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I just read through a bunch of BFL_Josh's posts that allude to them having 'test chips' but it really seems like he's lying through his teeth.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 01:43 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 10:38 |
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Lolie posted:There's a kind of interesting discussion happening on reddit about whether the terminology of Bitcoin should be changed so it more accurately reflects the purpose of mining/miners, what a wallet actually is, etc. I like that the conversation starts off with, "Fine, who's stopping you from calling it these things? No one is censoring your posts to stop this terminology" and the response, "Well, yeah, but I thought I'd mention it in case other people agree." Then the detractor: "Well, if you hadn't said anything, it would have just happened organically! No need to mention it, God!" Redditors can't even argue over fun-bux properly.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 01:45 |
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Peter Ugsly posted:I just read through a bunch of BFL_Josh's posts that allude to them having 'test chips' but it really seems like he's lying through his teeth. That's another thing. One way or another, they are lying. There have been excuses about fixing errors in chips and bad batches, but we know now that absolutely nothing has actually been produced. Even if they did, at one point, intend to deliver a product, they are clearly in over their heads at this point, and it is doubtful that anything will ever be produced. They are lying, either to buy time to pull of a heist or just a desperate bid to buy time to finish the product. 30 days is a laugh. Even if they get the chips, they'll need to test, and there will certainly be problems, which they'll need to fix, and produce more chips, which will take just as long as this is taking, as they have no idea how to deal with asian manufacturers. This could easily happen several times. We're talking on the order of several years before they get anything out, by which time the hardware and methods are going to be sadly outdated. They'll need to make a new design, print chips, test them, etc, all in a hilarious loop of incompetence. Scam or not, no one is ever going to see an ASIC from BFL. The Bible fucked around with this message at Dec 14, 2012 around 01:58 |
| # ? Dec 14, 2012 01:52 |
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Paul MaudDib posted:It's a prisoner game. The optimal decision is that everyone CPU mines, but you can defect and buy GPUs/FPGAs/ASICS to increase your processing power against everyone else's. However, if everyone does that you're right back where you started, just further in debt. Naturally everyone's mashing the "defect" button as hard as financially possible, because libertarians are irrational selfish idiots. It's rather impressive to see a textbook example of the Tragedy of the Commons. All this time I thought it was more of a theoretical thing.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 01:54 |
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e: goddamn it  ^^^Paul MaudDib posted:It's a prisoner game. The optimal decision is that everyone CPU mines, but you can defect and buy GPUs/FPGAs/ASICS to increase your processing power against everyone else's. However, if everyone does that you're right back where you started, just further in debt. Naturally everyone's mashing the "defect" button as hard as financially possible, because libertarians are irrational selfish idiots. A bit off-topic, but I always thought of it more like the tragedy of the commons than a prisoner's dilemma. Basically you can boost your personal gain at a small negative cost to the entire group. And given the Bitcoin philosophy, you have people scrambling to gently caress each other over.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 01:54 |
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I need some money to pay bills so I was thinking I should get into bitcoins. And by 'get into bitcoins' I mean 'ask people to give bitcoins to me'. But now seeing how much information Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange would ask of me, I think I'm just going to pass.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 02:16 |
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Why exactly does bitcoin draw the kind of unique blend of libertarian people it does? It isn't gold, yet they rant about how fiat money is less good than bitcoin. You can just buy the drat things on the open market yet people will spend much more on dedicated hardware for what is essentially a giant lottery with unpredictable yet still absurdly long odds to win a couple for "free" every ten minutes, and this is considered a good investment by the community? They got scammed by someone calling themselves "Pirate"? It just raises so many questions and the answers are just more questions.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 02:29 |
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derp posted:I need some money to pay bills so I was thinking I should get into bitcoins. And by 'get into bitcoins' I mean 'ask people to give bitcoins to me'. Remember how many times Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange got hacked too! Your currency wants liberty and freedom, so do your passport scans!
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 02:31 |
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Shifty Pony posted:Why exactly does bitcoin draw the kind of unique blend of libertarian people it does? It isn't gold, yet they rant about how fiat money is less good than bitcoin. You can just buy the drat things on the open market yet people will spend much more on dedicated hardware for what is essentially a giant lottery with unpredictable yet still absurdly long odds to win a couple for "free" every ten minutes, and this is considered a good investment by the community? They got scammed by someone calling themselves "Pirate"? Mere months later they were scammed again by one "Nefario". The draw is overthrowing the current rich and corrupt elite to become the new rich and corrupt elite. The libertarian part comes in with the fact that to become rich, you need to do a lot of work, or be born into it. Bitcoiners weren't born into it, and they don't want to spend years learning, working their asses off, and gaining experience enough to get rich. Bitcoin allows you to succeed simply by being willing to leave your computer turned on all the time. They actually call this "work". They all hope to be among the earliest groups of people to leave their computers turned on, and become the new financial elite. The only person who could believe this would be someone with no practical understanding or knowledge of even the basic concepts by which the world works. So, libertarian. The Bible fucked around with this message at Dec 14, 2012 around 02:41 |
| # ? Dec 14, 2012 02:39 |
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I'm just saying they seem almost like a population pulled right out of a Terry Pratchett book.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 02:47 |
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Peter Ugsly posted:I just read through a bunch of BFL_Josh's posts that allude to them having 'test chips' but it really seems like he's lying through his teeth. The evidence for them having had chips is statements and photos, both of which are easily manufactured. The evidence against is his apparent complete ignorance of how business is done in China, which is really indistinguishable from regular Bitcoin incompetency.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 02:52 |
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Ghostlight posted:The evidence for them having had chips is statements and photos, both of which are easily manufactured. The evidence against is his apparent complete ignorance of how business is done in China, which is really indistinguishable from regular Bitcoin incompetency. I sometimes wonder whether Josh is even in the loop at all, given that he was telling people the delay was being caused by flawed chips and Nasser had to come in and explicitly state that it was a design change on BFL's part which was causing the delay. How the hell did Josh not know about the clock buffers being added if he's over-seeing the process in any way?
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 03:01 |
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Lolie posted:There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of appreciation for the fact that once ASICs hit the market the options for "trying Bitcoin" will be limited and pretty lovely. You'll either have to buy some (a complete pain in the rear end currently if you only want a couple to play with) or get people to give them to you. Yes. IncendiaC posted:A bit off-topic, but I always thought of it more like the tragedy of the commons than a prisoner's dilemma. Basically you can boost your personal gain at a small negative cost to the entire group. And given the Bitcoin philosophy, you have people scrambling to gently caress each other over. Yes. Successfully transitioning to ASICs would be terrible for Bitcoin as a whole as it raises the entry barrier too high for people to join and will force out people who are already on the margin of being profitable. Not successfully implementing ASICs (because everyone is incompetent or goes broke) means a lot of people have wasted time and money chasing a silicon unicorn. Either way it's a terrible outcome for Bitcoin believers.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 03:10 |
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Cursed Lumberjack posted:I must be understanding the halving wrong, then: the next will half to 12.5, yes? And then to 6.25? And again to 3.125, 1.06125, etc etc until the block reward is a miniscule amount of bitcoins? Within those halvings, don't you end up eventually with a reward so small that the final 10th of a Bitcoin or whatever just gets drawn out into infinity and never ends, getting infinitely smaller and smaller? I've stared at the Bitcoin client code for a project I support, so I can help with your question. I didn't get to write much new code myself, since I'm not as good of a programmer as the rest of the team, but I learned a bit about Bitcoin internals. The easiest way to understand the Bitcoin reward scheme will is to think about it a little differently. The software solves 210,000 blocks and then divides the reward, ironically called a "subsidy" in the client, in half. So in the first 210,000 blocks, 10.05 million bitcoins will be rewarded. In the second 210,000 blocks, 5.25 million, etc. What is this? If you factor out 210,000*50 from the infinite series, you get a geometric series times 210,000*50. That is 10,500,000 * (1+1/2+1/4+...). It is mathematically proven that the above geometric series (1+1/2+1/4+...) equals 2. That is how you can say there will be 21,000,000 total coins. However, why 21 million? If I had to guess it would be that 21,000,000 has more prime factors than a power of 10. The Prime Factors of 21,000,000 : 2^6 • 3 • 5^6 • 7 The Prime Factors of 1,000,000 : 2^6 • 5^6 The extra factors make it easier to say you have some fraction of the total amount of Bitcoins, because you can also factor out a 3 and 7. Install Gentoo posted:Correct, you never really mine the last bit of the 21 million, the reward just drops to 0.00000000000000025 or something. With Bitcoin because you will eventually run out of precision due to the way the numbers are stored, so the last reward will be "mined" eventually. An alternative would be to store all values with libGMP and libMPFR to avoid this problem. You will eventually run out of precision too, but its much more unlikely. A lot of Bitcoiners think that you should never store monetary values as an non-integer, because someone said it on the Bitcoin forum once. However, this is why computer scientists created floating point libraries like the ones listed above. Shifty Pony posted:Why exactly does bitcoin draw the kind of unique blend of libertarian people it does? It isn't gold, yet they rant about how fiat money is less good than bitcoin. You can just buy the drat things on the open market yet people will spend much more on dedicated hardware for what is essentially a giant lottery with unpredictable yet still absurdly long odds to win a couple for "free" every ten minutes, and this is considered a good investment by the community? They got scammed by someone calling themselves "Pirate"? What sorts of people do you generally find out on the frontier? 
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 03:10 |
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Josh appears to have confirmed that the January 14 delivery date they're aiming at now is for uncut wafers.quote:I will be walking it through all stages after delivery (Yes, that will involve sitting around in another country for a few days waiting for the wafers to get cut and packaged, then to the testing facility, then to be mounted on the PCB at yet another facility). Any tech people care to take a guess at how long all of those post-delivery steps will take, remembering that at some point in the process the product has to get from Asia to Kansas?
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 03:23 |
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Lolie posted:Any tech people care to take a guess at how long all of those post-delivery steps will take, remembering that at some point in the process the product has to get from Asia to Kansas? Most likely a month, plus or minus never.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 03:25 |
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, but it reflects poorly on the forums. 
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Can someone explain to me what ASIC and BFL is? I get that they are trying to have a Chinese sweatshop make them some sort of special mining computers, but that's as far as I understand.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 03:28 |
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BFL is Butterfly Labs, who claim to be making these chips. An ASIC is an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, a custom-made chip that will do one thing and one thing only, provided it exists. E: and these places are about as far from a sweatshop as it's possible to get.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 03:31 |
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derp posted:But now seeing how much information Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange would ask of me, I think I'm just going to pass. They do that because they're an actual law-abiding business who is complying with anti money laundering regulations, to be honest.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 03:31 |
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If BFL actually believed that they could ship ASICs to customers in 2012, their financial forecasts will be shot to hell by now because they would have counted on getting a significant amount of new orders on the basis of being first to market. Right now the only advantage they have is that their first batch is bigger than anyone else's and they've already ordered chips for a second batch but I doubt they're going to get anywhere near the amount of second wave orders now that they would have gotten had they delivered even this month. I notice that Josh has also back-pedalled on his earlier assertions that the lab would be breaching its contract if they didn't deliver by 24 December 2012 - another thing which suggests that he's not really involved in any of the project management. Lolie fucked around with this message at Dec 14, 2012 around 03:49 |
| # ? Dec 14, 2012 03:37 |
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Raneman posted:So I went to Mt Gox because I wanted a cool buttcoin. Jackboot government thugs foisting responsibilities on my bitcoins Cursed Lumberjack posted:If you aren't aware, almost the entirety of Wiki's editors are libertarian sperglorgs and are really the perfect demographic to be Bitcoin obsessed. I've kind of always taken it for granted that someone high up in the edit-chain-of-command, considering how laudatory the Bitcoin wiki page has been since day 1. Aaaaand it's gone. Kuwait number one 
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 03:46 |
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are bitcoins not anonymous?
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Paul MaudDib posted:That said, the reward is $25 per ten minutes distributed across the whole network, whether everyone is running $200 desktop graphics cards, a rig with 4 $200 graphics cards, a $1300 ASIC, or a $30,000 super ASIC machine. 25BTC, not $25. Note that, assuming $10/BTC, that gives the value of *all mined bitcoins in a year* as somewhere around 13 million dollars. Which may sound like a lot, but note that this isn't quite enough to keep 1,200 US citizens above the poverty line . . . assuming they get their bitcoins literally for free and don't have to pay for anything pesky like "hardware" or "electricity". http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ tells me that the entire network is chugging along at somewhere in the vicinity of 23 TH/s. Assuming it's all FPGAs, and going by this page for power consumption, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume everyone's getting about 22 MH/W power efficiency, that means the entire Bitcoin network is using around 1.1 megawatts of power, 24/7, or a total of about 9.64 *million* kWh. Average cost of electricity in the USA is 12c/kWh. The total cost of that power is around 1.16 million dollars per year. Which actually isn't as much as I was expecting. But wait, what about the FPGAs themselves! The best model gets around one MH/s/$, so our hypothetical 23 TH/s network would cost . . . 23 MILLION DOLLARS. For tapping into a source of money that will produce around 13 million dollars per year. Quite literally, if they could keep the status quo going for two years, they'd almost break even. And that's assuming they're all using the most cost-effective hardware, which, note, didn't even exist a year ago, and is probably about to be obsoleted.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 04:05 |
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Install Gentoo posted:They do that because they're an actual law-abiding business who is complying with anti money laundering regulations, to be honest. Which is great. It does seem to be in direct opposition with the "advantage" of bitcoin's anonymity, though, which is much touted by it's supporters.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 04:09 |
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The Bible posted:Which is great. It does seem to be in direct opposition with the "advantage" of bitcoin's anonymity, though, which is much touted by it's supporters. On the other hand, it does mean they're able to sock away a half million dollars plus a year. Thanks to all their transaction fees and such, and the fact that they're doing it legally so they don't have to worry about getting busted.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 04:57 |
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ZorbaTHut posted:25BTC, not $25. Even then, that profit would be contingent on people willing to buy bitcoins outside of the mining network itself. 10$/BTC would never last long as a price point if bitcoins started being dumped. As I recall, most of the mined volume of bitcoins has never been traded. That plus its use on silk road sort of explains why it hasn't crashed yet, but if all those hoarders started cashing out, the price would drop precipitously. After all, TSR doesn't actually pay out in bitcoins, it just uses an exchange somewhere to turn them back into cash again. The merchants on TSR wouldn't give a poo poo if the price of their opium was 3 BTC or 3000 BTC, since they don't retain them and hence don't face the threat of devaluation.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 05:02 |
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The thing is that the Bitcoin fandom is all "woo hoo no more banks no more fiat monies" but everything that it is actually useful for except Silk Road just acts like a bank and/or converts the funbux directly into fiat monies.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 05:02 |
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President Kucinich posted:Kuwait number one Honestly, if they were going to include Bitcoins as a currency, they may as well include WoW gold. There are probably more places that will convert WoW gold into USD than bitcoins, hahaha.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 05:17 |
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AlbieQuirky posted:The thing is that the Bitcoin fandom is all "woo hoo no more banks no more fiat monies" but everything that it is actually useful for except Silk Road just acts like a bank and/or converts the funbux directly into fiat monies.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 05:43 |
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quote:I've just gone ahead and added Bitcoin again to the list, with proper references for the price quotes that I used. No country code or ISO code was used in the making of my edit, which should assuage any complaints that Bitcoin is usurping some ISO code not officially assigned to it. As for the complaints that "Bitcoin isn't a real currency", well, Bitcoin meets the colloquial and academic definitions of "currency" (no, there is no "must be printed by a central bank" in any definition except self-styled definitions made up solely to discriminate against Bitcoin), people are using it in legitimate and significant ways (that alone makes Bitcoin at least more WP:N than, say, Linden dollars or Ecuadorian Sucres), and that's that. I expect there will be backlash, as we all know that liars will lie -- or, for the more sophisticated version, invent arbitrary burdens of evidence that Bitcoin must pass before they accept reality, but somehow refuse to apply to other currencies -- so I cannot do much about that. Rudd-O (talk) 05:25, 14 December 2012 (UTC) I'm putting them back because bitcoins. So there. 
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 05:56 |
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You forgot the best part.quote:Also, to whoever underhandedly removed Bitcoin from the list, and proceeded to add the ex post facto and arbitrary demand that a currency be in the ISO list of currency codes for it to be listed on this page: real nice, scumbag, you must be proud of how you deceive people in the most underhanded way. I don't know about you, but I'd trust the ISO's judgement on what a currency is more then some internet libertarians.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 06:05 |
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President Kucinich posted:Aaaaand it's gone. It's still there when I go to the wiki page. Maybe a cache problem, but Bitcoin is sitting nice and at the top of the list above the KWD on my end.E: Well I refreshed Wiki 4 times before posting this to make sure I wouldn't look like a fool, then I go and post and refresh one more time and KWD is at the top. Is there an edit-war going on right now or am I just bad at internets? vvv Oh, sweet conflict and mayhem. Feed me your chaos. Cursed Lumberjack fucked around with this message at Dec 14, 2012 around 06:40 |
| # ? Dec 14, 2012 06:20 |
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Cursed Lumberjack posted:It's still there when I go to the wiki page. Maybe a cache problem, but Bitcoin is sitting nice and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php...&action=history
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 06:39 |
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Every time I read about Bitcoiners praising how beautiful and valuable and brilliant their internet funbux are, all I can think to myself is how grateful I am that when I go to the store and see that a loaf of bread is $3.99, I don't have to think to myself: $3.99 USD? That's like...2.8 Euros! Which is the benchmark of a real currency. Whether or not you have to constantly translate its value as forever relative to other, practical currencies.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 08:19 |
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Oh god. Apparently some of these champions of the free market are talking about forming a https://forums.butterflylabs.com/mi...oin-market.html They really are cargo-cultists. Lolie fucked around with this message at Dec 14, 2012 around 09:01 |
| # ? Dec 14, 2012 08:58 |
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"This article is being vandalized by Something Awful goons!"  EDIT: Oh, there was some actual vandalism. I thought they were just mad about it getting reverted. Lolie posted:Oh god. Apparently some of these champions of the free market are talking about forming a BitBoyen posted:That article tells me that the people with deep pockets are saving them therefore increasing values. I suspect they will attempt to keep the status quo because they have the most to lose. "Up uP UP!" is still alive and well. Three-Phase fucked around with this message at Dec 14, 2012 around 11:00 |
| # ? Dec 14, 2012 10:21 |
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Three-Phase posted:"This article is being vandalized by Something Awful goons!" Nah, he does consider it's original removal vandalism. quote:It was added a long time ago before that post. I merely readded it. The readdition was merely restoring content that was vandalized by being removed, and properly sourcing it. Check the change log if you doubt me. I think I read on reddit that someone added CosbyCoins to the list. Others have tried to make the point that you can pretty much add any alternative currency including Liberty Reserve etc, and render the whole chart meaningless if you're not going to stick to some kind of standard for listing criteria
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 10:40 |
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Lolie posted:Nah, he does consider it's original removal vandalism. Someone should tell him that Canadian tyre money deserves to be there more than buttcoins.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 10:52 |
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Ahahahahahah, whoops:Hal posted:bitcoin-qt tries to randomize the position of the change output, but I believe the code has a flaw:
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 12:49 |
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Three-Phase posted:"Up uP UP!" is still alive and well. Actually, there's a guy in the thread posted above who believes that a low-valued bitcoin would be positive overall: some idiot posted:It could hurt the mining markey....price of coin going down is only bad to miners. in return, others will buy at a discout..who doest wat to buy some thing ON SALE.....who will spend more of the coins...others will see that they can get with bitcoin....and it will go up 3 fold in price So I guess mass adoption of bitcoin will occur when hoarders dump their stash of coins, resulting in the price crashing, thus causing Joe Public to scoop them up because they're on sale and because ... supply & demand.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 13:03 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 10:38 |
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makomk posted:Ahahahahahah, whoops: Wait, I thought being able to trace transactions was supposed to be one of the good things about bitcoin. I mean, isn't that what the blockchain is for?
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| # ? Dec 14, 2012 13:03 |
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