BitCoin: "The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen"

That's kind of the time to buy.

Any investment is risky, Bitcoin doubly so, but when it troughs is when you want to buy. Moment any bad news happens people sell off to take the profits in order to get jam today, you then buy in on the expectation of recovery and jam tomorrow.

Just don't buy any if you can't keep track of it on an almost hourly basis or you expect it to be anything other than a short term investment. Or it's money you really don't want to lose.

ICO's are currently bullshit, pure and unmitigated. Just a way of parting money from fools.

Kodak have just wrapped it up in some reasonable sounding functionality. Essentially they've found a sales pitch for the snake oil.

So yes, other companies will do the same.

In other news the BoE is looking into a sterling-backed cryptocurrency, which is a whole different ballpark. That's going to muddy the waters between the concepts of a central bank and a retail bank, and I expect other central banks to follow.

I can barely begin to think of the intended consequences of such a move if it comes to pass, let alone the unintended ones.

blockchainforge.com was taken (and it doesn't go anywhere). Blockchainforge.net was available, so I snagged it. Not sure if I've got the forward set up right. Probably have to wait for things to propagate to be sure.

And when you won't even take your own crappy currency for your conference, that's saying something.

And it works, so feel free to pimp us!

How much did that domain name cost?

$15.00 tax and all.

Uh, oh! Markets are dropping!

This is a longish piece by an author who tried to buy Bitcoin at an ATM in Las Vegas. What he discovered (the hard way) is that there was a $40 fee for the transaction, and even though the transaction didn't go through, he couldn't get his money back until he called to complain. (And even then, he only got a portion of it back.)

There are over a hundred of the things?!

I feel like I should be surprised, but somehow I'm not.

Bitcoin is the 2010s version of the S&H Green Stamp.

Why have they not crashed this whole ecurrency scam yet? Really, what sort of currency is stable when you can emine it like you would WOW gold? I would think about investing in it if it wasn't for the reality some pinoy with too much time and too many accounts is probably stockpiling enough of the coins to seriosly fuck with the economy. That shit is all fun to play around with when it is imaginary, but I am not putting my cash into something some teenager can squeeze a living off of while jerking off in his parents basement with his Japanese sexbot.

Not for nothing the real power in the world is just going to squish it when they realize the whole thing is reliant on people who are basically anon with a real plan for world domination. Power does not share very well, and I am pretty sure that organized crime is only going to start killing the bitcoin geeks when they realize all their money is in fantasyland.

Why not just cut out the middleman and go directly to using energy as a currency?

Because that's what Bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies fundamentally are. Whereas regular currencies are backed by gold, cryptocurrencies are backed by electricity. The more electricity you can generate, the more mining you can do, the more bitcoin you can produce.

If you owned a few hectares of land somewhere out in the deserts of the US southwest, you could become a bitcoin millionaire by simply coating your land in solar panels and using it to run bitcoin mining.

I'm shocked! Shocked, I say, to discover that people are being ripped off!

I put in $25, let it get to $60 before I pulled out. I don't like the environmental effects of creating imaginary value.

And if this tweet is to be believed, it looks like some Bitcoin mining operations can be easily hacked.

Not after the tariffs Trump put on solar panels...

Do you know which states Robinhood will deal Bitcoin in?

ICOs are at best a horrendously inefficient way of crowdfunding, and a scam at worst.

Most regular currencies are not backed by gold.

Emine WOW gold? Now that's important. How is that done? If I find out I can say goodbye to the drudgery of farming peaceblooms and copper ore!

Oops.

It's true. Bitcoin is a lot of things, but unless you only deal with coins you mined yourself or paid cash for, it's not anonymous.

Aren't you supposed to rotate your bitcoin address so it only gets used once, which means it's harder to follow your transactions?

OMFG! This is the level of insanity we've reached: The guy who started Mt Gox (and who couldn't write a security program to save his ass because it got looted easily) is responsible for the current darling of cryptocurrencies. He's got IBM signed onboard!

Another record heist of cryptocurrencies.

An article about some of the crazy things that people are doing to buy Bitcoins. What it doesn't mention are people who are taking out mortgages to build Bitcoin mining operations. A friend of mine is an electrician, and he's been hired to wire up the addition some folks are building on their house in order to mine Bitcoins.

YouTube ads are hijacking your PC to mine for Bitcoins.

Russian nuclear weapons scientists busted using government supercomputer to mine crytocurrency https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...t-­­­­minting-blockchange-with-supercomputer/

I'm shocked, shocked, I say!

More at the link.

Oh well, fun while it lasted.

http://fortune.com/2018/03/20/bitcoin-price-blockchain-child-porn-ban-crime/

Hope no one here has any of this on their computer.

Ducking hell. What do you want to bet a government put it on to give them an excuse to ban it?

Long read, but worth it.

Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type of no-need-for-trusted-parties systems blockchain envisions. That’s permanent: no matter how much blockchain improves it is still headed in the wrong direction.

https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/...-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec

I agree with most of that, up to a point.

Blockchain is great when the institutions are not trustworthy, and the article lives in a world where all institutions are trustworthy, or at least enough are that you can pick from competitors.

But the Venezuelan government is not a trustworthy institution, and if you live in Venezuela then you have no choice but to deal with it and watch your money become worth less towards worthless day by day. Nor the Chinese government. Nor, if you're a drug dealer, is the US government, nor the major financial institutions. Silk Road could only have existed with a blockchain, and while the author may be right about why it succeeded, it was only possible because of Bitcoin. If it had been written for Ethereum, it could have made all the reputation bits on-chain as well (assuming, of course, (and it's a bad assumption) that it wasn't hacked - he's dead-on about that).

Blockchain is about evading untrustworthy institutions, not replacing trustworthy ones. That's still a hugely powerful thing.