Bitcoin: Of Freemasons, Free Markets and Bill Cosby Related Investment Schemes

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > Bitcoin: Of Freemasons, Free Markets and Bill Cosby Related Investment Schemes

«‹›4 »

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

I don't like it because it's the libertarian dream currency.

Only those who were lucky enough to hear about it first can make money from it.
You have to have a computer to use the currency, if you are too poor to own a computer and Internet access and your employer only pays in bitcoins you have no choice but to do as they want to access to it.
There is a upper limit to the total amount of BitCoins that can ever exist, there is a lower limit on the smallest fraction of a BitCoin. This means that eventually there will be no way to generate more bitcoins and everybody has to fight over whatever exists. GOLD STANDARD!
Each person is personally responsible for their Bitcoins, if the file that says you have bitcoins is destroyed you will lose them. This is despite the fact that Bitcoins live exclusively on computers and all transactions are logged.
If you survive on digging out trash from the trash heaps of your terrible country you can never use BitCoins.
There is no way to convert BitCoins into paper currency for said terrible countries that can only afford civil wars every year. You could convert BitCoins into paper currency, but because they are not being logged the transactions are not real.

# ¿ May 24, 2011 03:01

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 19:22

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

The wallet thing is kind of confusing.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/EWallet

As I understand it, the wallet is like a real wallet with paper money in it.

The currency is not protected against rich assholes. :argh:

# ¿ May 24, 2011 03:33

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

Agnostic watermelon posted:

If you're going to make a cool new future currency, you can't come up with a better name than "bitcoins"?

The future currency is supposed to be Credits or SpaceBux.

# ¿ May 24, 2011 04:24

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

ChubbyEmoBabe posted:

Heh, you could do that now without a single bitcoin in your possesion. There is the whole problem.

Would this work?

Use multiple accounts to buy and sell bitcoins at increasing prices between them. Once the price is at the point you want, sell them off to the bitcoin buyers who see dollar signs as the price goes up. Do the opposite to bring the price down, buy up all the bitcoins that everybody is trying to sell, and raise the price again.

Considering the whole thing is electronic only and there's no waiting period, I'm surprised infected computer's have not done this yet. I guess once it gets more popular we'll see something like this happen. Or maybe it has happened and caused the bubble.

It's also a bit late, but I wanted to make a joke about packaging oatmeal raisin cookies with chocolate chip cookies on the end to trick buyers into buying toxic assets.

# ¿ May 24, 2011 23:13

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

If I would have bought $40,000 when it started I could have made $360,000 not too long ago, and instead of the rich banks getting the money first the little guy like me with a 10,000 GPU cluster gets a chance. It's the great equalizer people! I need to tell the folks down at the golf course about this. Maybe I'll make my own e-currency and only generate 10 million of them.

# ¿ May 25, 2011 02:06

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

tiananman posted:

Yeah but it's size to value ratio is quite miniscule. You can carry around hundreds of thousands of dollars in a small handbag without breaking a sweat. Or you can carry around a few grand in your pocket. Compare that to how much copper you'd need to carry around, or even the amount of silver you'd need.

That's only because people value gold to have a high price. Like bitcoins, there is only so much gold in the world. Once it's mined up, nobody can get any new gold from this planet. They can turn it into fractions, but that just makes it fiat currency because only governments or rich people would get to set it, and rich people are pretty much the government in most countries. After that the price of gold would rise in a bubble until somebody lands on an asteroid filled with gold, causing the price to crash.

tiananman posted:

The continued destruction of unsustainable paper money systems that we've been watching occur at an accelerating pace over the last 40. We'll see a balance of power tilt increasingly towards China, which will be precipitated by a rise of the yuan and the death of the dollar.

Westerners who don't own any real assets will take it in the shorts and they'll blame Obama and Bush and Congress and their neighbors, and Canada and Mexico and Jesus and the Internet - but as I said these folks are doomed to be the dullards of history.

Our grandchildren will say, "why did everyone trust central banks, putting all of their eggs in that basket, when it was CRYSTAL clear that governments were broke, the fiat currencies were on death's door and the central bankers were all full of poo poo?"

The question isn't "when will the dollar fail" it's "what makes you think it isn't failing right now?"

I'm not the person making these claims. Check out this recent report from the IMF saying basically the same thing: http://www.newsytype.com/5690-imf-china-economy-us/

I'm confused, you start about paper currency being terrible, and then say the dollar will fail and the yuan will replace it as though there is only room for one type of currency in the world; the UK still has it's own currency despite losing vast amounts of territory and economic power over the last few centuries.

Edit: I want to make it clear that gold is completely worthless except in 10% of it's use. It may as well be fiat currency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Consumption

quote:

The consumption of gold produced in the world is about 50% in jewelry, 40% in investments, and 10% in industry.

# ¿ May 25, 2011 06:27

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

The Mad Archivist posted:

Alright, obviously putting real money into this is retarded as poo poo, as is leaving your computer on all the time to mine it. But is there any drawback to just having it run in the background while you do whatever, and then at the end of the week cashing in and getting yourself a soda?

You could be using your processor to produce something more than a fiat-like currency that only has value because it's backed by people on the Internet.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

# ¿ May 25, 2011 06:47

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

I just thought of something, where are the competing open source currencies? It's been a couple of months, there should be fifty of them by now and 100 forks of the Bitcoin project.

# ¿ May 25, 2011 06:55

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

Blorange posted:

I wonder what the actual value of the flops people are throwing at this adds up to be. If someone like folding@home started sponsoring bitcoin so you get "paid" for your calculations, this could almost be feasible.

Of course, Russian mob money can work too.

You can not really put a value on the FLOPs, as the value can only be determined by what the time produces. For example, if you play The Witcher 2 for 22 hours, those FLOPs are worthless. If you run a command and control computer to run down/up the price of Bitcoins using millions of infected PCs, you'll use significantly fewer FLOPs than the previous scenario but will make quite a bit of money.

It gets harder if you are running Folding@Home or BOINC. You are producing work, but there's no way to know how much value your computer produced until the work is completed and analyzed. Any value assigned beforehand will be completely arbitrary, or the expected value of the work (also arbitrary, as they won't know the value until it's done) divided by the total number of users.

What you can do is determine what work would make the most money for the hardware you have, it's done all the time.

# ¿ May 25, 2011 07:17

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

I'm going to start a socialist ecurrency service. For the first year everybody that joins will get an equal amount of SociBux and will be unable to sell or buy SociBux. After the year is over SociBux will not be given out for free to everybody at once, but will be given out randomly with those who have historically had the lowest amount of SociBux without selling getting the highest priorty. At this point you can sell and buy SociBux to your hearts content.

This solves the issue of early adopters getting a huge leg up, and prevents the rich from getting all the SociBux. It does not solve the issue that all the numbers will be completely arbitrary.

# ¿ May 26, 2011 23:14

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

CascadingStyleSheet posted:

You guys can rage against Bitcoins all you like but I have made a fair bit of money off them in the last month. I initially bought them to buy drugs with but I had some left over and they've appreciated in value buy about 300%.

But yeah, I'm the stupid one.

Good job getting in early while also not being poor. Let me give you a round of applause for all the hard work you did.

# ¿ May 28, 2011 21:01

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

The libertarian ideal is to let the rich horde all the money, causing the economy to collapse and all the money to fall down on the poor from the collapsing ivory towers, making the poor rich and starting the cycle again.

# ¿ May 29, 2011 23:40

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

Thunder from Down Under posted:

Do they also wear top hats and monocles?

All of them have had one semester of someclass 101.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2011 17:23

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

I can't wait for the next open source currency to open up so we get to see the arguments over which one is the most free. We need a BitFork.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2011 07:40

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

I can see it now.

Student: Why did BitCoin fail?
Teacher: Well, BitCoins were backed by the quality of posts in a comedy forum...

# ¿ Jun 12, 2011 01:49

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

We need to start our own currency. Every time you make a post you get one Spergcoin, if you get banned you lose all your Spergcoins and they are spread equally between all members.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2011 03:09

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

I bet they are going to delete their wallet once they are done transferring all the bitcoins.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2011 22:52

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

evensevenone posted:

it's not because it's a 2-year-old overpriced unpopular card? they probably haven't even made them in a year since the 6000 cards came out and were way better.

It's nice of the Bitcoiners to clean out the inventory and make some space for the retailers. I wonder if Bitcoins are a plot by AMD and the retailers to get rid of old inventory; it all adds up folks.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2011 04:14

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

I'm thinking of starting a bitcoins futures website. You send me bitcoins based on what you think the value of the USD will be in the future, and then I shut the website down and run away with all of your bitcoins.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2011 18:42

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

C-Euro posted:

I'm half tempted to buy a single Bitcoin while they're in the toilet just on the off chance that it ever picks up again. Even if I buy it for $10 and sell it for $11, I can still say I got free money once in my life. And hell, if someone sees me buy that Bitcoin maybe they'll flip and buy 10,000 of them and I'll suddenly be rich or whatever.

That's just a 10% return for one year, not that great really. I've actually got in on the ground floor of the next big thing. The value goes up and down just like Bitcoins, however they also give you free money twice a year just for owning the items, which they call shares. I've got another one that does not give me as much money, but the value never goes down unless I remove money.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2011 20:56

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

"My parents won't buy me Modern Warfare 3 for my birthday, they are assholes and I hate them."
- Atlas

# ¿ Jun 14, 2011 21:54

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

Reading the last page made me realize why a non-governmental currency can't exist, because anybody that makes the currency will do so for the sole purpose of trying to make a lot of money. An actual open source currency should make the maintainers of it no profit except from donations from users. There's also the question of why we need yet another currency when there's already plenty of them. If you're going to go with a new currency you might as well go all in and create a new economic model while you're at it.

Edit: meant can't

# ¿ Jun 15, 2011 01:44

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

tiananman posted:

It's called gold. Welcome to the last 5000 years of human history EXCEPT for the past 40 years.

There's not enough gold to go around for everybody though, as more people are born the price of gold has to continually increase. The issue with this is that gold has more uses than just currency; gold is used in electronics, industrial, and medical applications. These applications could be destroyed if the price of gold goes too high.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2011 02:02

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

Chaos Motor posted:

Can't decide if I should sell the other 50 or hold on to them...

Sell all your bitcoins and start a panic.

While you're doing that I will be counting all the money in my real investments. :smug:

In a mere 100 years I'll have 480 million dollars; I'm taking the strategy of the republicans and including that as my income on anything that asks for it.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2011 02:30

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

I was thinking if I had bitcoins I would be hurting stupid people but if they are selling their cats they can go gently caress theirselves. I wish I had gotten in this back in 2008, although my wallet probably would have become corrupted the instant I tried to sell.

Edit: My ill-gotten gains would have gone to cats.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2011 06:30

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

I hope they are buying that hardware from locally owned stores. Buy local act global people.

Oh, you can blow up the picture, it's all from Newegg. I don't see any cases or racks so I assume the person is going to lay all the hardware on the floor and use those three fans to keep them cool. At least Newegg is happy clearing out some space.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2011 01:27

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

Death Himself posted:

Maybe, but I wouldn't want them. Not only have they been running 24/7 under high load and possibly in high heat conditions the cards which are best for bitcoin mining aren't even that good at graphics rendering compared to what else is around.

They'll be so cheap you'll be able to buy them up for your own Bitcoin mining rig.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2011 01:41

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

kazmeyer posted:

If I remember correctly, that happened about two or three weeks ago.

I heard they took his Bitcoins because he could not prove he did not earn them selling drugs.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2011 02:37

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

Garfu posted:

Someone just came online yesterday with 45ghash/sec

http://eligius.st/~artefact2/eu/1E8jPYas4iJGTrpwfgRgigjRmjGFNqtcuF

I was wondering when virus filled computers would start being used to mine bitcoins, glad to see it happened.

Squish posted:

I really, really like this second option and hope that it comes reasonably soon. I would like to get a cheap video card when the secondhand videocard market explodes in the wake of a collapsing bitcoin bubble.

That will make the price of video cards go down. The price is going to crash, sell sell sell!

# ¿ Jun 16, 2011 13:35

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

homeless snail posted:

Bad programmers comment like that. They know they're supposed to make comments, but they don't know which lines need them or what they should be saying.

They told the first programmer they were going to outsource the code so he had to comment the whole thing so they would know what's going on. That's my guess.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2011 23:17

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

Bitcoins have value, every bitcoin created further proves that physics have not suddenly changed and turned electrons into unitrons, which are a mix of unicorns and electrons created when a unicorn stepped into a particle accelerator and became a unitron. He now leaps around the world putting right which once went wrong, hoping his next leap will be the leap home.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2011 01:34

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

Is the creator of Bitcoins going to hold a huge conference, declaring that the libertarians did not notice Bitcoins only have value because people perceive them to have value, and that nothing has inherent value? Maybe it will change some libertarians minds.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2011 01:42

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

Do you guys think MTGOX is going to put pictures up of all the big winners like casino's do? The only sure way to have made money, assuming you don't destroy your wallet, was to get in on it early. If you did own a computer at the time it would not matter though, so if you are poor you should be happy that missed out.

Has anybody bothered to explain yet how people that don't have a computer would be able to use the world's future currency? Or is it assumed that they are poor so nobody cares about them.

Edit:

Chaos Motor posted:

Except instead of a scam, this was a voluntary exchange in which no one was deceived. But again, go ahead and be jealous if you like. I understand how these things work. Some people just sit around and complain about others.

Nobody is jealous, we are all laughing that you think the equivalent to winning at a casino is something to brag about on an Internet forum and now you're angry that nobody congratulated you on a job well done.

Here I am though, congrats.

If you don't congratulate me on winning at a casino I will assume you are jealous and get very angry about it as well.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2011 18:54

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

I'm going to have to show off my dividends I'm going to make to make Chaos Motor shut up about being jealous. It's lower than the amount he made, but this year I should get almost $1000 and then more next year, surpassing the amount Chaos Motor made, and I'll be making that much every year. In fact, in 100 years I'll have over 400 million dollars!

Also, I'm laughing that $2000 is a windfall to Chaos Motor.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2011 19:01

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

madprocess posted:

And I won $2275 in Atlantic City last weekend on 5 plays of the quarter slots.

Congrats on a job well done, however I won $2276, which means I am better than you as a person. Jealous? :smug:

# ¿ Jun 17, 2011 19:16

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

Cynnik posted:

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=18519.0

Somebody needs to go in there and demand that the free market not be tampered with and claim that he is a government plant to destroy the free bitcoin market.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2011 21:54

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

Jabbu posted:

For the people who don't have confidence in the USD, why not stick your money in euros or yuan? It wouldn't surprise me if there was an ETF shorting the dollar, Hell, maybe there is a psycho ETF out there shorting all major currencies? why not buy that?

Edit: Here you go http://etf.stock-encyclopedia.com/UDN.html

They are all fiat currencies being destroyed by governments trying to control the world. I prefer my currencies value based on what a botnet and a 14 year old libertarian thinks the price should be thank you very much.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2011 22:44

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

If the economy does collapse only gold and bitcoins will be taken. I only own a massive gold and silver and bitcoin chain as a coincidence to this fact. I'll be buying bitcoins for 50 cents on the dollar!

# ¿ Jun 17, 2011 23:16

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

No, it went up, buy buy buy!

# ¿ Jun 18, 2011 15:27

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 19:22

Yaos: Feb 22, 2003; She is a cat of significant gravy.

Very soon we are going to reach peak Bitcoin, this is what they don't want you to know about peak Bitcoin.

A spectre is haunting the Internet - the spectre of an acute, civilisation-changing crypto-currency crisis. The latest wobble over disruptions to Bitcoin prices is merely the latest in a series of reminders of how dependent we are are on growing supplies of Bitcoin. On Wednesday, Bitcoin's deputy chairman was in a suburban mansion reassuring Atlas that there would be no risk of disruption to Bitcoins in the fall-out from the ongoing spat between the Bitcoin forum and Something Awful. The very next day, bitcoin prices plunged to a 50-second low, plunging to 15 USD per Bitcoin. Bitcoins normally sold were horded by covert CIA agents trying to destroy Bitcoins.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2011 21:13

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > Bitcoin: Of Freemasons, Free Markets and Bill Cosby Related Investment Schemes

«‹›4 »