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

I hope every dumbass who was stupid enough to buy into the BitCoin scam loses their shirt and goes bankrupt.

Un-fucking-believable that anyone ever fell for this horseshit.

If you think Autumn Radkte committed suicide you are a true sheep.

Fiat currencies are how governments control the people. If someone came up with an alternative that allowed people - say the entire population of the earth - to just work around that... how badly would the governments want them removed?

Obvious Vince Foster job is obvious.

So she was killed by a tactical polonium-laced bullet shot from a submarine equipped with an otter-powered conveyor belt?

You're assuming Bitcoin is an actual threat. Which it's not. It's a scam wrapped up in a fraud encased in a swindle.

Looks like MF is just the kind of tool Bitcoin was designed to scam. @Midnight Funeral, how much did you lose?

Its more than just that, if you're running a mining operation, your machine has to check with a central authority to verify that you're the first one to correctly solve a hash and thus get the Bitcoins.

That's not 100% correct as I understand it. Bitcoin operates by consensus, meaning that if 50%+1 of the network agrees on something, then that becomes the accepted truth. So when your machine solves a block it pushes the solution out to the network. Your claim propagates through the network and if other mining clients verify your solution it is accepted and passed on by them, until the majority of the network has the record that you solved that block.

You might be right, but if that's the case, it makes Bitcoin even dumber than it already is. The various hedge funds all have data centers located as close as possible to the various stock exchanges, because even the millisecond delays caused by being even a couple of miles away from the exchange are enough to cause losses. So with a global network of machines that have to determine if your solution is valid or not, anybody outside of a major tech center is going to be out of luck when it comes to mining Bitcoins.

Which ties into my post about how the mining pools have effectively become centralised authorities.

I have a feeling that the folks connected with Mt Gox aren't going to be 'north of dirt' for very much longer, if you get my meaning.

More at the link. In short, it looks like the guys running Mt Gox "misstated" the amount of Bitcoins that had been "stolen" from them, and that some of those "stolen" Bitcoins have been turning up in other exchanges.

ANC made a deep post that doesn't do anything to advance discussion.

He should kill himself.

Here's some fun facts:

Hi

I hear Putin and his cronies are behind much of tge spike in bit coin prices. They need a way to launder dirty money from their corruption and sanctions have cut off most of the modern banking system outside of Russia thus bit coins are one of the things they use to get around that. RT has been pushing bit coins nonstop for the last tear or so.

Oh what a few years it's been.

Today Bitcoin hit $11,000/BTC before crashing to $9.2k and recovering to $10.5k.

Bitcoin itself seems to be pretty unsustainable. Transaction costs are skyrocketing, as are electricity costs (though at Tuckerfan's second bolding; that's just dumb extrapolation). Some of the hard forks - Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold, in particular - have a brighter future from a technological (and arguably policy, in the case of the latter) perspective. Still, Bitcoin is quite useful as a speculative instrument.

While we're on the cryptocurrency topic, let's talk about Ethereum, which seems to be the new crypto hotness. Basically it's like Bitcoin with a different proof-of-work algorithm (which they're trying to transition to proof-of-stake, but that's not generally accepted to be mathematically secure yet), but the main difference is in the transaction language is Turing complete. Which means that instead of just a distributed ledger, it's a distributed program. This sounds cool - and you can do things like have insanely complicated self-enforcing contracts, and complex access and escrow controls. But with great power comes great ability to fuck up terribly. And with Ethereum, boy are people fucking up. Just last week $300 million worth of Ether were rendered inaccessible to ANYONE, legitimate owners or otherwise, with no way to undo the transaction, because of a trivial security flaw. A month ago $65 million was stolen via similar a similar flaw. Last year, the DAO (Distributed Autonomous Organization) fucked up so massively that Ethereum had to hard fork to undo the transactions and maintain any semblance of credibility. Ethereum is an amazing idea people are generally too dumb to use safely (myself absolutely included. I wouldn't write a program for Ethereum more complex than a simple transaction). There was even a business that specialized in auditing programs for the Ethereum network, and... well, you can guess how well that went.

For more than speculative purposes, I wouldn't touch Ethereum with a 10-foot pole.

This is why I'm saving up ketchup packets. Cryptocurrencies come and go, but people love ketchup. So when we enter our economic apocalypse, I'm all stocked up and ready.

Yeah, well, Ima ketchup to you. You'll see!

Boo! I'd throw a tomato at you, but I'm using them to make real tomato ketchup.

Yeah, the ice caps will have melted and drowned us all long before then.


I finally read up on BitCoin on wiki, just to figure out what the "mining" thing is about, and basically . . . everybody runs a program trying to generate the next unbreakable hash, and if you're the first one to generate a hash that everybody likes, some BC is assigned to that hash and it's yours? That's it? You aren't actually creating anything except an electronic construct in which BC can reside? Even the Mint pays its workers for converting paper and ink into functional currency.

A single office has more than enough computing power to run the entire Bitcoin network, mining is an arms race where the difficulty constantly rises as new processing power joins.

It just kinda strikes me as not currency, but collectibles. They're worth as much as the highest bidder is willing to barter for them. And they don't even have Mickey Mantle's face on them.

Sort of. From what I understand, the hashing is really just confirming other people's transactions.

A guy at work actually mined a few bitcoin on his own several years ago. He said yesterday that he sold when it was $400.

I was going to save up pornography and sex toys.

Hitchin needs to have hello kitty on their digital currency. She is easy to purchase and her presence would increase their value. Not to mention it is inevitable eventually she is going to end up on some form of world currency. It is the last thing she has not touched.

Big Bang Theory had fun with bitcoins this week. Topical!

I mean yeah, but what makes that different from gold or greenbacks?

The only use I've seen for bitcoin is to get around (in this case stupid) laws.

http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/y...shington-state-because-technically-youre-not/

A lot more people agree greenbacks and gold have value.

And when your harddrive crashes, or we get hit with an EMP, the greenbacks and gold remain.

That's the brilliance of Bitcoin. You can export your private key, even print it out and stash it in a safe deposit box, and then even if your hard drive crashes or your city gets hit with an EMP, it only takes one Bitcoin user's hard drive surviving somewhere in the world to restart the network. Whereas if your bank's primary and backup systems are hit, your bank money is gone. Greenbacks burn in a simple house fire. Gold? Quite durable, but add mercury or aqua regia and pour it down the drain, and goodbye gold.

Holy shit, I did not know that. Sounds like a pretty resilient currency.