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Bitcoins... wow, 2011 flashback. Hmm... I wonder if they're still going up up UP like Bruce promised. Well. Stagnant price and swiftly-declining trade volume. That'll show those unstable fiat currencies what's what. Source of chart. (Had to try three different sites I remembered from last year before I found one that's still operating.)
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| # ¿ May 26, 2012 16:34 |
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| # ¿ May 22, 2013 10:09 |
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Ashenai posted:It's a crypto thing, yes. Essentially, each bitcoin is an integer, but when you transfer them to another person, the integer changes, and only the new owner will know what it is. It's a lot more complex than that, but that's the core of it. Yup. From what I've read about the underlying structure, there's actually some pretty cool cryptographic math involved. And if I recall correctly, there hasn't actually been a successful attack against bitcoin itself -- the hilarity comes from people learning the hard way that "anonymous, irreversible transactions with NO higher authority" works for thieves too. Well, that and the fact that these people are happily buying and selling shares of absolutely nothing for real money.
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| # ¿ May 26, 2012 16:57 |
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Nessus posted:I don't think that's ironic, I imagine it's seen as a feature. Early adopters got lots of 'money' easily and without difficulty and are now the ones with the lion's share; new arrivals provide largely a secondary market. There were a number of Bitcoin "forks" that attempted to do this quite blatantly. (Essentially, someone would take the Bitcoin source code, do a global replace of a few things, and then launch SteveCoin or whatever they want to call it.) I remember there was one where the guy rigged it to first give himself 51% of all the coins that could ever be made, and then released the client so the public could mine the rest. And then, when the new currency went up up UP, he'd own half the money in the world! Unsurprisingly, all these little spinoffs went precisely nowhere even faster than the original Bitcoin. Good Citizen posted:I couldn't find the picture of the time we caused Bruce's phone to vibrate off his chair, though. Truly our greatest moment. 
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| # ¿ May 27, 2012 03:11 |
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I'm 90% sure the gift card thing was a Logansryche operation. The short version of the story: Logan decided he wanted in on all these Bitcoin riches that he imagined everyone around him to be making, so (as one of his many failed ventures) he opened a webstore that sold giftcards for Bitcoins. In theory. The website was hilariously awful, to the point that he left most of the page headers saying things like "Company Name Goes Here." And the gift cards were sold for face value, plus a small service fee. So it was just like buying one at the local store, except more expensive and slower. Someone from the Bitcoin forums took pity on him and sent him the bitcoins to order a card. At this point it was revealed that Logan didn't actually keep any stock, he had to go out to HIS local store and buy it before he could mail it out. But it turns out Logan didn't have the cash on hand to do that either, and his girlfriend wouldn't loan him any more money. So he had to sell the bitcoins that he was paid for the order. This took days, and I'm pretty sure that between MtG:OX service fees and plummeting bitcoin prices, when he finally got it turned into real money, it wasn't enough to buy the gift card. I don't think the attempted buyer ever got his gift card or his bitcoins back. Oh, and for reference, Logansryche isn't a kid, he's a grown-rear end man.
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| # ¿ May 27, 2012 04:16 |
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Lolie posted:Wasn't that logansryche, he of the Hub Theatre project fame? I actually saved Logansryche's entire theater-begging website for the benefit of future Internet Archaeologists. Here you go, enjoy the HTML skills and the business savvy: http://filesmelt.com/dl/Theater.zip
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| # ¿ May 27, 2012 04:29 |
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President Kucinich posted:The Wulong Device. Does anyone still have the plans for Atlas' Wulong Device? So stupid. I use a tame black hole for a filing system. Behold Atlas's brainchild: 
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| # ¿ May 27, 2012 04:37 |
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TVarmy posted:"No, you see, we're making pure profit. I'm using my computer as a heater that makes money. This is an actual idea that's been proposed, outside of the Bitcoin loony bin. They're calling them data furnaces. Of course there are a zillion and one practical issues that would have to be overcome, but the concept of making practical use of a server's waste heat isn't completely bonkers. (This is assuming that the server is doing something more practical than mining Bitcoins, of course.)
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| # ¿ May 28, 2012 20:28 |
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eschaton posted:The value it represents during use is completely disconnected from its production: Think about the difference in value represented by ten cents in 1962 and today, while a dime produced in 1962 isn't treated as more valuable than a dime produced today. Actually, yes it is -- a pre-1964 dime is now worth about two bucks for the silver content. Which kind of proves your point, come to think of it. When currencies have an intrinsic value, it can play havoc with their representational value.
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| # ¿ May 29, 2012 03:09 |
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gninjagnome posted:The point is though, that over time, the total # of bitcoins can only go down. There are just a ton of ways for bitcoins to be removed from the system - if someone's hard drive crashes, or their wallet gets corrupted, or they forget the password to an encrypted drive, or those physical bitcoins get lost, etc. The funny part is that there's no way to tell the difference between a wallet.dat that's been truly lost and one that's just inactive. Say there are a few million bitcoins that haven't moved in a zillion years. No one could ever know for certain if they're forever irretrievable, or if someone's sitting on them, waiting for the right moment to deliver a single-shot "inflation event" into the bitcoin economy.
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| # ¿ May 29, 2012 22:40 |
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spoon0042 posted:Lorentz Factor sort of touched on this in his last paragraph, but as I understand it a new version of the client was released - it's decentralized but there's still an official client - which required the transaction fee, and once enough (half or so) users upgraded, transactions without the fee would be rejected. A similar process is expected to happen after all the bitcoins are mined - after enough users adopt a client that rejects free transactions, all will have a fee. Otherwise the system will likely collapse as Lorentz Factor described. Who gets the fee? The miners, I would guess?
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| # ¿ May 30, 2012 22:36 |
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Regence posted:Was there ever a way to reclaim "lost" bitcoins implemented due to human error? I mean if Joe Bitcoin loses his USB stick with 20 bitcoins on it, will the total amount of bitcoins available forever be reduced to 20,999,980? Gone forever. But unless you personally were the one who screwed up and lost the wallet key for those bitcoins... how do you know they're truly lost? As far as the world is concerned, they're just sitting inactive. They could be in someone's digital piggy bank for all we know.
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| # ¿ May 31, 2012 17:21 |
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spoon0042 posted:I think it peaked at $30. Even when it started to fall the bitcoin forums were knee deep in logscale graphs with lines drawn on them proving it was going nowhere but up, up, UP! I saved a couple of them. Why, looked at on a log scale, there was no bubble and no crash, they're just little bumps in a slow and steady rise!  And that rise is certain to continue! Why, by the middle of 2012, Bitcoins will be pushing a thousand dollars each! In just a few years, they'll have gone up by about fifteen orders of magnitude.  For scale, this prediction would put each bitcoin at about a tenth of the GDP of the planet Earth.
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| # ¿ Jun 1, 2012 19:01 |
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Asehujiko posted:And what is keeping people from copy and pasting their wallet.bat? The bitcoins themselves aren't "stored" in the wallet.dat file. Think of the wallet.dat like the "debit card" of bitcoins. If you put your debit card in a Star Trek replicator and made an exact copy of it, then you could use either card in a store or ATM, but it wouldn't magically double your account balance.
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| # ¿ Jun 4, 2012 16:50 |
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gnarlyhotep posted:
This one, you mean?  That was when MtG:OX got hacked. From Wikipedia: Wikipedia posted:On 19 June 2011, a security breach of the Mt. Gox Bitcoin Exchange caused the leaking of usernames, emails and MD5 hashed passwords of over 60,000 users onto the Web. The price of a bitcoin briefly dropped to $0.01 on the Mt. Gox exchange (but remained unaffected on other exchanges) after a hacker allegedly used credentials from a Mt. Gox auditor's compromised computer to illegally transfer a large number of bitcoins to himself and sell them all, creating a massive "ask" order at any price. Within minutes the price rebounded to over $15 before Mt. Gox shut down their exchange and canceled all trades that happened during the hacking period. The "rollback" was apparently possible because everything happened inside the MtG:OX server and nothing actually got withdrawn into outside accounts. Still funny as all hell, though.
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| # ¿ Jun 8, 2012 23:30 |
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Godsavethefritos posted:If bitcoin really did take off and become a non laughable currency accepted by places that don't just sell drugs then all they would have accomplished would be the creation of a new economic elite in those first wave of miners. Funny you should mention that. Here's one of Atlas's more hilarious posts from last summer: Bitcoin Forum > Bitcoin > Bitcoin Discussion > I am pretty confident we are the new wealthy elite, gentlemen. Atlas on Bitcointalk.org posted:http://astrohacker.com/ahc/bitcoin-is-the-economic-singularity/
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| # ¿ Jun 10, 2012 21:45 |
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Atmus posted:Plastic is a lot cheaper than aluminum or steel. I'm not looking into it, but I guess Atlas thinks he can use a 3d printer to print a plastic lower. That might work, if someone capable was doing it, but... It's lighter too. Plenty of guns, like the AR-15 and all varieties of Glock pistols, make extensive use of plastics wherever possible. But here's something I don't know -- what's the legal status of a completely DIY firearm? Might Atlas get thrown into jail (where he'd be happy  ) after all?In a way, I suppose Atlas is ahead of his time here. It's always been possible to make a working gun from scratch, but it's always required a machine shop and enough know-how to make a living as a gunsmith. As 3D printers for various materials get more capable and more common, suddenly it'll become possible for any junior high schooler to torrent the "replicator pattern" for an M1911 and make one out of thin air.
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| # ¿ Jun 13, 2012 15:33 |
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mrwuss posted:Plastic is not the same across the board. Good point. The ones I know of use ABS, the same stuff as Lego bricks are made of. I don't know what others are available / possible. Same goes for the more expensive printers that work with sintered metal -- it may not be suitable for all purposes.
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| # ¿ Jun 13, 2012 15:47 |
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Milky_Sauce posted:That also reminds me...what was the huge retail outlet that Bruce was excited to announce that he had convinced to accept Bitcoin? As I dimly recall, that turned out to be just someone trolling Bruce. They claimed to be from Amazon (or something) and told him how they were just about to switch over to bitcoins. (Anybody remember which site the troll actually said?) Milky_Sauce posted:Second question: how is Bruce so ballsy that he's still sticking with the whole Bitcoin thing after being outed as a total scam artist? He knows that even Goon Justice eventually gets bored and wanders off.
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| # ¿ Jun 18, 2012 16:27 |
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less than three posted:Here is a chart of the network's current GH/s being wasted mining Bitcoins: http://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate From there:  I'm just enjoying how the use of these big wasteful electric furnaces has a big upswing every summer* when they require even MORE waste to cool them. Rational actors indeed. * I'm assuming that most of these are in the northern hemisphere.
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| # ¿ Jun 22, 2012 15:54 |
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rivid posted:Anyways with bitcoins floating around, I wonder what will happen if they fall out of use. For example, what happens if ten years after they're declared dead, a group of people sort of pick them up and find some new uses for them. By themselves, bitcoins don't do a drat thing. In fact, they can only be said to "exist" in the consensus of the computers running the mining software and keeping track of transactions. So if no one's running the miner -- or if the miner doesn't have the complete blockchain history -- then the bitcoins simply aren't there. There's nothing to "pick up." Personally, I think it'll be a while yet before bitcoins hit that level of death. My guess is that at least a few true believers will keep on truckin' for many years even after it's been completely abandoned by the rest of the world. (Sort of like the people who still run gopher servers today.)
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| # ¿ Jul 1, 2012 19:55 |
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Lolie posted:The list was on the now defunct website. I thought I'd saved it, but apparently I didn't. Powered Descent posted:I actually saved Logansryche's entire theater-begging website for the benefit of future Internet Archaeologists. Here you go, enjoy the HTML skills and the business savvy: It's just plain HTML files, no malware worries.
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| # ¿ Jul 7, 2012 05:04 |
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Zhou Tong posted:I'm an Agnostic and a Libertarian who believes in living one's life for others' good Ayn Rand posted:I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. They don't make Libertarians like they used to.
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| # ¿ Aug 4, 2012 16:16 |
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Shasta Orange Soda posted:And I'm pretty sure the owner was only interested because frequent customer Bruce talked him into it. He probably talked up his Internet TV show and pitched it as a cross-promotion thing. With Bruce's mortgage scam money paying for a studio in a great location, you can see how it might seem legit to a small business owner who was more focused on bringing in customers than prying into the details of libertarian cryptocurrencies. Bruce probably got him into it, but if you look at it as a promotional stunt, it worked out really well. For the cost of giving out a few burritos in exchange for digital magic beans, he got plenty of advertising all over the world, to both bitcoiners and bitcoin-point-and-laughers. Think about it, it's been a year and we all still know Meze Grill by name. And hey, if he was able to sell the digital magic beans and get some of his costs back, so much the better. Unless he gave Bruce any actual money as part of the promotion deal. In which case this whole thing is just depressing.
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| # ¿ Aug 5, 2012 15:35 |
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peak debt posted:Amazon S3 doesn't exactly have the most user friendly interface, it's pretty easy to make an error like that. It's even easier to do no testing. And easier still to have no backups.
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| # ¿ Aug 10, 2012 15:56 |
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Lolie posted:No, that was logansryche. logansryche's business plan was delusional. dank's could actually work if he ever got off his rear end and actually did something rather than just posting about it on a messageboard and expecting everything to fall into place by voodoo. True that. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Dank's idea here -- a hookah lounge in a college town might do quite well. (Or it might crash and burn even with excellent management. That's small business for you.) But Logansryche's theater... even if a miracle had happened and he somehow got the money to buy it and put in all seventy-three varieties of soda machine that he wanted, I just can't imagine any chain of events that would lead to it ever being profitable. Of course, since they're both unwilling to put in any actual work beyond "getting the idea," neither scheme could ever become reality. Which is kind of sad, really. It would have been hilarious to watch the bitcoin theater trying to actually operate.
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| # ¿ Sep 20, 2012 00:29 |
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Paramemetic posted:Freemasons -> CIA -> SA. Don't forget the reverse vampires!
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| # ¿ Sep 26, 2012 00:19 |
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jackyl posted:Not exactly in my proposal, but note the "some random time after repayment request" disclaimer. That might suffice. Or just wait for someone to request their bitcoins back, and say "Oh... oh yeah, I had to sell those to pay for a car repair. Sorry. But hey, it's an investment in me, right?" And at LEAST half of the bitcoiners will be on your side.
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| # ¿ Sep 26, 2012 17:09 |
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Darth123123 posted:People are literally paying others for addresses to go beat them up. I wonder how the market of selling fake names and addresses is doing these days.
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| # ¿ Sep 26, 2012 18:50 |
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I wonder if Dank has ever attempted to play (or sing) a tune that actually exists. He obviously hasn't in these recordings, but I wonder if he's ever tried, in the privacy of his "practicing," to play a recognizable version of Three Blind Mice. Oh, who am I kidding? Random arrhythmic un-tuned notes from the top of his head are always going to be infinitely better than anything some "composer" ever wrote, so why should he even bother with that junk? 
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| # ¿ Sep 28, 2012 04:45 |
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timb posted:Bitcoin itself may very well get shutdown over illegally selling securities Hah. Bitcoin can never be stopped. Remember the distributed crypto?  Of course, the exchanges can get shut down, making it a hell of a lot harder to buy or sell bitcoins for real money. Thus making it vastly harder to use bitcoins for their only practical functions: buying drugs on the Internet and fleecing wannabe Captains of Industry. But they can't stop the bitcoins themselves, even if there's nothing left to use them for! End the Fed!
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| # ¿ Oct 6, 2012 16:43 |
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hobbesmaster posted:Well, bitcoiners use this exact line of thought. They think if they do their illegal stuff with internet funbucks it doesn't count. After giving this a little thought, I realized I don't actually have any idea where the law draws the line on this sort of thing. I mean, EVE Online is full of every scam and swindle in the book, right? Stuff that would be incredibly illegal if you tried it with dollars? And even though (just like WoW gold) people can and do trade ISK for real money... the SEC still isn't about to step in and start policing the fictional economy of a video game about spaceships. With bitcoins, we're getting a lot closer to the "I will only do this illegal deal in unregulated Chuck E. Cheese tokens, but fortunately there's a booth to buy and sell Chuck E. Cheese tokens right here" example. But I have no idea where the line between them falls, legally speaking.
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| # ¿ Oct 8, 2012 03:36 |
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Peter Ugsly posted:Another satisfied customer! I'm going to guess he has a Samsung. I looked up that app and it looks like it's just a way to access a perfectly standard wallet file... a wallet which you're SUPPOSED to keep backed up somewhere, and in fact it looks like the app gives you several easy ways to do exactly that. This person Bitcoin, ladies and gentlemen! 
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| # ¿ Oct 12, 2012 19:52 |
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ButtFaceMcCrackin posted:Good news! He has. See, this right here is a perfect example of a troll over-reaching. Cut all of the numbers by a factor of ten and it'd be a little more believable that he's still a bitcoin believer and not in complete panic mode.
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| # ¿ Oct 15, 2012 23:03 |
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I wonder if anyone has tried a CD-style bitcoin bank scam. You announce whatever outrageous interest rate will attract the marks... to be paid in a lump sum after 6 months. Stiff penalty for early withdrawal -- namely, you forfeit your accrued interest. So, for those six months, you play it "legit." You send out weekly statements with correctly-calculated interest, over which they can gloat at how many bitcoins they have in their accounts. If anyone wants to withdraw their bitcoins, you let them take them (original principal only, as per the terms). For six months you're the forums' go-to example of a legitimate and honest business. People start to feel foolish for not taking the "safe option" of investing with you. Naturally, your first few accounts are from sockpuppets, so when their CD matures, you go ahead and pay them -- hell, show off the transactions in the block chain explorer. Having thus proven beyond doubt that you're the real deal, the last few skeptics will jump on board. Then you run away with all the bitcoins and begin the only hard part about this process -- gradually feeding them through MtG:OX to turn them into money.
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| # ¿ Oct 16, 2012 17:51 |
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max4me posted:So how do wallets work? I mean if someone sends me a thumb drive with coins on them, and I put them into my wallet will the block chain show a transfer? Cause I recall people got their wallets hacked a few times. As I understand it, all that a wallet file contains is a cryptographic private key. There are no bitcoins "in" a wallet in the same sense that there's no money "in" a debit card -- it's just the instrument by which you authorize a payment from your account to somewhere else. In the case of bitcoins, the accounts are all collectively maintained by the miners. The key stays the same even when the balance changes, so the wallet file can be easily backed up or copied. But if it's lost or compromised, there's no central authority to go to to recover your bitcoins. You're just out of luck. So in your example, a thumbdrive full of bitcoins would have to be a thumbdrive with a copy of a wallet file on it. You then use that wallet to authorize transfer of the bitcoins to your own account. Bitcoiners, being bitcoiners, get their wallets lost or stolen all the time.
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| # ¿ Oct 17, 2012 06:15 |
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Les Oeufs posted:I get that. I guess what I'm saying is that all currencies derive their price from this idea of GDP, and then we determine value by sort of comparing performance against each other. Well its more complicated than that, but thats an extreme layperson explanation that I have in my head because if I tried to understand economics further I'd probably cry. Your mistake is that you're thinking of bitcoins as money. Don't fall into that trap. Think of them like baseball cards, except made out of numbers instead of cardboard. People buy, sell, and trade them for real money even though they have no practical purpose or inherent value. The amount people are willing to pay for a baseball card or a bitcoin goes up and down according to supply, demand, and other less rational factors. That's it. And if someone trades you some drugs in exchange for a baseball card, that doesn't make baseball cards a real currency. Same for bitcoins. The only reason people use bitcoins for drug deals is that they're easily sent over the Internet and can be difficult for the authorities to trace to a specific person.
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| # ¿ Oct 23, 2012 00:49 |
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spengler posted:I wonder how escrow works when 95% of the poo poo on that site is flat out illegal. It's me, I'm the escrow service. I'm AAAA++ rated.
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| # ¿ Oct 25, 2012 19:29 |
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Saint Darwin posted:Now I really want to just look at the site, but lol Tor. Yeah, but using Tor is stupid easy nowadays: you download TorBrowser and then you run it. That's all there is to it, no installation or anything. In that window you have access to hidden servers with .onion addresses, so you can go rubberneck at the only thing Bitcoins have ever proven useful for (besides comedy, of course). Silk Road's .onion address isn't hard to find (I think it's even linked on the Wikipedia page).
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| # ¿ Oct 26, 2012 03:43 |
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Install Gentoo posted:What has the man ever done that leads you to believe he thinks? The guy specifically wanted a 1993 or 1994 ford explorer as a car for crying out loud (they're some of the worst of that model that were ever built by the way); and then you have the theater and so on. The best part about the 1994 Ford Explorer is his reasoning for needing that specifically instead of something more economical: logansryche posted:I can't drive cars lol. I run them into the ground too fast. It's this reason I've always had either an explorer, aerostar or some sort of ford pickup to stand up to the abuse(ran the last pickup oil dry but it was on accident, was fords I6). https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?t...99718#msg499718 I guess a Civic or a Corolla just isn't tough enough to stand up the sheer manliness of his driving.
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| # ¿ Oct 30, 2012 22:13 |
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| # ¿ May 22, 2013 10:09 |
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The Bible posted:I guess I don't see what they can do with a satellite that they can't do without it. I think the intent behind the original satellite idea was that in case of a nuclear war that destroys the Internet, a copy of the precious bitcoin blockchain would be safe, out there in space. Imagine, if you will, a bombed-out, scorched, bleak, radioactive crapsack of a post-apocalyptic world. And then imagine the wretched survivors concluding that bitcoins are just the thing they need. Not a source of clean water, or a piece of land where they might still be able to grow plants. Nope. Bitcoins. And not just any new cryptocurrency, but the OLD cryptocurrency, complete with its records of every Silk Road drug deal and every Meze Grill burrito. The original bitcoin, which is safe, out in space. Waiting for them. So they decide to cobble together a radio dish. But they never build it because the guy who thought of the idea thinks that should make it his dish, and everyone else should just work for free. And in any case no one knows the comm protocols to talk to this satellite, what frequency it's on, how to build a radio dish, or even where in space the satellite might be found. So they cancel the project due to lack of interest and are promptly killed by their horrible radioactive tumors. Bitcoin!
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| # ¿ Nov 5, 2012 06:36 |
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