Bitcoin on the rise

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stayhigh
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by stayhigh »

Ydobon wrote:Does anyone have any tips for someone just starting out?
I'd recommend spending some time reading this, for better understanding:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page

Ydobon
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by Ydobon »

stayhigh wrote:
Ydobon wrote:Does anyone have any tips for someone just starting out?
I'd recommend spending some time reading this, for better understanding:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page
Thanks for that.

steveo73
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by steveo73 »

I'm bumping this thread because I've been reading up on bitcoin. I think a crypto-currency makes a tonne of sense. At the moment there are a tonne of these crypto-currencies but bitcoin is definitely the largest.

I'm not sold on investing in bitcoins but I'm going to buy a tiny amount and use it just to experiment. I think as part of my cash savings I'd like to have some bitcoins or other crypto-currency.

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Seppia
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by Seppia »

I am more skeptical honestly.
What, ultimately, gives any currency its value?
I think if we dig enough, we have to get to the conclusion that the real reason why a piece of paper with a dead president's face drawn on it it commonly accepted as form of payment is the fact that the US government only accepts said currency as a form of payment for taxes.

Bitcoin does not have that.
It's a piece of code, it has zero "real" value, aside from the fact some people are willing to accept it as form of payment.
The same people could tomorrow decide to utilize rocks, and the Bitcoin value would immediately become zero.

It is unlikely that the us government will shift to rocks, since they are the ones printing dollars.

Not saying Bitcoin is useless, I know it has its advantages, but I would never own them for more than a day or two (just the time needed for an eventual Bitcoin based transaction)

Even if there was not this type of problem, I would not consider investing in a currency.
It's speculating, not investing, in my opinion.

steveo73
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by steveo73 »

Seppia - I also wouldn't invest in a currency. I just think the risk is too high. I have traded currencies and still do but I don't do it a lot.

I like the concept of crypto-currencies a lot though. They are worldwide currencies with trivial barriers of exchange. It doesn't cost a fortune to transfer funds from my account to someone else's account. Banks get much less opportunities to gauge fees from us.

I think as a form of money they make more sense than US dollars or gold or any other currency.

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Seppia
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by Seppia »

Bank fees?
In the last 6 years I got a significant amount of money out of banks (a minimum of around $500 per year, but I never kept precise track) via credit card churning (I'm not counting the ongoing rewards because those are built in the price of goods, just the bonuses) than they did from me in fees (probably $50-60 per year in international transfers).

Now that I'm back in Italy I unfortunately cannot make money on banks but my fees are zero

BRUTE
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by BRUTE »

Seppia wrote:What, ultimately, gives any currency its value?
I think if we dig enough, we have to get to the conclusion that the real reason why a piece of paper with a dead president's face drawn on it it commonly accepted as form of payment is the fact that the US government only accepts said currency as a form of payment for taxes.
that certainly helps. but the real answer to the question is, "because humans expect other humans to accept it". this is usually roughly based on "other humans accepted dollars yesterday, so they'll likely accept them again tomorrow". absent catastrophic hyperinflation or civil war, this is usually a correct gamble.

as examples, humans in many non-US countries accept US dollars, because it's accepted well enough in their countries. in contrast, many US citizens accept bitcoin even though they can't use it to pay their taxes with the US government. but they know it had a certain value yesterday, and they speculate that it'll have a similar value tomorrow.

brute isn't entirely sure where the difference between speculation and investment is. clearly bitcoin is more risky a currency than the USD, and probably most other currencies (except maybe the EURO :D).

so it'll depend on an individual's risk tolerance and actual use. bitcoin is amazing for some types of payments. it's like internet cash. no credit card numbers, no risk of getting identity stolen, no counter party risk for the bank (unless using 3rd party wallet), relatively high privacy, relatively fast (actually depends a bit on luck these days because of core BTC protocol problems, sometimes it can take a few hours). and it's much more convenient than typing in CC information, there's a link to click, checking the balance is correct, clicking ok, done.

steveo73
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by steveo73 »

BRUTE wrote: bitcoin is amazing for some types of payments. it's like internet cash. no credit card numbers, no risk of getting identity stolen, no counter party risk for the bank (unless using 3rd party wallet), relatively high privacy, relatively fast (actually depends a bit on luck these days because of core BTC protocol problems, sometimes it can take a few hours). and it's much more convenient than typing in CC information, there's a link to click, checking the balance is correct, clicking ok, done.
There seems to me to be so much upside. I'd love to see a crypto-currency become an international currency that is utillised for everything.

In Australia there is a company that has set-up an app/web-page to pay most bills via bitcoin.

BRUTE
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by BRUTE »

brute thinks similarly. it's so convenient when it works, and there are quite a number of gateways/connections. brute has met a few people that travel exclusively using bitcoin - buying flights, booking hotels.. it can be more work, but it can often be done.

bryan
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by bryan »

Bitcoin up 20% in the 1 month since last post.

fyi Zcash launched last week. It is the fork of Bitcoin that introduces encrypted entries in the public ledger for from/to/amount. Possible to create and validate transactactions thanks to zero knowledge proofs: zk-SNARKS. I've been researching it and it seems extremely experimental and risky at the moment. For instance it required a trusted setup of the public params based on a new protocol that was only published two days ago. The nature of this technology/blockchain also means that if a particular type of flaw is found in the software it could mean counterfeiting of coins without the capability to detect or roll-back (hard-fork).

Do your research before thinking about buying into this stuff. For instance the mining/monetary policy of the first few thousand blocks of zcash plus release hype means extremely limited supply and a ton of demand. Personally, I would only be comfortable with trading electricity costs to try to mint some with a GPU. If a some weeks go by without getting any, I might consider buying a small amount, on the order of ~.25% of NW.

The technology/model could be extremely attractive to the corporate world. There is some work being done in corporations to tweak Bitcoin to use trusted mining ("permissioned ledgers") which eliminates the capital/energy waste of Bitcoin (at the cost of losing "decentralized"/"trust-less"/"permission-less" features) while allowing some easier access to ledgers across corps. However, you can imagine wanting to keep some things off of the public books (so these experiments would be practically limited to certain, no harm in being public, uses)... Now with this technology, you could now combine these experiments with the trusted setup and code of zcash to achieve a a blockchain like before, but is now private.

I've always felt a big organization introducing a Bitcoin competitor has always been a major risk to Bitcoin.. this technology may make it more palatable for some governments or corporations.

bottlerocks
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by bottlerocks »

Some concise big picture analysis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoWY2UzIB_8

workathome
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by workathome »

Is mining BTC still feasible for an individual?

I did a little mining a few years ago with a couple graphics cards, but it looks like that's not workable anymore.

bottlerocks
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by bottlerocks »

Not with GPUs. There have been 7-8 generations of ASIC development that have made each previous generation of mining hardware obsolete. There has been a lot of shady dealings with mining hardware developers in the past (see Butterfly Labs & KNC Miners for good examples) so I've stopped following who the big players are nowadays. I'm sure there's a $500 single piece of hardware out there that will generate 0.1-0.2 BTC per month on generous mining pools. To make real money you'll have to have cheap power and hope BTC rises in the future. Also you'll have to stay up to date with the latest hardware. A single miner nowadays probably has more hashing power than the entire network did 4 years ago.

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Seppia
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by Seppia »

bottlerocks wrote:Some concise big picture analysis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoWY2UzIB_8

Sorry
I mean no disrespect but, in the first two minutes I heard
- a "big picture" description where he basically just describes the past in a textbook rear view mirror analisys that is worth zero.
- "this has been growing a lot in the short term" so this is good for convincing people? Wait is he shilling or making an argument?
- "but we are able to see the long term" referring to a graph showing data since 2011.

I then closed the video, had enough

daylen
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by daylen »

@Seppia

:lol: THIS is a prime example of the ignorant use of statistics. I can see where Jacob is coming from when he said basic stats shouldn't be taught to high schoolers; it results in people like this giving bigger idiots confidence. The worst part is that his like/dislike ratio is north of 20!

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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by jacob »

In more poetic terms. And in less poetic terms.

This was more a comment on general principles than anything wrt bitcoin.

bryan
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by bryan »

my own feelings at the moment:
- since 2013, 2014 governance is more questionable (good and bad, depends on your perspective) and clear it will not scale for some use-cases (and those must build layers on top or to the side)
- no other investment like it (other than the other cryptos, of which ethereum has the lead for smart contracts and zcash/monero have the lead for anonymity. The first two have open issues, concerns, at least.) as accessible and simple (great choice in the last few years of current events which are trending in the same direction)
- cyber-techno-anarchy as predicted (digital/physical property, smart contracts, decentralized prediction markets) still in the works but certainly marching in that direction and not clear on ETA. Bitcoin accepted there.
- un-announced competitors can always come out of the shadows to kill BTC (decent nation state crypto-currency or Apple are the ones I am keeping an ear to the ground for)

daylen
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by daylen »

bryan wrote: - un-announced competitors can always come out of the shadows to kill BTC (decent nation state crypto-currency or Apple are the ones I am keeping an ear to the ground for)

The only competitor Bitcoin has is a better crypto-currency algorithm/protocol. Decentralization is the whole point of Bitcoin. I do not know much about this subject, but this is my current understanding.

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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by jacob »

Since electricity-cost seems to be the Liebig limit on bitcoin(*), I wonder if any of you nerds are able to do a rough back of the envelope calc on the approximate cost in kWh per bitcoin is. I presume it's been pretty constant-ish?

Also would like to know what the total energy cost (kWh again) of the total collection of bitcoins is?

If possible ... can we get within half an order of magnitude or better?

(*) Unless the lowest cost producers all get it for free?!

BRUTE
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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Post by BRUTE »

daylen wrote:The only competitor Bitcoin has is a better crypto-currency algorithm/protocol. Decentralization is the whole point of Bitcoin. I do not know much about this subject, but this is my current understanding.
depends on what it's competing for - decentralization only has advantages in a few very specialized use case. that's why humans still mostly use checks, cash, credit cards..

@jacob:

the kWh per btc mined has been going down very dramatically, probably orders of magnitude every few months, since its inception. brute has no idea where they currently are, but like mentioned before, several years into ASICs. brute is sure the efficiency gains have started slowing down a while ago, and will approximate general purpose efficiency gains over time.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=520977.0

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