bitcoin

[dj3stripes]

said the lawyer to be

[Smoke]

it is all make believe

[Jordan311]

Turns out my bank account info was entered incorrectly when I purchased and the order was cancelled, so I never received my coin and wasn't charged. It's now down in the $800 range, so I'm gonna wait and see if it goes lower before buying back in.

blessings in disguise

Later

[dj3stripes]

*Inserts transformers logo with "Blessings in disguise" instead of "robots in disguise", maybe autobot priest or decepticon rabbi*

[Smoke]

Turns out my bank account info was entered incorrectly when I purchased and the order was cancelled, so I never received my coin and wasn't charged. It's now down in the $800 range, so I'm gonna wait and see if it goes lower before buying back in.

blessings in disguise

Later

well isn't that convenient.

[fatlip]

not to mention treating bitcoin like an investment completely undermines the entire purpose of it in the first place. it's supposed to be a viable replacement for national currency. i understand people invest in other countries' currency in order to make a few bucks as well, but that's with established systems. this is new and no one is ever going to take it seriously once it pops like the bubble it is.

its scarcity is actually hurting it, not helping. people see big bucks and they're gonna trade it short-term to make a buck and then the price will be driven down once everyone realizes that it's not a stock in something that actually exists and is merely a bunch of numbers based on pseudo-wealth (much like the fed and our plummeting dollar!)

[$lmjimy311]

said the lawyer to be

The law I have no problem with...imaginary currency...that's a whole different story.

[Jordan311]

Fatlip, I completely agree that if people keep treating it like a commodity then it doesn't have a real future, and in order for it to truly be successful, it needs to be handled like an actual currency. Which many people do already and the support continues to grow amongst online and brick & mortar vendors.

Anyone saying it's just an "imaginary currency" is not really seeing the big picture. If there is a demand for it then there is value. How about email? That's digital and has completely changed the way we communicate as opposed to standard post. online publications and blogs and social media are making print media obsolete. It's all relative. Who's to say that bitcoin is any less of a valid currency than pieces of paper with pictures of dead presidents on it? In fact, only 8% of actual money physically exists. The rest of it is in computers just as numbers and in online bank accounts. (http://www.howstuffworks.com/currency6.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;) The way the government handles money is extremely flawed and we all know it.


For all you armchair economists hating on bitcoin, here's a quote that explains a lot of its benefits.

Bitcoin is a fixed supply, a first-of-its-kind, global-in-scale, voluntary, decentralized open-source digital currency and payment network that enables direct, peer-to-peer, borderless, pseudo-anonymous, nearly-instantaneous, nearly-free and irreversible cash-like transfers of value. The first currency and money system in the world which has no counter-party risk to hold and to transfer.
Instant transactions, no waiting for checks to clear, no chargebacks (merchants will like this), no account freezes (look out Paypal), no international wire transfer fee, no fees of any kind, no minimum balance, no maximum balance, worldwide access, always open, no waiting for business hours to make transactions, no waiting for an account to be approved before transacting, open an account in a few seconds, as easy as email, no bank account needed, extremely poor people can use it, extremely wealthy people can use it, no printing press, no hyper-inflation, no debt limit votes, no bank bailouts, completely voluntary. This sounds like the best payment system in the world!
Back in 1994 when Amazon was just getting started the bricks-and -mortar merchants were asked how they would respond to Amazon.
They were asked "What's your Internet strategy?" And their collective response was along the lines of ... "Our what?" It's 2014 soon. The question now is ... "What's your Bitcoin strategy?"

Later

[$lmjimy311]

"imaginary currency" was a joke.

So sensitive this jojo

[Jordan311]

I aint even mad. It's just a pretty common sentiment people who don't understand bitcoin tend to use.

Not saying I'm an expert in economics or bitcoin but I can see the value in the vision behind it and if it succeeds it would be good for everyone, so I think it's funny to see people wishing failure on bitcoin and digital currency for no good reason.

Later

[$lmjimy311]

I understand the concept of it. it's just the mining part that still goes over my head.

[Shiny]

Can you explain this to me? I have no experience with or real knowledge of computer coding

This processing power crunches numbers, think of the SETI@home program. The crunching of numbers has the opportunity to have a hidden code in it which is a "bitcoin". The chances of one person actually mining a bitcoin is pretty much not going to happen without some major computing power.

What are the numbers that it is crunching? Is there some master plan that it is working on finishing, or is the sole purpose to discover bitcoins?

What is the hidden code? What makes the code translate into a bitcoin? What is valuable about the code that turns it into a bitcoin?




^^ I've searched for this on google already and did not find a satisfactory or beginner's explanation to these questions.

[Smoke]

Can you explain this to me? I have no experience with or real knowledge of computer coding

This processing power crunches numbers, think of the SETI@home program. The crunching of numbers has the opportunity to have a hidden code in it which is a "bitcoin". The chances of one person actually mining a bitcoin is pretty much not going to happen without some major computing power.

What are the numbers that it is crunching? Is there some master plan that it is working on finishing, or is the sole purpose to discover bitcoins?

What is the hidden code? What makes the code translate into a bitcoin? What is valuable about the code that turns it into a bitcoin?




^^ I've searched for this on google already and did not find a satisfactory or beginner's explanation to these questions.

Well maybe this well help. I stole it from reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/commen ... _5_please/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Short answer: Miners perform an accounting function for the system, and get rewarded for their service, by receiving Bitcoins.

Long answer:

If you think about electronic currency as a file on your computer that you pass to another person, you can immediately see an issue with this concept: "I can just make a copy of the file, and spend it twice!"

So, generally there needs to be a central clearing house to avoid the "double spend". If you ever got PDF tickets to a concert, you can probably imagine how that works. Someone scans your PDF, and if it's already been scanned by someone else, they won't let you into the concert. There's a central clearing house keeping track of tickets that are already spent.

One of the key features of Bitcoin is that there is no central location or clearing house. It uses Peer-2-Peer technology, rather than central servers. If you remember back to Napster, it was a centralized service (and therefore was easily shut down), whereas sharing services now use P2P, which are hard to shut down (like bittorrent). Bitcoin is like Bittorrent in that respect.

So, the challenge came about: How do you have a central clearing house in a decentralized system? A very tough problem that Bitcoin created an innovative solution for. Basically, the concept of Mining bitcoins came about, as a way to solve the "central clearing house in a decentralized system" problem.

The issues that are being addressed with mining are these:

1) What are the account balances? (How many bitcoins are in each account?)
2) What is the sequence of transactions? (If someone tries to spend money twice, which one happened first?)

The Bitcoin system was designed very cleverly. Basically, they reward people ("miners") to perform these two functions, thereby solving a couple of other problems:

3) How do you get people to devote resources to the clearing house problem?
4) How do you fairly distribute all of the bitcoins?

Solution: Pay the accountants in the very currency that they are accounting! Genius! Call them miners, like they are mining gold.

In the early days (2009-2010), you could just run the mining software on your PC. The software would look at recent transactions, and put them together in one list (a "block"), toss one extra number into the block, and perform some predefined math on the block. The math spits out an answer, which can be a number anywhere from 1 digit to 86 digits long, when represented in standard decimal. The trick to "confirming transactions" is that some miner needs to determine what extra number gets tossed into the block of transactions so that the math creates a "small enough" answer. So really it becomes a race of a search to see who can find the extra number that confirms the transactions.

The beauty of this is that finding that extra number can be an easy problem or a hard problem, depending on how small you define "small enough". The bitcoin system was designed to automatically adjust that difficulty as more and more miners join in. Imagine this: back in 2009, "small enough" was a challenge to find a number such that the math spit out an answer that was, say less than 80 digits long. Well, there are about nine times as many 2-digit numbers as there are 1-digit numbers. And about nine times as many 3-digit numbers as 2-digit numbers. You can imagine that the answer would come out to be an 86-digit number about 90% of the time, an 85- or 86-digit number about 99% of the time, and an 84-, 85- or 86-digit answer about 99.9% of the time. To get an answer that's less than 80-digits long, you might have to try about a million extra numbers before you find it.

Of course, you might get lucky and find it on the first try. Or it might take two million tries. It's random, but on average it might take a million tries. So, back in 2009, you could find that extra number that worked, by performing some amount of work on the transactions - say about a million attempts (I'm making this number up, but it was a lot of attempts). And once you found the number, you could tell all the other bitcoin users "here's the number", and they could easily verify your work. Later, as more miners joined in, and the difficulty increased, it took on average about a billion tries to find an extra number that worked. Now it takes on average about 300 billion billion tries. So it's extremely unlikely (but possible!) that you, with your little PC, are going to find an extra number that pays off, since you can only try a few million tries per second, and it takes 300 billion billion tries on average. But someone will find it, and does, every ten minutes or so.

Once an extra number is found that creates a small enough result, those transactions in the block are "confirmed", because it'd be hard for someone to reverse the transactions; they'd have to do the same amount of work on a different transaction set, to un-do those transactions. This is called a "Proof of Work" system, because you can Prove that you did some work by showing the extra number that produced a good answer.

Each block also contains information about the previously confirmed block, which is why Bitcoin refers to this as the "Block Chain" - they are linked together. That means that any work spent confirming block #2 is also considered to be extra work confirming block #1; in order to un-do block #1, you'd have to do all the work for block #1 and block #2. This means that the more "confirmations" there are, the more work has been done to confirm the transaction, and therefore, the harder it is to un-do the transaction, so the more permanent it is.

In this way, transactions are sequenced, to solve the double-spend issue.

Miners get rewarded by adding a transaction into the block, that puts a certain amount of bitcoins into their account. The amount currently is 25 bitcoins, and it decreases every 4 years or so. A miner couldn't give themselves extra bitcoins, because other people can verify their work and if they did, the verification would fail, and people would just ignore them. (A dollar-example that is parallel to this would be if you took a sharpie and changed the "$1" to "$1000" on a dollar bill. You may convince yourself that you now have $1000, but you won't convince anyone else!)

The difficulty automatically adjusts based on a formula, every 2 weeks, with a target which was intended to have blocks confirmed every 10 minutes or so, and adjusting to the number of computers performing the mining. So, while in 2009 it was very easy to run your PC, and generate (back then) 50 Bitcoins every ten minutes, now there are so many powerful computers performing mining (and being rewarded 25 Bitcoins every 10 minutes), that if you don't have a specialized machine, you won't be successful.

In short, mining is approximately a break-even or losing proposition. People selling the specialized machines can charge a premium, because they are essentially money-printing-presses. You are lucky to break even, when you consider electricity costs, mostly because there are numerous people who perform mining, and many don't do the math to see that you are are lucky to break even.

[Jordan311]

Just bought back in at $875.

Wish me luck although you guys are assholes so I'm sure you'd love to see me lose my money.

Later

[Smoke]

Just bought back in at $875.

Wish me luck although you guys are assholes so I'm sure you'd love to see me lose my money.

Later

There is a quote that sums up my feelings here

"A fool and their money, are soon parted"

[dj3stripes]

Just bought back in at $875.

Wish me luck although you guys are assholes so I'm sure you'd love to see me lose my money.

Later

http://taiyedbrodels.com/download/Audio ... ction).mp3

[Alexnova]

LOL @ you people.

China's bank doesn't recognize bitcoins as money...which now is plummenting.

Enjoy your ponzi scheme.

[Smoke]

http://www.bitcoinexchangerate.org/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

$859

[Smoke]

1 Bitcoin = $546.40

[Jordan311]