Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Is it worth getting into this? Any guides out there on where to go?

Buffet hates gold too. He just prefers assets that produce wealth (he uses a farm as an example) so it's no surprise that he hates bitcoin. He also stays away from technology stocks.

Bitcoin is being bought by some hedge funds now. Some of the big time VCs also invest in it; Coinbase started as a Y combinator startup I believe. The bankers of course don't like it. Jaime Dimon (the CEO of JPMorgan Chase) likes to say bad things about bitcoin which the crypto community finds amusing.

If crypto 100% succeeds at it's goal, companies like JPMorgan get screwed, so yea.. he's not gonna talk it up. That said, if it does well enough, they kind of have to jump on board, which many of them are doing.

For anyone getting into a crypto now, I'm imagining btc will have a bit of a large correction from it's massive gains. It's corrected down as low as 13k since its peak, and it might do that again. If you are keeping close tabs and can buy in whenever its below 16k, ideally under 14k, that'd be best. Otherwise, buy it and just forget about it. It's too violatile day to day right now, but long term it's done nothing but go up. Every so often it has a big spike that draws attention to it again, but hard to tell what will trigger each one. It's often from some big company/investor putting a bunch of money into it suddenly.

If you aren't already experienced and knowledgeable about the field, it's not worth trying to get into trading and riding the highs/lows. There's a lot of research you need to do before trying that. Just like day trading stocks.

Trading is much, much harder than it looks. I do a little trading, but I just wait for 'blood in the streets' before I enter into a long, and I don't do shorts. Essentially I just wait for a massive price tank that only happens every few months, and I don't use much leverage, making for a rather safe bet.

If you want to start trading, start with very small trades, and don't get cocky if you call the coin flip 5 times in a row. Crypto allows you to place teeny tiny bets at virtually no cost, so you can practice all you like on the real market.

Monero is an easy one to get into with mining since it can be done reasonably well with just a decent PC. The rate does drop over time, it currently takes me about 6 weeks to mine 0.5 coin (minimum payout for most pools) and that's with leaving a PC on 24/7 running both a CPU and a GPU miner.

I used to live with a guy who hacked into computers but didn't steal anything, just installed bitcoin mining software. Was he full of shit?

It's be great to covertly install a miner on a work network or something (obviously not going to do this just in case), is there a way to have it run from a USB or get around network security I wonder?

Chris said:

I used to live with a guy who hacked into computers but didn't steal anything, just installed bitcoin mining software. Was he full of shit?

It's be great to covertly install a miner on a work network or something (obviously not going to do this just in case), is there a way to have it run from a USB or get around network security I wonder?

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I had a client have this exact thing happen to them. Maxed resources 24/7 on some serious fucking server hardware...This went on for 9 months before they called and complained.

How much money did the hacker make!?

Big_w_powah said:

I had a client have this exact thing happen to them. Maxed resources 24/7 on some serious fucking server hardware...This went on for 9 months before they called and complained.

How much money did the hacker make!?

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He claimed to have a few tens of thousands of pounds worth but he split the key or whatever on several memory sticks to hide it.

We lived in a shithole shared house but he was a little retarded with some of his descisions so I doubt it but I can belive it too. He demonstrated his hacking and gave me a bunch of tools so that parts true at least.

I always think that there's probably some way to harness the power of ALOT of computers to mine, using some sort of public network or something.

when you used to be able to cpu mine bitcoins, hacks like this would work pretty well. Most pools now ban cpu and gpu mining, so the hacks are worthless now.

Did coinbase just up their transaction fees from 2 to 3$

What happens to the blockchain when transaction flow slows to a crawl? If the difficulty gets so high that most people stop mining does it even matter for future difficulty processing?

Is there a purge criteria on the blockchain? Is there a time to live on the transactions?

Khane said:

What happens to the blockchain when transaction flow slows to a crawl? If the difficulty gets so high that most people stop mining does it even matter for future difficulty processing?

Is there a purge criteria on the blockchain? Is there a time to live on the transactions?

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Transaction fees are suppose to replace mining rewards. That's why the block reward halves.

Something really needs to be done about the block size. There are something like 150k unconfirmed transactions right now and fees are pretty high.

But how can the transactions be confirmed and added to the blockchain if nobody is mining?

Khane said:

But how can the transactions be confirmed and added to the blockchain if nobody is mining?

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I guess the theory is that people will mine for the transaction fees and that what will keep them mining. It only takes one person mining to confirm a block.

Arative said:

I guess the theory is that people will mine for the transaction fees and that what will keep them mining. It only takes one person mining to confirm a block.

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Block size is definitely a concern (currently only ~2500 transactions will fit in a block. Assuming that was not a constraint you could argue that the reward is still too high (driving the current difficulty and energy cost up). Lot of people in the game and it has become big business. Energy requirements rivaling some countries.

A few things I don't really get...

1) Why gate the block validation to ~5 an hour? As I understand it the difficulty change is directly correlated to mining capacity with the intent to statistically meter the rate a block is solved.

2) Why the low limit on block size? You can conceptually have a low (empty?) block, which would serve to confirm the historical blocks and increase confidence of the blockchain, however why put an upper limit?

3) As someone asked earlier, what happens to the transactions not in the current block? Assuming these are held in a queue based on transaction priority?