Bitcoins

[Ddrak]

Crazy-ass geek currencies scaring people.

Thoughts?

Dd

[Harlowe]

I'm trying to gather more information on it, but I created an account on Mt Gox (I think I have thousands of people ahead of me waiting for verification though) and think I'm going to use http://bitminter.com/ for mining.

Why is it scaring people? Because of the annonymity?

One thing that scares me are brainwallets and scamming - scammers using the same addy as a legit bitcoin service with a .net or .org extension = steal all yo bitcoins.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

De-centralized banking scares the shit out of the government and it should. The government has had its grubby paws in our banking system since day one, and now here's a system it's excluded from. It has recently been using PayPal as a weapon to cut off the money flow from all manner of legitimate businesses its special interest buddies don't like, all over the world. The rise of Bitcoins is a rejection of centralized banking.

The more the U.S. acts like a repressive regime, the more the world will adjust accordingly to us. It's a sad fact.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Has anyone here attempted mining bitcoins? There's people who devote whole server racks to mining them. With the exchange rate going through the roof, I've thought about un-retiring a few old machines and trying my luck. Mining them involves solving computational puzzles which require large amounts of compute resources. The high barrier to mining keeps inflation down.

[Harlowe]

My guy is trying to figure out whether it pays more than the electricity required to do it though.

[Ddrak]

My PC mines about 0.005BTC per day on a GeForce 560Ti using cgminer. At the current exchange rate ($120-ish), it's probably worthwhile, but not going to make me rich (and going to get harder as more people mine).

I'm verified at MtGox but it's still a complete pain to transfer money without actually going to a bank and depositing physical cash.

Right now, I'd expect the value to crash a fair bit more but BitCoins aren't going away. It's just hard to see them as a currency. They really seem more like diamonds or some other easily traded commodity.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

They are exactly like a commodity, and yesterday they did crash. I think they lost something like 50% of their value in 24 hours.

[Harlowe]

Yeah there was a 4 hour period it lost 40% from what I read.

[Ddrak]

Bitcoins go boom (sort-of, they're still way higher than the start of the year):

Screenshot_041213_095715_PM.jpg

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Hmmm it seems dubious that .005 per day would cover the power costs. I guess it depends on the machine. Maybe I should daisy chain 100 Rasberry Pi boards together.

Either way, it's exciting that with some of these new technologies, it looks like privacy might be poised to make a comeback. It's nobody's goddamn business if I want to buy a loaf of bread without the man all up in my grille. I'm not super thrilled to be sharing the underground culture with people like child molesters, but was probably inevitable, and society has to deal with both legitimate and illegitimate uses of privacy. Especially if our elected representatives are the primary drivers of privacy innovation through bad public policy.

[Fallakin Kuvari]

And to think I almost put $20 into Bitcoin back in 2009...

I look like a damn fool now.

[Bahd Zoolander]

Assuming they actually start shipping them, the ASIC rigs are going to be the only way to mine with a chance of a profit soon.

[Ddrak]

@Freecare:

BTC-E have a decent API for trading between USD, Bitcoins, Litecoins and a few other things. Given the volatility in the market, I wonder how hard it would be to set up an app that takes advantage of the bouncing and makes money?

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Hmmm interesting. Thanks for that. I actually have a co-worker that was trying to do that with currency markets but it was too volatile and the big players stack the chips against you. But it should be easy to set a bot for "big score mode" and if the bot doesn't see a big gain, it won't do anything. But that's probably already happening, so what is now the affect of a hoarde of bots all with high and low thresholds? I guess maybe a sophisticated algorithm would be needed to beat those guys.

[Ddrak]

Yeah, I bet there's a bunch of bots there playing. Be interesting to see what you can guess from the market depth.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

New bit coin mining box!

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/ ... darn-fast/