I hope not too many people are taking this "fork" seriously.

Come on. Taking the BTC source code, changing almost nothing but the name, and trying to compete with Bitcoin (after mining 500K coins for himself, of course)?

It's not like he's actually solving any problems with this rollout. If anything, several problems with BTC (inflation, for example) are being made *worse*.

And people are falling for it?

To better illustrate what's wrong with IXcoin, try to picture what *would* be a welcome rollout. Say a developer came up with a fork, but also had a business partner who had lined up several websites/programs/an exchange/trust system/reviews system/etc. and rolled it all out at once. Then you might be tempted to think, "Hey, maybe this will be just what we need! This could take over where Bitcoin left off!"

But this fork is a total wannabe in every way. I don't know why anyone's buying into this nonsense.

Here is a post someone else wrote, which sums up the situation nicely. I will only add that "Thomas Nasakioto" is a re-arrangement of the letters in "Satoshi Nakamoto":


I mean, is he claiming to be Satoshi? He better be. You just don't have two guys with the same letters in their names independently coming up with BTC and IXC.
Sorry, I don't believe in those kind of coincidences. I'm not a fool.

I mean, the British Pound and US Dollar weren't invented by two guys named George Franklin and Franklin George!

But that wouldn't involve theft -- which takes all the fun away for some people.

As if running a computer to make free money wasn't great enough -- some people don't even want to "work" that much at it. They want free electricity.

IXCoin is to scrap steel as Bitcoin is to Gold

FTFY. (I'm learning these hip acronyms -- for anyone who hasn't figured this one out yet, it means Fixed That For You)

Namecoin is the equivalent of silver.

No, it's not LITERALLY the same thing as Bitcoin, or it would be Bitcoin. Do you even know what literally means?

It's not even "more or less" the same thing as Bitcoin.

There are several exchanges that trade Bitcoins, there is a small economy built up around Bitcoin, etc. and none of that works with IXcoin.

What can you spend IXcoins on? Even fewer merchants than Bitcoin, and that's pretty bad!

This is obviously a joke -- or the OP was drunk.

Maybe both!

+1

18 pounds a BTC -- isn't that $30?

I think there are a lot of people (even among miners) who have accepted that $30 isn't coming around again any time soon -- if ever.

I personally would be ecstatic to see $15 again, nevermind $30.

After this long at $9.50, if we hit even a modest spike to $12 there would be a massive flood of selling. It's human/market psychology.

You're correct.

Profits are there, but marginal.  

You're not going to be able to quit your job or anything (unlike early June '11, where that looked to be quite possible!)

Unless you have a serious number of cards (= decent investment of $$$) you're looking at pocket change, not "money that folds".

Plus the profit potential varies widely by geographic location -- climate, electricity rates, etc.

IXcoin doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.

It's an obvious attempt by a Bitcoin fan to get a "second chance" to be an early adopter.
He mines 500,000 coins and then releases "IXcoin" to the public, complete with a fake pic of a Japanese person, and his name is a re-arrangement of "Satoshi Nakamoto".

I, personally, am not falling for it.

Please see the thread about IXcoin -- one member posted a really good fact-gathering post about the man.

Now, to address the point of my post, Which of these flaws has been fixed by IXcoin?

Up. to. his. neck.

Frankly, there's nothing wrong with Bitcoin. No, I'm not talking about the economy that's sprung up around Bitcoin, I'm talking about Bitcoin itself.

Can anyone tell me what's wrong with Bitcoin?  Is it something that IXcoin, Smurfcoin, or some other fork can solve?

I think most things a person could bring up would be things like: Mt. Gox, Mybitcoin, difficulty using exchanges, lack of accountability, lack of insurance, mass adoption, business adoption, etc. -- things that are connected to Bitcoin, but not Bitcoin itself.

So starting a new blockchain does *nothing* to bring us even one nanometer closer to electronic currency nirvana.

Yeah, the Namecoin bonanza is going to last all of 2 days. I doubt it will even affect BTC difficulty.

Do IXcoins even have value yet? Do any exchanges trade them?

I am also doubtful about the value of IXcoin, aside from giving Mr. Nasa-Kyoto a 2nd chance at being a Bitcoin early adopter.
I don't see the benefit(s) of this fork over real Bitcoins.

And who chooses a picture of themselves for their forum avatar? (Apologies to Vladimir) Actually, there is a difference between Vladimir's pic and this guy's. Vladimir is just showing what he looks like (average guy). This guy is going for more of a glamour shot, which is disturbing to say the least (considering this forum is mostly guys!)

Pretty forked-up, if you ask me...

Matthew

I'm tempted to start a thread "Who's running 5830's and getting less than 300 Mhash"

By reading this board, I think there'd be just one post in the thread!

But actually I'm sure there are some others out there. The card's stock settings are 250 Mhash/s and if you have the wrong motherboard (or cooling situation, climate, etc.) the 1st card in the system can get very hot.

I have 1 Asusrock motherboard (the rest were all sent back defective) that has the 2 PCI-E slots very close together.
Turns out there's a much better mobo for $10 more that has *much* better placement of the PCI-E slots, plus it's a better board.

Anyhow, unless you're running Windows, it's also difficult to mess with the card's voltage. All my cards are stock voltage. I'm running Linux.

Here in Texas it just touches the upper 70's late in the middle of the night -- for about 2 or 3 hours, then it's back up to the 80s in the early morning hours with a daily high around 103.

Who's still buying cards?

The 5830 only brings in 0.129 BTC a day -- after electricity, that's $1.15 a day.
Not exactly a killing.
That assumes no difficulty increases and no further crashes in BTC price.

It may be luck. In that case, we've had nothing but bad luck for the past 7 days. The last time we had 7.XX blocks per hour (per BitcoinCharts.com) was on 8/2.
For the last several days, it was 4.XX or 5.XX blocks per hour, all day long.

Nevertheless, it doesn't look like anyone's left the party.

I think any plans as to "how will you celebrate the difficulty decrease" (see the thread by that name on this very forum) are premature at best.

There's a good Aesop's fable whose moral is:
"Don't count your chickens before they're hatched."

What's funny is that even when it looked like there was going to be one, it was only going to be somewhere in the ballpark of 1 or 2%.

We'll probably end up with a 3-5% increase this time around.

Unless you have solar panels, SOMEONE is paying for it, and they're not going to like it when they get their first electric bill since you added a dozen rigs (plus extra A/C) to your normal electric usage.

Are the other exchanges cheaper?  Tradehill is pretty close to Mt. Gox's 0.65%.
I haven't checked out the others -- mostly because I don't believe they have enough critical mass/volume to make them worth it just yet.