That's almost as annoying as when people who do not understand the technology advocate a government ban on said technology when they are under no obligation to use the technology and simply ignoring it and letting others do with it as they wish would have no net negative effect on their life whatsoever.

A digital currency traded on conventional "Internet" networks.



The bitcoin concept allows anyone to create new money. It requires computational power, so there's a cost to it. But if you have a computer sitting doing nothing, you could assign it to "bitcoin mine" and occasionally you'd generate bitcoin. This bitcoin is compensation for validating the integrity of bitcoin transactions.

Quote:

How can I use it to go to the store to buy some milk and eggs?

Probably not at a regular grocery store. Most entities that accept it are online. And more and more mainstream vendors are accepting it.





There are online exchanges that you can use to buy bitcoin with other currency, or sell bitcoin. On these you will get assigned a bitcoin address.






Buy some on a bitcoin exchange.

Maybe you're missing this, but a "highly speculative" currency, is something that any quarter brained investor will avoid. Fully brained investors don't invest in currency to begin with.

all I know is that if someone bought $1000 worth of bitcoins around 2010 when it first became available - today they'd be worth about $10,000,000 . . . imagine doing that with a ROTH

Fuck man... who pissed in your Cheerios this morning?

Yes, the crypto world is highly unstable. Anyone using crypto as the core of their portfolio is essentially gambling. This is not a controversial statement. Even the devs working on these projects will admit all of this. To most of them it's not about money anyway, they're developing the tech for the sake of the tech.

People get hung up on the word "currency". I view this stuff as an entirely new asset class, which just so happens to be wildly volatile and not correlated with anything else available to the retail investor, which in the context of modern portfolio theory can actually reduce the risk of the overall portfolio if used in small amounts.

And that's not even getting into the tremendous upside if even 1% of the world's financial activity is someday denominated in crypto. Some of the smartest people on planet earth are working on crypto projects right now. Like any speculative arena, many of them will crash and burn, but for any of them that stick the early adopters stand to reap tremendous gains.

But hey, maybe you're right. Put your money where your mouth is, get on GDAX or Kraken and short Bitcoin and Ether. Get rich. Any quarter brained individual can clearly see this is all tulip bulbs, right?

So the beta is so high that greedy dipshits put their money in it. Thanks.

What's wrong with greed?

You dig shiny things out of the mathematical ground with your computer (and especially its graphics card) and the electricity it takes to power your computer. Other people want those shiny things and will pay you $$ for them. None of it has any intrinsic value except for its ability to prop up the system--the "treasure" your computer discovers allow people to transfer bitcoins securely (mostly) and enable the system to keep running. Part of the value is because this is something that, by design, the government cannot track.

Bitcoin mining is really in many ways like the guys combing the beach with the metal detector searching for treasure. Only the treasure is extremely rare solutions to very specific mathematical calculations, which take lots of computer processor power and electricity to discover. High end graphics cards or specialized hardware are better at discovering these solutions because of the nature of the calculations. But there is still a huge element of randomness unless your scale is ginormous.

And, no new treasure is being added to the beach. The first guys there found most of it, and now new adopters are stuck hiring more and more metal detector dudes and equipping them with the latest metal detector technology to find the few remaining pennies. (The mathematical solutions get more and more rare and costly to find the longer the whole thing runs, meaning the early adoptors found most of the treasure and guys just getting onboard in 2017 are picking up the pennies left behind. The rarer new solutions become, the more valuable the earlier bitcoins become, in theory--but you still have to have people willing to pay $$ for them, so the whole thing has crashed in value a few times when the market has lost confidence. But overall it is still trending up and has taken a huge upward leap in the last year especially.)

In some ways it is a ponzi scheme meant to prop up and reward the early adopters. In other ways it is something so complex that an ignorant but curious 6 year old couldn't comprehend it in a million years. Hence the frustration of many who are just now trying to figure it out. There is a certain level of technical competence required to really "get" the whole thing, which is beyond most people. (Probably myself included, and I'm sure people will correct some of the above.) Most of the people who are able to understand what it's all about googled it years ago and figured it out. Sorry if that seems condescending, it is just the facts.

Not condescending at all. Yeah, it seems very complex and involved - even at it's most basic level. Hell, when someone says the best way to learn about it is a 26 minute Youtube video, you know you're in trouble.

I also agree that I'm glad I'm not making legislation on this sort of thing. To echo what another poster mentioned - I do hate it when politicians make policy on complex issues (climate, bitcoins, stem cell,) with a laymen's understanding. It's truly a disservice to all. (NOTE: I do not mean to hijack the thread with that comment - if someone wants to start a "should ignorant, yet well intentioned politicians make policy decisions on complex issues based on limited knowledge?" thread - go for it.)

Thanks for all of the replies... though, admittedly I'm not too much closer to understanding it. Maybe I'll watch that youtube vid.

Frank

So, besides JeffJ and his son, who else here is mining bitcoins???

Anyone?

---

Gnothi Seauton.

Bump,

About 4 years later and the bit about the Chinese government just shutting down or making Bitcoin mining illegal just came across my news feed.

Curious, anyone out there still have a small residential mining set up?

Maurice

Bitcoin was ~$4000 when you posted this. It's now ~$40,000 (my google tells me the price in CAD...).

So how about $100,000,000?

---

How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

Interesting to read this thread from 4 years ago.

KoopaTroopa's comments and perspectives still hold up.

.

There's not much point, unless it's just as a hobby. Just doesn't make economic sense with residential power rates. Even if you had a solar power rig or something, it'd make more sense to just sell the power than mine bitcoin.

The definition of 'currency' can be very broad, anything of value that can be exchanged to something else is, technically, a currency.
Bitcoin definitely has value. Like APPL stock, Birkin bags or art by Andy Warhal. It can be exchanged. So, yeah, whatever, it's some kind of currency.

But to be similar to national currencies, like dollar or euro, it should have a number of other properties. Like who's going to pay when shit hits the fan. And cryptocurrencies don't really have those.

Bitcoin and Ethereum mining has gotten much easier in the last week! It is likely to continue downward for a couple weeks.

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/difficulty




Check this mining set up out though, guy claimed it was worth it. This video is from 10 months ago, so he was really killing it this spring.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrQ3-q2K03Q&ab_channel=VoskCoin

Yeah, maybe it could be changing if the Chinese mines are getting shut down.

 
... or setup mining operations quietly.... until it becomes apparent. Lake Seneca is turning into a hot-tub.

https://www.nbcnews.com/...inger-lakes-n1272938

"... increased the electrical power output at the gas-fired plant in the past year and a half and use much of the fossil-fuel energy not to keep the lights on in surrounding towns but for the energy-intensive "mining" of bitcoins."