Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Arative

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
3,042
4,717
I think tea was right at least about the price. Current price is $35, high today was $49. That's a hell of a drop.
 

Tea_sl

shitlord
1,019
0
It's not rocket science. Shit is following standard curves almost exactly. We've hit the bull trap now but not the bottom. Holy fuck, someone just bought $15k worth of fake money at $39.5 per.

edit: And another 20k at $39.6. Fuck.
 

Tral_sl

shitlord
79
0
Bought a bit a week or so ago mostly just to see what the transaction process for buying BTC was like, sold last night, perfect timing. Probably staying out until the inevitable crash.

Kind of fascinating to watch this whole process though.
 

Tripamang

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
5,372
32,627
The same company that said they would ship in November of last year and has yet to ship anything more than a couple test units. Late June is a pipe dream for batch 3 orders. It's also laughable to think that there is any pressure being exerted on the market that isn't speculation. Bitcoins are an intermediary method of payment. It doesn't matter what the exchange rate is for Silk road or gambling since those bitcoins are being immediately converted into dollars. Not only is it a market driven by pure speculation, it's also a speculative market where the end game is essentially a worthless commodity. Bitcoin will never gain widespread acceptance because of the inherent faults with it: enormously long transaction times, deflationary, and lack of protections.
They've bumped the chips, tested them at 350mhz which they passed IO validation and they should finish packaging this week and then final assembly next week. Sure they've missed a bunch of deadlines, but they're actually in a position to start shipping shortly with a high degree of certainty.

I'm going to disagree with bitcoins never gaining widespread acceptance, and theres no point in us debating it because it's all speculation on where it's going to end up anyways. There has never been a currency/commodity that has the properties of bitcoin, regardless of whether it explodes into the mainstream it's going to change the way currencies are viewed and evolve for the better.

I think tea was right at least about the price. Current price is $35, high today was $49. That's a hell of a drop.
It's back to 44$ this morning.
 

gogusrl

Molten Core Raider
1,362
105
I think the current price says enough about the severity of that problem. They caught it early and they dealt with it. Welcome to last week.


edit : For those that don't know the details they had to revert some transactions from a 2h time frame. The price took a dip for a few hours before going back to 47$.
 

Arative

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
3,042
4,717
The pool I mine at btcguild lost 1254 coins from the hot wallet of the pool because of the issue. 16 users got those coins, so far only one user has returned those I'll gotten coins. The guy that ran the pool basically lost 60k because of it. A bunch of people are donating hashing power to the pool to help him recover it.
 

Aychamo BanBan

<Banned>
6,338
7,143
Can someone explain this entire concept to me? What the heck is mining? Are you being rewarded for processing packets with fractions of a penny? Ie, like[email protected]/* <![CDATA[ */!function(t,e,r,n,c,a,p){try{t=document.currentScript||function(){for(t=document.getElementsByTagName('script'),e=t.length;e--;)if(t[e].getAttribute('data-cfhash'))return t[e]}();if(t&&(c=t.previousSibling)){p=t.parentNode;if(a=c.getAttribute('data-cfemail')){for(e='',r='0x'+a.substr(0,2)|0,n=2;a.length-n;n+=2)e+='%'+('0'+('0x'+a.substr(n,2)^r).toString(16)).slice(-2);p.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(decodeURIComponent(e)),c)}p.removeChild(t)}}catch(u){}}()/* ]]> */, but if you complete a packet you get 1/1000 of a cent or something?
 

gogusrl

Molten Core Raider
1,362
105
What I'm about to say is not technically correct but it made it easier for me to explain mining to people.

Think of mining as accounting where you receive a "block" with the transaction data of others. You use your computing power to verify those transactions and for that the system pays you some bitcoins. The more computing power you have, the more blocks you can process and the more bitcoins you earn. Beside this, mining is also a way to distribute new bitcoins among the users instead of giving them away.

In reality it's a much more complex system but you're gonna have to use your google fu since i'm not typing all that shit.

You can start (again) with the paper written by the inventor of bitcoins =>http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
 

Aychamo BanBan

<Banned>
6,338
7,143
Ok thank you. I get that. But what is the data I'm mining? Am I helping discover new proteins? Or am I computing theoretical cures for cancer? Or is it literally just crunching numbers pointlessly?
 

gogusrl

Molten Core Raider
1,362
105
Your crunching them pointlessly because that's the balancing mechanism to keep the input of bitcoins in the market constant and also give enough time for the solved blocks to propagate in the network. The system is made so all the miners "solve" one block every 10 minutes. If you add more computing power to the network, the block will be solved faster so the system will artificially inflate the difficulty of the next block to slow everyone down going back to 1 block every 10 minutes.

You're not curing anyone, you're just helping keep the network alive and protected. The more miners there are, the harder it is to take it over. The more users there are (with the regular bitcoin client, not the mining client), the more backups you have of the whole blockchain (transaction history) and the harder it is to take down.
 

Aychamo BanBan

<Banned>
6,338
7,143
Your crunching them pointlessly because that's the balancing mechanism to keep the input of bitcoins in the market constant and also give enough time for the solved blocks to propagate in the network. The system is made so all the miners "solve" one block every 10 minutes. If you add more computing power to the network, the block will be solved faster so the system will artificially inflate the difficulty of the next block to slow everyone down going back to 1 block every 10 minutes.

You're not curing anyone, you're just helping keep the network alive and protected. The more miners there are, the harder it is to take it over. The more users there are (with the regular bitcoin client, not the mining client), the more backups you have of the whole blockchain (transaction history) and the harder it is to take down.
It just sounds so absolutely pointless.
 

gogusrl

Molten Core Raider
1,362
105
No it's not, it's actually one of the smartest things I've seen in a long time. That guy thought of everything. Again, you gotta read up a bit to really understand the system and appreciate it's genius.
 

Aychamo BanBan

<Banned>
6,338
7,143
No it's not, it's actually one of the smartest things I've seen in a long time. That guy thought of everything. Again, you gotta read up a bit to really understand the system and appreciate it's genius.
Maybe so... But, I have read and asked questions but I can't see the utility in pointlessly running my computers at full capacity to crunch numbers that serve no purpose but to generate an artificial currency that means nothing except to a select few computer people.

I'm not insulting anyone or anything, I just don't get it. Oh well!
 

Tea_sl

shitlord
1,019
0
I'm not insulting anyone or anything, I just don't get it. Oh well!
Sounds like you get it just fine. The thing that will make it clearer for you is that bitcoin was never intended to function as an actual currency. It was a proof of concept from a technical white paper. Mining was never intended as a means to make money, but as a reward to ensure that transactions would continue to be processed in theoretical crypto-currency land. It was thought that increasing block difficulty would discourage people from throwing ever increasing processing power at the blockchain, but that was clearly mistaken. Bitcoin would work just as well if everyone was still mining with spare CPU's, but as the speculation bubble grows people go crazy in a race to the bottom as FPGA's and ASIC's hit the market to allow truly blistering speeds of pointless busy work. Again it makes sense if you realize that it was never meant to actually be used as currency.

If you would like any clarification on how anything bitcoin works or suggestions for further reading from a non true believer point of view then ask away. I follow bitcoin pretty religiously not because I think it's a viable solution and the future of currency, but I find the whole shebang fascinating from an economic and social perspective.
 

Melvin

Blackwing Lair Raider
1,399
1,168
It just sounds so absolutely pointless.
I don't think it'sentirelypointless. The psychological effect of requiring "broken eggs" (a.k.a. the real cost of converting electrons into heat via a gratuitous ritual of esoteric computation) to "make an omelette" (a.k.a. bitcoins, a.k.a. monopoly money) seems to have done something good for bitcoins.