Bitcoins!

[NinkobEi]

Rough calculation for LTC, at $20-30/LTC, a single 7950 running 24h/day will give you $5-8/day or $0.2-0.3 per hour.

is that after electricity costs or before

 

[Octopuss]

That much?

Electricity cost is irrelevant to me. I currently have 5850 in my machine and my father in law's laptop with 6770m, but the former is getting upgraded to 280x. I might give this a shot...

 

[mauriek]

is that after electricity costs or before

that before electricity cost, for me a single 7950 at 24/7 electricity cost maximum $17/month, usually only cost an average of $13/mo, so for a single 7950 my lowest acceptable LTC price is around $2-3, anything above that will speed up the break even for hardware cost. With current LTC difficulty and the diff rising, i calculate 7950 will still be profitable for at least another 6-8 month, assuming the price will not fall below $10.

 

[NinkobEi]

That much?

Electricity cost is irrelevant to me. I currently have 5850 in my machine and my father in law's laptop with 6770m, but the former is getting upgraded to 280x. I might give this a shot...

Look at the poop, smell the poop, but never touch the poop. And why is electricity cost irrelevant?

 

[Octopuss]

Because I don't pay for it.
I don't understand your first sentence.

Also, everything even remotely AMD-related is hopelessly sold out, and 280x's are skyrocketing even when out of stock.

 

[Nordic]

Depends where you live. I have really cheap electricity. Last time I did the math it was like $3.11 for my 7970 alone if running 24/7.

 

[NinkobEi]

Really good read

That placement on the standard bubble roadmap posted earlier might be accurate. Although bubbles usually grow far bigger than expected, there are quite some reasons why this might finally end soon.

- Media attention was at an all-time high. Regional newspapers were running Bitcoin stories, papers in China were running daily Bitcoin stories. Metro announcement systems in Germany were showing news about Bitcoin. A friend of mine heard people talk about Bitcoin in the streets. By now everyone has heard about Bitcoin.
- Dollar volume and Bitcoin volume has subsided substantially across all exchanges.
- The latest boom upwards featured a 6 or 7 sigma event by going up 50% in a single day, that is, an event 6 to 7 times above the standard deviation of daily percentage change based on all daily data available. The likelihood of such a day are roughly 1 in 500,000,000 to 1 in 400,000,000,000 (rounded numbers). In a chart this looks like this, with the early part of Bitcoin history omitted:

Because I'm interested in bubbles and trade other, real markets anyway, I've got the same data on the 1980's gold bubble, the dot-com bubble, the South Sea bubble of the 1720's and a few others. Bitcoin looks and behaves a lot like them when they reached their highs. This craziness might go on for another month or so though, it’s almost impossible to get right, but the increasingly large swings in volatility are unsustainable and it’s only a matter of time before it spins out of control (December/January are good months for bubble pops; people and organizations tend to relocate funds for the new year).

This is also why I've killed my bubble portfolio. Yes. I’ve owned a bubble portfolio. It consisted of roughly 20 alt currencies and held a total value of about what I'd lose during a bad day of forex trading, meaning nothing I wasn't willing to lose anyway. It went up by roughly 780%, which is a windfall I didn't expect at all because I had written that money off as a potential loss the moment I threw it at some sketchy exchanges in Russia (BTC-E) and wherever the fuck Cryptsy is located.

I’ve found that alt currencies are pretty much leveraged Bitcoin. When Bitcoin goes up, the alts go up faster, when Bitcoin goes down, alts plunge faster. I've owned some pretty volatile shit back when I didn't know enough about trading not to do so (silver ETF's leveraged times 3, horrible amounts of leverage on Forex), but alt crypto's are the most insane stuff I've ever seen. Quarkcoin once was up 5000-6000% before plunging down again.

To anyone disappointed on ‘missing out’, don’t be. What you were missing out on is stress, doubt, and all sorts of risks. You can get hacked, the exchanges can get hacked, the exchanges can just disappear, the services that convert Bitcoins to money can (and do) stop working the moment a significant sell-off starts to protect themselves from capital loss, and if all of that bullshit isn’t enough, crypto currencies can just hurl up intestines and die, go to zero or multiply by 100 in terms of appreciation. Also, Bitcoin is horrible with transactions. I've had money stuck in transit for hours because Bitcoin refused to confirm my transaction. It's a fun ride on pocket change, but you don't ever want to experience the bullshit people who dumped their retirement fund into Bitcoin are going through. It's horrifying how stubborn people can be when they lose and keep losing money, just because they don't want to admit they made a mistake and were wrong.

 

[Octopuss]

Does anyone happen to have cpuminer 2.3.2? Goddamn Sourceforge is blocking it on virus allegiations.

 

[Nordic]

@NinkobEi

On Sunday, Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal admitted he was rethinking his former view that Bitcoin was a "currency for clowns." But Matt Yglesias still isn't convinced that Bitcoin is anything special:

Bitcoins are more portable than either suitcases full of $100 bills or diamonds. So there's some use there. And even though I think inflation paranoia is dumb, it's certainly a real phenomenon. And anything gold can do Bitcoin can do better. In essence you've combined the smuggling utility of pieces of paper with pictures of Ben Franklin on them with the inflation hedging properties of gold. That's a decent achievement. But it's not going to set the world on fire.

I don't know if Bitcoin is going to set the world on fire, but I think this analysis overlooks the characteristics that give the financial network the potential to do so. To see what Matt is missing, it's helpful to go back to an analogy I made a couple of weeks ago: the early Internet. The Internet of the 1980s was a small, strange and inhospitable place. Reading Bart Gellman's dispatch from the Internet circa 1988, it's easy to imagine sober-minded people wondering why millions of dollars of taxpayer money are being spent so a few thousand nerds can argue about their favorite science fiction franchises and send each other glorified telegrams.

And indeed, if you'd asked a nerd from the early 1990s what the Internet was good for, they would have struggled to give a compelling answer. Many nerds had half-baked ideas for revolutionary Internet applications. Others were pushing crazy theories about the Internet becoming a global free speech zone unencumbered by governments.

Most of those specific ideas turned out to be wrong, as we discovered when the dot-com bubble collapsed. And the anti-government ideology of some early Internet users didn't have very much to do with its success. But obviously that didn't mean the Internet as a whole was a fad. What made the Internet special wasn't any specific application, but the fact that it provided general-purpose infrastructure for moving information around the world that was open for anyone to use. Crucially, it was designed in a way that made it easy for others, like World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, to extend the network's functionality.

The open-ended character of the Internet is especially powerful because innovation can happen at multiple "layers." After Tim Berners-Lee extended the basic capabilities of the Internet protocols by inventing the Web, others such as Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg used the web as the foundation for still more sophisticated services. More recently Zuckerberg's Facebook has itself has become a platform in its own right on which thousands of others have built online services.

The reason so many nerds are excited about Bitcoin is that they see the potential for Bitcoin to do for financial services what the Internet did for information: provide a general-purpose platform anyone can use to conduct complex financial transactions. The network's open architecture not only means that anyone can use the network, it also means that one person's improvements can become the foundation for another's tinkering. Optimists predict that competition among Bitcoin entrepreneurs will lead to a steady improvement in the technical capabilities of the Bitcoin network, just as competition on the Internet produced the World Wide Web and then Google and Facebook.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...tics-miss-about-bitcoins-long-term-potential/

 

[NinkobEi]

@James
"The reason so many nerds are excited about Bitcoin is that they see the potential for Bitcoin to do for financial services what the Internet did for information: provide a general-purpose platform anyone can use to conduct complex financial transactions."
It's almost as if the writer is oblivious to online banking, credit and debit cards, and the infamous steam wallet. Bitcoin could never handle the volume of transactions required to be considered a legitimate currency. Its design is too bloated to be practical - ever. It has no fail-safes and no consumer protection. And it is trying to replace something that is already established and works perfectly fine. A better designed crypto currency may make its way through the nethers one day, but bitcoin is nothing but a stepping stone to that.

 

[The Von Matrices]

@James
"The reason so many nerds are excited about Bitcoin is that they see the potential for Bitcoin to do for financial services what the Internet did for information: provide a general-purpose platform anyone can use to conduct complex financial transactions."
It's almost as if the writer is oblivious to online banking, credit and debit cards, and the infamous steam wallet. Bitcoin could never handle the volume of transactions required to be considered a legitimate currency. Its design is too bloated to be practical - ever. It has no fail-safes and no consumer protection. And it is trying to replace something that is already established and works perfectly fine. A better designed crypto currency may make its way through the nethers one day, but bitcoin is nothing but a stepping stone to that.

While I agree that the current implementation of Bitcoin needs improvement, the brilliant thing is that the protocol is open to modification as long as the majority of clients agree to it. It's disingenuous to say that Bitcoin is permanently flawed for that reason. Things like the block size, the minimum transaction size, and the number of decimal places allowed can all change as the currency grows.

The problem with the current online financial system is that there is always a middle man in the transaction, whether it is a bank, a credit card, a debit card, or even the Steam wallet. I can't send money to you directly. If I want to send money to you, I have to use a middle man, and of course the middle man wants a moderate fee for transferring the money. With Bitcoin I can transfer money directly to you and have a much smaller transaction fee (if one is charged at all). In addition many of the poor cannot use electronic forms of conventional currency because the middle man (the bank) refuses them service based upon their financial situation. Bitcoin makes no such discrimination.

Does anyone happen to have cpuminer 2.3.2? Goddamn Sourceforge is blocking it on virus allegiations.

Why would you still be mining on a CPU at this point? The reason it's a virus threat is because the only people who CPU mine are people who write viruses. They make infected computers mine for them and don't have to pay for the electricity, so it doesn't matter how inefficient the miner is.

 

[qubit]

The one thing I don't get about bitcoin from a technical perspective, is how the block chain works.

First of all it's supposed to contain details every single BT transaction ever, with all the notes and things that go with it. This would lead it to becoming very large indeed in a very short time, so should be like that now. Then, it's supposed to be synchronized with all the other BT clients. As the system is decentralized, how is this supposed to work? How can you ever know that you have the latest version of the block chain?

To compound this problem, the block chain would have to be updated every few seconds, or even several times a second, as BT usage picks up. Eventually, it will have to be updated hundreds and eventually thousands of times a second, which would make maintaining a single updated version totally impractical.

Can anyone clarify all this?

 

[The Von Matrices]

The one thing I don't get about bitcoin from a technical perspective, is how the block chain works.

First of all it's supposed to contain details every single BT transaction ever, with all the notes and things that go with it. This would lead it to becoming very large indeed in a very short time, so should be like that now. Then, it's supposed to be synchronized with all the other BT clients. As the system is decentralized, how is this supposed to work? How can you ever know that you have the latest version of the block chain?

To compound this problem, the block chain would have to be updated every few seconds, or even several times a second, as BT usage picks up. Eventually, it will have to be updated hundreds and eventually thousands of times a second, which would make maintaining a single updated version totally impractical.

Can anyone clarify all this?

The entire block chain was never intended to be directly used by clients. BitcoinQT is a bad client in this regard; there are other clients that can access the block chain without downloading it all. It was always intended for the whole block chain to be hosted by only a few servers (like blockchain.info) allowing clients access to transaction info without downloading the entire chain. As far as controlling growth, there is significant debate on what to do, whether it be a purge or something else, so I don't have an answer to that.

 

[Solaris17]

The one thing I don't get about bitcoin from a technical perspective, is how the block chain works.

First of all it's supposed to contain details every single BT transaction ever, with all the notes and things that go with it. This would lead it to becoming very large indeed in a very short time, so should be like that now. Then, it's supposed to be synchronized with all the other BT clients. As the system is decentralized, how is this supposed to work? How can you ever know that you have the latest version of the block chain?

To compound this problem, the block chain would have to be updated every few seconds, or even several times a second, as BT usage picks up. Eventually, it will have to be updated hundreds and eventually thousands of times a second, which would make maintaining a single updated version totally impractical.

Can anyone clarify all this?

Its a mix between diffirent cryptographic functions it downloads a set amount of data for one. almost like a work unit in F@H or boinc. then this block chain needs to be computed using a distributed key http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_key_generation much like F@H and WCG you can have errors and your "segment" of the block chain will not validate with the "pool" (server that has all the other half of the algorythm) then it will dump the work and force an update. because its hash value did not make the handshake the work isnt counted.

 

[qubit]

The entire block chain was never intended to be directly used by clients. BitcoinQT is a bad client in this regard. It was always intended for the block chain to be used by a few servers (like blockchain.info) allowing clients access to transaction info without downloading the entire chain. As far as controlling growth, there is debate on what to do, whether it be a purge or something else, so I don't have an answer to that.

So the block chain isn't decentralized then. Ok, that would keep things manageable.

Of course, this gives BT a weak spot, a choke point for control and potential snooping by governments who don't like the idea of a currency operating out of their control for various reasons. Witness the takedown of the Silk Road exchange for example.

EDIT: Thanks Solaris, just saw your reply after posting mine. I'll check out that Wikipedia article.

 

[The Von Matrices]

So the block chain isn't decentralized then. Ok, that would keep things manageable.

Of course, this gives BT a weak spot, a choke point for control and potential snooping by governments who don't like the idea of a currency operating out of their control for various reasons. Witness the takedown of the Silk Road exchange for example.

It is decentralized in that no one "owns" the chain and can modify it alone; all the servers still have to be synchronized to the protocol, and you can still download the entire chain and start your own server if you really want it. However, you aren't required to have your own personal copy of the entire chain to use the currency. I really hope that the BitcoinQT client begins to die off for consumers because it's such a waste of bandwidth.

 

[Octopuss]

The reason it's a virus threat is because the only people who CPU mine are people who write viruses. They make infected computers mine for them and don't have to pay for the electricity, so it doesn't matter how inefficient the miner is.

Not sure if serious or...

 

[The Von Matrices]

Not sure if serious or...

https://blog.avast.com/2013/08/01/malicious-bitcoin-miners-target-czech-republic/

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/8/bitcoin-trojan

 

[Easy Rhino]

https://blog.avast.com/2013/08/01/malicious-bitcoin-miners-target-czech-republic/

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/8/bitcoin-trojan

There are legit cpu miners out there. Obviously there will be abuse... this is Earth and we are humans after all...

 

[Nordic]

There is no profit to cpu mine anymore though. Even the botnets are not that profitable, even with the free computational power.

 

[Octopuss]

I am getting extra ~50kh/s with 6 threads running on my 3770K on top of what's running on the GPU. I'll take that. The PC would otherwise idle anyway.

 

[Easy Rhino]

The real money is not in mining. You guys are just trading electricity for a virtual currency. The real money is in TRADING the coins.

 

[The Von Matrices]

The real money is not in mining. You guys are just trading electricity for a virtual currency. The real money is in TRADING the coins.

If you already have the hardware, it makes a lot of sense. However if you are buying hardware just to mine, I agree with you completely. You can make a lot more money investing.

That's exactly the reason I think the people buying every 280Xs on the market are crazy. They don't realize that they will only break even or be marginally profitable in the end. Litecoin adjusts difficulty 4x more frequently than Bitcoin so you can't take advantage of that lag in difficulty change. Wise investors don't blindly follow the horde when making investment decisions.

 

[Easy Rhino]

It cost me 66.85 bitcoins to get $50 virtual visa.

OMG, I am going through this thread again. You paid the potential of $66,000 USD for a $50 visa. LMFAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There are no words.

 

[The Von Matrices]

OMG, I am going through this thread again. You paid the potential of $66,000 USD for a $50 visa. LMFAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There are no words.

The transaction widely cited as the first Bitcoin sale was 10,000 BTC for two pizzas (25 USD) in May 2010. It looks crazy now, but if you were holding coins then, it was a good deal for a currency that had no real exchange value.