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Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

To be fair I only heard about bitcoins by the time you needed a mining rig and weeks of processing power and electricity to mine one bitcoin

so it was really my fault, I suppose

Much like everything else in my lovely life

It's all... my... fault... I'm a worthless piece of poo poo... why am I still alive... loving unlovable piece of poo poo... worse than the sludge at the bottom of an old sewer full of rats... that's me... gently caress I hate myself so much and I hate anyone who would love me :negative:

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Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

plape tickler posted:

I bought part of a bitcoin on May 29th . It's worth $651 more than I paid as of right now. Chump change but it's still a decent profit. Should probably sell it

Do NOT sell, it's going to the moon !!!

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

I need a census

Those who think you should buy bitcoin NOW and hold for the future please state so here

Those who don't, post Krust.jpg

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

divabot posted:

you should buy, nobody else should

you are our Captain of Industry, navigating us onto the rocks of Freedom

divabot posted:

you should buy, nobody else should

you are our Captain of Industry, navigating us onto the rocks of Freedom

I already bought 1 whole Eth :agesilaus:

See you on my yacht, poooooors

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

EorayMel posted:

Mark did nothing wrong.

Also I just remembered I have this picture saved to my computer.



:bernin:

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

This thread is such poo poo

Ok serious question - is it only Bitcoin that you guys think sucks, or is it the whole Cryptocurrency thing? Because there's a video of Bill Gates following me around youtube saying Bitcoin is amazing and cryptocurrency is never gonna stop

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

I'm gonna buy Byteballs, Moneros, Xems, Nems, Reddcoins, BluCoins, Blood Coins, Dash Coins, Sonic Coins, Coin Coins, Speedballs, SiaCoins, Beatles Coins, all sorts of coins TO BE RICH

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

You fuckers just don't want me to be rich, but I ain't listening!!! BTC bitch!

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

It's pretty simple, you go to virtex world exchange, buy second life lindens, exchange the lindens for gold stocks, then slowly you get the cash out from your gold holdings by selling for usd

loving idiots

This is a real thing btw, I've been looking into it

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.


Sounds like a good idea to get the police involved

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

plape tickler posted:

I'm up ~$800 on my crypto currency purchases I made starting May 29th. If I'm not robbed or my bank account isn't closed.

I've made 50 dollars so I feel fine. To the moon!

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

Bitcoins next stop is 100,000 dollars, idiots

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

There sure are some dumb bitcoin stories ! But here I am making money on the bitcoins ! 💰

Im about to buy a second PC just to mine!

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

Im almost 100 dollars in profit on the Bitcoins*! To the moon!

* before electricity costs

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

plape tickler posted:

I'm at a little over 1K profit in two weeks. Getting an itchy sell finger

Never sell, never surrender! Bitcoin retirement here I come !

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

Zo posted:

i can't really tell if goons really believe the "you can't cash out bitcoins" meme or if they're just desperately holding onto that thought to avoid the truth of having missed out on free money

Aren't you the Diablo 3 baron? Are you into bitcoinzzz too? You'd make a killing, please make a thread about cryptocurrencies and tell us how to get rich

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:

It's funny because they post the line graph monument to their idiocy and drop dank memes like "to the moon!!!" instead of hoping people quietly forget about their embarrassing 5-year series of increasingly dogmatic mispredictions.

Well, it was worth missing out on thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars, because we had a few hearty laughs about how it's all going to crash one day

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

scott zoloft posted:

I dunno I just turned 200 dollars into 422, then again into 700. And now I am going to take that 700 and wait for it to drop more and then I am going to buy more. It's fun and doesn't require me to set aside more than a thousand dollars to play market.

Well, you see you're actually a loser because... *checks notes* uh... it's not "free money" because you had costs. Idiot.

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

This is actually good for Bitcoin, guys

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

My dad just put 500 bucks down on Ether, hope it goes to the moon

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

If only I'd joined bitcointalk forums instead of dumb old GBS

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

I honestly think a bunch of posters in SA kept the FUD about bitcoin to make more profits themselves.

Like I get if you kept your mouth shut during these times and didn't share how you were making money, but I suspect a bunch of goons of actively scaring others away

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

And sure it was full of risks but us Goons were uniquely well positioned to profit from this poo poo in case it worked. We had the gaming hardware, the nerdy disposition, the time (thanks to a lack of social life)

We should've been #1 in trying this poo poo out, and we certainly could've laughed about the poo poo while we profited and risked literally nothing, but nooooo let's give money to the Hot dog man, let's organize complex spreadsheets for Eve online or whatever you assholes do

For what it's worth I've got 100 extra dollars in cold hard cash in my bank account from this last week, by leaving my gaming puter on when not playing. I haven't noticed TOO MUCH brain damage and my berries are dry af come at me

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

Ohnonotme posted:

Nope, it's gone to poo poo.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!


https://www.quora.com/Is-now-still-a-good-moment-to-invest-in-Bitcoin-Ethereum-Ripple-Which-is-best-and-why-Why-not/answer/Terrence-Yang-4

Is now still a good moment to invest in Bitcoin/Ethereum/Ripple? Which is best, and why? Why not?
Terrence Yang
Terrence Yang, xWall Street VP. xMD @ $1B+ AUM fund. Berkshire 50 attendee.
Answered 5h ago

No, now is a horrible time for the vast majority of us to buy Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple. Or any cryptocurrency.

There is no way cryptocurrencies are worth anywhere near the $100 billion plus market cap they had last night.

Why?

Because there is no sustainable legal killer apps in the cryptocurrency world.

There's no moat, no pricing power.

So you're left with store of value, unrealized potential, hype, promises and code that may be worthless.

Is below the beginning of the end for the cryptocurrency bubble or just another temporary blip?


Yes, cryptocurrencies like Ethereum have a lot of potential.

Buying a $1 lottery ticket when the jackpot goes up to $500 million is a lot of potential too. That doesn’t mean your lottery ticket is worth $500 million. Or $5 million. Or $5.

The average lottery ticket is worth less than $1 because of the high margins and expenses embedded into the system.

When you overpay for a cryptocurrency, you are buying lottery tickets. Right now, with much worse odds.

So far the only legal killer apps for the cryptocurrencies you mentioned are:

Ethereum - ICO platform. This dies when the ICO bubble implodes. Ethereum is also a gateway to other coins. Meaning people usually buy Bitcoin or Ethereum with cash and then convert to a hot ICO cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin - Store of value/digital gold and gateway to other coins. Bitcoin dies if the code is somehow not secure because, e.g., quantum computing kills it.[1]It may also die if there is no real use case. Right now Bitcoin is not scaling. Transaction times, fees and unconfirmed rates keep going up and up.
Ripple - They have a good PR agency I guess.
Supposedly banks are using it but for what exactly? Anyone? And banks will just fork the open source code and build their own thing. Including trading with each other on it. I helped create several of the default swap indices traded by many banks.
When I worked for several years on Wall Street, the only things I saw that we did that was close to “open source” was work on standardizing industry deal documents such as for swaps and derivatives through International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Inc.
That said, I’m bullish on cryptocurrencies long term.

It’s a great way to help with identity management, etc.

The winner might be a cryptocurrency that isn’t even launched yet.

I hope answering the questions below will help you understand why you should be very careful about speculating or gambling in cryptocurrency. I think it's a bit disingenuous to call it investing.

Do you like to buy at or near the top? Do you panic buy? If so, you will probably panic sell.


Do you have FOMO or Fear Of Missing Out?

Do you succumb to social proof like the rest of us? If so, then you probably have some FOMO.

Most importantly, do you have an unfair advantage over all the other people buying, selling, trading and holding these cryptocurrencies?

I believe one or more cryptocurrencies will make it but that’s a guess.

And there’s a very high chance the winning cryptocurrency has not launched yet. Apple’s iPhone and Google search were latecomers.

What’s not a guess is 99.9% of cryptocurrencies are worth basically zero by any reasonable measure.

What is the evidence any of them have:

a killer app?
pricing power?
an unbreachable moat surrounding a valuable castle? (as Warren Buffett might say)
The vast majority of us should treat cryptocurrency as lottery tickets.

Just like you spend $20 or whatever at the local 7–11 or gas station when the lottery goes over $100 million, you can put a small amount of play money - money you won’t miss - on cryptocurrency.

Remember, you do not have to buy lottery tickets.

If you do buy cyrptocurrencies, just hold it and forget it.

It’ll probably go to zero.

But I believe one - possibly more - of them might change the world and finally find a legal killer app with an unbreachable moat in a massive market.

In 2007 I had relevant, legal, solid inside information because I worked on Wall Street at one of the banks that massively screwed up - Merrill Lynch.

I dumped almost all my equity positions one month off the market high.

And about 10 months before Lehman imploded, nearly taking down Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, many other institutions and causing a near-global depression.

Fast forward to 2017. I again have legal inside information. Not as great as last time.

But I even turned down a hot ICO presale I had access to.

Why?

Because I don’t really do quick flips. And I don't know when the bubble will burst.

Bottom line:

Because of the pseudonymity and decentralization, a cryptocurrency will always be useful for helping people and organizations:

launder money
bypass capital controls
do other illegal activity.
Silk Road did this, got caught. Now the Silk Road CEO is serving a life sentence in the US.

Another way to look at it is this:

You either have strong conviction present trends will continue or you don’t.

If the former, then act.

If you buy, this will help the good folks who are trying to ICO (disclosure: I am advising a new cryptocurrency investment fund (in formation) and a new cryptocurrency).

If you’re not sure present trends will continue, don’t act.

Just wait. Warren Buffett often waits a long time before making an investment.

If you think the market is overvalued right now but believe in [pick your favorite cryptocurrency] long-term, then don’t buy.

Wait.

The dot com bubble started in 1997. As you can see, there were many times to get in the NASDAQ below 2000. Until 1999 to 2001.

If you bought at just below 2000 - let’s say in 1998 - you’d be barely up in 2005. 7 years later.

So you can buy and hold. But are you buying at the peak at 5000?

What’s the point?


I don’t think you should have strong conviction after reading this and, really, anything else out there on cryptocurrency. If you do, please share.

I don’t give advice. If I were you, I might:

invest only what I can afford to lose.
avoid leverage or buying on margin.
I have had to dump stock to raise cash to help someone else I cared about meet a margin call.

I made sure that person never needed to ask me for an emergency loan ever again. :)

The world’s best investment banks with really smart traders and risk managers - Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch used leverage, had strong conviction (indeed, some of the ones responsible were quite arrogant) and nearly imploded in 2008.

What’s the killer app or apps for each right now?

I understand there’s a lot of activity.

Who cares?

I care about results.

Bitcoin has been around since 2008.

Is it like startups?

Because 99.9% of startups work hard, raise a lot of money and implode due to failing to meet unmet needs.

Webvan and Kozmo - each a poster child of the dot com bubble - both made something people want. But that’s not enough.

Delivering groceries, etc. for free is making something people love because you are massively subsidizing the costs.

“Hi, would you like to have your groceries and food delivered for free? Same cost as shopping in the store. No tipping!”

That’s not a business. That’s a VC funding your life.[2]


When you invest in cryptocurrencies, who’s life are you funding?

Are you just burning money?

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

Blockade posted:

Real talk here are my honest and true irl opinions:

I think that one company that's using blockchains to manage a cloud storage platform where your data is encrypted, broken into chunks, and stored wherever or in any pattern that is the very cheapest at that moment and passes those savings to the customer might do pretty good in the low value-very large data storage market. Last I checked their fees were something like 1/8th of AWS.

Everything else I've seen, even 'smart contracts' seems real speculative.

The Siacoin and the Storj

I think they're pretty good too, actually

(So sell, sell, selllllll)

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-804c9a906d36

WhalePandaFollow
Crypto OG. Talks about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Don’t take me too serious, unless I’m serious. Happy Panda most of the time, Sad Panda sometimes.
Jun 12
I was wrong about Ethereum

I was wrong about Ethereum because it’s such a good store of value… no wait, let me try again.
I was wrong about Ethereum because it’s such a decentra… nope.
I was wrong about Ethereum because everyone is using it as a supercomputer… No.
I do admit I didn’t see this Ethereum bubble coming, but then again I wrongly assumed that no startup would need or even dare to ask $50 million in funding and I also wrongly assumed that people would use common sense and that leading developers would speak out against this sort of practice. Quite the opposite it seems.
Ethereum’s sole use case at the moment is ICOs and token creation.

What’s driving the Ethereum price?
Greed.
Greed from speculators, investors and developers.

Can you blame them?
Speculators and investors: No.
Developers: Absolutely.
So let’s think for a minute and think what determines the price? Supply + demand. Pretty straightforward.
Supply: the tokens that are available on the market, right? But with every ICO there are more tokens that are being “locked up”. Obviously the projects will liquidate some, to get fiat to pay for development of their project, but they also see the rising price of Ethereum. So at that point greed takes over and they think, totally understandable, “We should probably just cash out what we really need and keep the rest in ETH, that’s only going up anyway it seems.”
And obviously there are new coins being mined, but if you look at the amount of ETH these ICOs raise, at this point, it’s just a drop in a bucket.
Demand: You have the normal investors (who are already very late to the game at this point… as usual), but the buy pressure that these ICOs are creating is crazy and scary. Take TenX for example, it’s an upcoming ICO at the end of the month. The cap is 200,000 ETH (at current ETH price of $370) that’s $74,000,000 for a startup. Here’s the best part: it’s only 51% of the tokens. Effectively giving it an instant $150 million valuation (if it sells out, which it probably will).
Another example is Bancor, a friend of mine runs a trading group, he collected 1,100+ BTC to put into Bancor. This needs to be converted into ETH before the sale starts. These are decent size players, but not even the big whales who participate in these ICOs.

What will the price do next?
It can go quite a bit higher, there are so many coins being taken off the market by these ICOs, that it can still continue for a while and everyone is seeing this and thinking: “Why aren’t I doing an ICO”. There are lots more coming.
At one point it will crash, hard. What the trigger will be? Bug(s) in smart contracts, major hack, big ICO startup that fails/fucks up, network split, even something as silly as not having a decent ICO for a couple of weeks which creates sell pressure from miners and ICO projects can cause a big crash. It’s not a question of “if”, it’s a question of “when”. That being said: Markets can remain irrational for quite a long time.
Usually when a bubble like this pops we could easily see 70–80% loss of value (for reference: Bitcoin went from $1,200 to $170 after 2013–2014 bubble). This is however quite the unusual situation and I’m not sure to what kind of bubble I can really compare it.
I’m sure most of you have seen “Wolf of Wall Street”. Just re-watch this clip and see if you find any similarities with the current situation. (bonus clip)

What I really find interesting is what the ICO startups will do, Bitcoin had hodlers and investors mainly, individuals who most of the time had a fulltime job and didn’t need to sell. With Ethereum there is this huge amount being held by companies who need to pay bills. Will they panic dump to secure a “healthy” amount of fiat funding, will they try to hold through a bear cycle?
Taking responsibility.
Everyone loves making money, you can’t blame traders or investors from taking advantage of this hype. That would be silly. People will buy literally anything if they can make a quick buck out of it.
The responsibility here is with the developers, Consensys and the Ethereum Foundation but they don’t take responsibility since they’re getting more money. This will end with the regulators stepping in.
The reason why I say that it’s with developers, Consensys and the Ethereum Foundation is simple:
The developers of a project assign these crazy tokensale caps, more money than any startup would ever need.
The Ethereum foundation members+ core developers use their own celeb status to actively promote these projects as advisors, for which they’re compensated well, luring in people who have no clue what they’re buying.
Consensys promotes all of this since it’s the marketing branch of Ethereum. The more fools that buy in, the better.
Let me illustrate this with an example. Have you heard of primalbase? It’s an ICO with a token for shared workspaces. Why would a shared workspace need its own token? It doesn’t, it really really really doesn’t. Let’s take a look at the advisors:

First thing that an advisor should’ve said in this case was: “Don’t do it, it’s stupid, it makes no sense.” But well there we have Mr Ethereum himself.
We all know that Vitalik has a cult-like following with the Ethereum investors so it will be very easy for primalbase to launch their ICO and use Vitalik’s face and name to get itself funded.
This is just one example, if you go through all of these ICOs you find a lot of familiar names and faces. Nothing wrong with being an advisor, but when you’re just sending people to the slaughterhouse…
The sad part is that a lot of people will lose a lot of money on this, some of them obviously more than they can afford to lose, that’s how it always goes. The regulators will step in after this bubble pops and what scares me is the fact that it will damage all of crypto, including Bitcoin, not just Ethereum and its ICO’s.

But you’re just an Ethereum hater
I’ve heard all the accusations:
I hate Ethereum because I’m a Bitcoin Maximalist. I’m not, I like other projects too, like Siacoin for example.
I hate Ethereum because I missed out. I did miss out on the crowdsale, but I traded plenty of Ethereum and it’s ICOs and made some nice profit.
I hate Ethereum because I don’t understand it. Really? Do you? The only smart contracts running on it are ICO token sales. Or contracts to buy ICO tokens the second they become available.
I hate Ethereum because I’m jealous of Vitalik. No, it’s impressive what he did at his young age. At the same time I think he’s largely responsible for this bubble and he has made a lot of mistakes. We all make mistakes, but bailing out your friends from the DAO while other hacks and losses aren’t compensated or fixed just shows total lack of integrity. Or it’s everything or it’s nothing. And when it comes to immutability in crypto, it should be nothing.
For the people that are scared that Ethereum will replace Bitcoin
Ethereum is not a store of value. It isn’t capped. Yes, I know they’re planning to switch to PoS (which it already kind of is). Do you think they managed to create the first software implementation ever without any bugs? Doing such a major change on a (currently) $30 billion market is completely irresponsible, borderline insanity. Even if we assume that there are no bugs, what about the miners? The miners who bought their equipment to mine Ethereum, the miners that supported the network for years. “But they knew we were switching to PoS.” Of course they knew, and do you think they’ll just give up on such a profitable coin? Some might switch immediately to Zcash and Ethereum Classic but there will be another fork and we’ll have ETHPoS and ETHPoW, with of course all the Ethereum tokens being on both chains. Even Ethereum developers think that his is a very likely scenario.
Ethereum’s fees are lower. They are, sometimes, by a bit. If you’re trying to send something when no token sale is active obviously, else you have people spending $100's to get in on the token sale and clog up the network. Also doesn’t apply when you send something from exchanges since for example with Poloniex it’s about $1.9 vs $0.28 for Bitcoin. Oh and another exception is when you actually use it for smart contracts, which require more gas to process than a normal transactions from account A to account B. You know.. the actual reason why Ethereum was created.
Ethereum is not decentralized. Bitcoin isn’t as decentralized as it should be, we all know that, but compared to most other coins, Bitcoin is very decentralized. Vitalik has called himself a benevolent dictator in the past. He is the single point of failure in this project and if he gets compromised in any way that’s the end. There is no way of knowing if this happens and since people blindly follow everything he says, he has the power to do anything. Satoshi was smart enough to remove himself from the Bitcoin project.
Ethereum is not immutable. Don’t have to spend much time on this: see DAO and split that lead to Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
Ethereum has the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. But but but.. all those big banks use Ethereum. No, they don’t. They use “an” Ethereum, which is a (private) fork of Ethereum. By that definition 99% of all altcoins are using Bitcoin. Still a separate chain. The fact that we’re talking about a private blockchain here actually makes altcoins more like Bitcoin than “an Ethereum” that EEA uses like Ethereum. You can compare it to 2013–2014 when some companies started to get interested in blockchain vs Bitcoin, only difference here is that for Ethereum it’s part of their marketing campaign to lure in potential investors.
If you think I’m just full of crap, which is fair, I am just some random popular guy on Twitter who has been around from before Ethereum. Have a look at what Vlad has to say about the current state of Ethereum here and here. Vlad Zamfir is probably the smartest guy on the Ethereum team, and I say this while I don’t agree with him on many of his opinions, I do respect him.
Conclusion:
If you’re an actual developer, be realistic and honest with your investors. Do you really ever need more than $5 mill? Finish a MVP first and then do a tokensale, if you really really need to do an ICO. Plenty of rich crypto investors and traders now that would love to be part of your project and who would be happy to just invest for equity. Yes, it will probably be less than what you can get in an ICO, but at least you didn’t sell out and it shows you actually really care about your product/service/…
If you’re a trader or investor, be realistic about the bubble. I know you hear this a 100 times when you’re trading but: don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose.
I have some Ethereum, not as a long term investment, but because the price is going up and I need it to invest in tokens which I can quickly flip as soon as they come on the market. That’s just the type of market we’re in. Everyone is making a lot of money, awesome right? What could potentially go wrong.

WhalePanda
Crypto OG. Talks about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Don’t take me too serious, unless I’m serious. Happy Panda most of the time, Sad Panda sometimes

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

vortmax posted:

I don't know about you guys but I can't wait for someone to save child porn on the distributed storage part of my hard drive.

Well, Storj has a pretty clear strategy to avoid attracting illegal content holders to their distributed encrypted storage platform: they ask you really nicely NOT to host your child porn there. P sure that's going to be foolproof

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

Isn't a Blockchain like a database then? It's just like, public or something

I don't know, and I don't understand it, buy, buy, buy!

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

QuarkJets posted:

Hope you weren't thinking of using Coinbase because they were down for most of the day


That's exactly right; a blockchain is an append-only distributed database where you give untrusted parties the ability to make insertions, and you deal with untrustworthiness by requiring everyone to participate in a hardware arms race. If you get outspent and lose control of your own database to some competitor then that's just the free market deciding that you don't deserve to control your own blockchain anymore, and since it's the free market making the decision that means the decision is just

If you want to set up a distributed database only on hardware that you already trust, and you don't want to give competitors access at all, then a blockchain is pointless. What good is a system that is only useful if you give a competitor a foot in the door to take control of your data, you ask? BLOCKCHAIN BLOCKCHAIN BLOCKCHAIN TO THE MOOOOOON

That sounds loving dumb, as I thought.

Then I read stuff like this guy and his Siacoins and I wonder if there's something there:


quote:

David VorickFollow
Jun 8
Decentralization Could Have Saved Users of Amazon Drive

Today Amazon announced that they would be removing the ‘Unlimited’ plan from their Drive service. Users have been given 180 days to find a new place for their data, or otherwise be charged.
Amazon Drive Unlimited was a valuable service for many Amazon customers, and is now being shutting down. The service provided a home for many users that had data which was largely unaffordable on other platforms. The promise of unlimited storage was a huge boon for many, especially in communities like Reddit’s /r/datahoarders.
Amazon Drive is ultimately a product by a centralized company that can perform centralized decision making. These decisions can be made for any reason and at any time, and very often end up harming the end user in ways that can feel unexpected or unfair. When you use a centralized service like Amazon, you are trusting that their service is going to be there for you tomorrow. Amazon has bills and motivations, and at any time they can decide that it’s no longer worth providing service to you. And as we see today, this is something that does happen.
Bitcoin brought a new type of distributed system into the world. A system where you did not need to trust. A crazy way of writing applications that can’t be shut down, even by their creators. Users of these applications can rely on them to be there tomorrow, because there’s no kill switch.
We’ve taken that way of doing things and applied it to data storage. With Sia, there is no kill switch. As the founders and developers, we can’t disable your access to the network even if we tried, because we intentionally designed ourselves out of the equation. Sia is infrastructure that you can expect to be there, regardless of how the political or financial status of the major players changes. And that’s because Sia works hard to make sure that no single player or group of players is all that important or powerful on the network.
This won’t be the last time that a centralized network makes a dramatic change to a service that people depend on. When it comes to critical infrastructure, you do not want to be vulnerable to that. When it comes to something as important as your data, decentralization has a lot to offer.

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

And Tyler Too! posted:

so how do i turn this internet monopoly money into real money i'm ready to invest

Buy, buy, buy!

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

Stealthgerbil posted:

sia coins definitely are going to be used for illegal poo poo and will probably end up being worth something because of that.

Oh no way, I'm sure business owners are going to love storing their information in distributed nodes instead of Dropbox or Google

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

FAGGY CLAUSE posted:

Wow bitcoin is up to 2700. I knew I should've gotten in earlier, I can't not get involved at these prices. Anyone know where to get some used miners?

Imagine not listening to goons in 2011 and buying like 1,000 bitcoins

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3824394&perpage=40

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/comments/2017/06/19/business/dealbook/ethereum-bitcoin-digital-currency.html

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

I did it, I bought 50 dollars worth of "WAVES" with my imaginary mined money, get rich bitch! To da mooooooooooooooooon!

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

I've been trying to buy "Reddcoins" but their bullshit app doesn't even load the blockchain necessary to assign me a wallet. It's been downloading the blockchain for 3 loving days and it's at 40%, taking up 30 gigs of my SSD hard drive.

But not to worry, as soon as I get on that blockchain, I'm buying thousand Reddcoins! It's the future of money baby!

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

Wow, you're selling this already and there's not even a finished product !!!

Sounds like Star Citizen to me!!!!

Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

Siri write down my new idea : Star Citizen ICO tokens or some poo poo

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Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

https://news.bitcoin.com/introducing-do-nothing-technologies-blockchain-ico/

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