electricity, add in the fact that your mining hardware is going to be producing fewer and fewer bitcoins over time, which makes mining more expensive than it initially appears to be. Now add in the expectation that bitcoins are going to go up in value, and price some of that future increase in now. End result = current cost of bitcoins. Since much of the above equation involves unknown variables, the cost fluctuates all over the place, but the market is aiming towards something which makes some sort of sense (forgetting for a moment that this entire thing is doomed to fail)".
|
| # ¿ Jun 16, 2011 19:15 |
|
|
ChubbyEmoBabe posted:Look at the volume, it has gone waaay down. You're right, the volume of trades has tanked. It's now back to what it was weeks or months ago. Can anyone who has more experience looking at markets give a guess as to what this tremendous drop in volume means?
|
| # ¿ Jun 16, 2011 19:24 |
|
|
Midorka posted:I read this as well and it doesn't make any sense. Electricity prices widely vary from place to place first off. Secondly the computers are still using the same amount of electricity regardless of whether 1,000 people are mining, or 10,000. It only gets harder to mine with more people, for less of a profit. Your whole case has a million holes in it, but basically, you're wrong. The value of Bitcoins has 0 to do with what it costs to mine them. Electricity prices vary from place to place, but not by all that much. They're somewhere around 12 cents per kilowatt hour, perhaps 50% more or less, in most places that anyone would be mining bitcoins. The computers are using the same amount of electricity regardless of how many people are mining, but the amount of electricity and hardware you put into the system gets you a smaller and smaller amount of bitcoins depending on how many other people are mining. You haven't in any way explained why I'm wrong, you're simply stating it. If my case has a million holes, you have yet to point out one of them.
|
| # ¿ Jun 16, 2011 20:53 |
|
|
Devian666 posted:I've been looking at the difficulty system and it adjusts every 2016 blocks to fix the rate of bitcoin production to match the curve. At the moment the production of bitcoins is way too high, and the next adjustment should happen in about 8-9 days at current rates. The payoff time for hardware is going to become very long. Here's an example (with made up, estimated numbers) of the problem which miners face: Pay $30,000 for your big pallet of graphics cards and motherboards, begin mining bitcoins. Make 50 bitcoins per day, worth $1000. 2 weeks later, only making 25 bitcoins a day, total = 700 bitcoins 4 weeks later, only making 12 bitcoins a day, total = 1050 bitcoins 6 weeks later, only making 6 bitcoins a day, total = 1218 bitcoins 8 weeks later, only making 3 bitcoins a day, total = 1292 bitcoins 10 weeks later, only making 1.5 bitcoins a day, total = 1334 bitcoins 12 weeks later, only making .75 bitcoins a day, total = 1355 bitcoins 14 weeks later, only making .375 bitcoins a day, total = 1365.5 bitcoins 16 weeks later, only making .1875 bitcoins a day, total = 1370.75 bitcoins And so on. The total never reaches 1400, worth $28,000 under today's prices. With the sort of exponential increases we're seeing in processing power being dumped onto the network, whatever amount of bitcoins you're currently mining within a few weeks X 2 = the total amount of bitcoins you will EVER be able to earn with your current computer setup.
|
| # ¿ Jun 16, 2011 21:23 |
|
|
Ok, I've realized something else here, which relates to the price of bitcoins. For any particular computer system, whether a single card computer or a ridiculous set of 15 computers with 4 graphics cards each, there is a total number of bitcoins which that system will ever produce. Due to the exponential increase in processing power being added to the bitcoin network, the amount of bitcoins any one system produces will be cut in half periodically until finally it is producing nearly none. What this means is that you can calculate, with some reasonable probablility of success, how many bitcoins your system will ever produce. So you can actually make a reasonable estimate whether it's a better investment/gamble to buy a $1000 computer for bitcoin mining, or to simply buy $1000 in bitcoins. How many bitcoins will your $1000 system ever produce? If it's more than $1000 worth (also taking into consideration the electricity cost), at today's prices, you are better off buying the computer. Less, and you're better off just buying the bitcoins. This is where the current price of bitcoins comes from. It's not an exact one to one ratio, but it's not TOO far off from this, nor has it been since bitcoins have been actually being traded in volume. People assume that bitcoin mining has been obscenely profitable over the past several months, but in fact anyone 1 month ago, 3 months ago, 5 months ago, would have done perhaps just about as well just buying the bitcoins.
|
| # ¿ Jun 16, 2011 22:08 |
|
|
According to this webpage http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/ (see bottom left corner) the Deepbit mining pool is currently providing over 50% of the computing power to the Bitnet network. This means that the Deepbit, if it wanted to, could seize everyone else's bitcoins or do whatever else they wanted to, and no one could do anything about it. Doesn't that mean that Bitcoin has essentially already failed? The Global Currency of the Future is now being controlled by whatever guy happens to be in charge of Deepbit.
|
| # ¿ Jun 17, 2011 07:13 |
|
|
Devian666 posted:There have been people DDoSing the server on occassion to "protect" the system. Despite what he says people are gullible if they believe he's not planning something or gets greedy one day. So Bitcoin started because Libertarians didn't like their currency being controlled by the government, and now their currency is being controlled by Some Dude who lucked his way into running the biggest mining pool. And whereas the government is controlled by the people through elections, Bitcoin owners have to merely hope that Deepbit Dude is a nice guy who doesn't want to cause trouble. This is a perfect example of the failure of Libertarianism as a philosophy. Take power out of the hands of the people, and put it in the hands of rich guys, that will surely result in freedom for all, right?
|
| # ¿ Jun 17, 2011 07:21 |
|
|
Doody the Clown posted:If people are smart they cash out whenever they're able to as often as possible from pools. Most pools take the fee out of the entire block when it's generated, not from transactions, so there's no downside to withdrawing as often as possible. He's making $2000 a day worth of bitcoins at current rates. When you said, "he could run away with however much is in the system at the time", my understanding is that ALL bitcoins are in the system at all times, and he could seize them all. Of course, this would collapse the whole system and probably then there'd be nobody willing to buy his coins.
|
| # ¿ Jun 17, 2011 07:37 |
|
|
Angela Christine posted:Why is a conspiracy even necessary? A month ago bitcoins were worth like $10 or so, right? Then there were a few popular articles (notably the Silk Road ones) that created a temporary demand for BTCs among non-technoanarchistlibertarians and the price spiked to around $30 very quickly. Since then the price has been very unstable. A couple months ago they had never been above $10, so how is "crashing" to $13 evidence of a vast illuminati/NWO/lizard people plot to destroy bitcoins? Bitcoins have been going up in value for the past year. May 22, 2010, someone trades 10,000 bitcoins for 2 pizzas worth $25, valuing bitcoins at 1/4 cents each. October 2010, Bitcoins are selling for 6 cents a piece. November 2010, Bitcoins first reach 50 cents. February 2011 Bitcoins first reach $1. May, 2011 Bitcoins first reach $6. And upwards from there. There have been flat periods of months, especially in the earlier days, but you can see a steady progression upwards. There is no "real price" to fall back on after the press coverage dies down, each burst of press coverage increases the number of people doing this and ultimately raises the price permanently... until the eventual collapse of the system.
|
| # ¿ Jun 18, 2011 07:39 |
|
|
KerwinSauce posted:How can it go up "permanently" and have an "eventual collapse", it either does one or the other. If the price never goes above $30 again, then the system will collapse. The bubble has to keep growing (in the long run, not every day), or all the speculators will stop buying, and that's 99% of the buyers. This thing is gonna keep growing exponentially till it implodes. I don't think there's any possible way we can predict when that happens, though. The price of bitcoins 4 months from now could be 10 cents, or $1000. A year from now, I'd guess on a price in the pennies, if anyone is paying anything for them. They have some use as tokens for online drug purchases.
|
| # ¿ Jun 18, 2011 08:28 |
|
|
Agreed posted:I want to see an olde tyme sepia photograph of the guy exchanging bitcoins and the pizza delivery guy shaking hands, grinning at the camera as pizza establishes the value of the Bitcoin. "From today forward, we shall all remember this momentous occasion as the day that pizza was first purchased, legitimizing our currency at one-quarter-cent of that awful government money! To the skies, friends!" Here are pictures of the pizzas which were bought for 10,000 bitcoins 13 months ago. http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/pizza/
|
| # ¿ Jun 18, 2011 08:30 |
|
|
Potential miners now losing money: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=18803.0 This guy spent $11000 for a system which produces 12 ghash of procssing power, and would now make 12 bitcoins per day, worth $180 at today's prices. But he's gotta pay electricty on top of that, and with the amount of processing power being added to the network all the time, he'll soon only be making 9 bitcoins a day, then 6, then 3, and so on. He did the math, realized he was going to lose money with the price of bitcoins at $15, and is selling all his mining equipment before he has barely started.
|
| # ¿ Jun 18, 2011 10:02 |
|
|
gninjagnome posted:So, if I'm understanding this right, difficulty increases after a set number of blocks are mined, and the difficulty is based on the computing power used to mine the previous set of blocks. Does this mean when the profitability falls, and people start pulling their rigs, the difficulty update to adjust to the newer smaller computing power could take months to reach? Like if 75% of the computing power vanished right after it updated, it would take 8 weeks to or so to update? Yep, that's how it would work. But the odds of 75% of the processing power disappearing from the network right after the update are pretty small. People aren't likely to pull their computers from the network, though, since once they've already bought them and put them into use they're going to keep mining with them until the cost of electricity is more than the value of the bitcoins. The guy who was linked to above only did so because he hadn't yet opened the boxes on most of his equipment, so he could still sell it as new equipment.
|
| # ¿ Jun 18, 2011 11:27 |
|
|
Millstone posted:If one sets up a rig with 2 6990s, how long does that take to make 1 ButtCoin at current difficulty? If they aren't overclocked, each one produces 670 megahash, and I believe that at current difficulty, it takes around 1 gigahash to produce 1 bitcoin per day. So, the rig will make about 1.3 bitcoins per day, which currently sells for about $20. Keep in mind that about 10 days from now, it will drop to .9 per day, and 2 weeks later it will drop to .6 or so, probably, and so on, as the amount of computing power on the network is going up exponentially.
|
| # ¿ Jun 18, 2011 19:19 |
|
|
Frozen-Solid posted:The "work" being done by mining is the fact that you are allowing your machine to be a part of the transaction process. Each time a transaction is made on bitcoins it has to be verified by the entire block chain, which are other systems that are mining. This includes whenever someone "mines" a bitcoin it has to be verified that it has been mined. Except there is far, far more processing power in the network than there needs to be in order to get it to function, probably 1000 times as much as is necessary. The only value in having 30,000 graphics cards (or whatever it is) all maxxed out running the network is that it makes it difficult for anyone to invade the network and compromise it. But you could achieve the same effect by simply having official servers running the network, at 1/1000th the cost (in processing power). But then The Man would be in control of the system, instead of The People.
|
| # ¿ Jun 18, 2011 19:29 |
|
|
Good Citizen posted:Does anyone know how many bitcoins are currently in circulation, and, possibly, have a calculation of how long it will take until the full 21 million are mined out? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:T...s_over_time.png The increased difficulty is not actually a result of fewer bitcoins being produced per day. There are as many bitcoins being produced today now as there were in the beginning. It's because there's 100,000 times (or whatever it is) as much processing power in the system now as there was in the beginning, all chasing the same 50 coins being produced every 10 minutes.
|
| # ¿ Jun 18, 2011 23:40 |
|
|
Bitcoin poetry: The increasing price of Bitcoin Might one day entice you to join But the impending crash Will take all of your cash You'll feel like you've been kicked in the groin
|
| # ¿ Jun 19, 2011 00:43 |
|
|
A Fancy 400 lbs posted:"And feel like a kick to the groin." would be a much more aesthetically pleasing ending. Alright, new improved limerick: The increasing price of Bitcoin May one day entice you to join But the impending crash Will take all your cash And feel like a kick to the groin
|
| # ¿ Jun 19, 2011 03:48 |
|
|
So someone just sold 432,000 bitcoins, 200,000+ of them at a penny a piece? If this really happened, and from the evidence it looks like it did, the fallout from this should be hilarious. Were these coins all stolen? Did someone gently caress up and accidentally sell all their coins for whatever they would go for? If not, why would someone purposely sell 200,000+ coins for 1 cents each? Will Mgtox try to reverse these transactions? One way or another, fun times for everyone watching!
|
| # ¿ Jun 19, 2011 19:02 |
|
|
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?...44409#msg244409 "I can confirm from someone I know that bitcoins were indeed bought at the $0.01 price based on a standing bid that had been there. These coins were then transferred out of mtgox for obvious reasons and have showed up in the wallet, so they're real". So the question is, did the guy who bought 250,000 bitcoins at 1 cent a piece manage to cash them all out of mtgox before it went down? If he did, there is NO WAY for anyone to get those coins back again, even if they're stolen.
|
| # ¿ Jun 19, 2011 19:13 |
|
|
Ok, so it appears that someon hacked into mtgox, got all the account info, and went after the account with the most coins in it, which had 432,000. Which means, amazingly enough, that someone actually had 432,000 bitcoins. I think we just found Satoshi Nakamoto! Then he sold them all at once, but bought most of them back himself with another account. The 250,000 buy order for 1 cent each was the same person who sold them. Mtgox claims they are going to reverse all the transactions. If it's possible to mostly do that, it means the hacker was stupid enough not to simply withdraw all the bitcoins himself, instead of trying to do this weird move. Absolutely nothing could have been done about it if the hacker had simply stolen hundreds of thousands of bitcoins. Hell, he could have stolen ALL of the bitcoins on mtgox, which I'm guessing is the majority of the world's supply. Welcome to the currency of the future, where the only thing that stopped one person from stealing most of it was his own incompetence! I guess as long as all future hackers promise to be equally incompetent, we can all trust Bitcoin to be our global currency.
|
| # ¿ Jun 19, 2011 19:30 |
|
|
The $4,000,000 question is, did the hacker manage to withdraw those 250,000 bitcoins from Mtgox before it went down? The mtgox press release is implying that everything can be reversed, but why would the hacker not IMMEDIATELY withdraw the coins once the sale went through? Am I a bad person for hoping the hacker got the bitcoins? The result would be hilarious, especially as I like to believe that only the founder of bitcoin himself would likely have so many bitcoins.
|
| # ¿ Jun 19, 2011 19:49 |
|
|
Aleksei Vasiliev posted:MtGox limits daily withdrawals to $1,000. Yes, $1000 in cash. But it was my understanding that you could withdraw as many bitcoins as you wanted. There is no way that Mtgox would only allow people to withdraw 50 bitcoins a day or some tiny amount like that, nobody would use the exchange if that were the case.
|
| # ¿ Jun 19, 2011 19:54 |
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2013 04:53 |
|
|
Molotov Cock Tale posted:So if you can withdraw $1k max to your wallet, is how many bitcoins you are capped at dependent on the current exchange rate? So if the exchange rate is $0.01 to 1 bitcoin, you could withdraw 100k bitcoins? No, no, no, you can withdraw all the bitcoins you want.
|
| # ¿ Jun 19, 2011 19:57 |
|
