Bitcoins,,,they are suppose to be the new

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I first heard about bitcoin in 2011. I thought, at the time, it sounded silly. But now that I'm older, the idea of unregulated currency is rather appealing.
 
Well, it hit $3,250 today, as it continues a slow slide...

So, that money highway to making millions, as it was called when this thread started, has gone from a high of nearly, $19,000 to about $11,000 at the start of the thread...and now, close to $3,000.

A great way to make a small fortune.

If you started with a large one!
 
Astro, it'll go back up when all the compromised routers doing bitcoin mining go up in smoke.
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Meanwhile, the people who saw this as a reasonable medium of exchange, particularly electronic exchange, keeping the banks and their fees out of the loop, have been quietly steaming for a lengthy period of time.
 
Originally Posted by Garak
Astro, it'll go back up when all the compromised routers doing bitcoin mining go up in smoke.
wink.gif
Meanwhile, the people who saw this as a reasonable medium of exchange, particularly electronic exchange, keeping the banks and their fees out of the loop, have been quietly steaming for a lengthy period of time.


Have you been following it at all? The miners all use specialized ASIC's and server farms to mine it. I doubt the routers have anywhere near the computing power needed. The real key is when all these server farms will shut down as the cost of running them exceed the value of the coins themselves. At one point it was estimated that it costs 6,000 to keep them running, but some others have said where the electric costs are low it could be as low as 3000. But maybe a bunch of higher costs ones will shut down. They all claim it's a game of chicken as some just keep running at a loss hoping the market comes back. One of the problems of bitcoin is that it can't process that many transactions and the transaction costs were pretty high at one point which defeated the concept of low fees.
 
I was just being facetious with respect to the routers. You'd need an awful lot of routers working in tandem to get anywhere near what a server farm could do. However, it's been claimed that it's been happening. It won't be efficient or fast, but if it's someone else's computing power and electricity, it's a pretty attractive idea. In any event, speculation and greed have ruined things once again. The concept was great, except for failing to assume that everyone is greedy as all heck.
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For that matter, the supposed inventor of Bitcoin was probably relying on the notion of a semi-stable currency alternative, to push the popularity, and had the greed himself to profit from what happened to the value of the thing. You get guys like RMS who are all in favour of the notion of alternative, semi-anonymous methods of payment, but just blindsided by what goes wrong in the real world.
 
Originally Posted by Garak
I was just being facetious with respect to the routers. You'd need an awful lot of routers working in tandem to get anywhere near what a server farm could do. However, it's been claimed that it's been happening. It won't be efficient or fast, but if it's someone else's computing power and electricity, it's a pretty attractive idea. In any event, speculation and greed have ruined things once again. The concept was great, except for failing to assume that everyone is greedy as all heck.
wink.gif


For that matter, the supposed inventor of Bitcoin was probably relying on the notion of a semi-stable currency alternative, to push the popularity, and had the greed himself to profit from what happened to the value of the thing. You get guys like RMS who are all in favour of the notion of alternative, semi-anonymous methods of payment, but just blindsided by what goes wrong in the real world.


Richard Stallman? I've met and chatted with him before. He's definitely not in the real world.
 
What got me was that people with green leaning tendencies took bitcoin as a saviour, sticking it to the man, while it burned energy equivalent to New Zealand "mining"..."mining, absolutely nothing, but the environmental consequences of a small country.
 
Originally Posted by Wolf359
Richard Stallman? I've met and chatted with him before. He's definitely not in the real world.

That depends what world.
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That's said quite regularly about him, but when I was growing up with computers, that was the days of bulletin boards and user groups and user group meetings. RMS, watching his videos and presentations, looks and sounds exactly like half the people I knew back then. He wouldn't have been out of place there in the least. The hair and the clothes are certainly not my style, but even that would have fit in. I've never had the chance to meet or chat with him. The only "interesting" person in computer science I got to speak to was Phil Zimmerman, but that was a fairly technical matter. RMS would be awesome to meet, though. I've been using variants of emacs since the 1980s and have followed the various software licensing models for even longer.

Shannow: Yes, that is rather unfortunate, and I wonder how much of that was the law of unintended consequences. Mining takes progressively more and more computational power and subsequently electricity. At the outset, hardly anyone thought about it, and those who did generally didn't say much about it.
 
Yeah, some funny stuff was going on when the fad was in full swing. I remember reading an investment article citing advice from an 11 year old, or something close to that age, because at the time he supposedly made several million dollars with Bitcoin. He was talking how it's the future and the price can only go up.

Apparently being lucky makes you an expert as well
 
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Best thing about Bitcoin is the concept of block-chain that was borne out of it. Other than that, it's been another arbitrary little investment game to procure money by doing no work or producing no product
 
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