What kiba said. And don't underestimate the power of face-to-face meeting to build a sense of shared community.
Agreed with SunAvatar and kiba. But I prefer smaller meetings then a bit conference. Small meetups are always good -- better then one big, expensive, complex and centralized conference. It is an interesting point. Small localised meet-ups but with some connectedness is harder to suppress if it comes to that. Brings to mind the operation of "terrorist cells" chillingly. |
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Yeah, i knew it wouldn't be worth worrying about, just making a mental note for the future.
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I sold 15,000 BTC on Bitcoin Market for ~0.003 USD: the all-time low on any market, AFAIK. I had measured my power consumption and determined that it only cost me ~0.001 BTC to make one BTC, so I thought 0.003 was a good profit margin. I knew the price would rise over time due to the deflationary nature of Bitcoin, but I didn't think it would happen so suddenly. Neat story. What I find really interesting that even at that low of an exchange rate you were still able to be profitable. Obviously, the machines that are doing the mining have got a lot more powerful but I wonder if the margin has changed dramatically? Must be that law of price driving difficulty driving hardware selection driving profitability and energy/resources expended was in effect from the earliest days. Maybe we should change the title of the thread to "2 Pizza for 10,000 bitcoins? It really happened. |
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I would advocate for a country that does not harvest fingerprints and eye-scans from law-abiding foreign travellers for databases, upon border entry.
Do they scan everyone or just pick some at random? Everybody and have done for quite some time ... more than 5 years now I think. Edit: actually longer, since 2002, it was part of the whole Patriot Act police state expansion boom. http://travel.state.gov/visa/immigrants/info/info_1336.htmlIris scans and ten fingerprints from anybody entering as a requirement to get a visa for entry. |
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What's the BTCmine.com policy regarding transaction fees that maybe included in blocks? (e.g. Will they be distributed to the miners or retained by the operator?)
Also, do you have a policy for how many free transactions are included?
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Put your guns away son I wasn't talking to you.
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Not sure if the bandwagon is big enough carry all the murdering socialists ideological centralisation baggage as well.
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I would advocate for a country that does not harvest fingerprints and eye-scans from law-abiding foreign travellers for databases, upon border entry.
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Who would come with 10K ounces of gold!
Bill Gates? Scrooge McDuck? Idunno, it's a lot of money but there are a lot of billionaires out there. They just think they are billionaires but mostly it is in unbacked fiat currency valuations held in a bank computer account somewhere, with less security backing than bitcoin. If they ever came to try and buy bitcoin with their funny money they would find out poor they really are. |
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It was inevitable the preachy, intolerant mainstream would show up eventually I guess ... kind of sad never-the-less, they never fail to satisfy the stereotypes.
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Well, back in the days Bitcoins were a very risky thing and nobody knew what could happen to the project.
The pizza thing was one of the very first attempts to trade bitcoins with real goods.
Everybody could generate thousands of bitcoins per months so they didn't have a real value back then.
I think you, or someone else who was around at that time, should write up an essay or similar to how things were, i.e, what was going through your minds and what kinds of things you were doing .... just for a historical perspective. Another yeah of smoking-too-much and it'll all become a blur and future generations will never know what it was like to be a bitcoin miner in the clean, fresh open fields of bitcoin paradise with your solo CPU rig doing 1MHash dragging in what would turn out to small fortunes in value from the ether ... it'll make a good narrative, imo. |
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I did a thought experiment that I found illuminating.
Bitcoin mining is a little like gold mining as has been said many times before, except that the work involved in gold mining is not useful, even though it does keep the value of gold high. The value of gold as a currency is just because it is hard to forge because of this work. But men do die doing it.
Bitcoins, on the other hand, are pulled from the mathematical ether with raw computational power, and if that is a waste, it seems a necessary one.
Why not have a bit coin client that can also do useful problem solving? I thought. Well, actually, why not have such a client that is quite separate from bitcoin, but happens to accept bitcoin as a means of payment of the person running the GPU's?
The answer seems to be that technically we are not quite there yet. And that many people offer free computer power via the folding at home network. But I think this could happen by the time bitcoin becomes mature, and could be an alternative way for miners to spend their GPU electricity.
Would it be better to have an electronic currency based on real useful work, maybe, but in fact it does not have to be built into the currency and in fact probably should not be.
This is a very perceptive and useful observation. The bitcoin miner network is providing a service that it gets paid for (that of maintaining a currency value that can be used in the economy as money). It should not be need to be said here that sound money in itself is an amazing invention that is efficient at distributing labour, good and services in a free market. The economic benefits from having a properly managed money are enormous and should not be underestimated. In free market of currencies the one that delivers the most benefits will win out, currently we have no such thing. We have an elaborate system full of historical kruft and arcane regulations that is dysfunctional as a financial system of resource and capital allocation. It is administered by a facistic elite hell-bent on self-enrichment, at the expense of the proper functioning of the entire global economy. If bitcoin or crypto-currencies in general can right this listing ship they will be cheap compared to how many hundreds of billions that are being thrown into the current banking systems toxic pile of debts to save it, yet inevitably ends up in bankers bonus pay-packet. Bitcoin offers a model for using a distributed network of computers, each with an individual economic incentive to perform work, and is a step up in evolution over the volunteer grid computing of folding@home, SETI, etc. It can even be said to be the beginning of a time when GPGPU power connected to the network has become a marketable commodity. |
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From today's perspective I'm pretty lucky not to have sold them for 50 bucks  yeah, that's what I was thinking ... the "they" I was referring to was anyone who saw the offer and didn't buy them! Easy to be a genius in hindsight eh? |
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 Citibit? Citibitibank? citibitcoin? Probably buy the whoile bag of toxic crap for a few bitcoins when it is all over ... |
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Some of these arguments are switching between effects associated with different time scales. At present, Bitcoin IS inflating, at a huge rate in fact, around 33% this year and 25% next year. The deflationary "currency dividend" that seems to be hated is not going to be enjoyed until out into the far future. At least base your arguments on either the current state or a future one specifically.
In the long term, most of the speculation and sitting on coins going on now will abate when a more stable market value for bitcoin has been established. This may not happen for some time, i.e. when the current rate of inflation of bitcoin and growth of demand for bitcoin equilibriate.
Muddying the waters with mixed arguments pertaining to effects from vastly different time scales is pointless.
Also we need a graph showing the projected inflation rate for bitcoin ... so when another noob comes and says "... but, but what about nasty deflation you can point them at the chart ...." and say, "get back to me in 20 years time and we'll see if it is problem."
Over-valuation due to speculation is a different matter.
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The way the network is growing, difficulty climbing and will climb again now price has taken another jump (2 weeks delayed), even some of the big guys become little guys quite quickly.
It is getting really competitive.
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Thanks for that. I think it worths transcripting it here, as this has historical value for the bitcoin community: The Times
Saturday 03 Jan 2009
Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
Alistair Darling is considering a second major bailout for UK banks, as last year's £37bn part-nationalisation has clearly failed to keep credit flowing. The Treasury is likely to consider such options as cash injections, cheaper state guarantees for private fund-raising and buying up `toxic' assets. The moves follow the BoE's disclosure on Friday that banks continued to curb lending in the final quarter of 2008, in spite of intense pressure by the government to increase the supply of credit. The MPC is also expected this week to cut the base rate to below 2%.
The final Woolworths stores are set to close on Tuesday - a day later than planned - and will add to the surge in unemployment as companies in all sectors come under pressure. More retail chains are also expected to collapse in the next few weeks as even the late surge in demand over the holidays failed to compensate for overall weakness in the High Street. Meanwhile, JD Wetherspoon is to cut the prices of some beers to 99p a pint or bottle in a move likely to trigger a price war among pub chains.
Anne Ashworth reveals that homeowners are turning to `warm-coloured soft furnishings' in response to the downturn, rather than the neutral decor favoured during the boom years.
Editorial: The Times says the banks must start lending again and give up the `reckless caution' that is slowing the system down.
And if you knew the cypher, the exact, original text of this article contains a coded message from Satoshi himself revealing his true identity and a few more secrets of the Bitcoin protocol? lol. |
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The feds could start shutting down BTC trading merchants .... in America ... the rest of the world will be free to do what they want.
All US will be doing is cutting off its nose to spite its face. I'm picking that when push comes to shove they will leave it alone because in the end cutting yourself off from possibly the next big thing in global finance is economic suicide.
They may be bent, crooked, power-crazed facists but they are not that stupid (are they) to know which side their bread is buttered ... that's why the big criminals are the biggest campaign contributors. It will just be a shifting of the order.
We should get a bounty started for campaign contributions, to Ron Paul, or similar.
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Is the fixed amount of blocks per hour needed? Yes. It makes more sense to secure the system by verifying one big block every 10 minutes than a small block every seconds. As a matter of fact, that's also a measure to save resources. It is beyond me that you could think bandwidth and computational efficiency were not considered in the building of a p2p network... Hell, under your logic, why would people have bothered researching gpu mining, if they're making a point of "wasting energy" to mine, as you portray it.
You seem to be ignoring or misunderstanding my point; I haven't questioned why anyone would mine, nor have I questioned the need for mining in a network like Bitcoin. The question is whether the particular choice Bitcoin made among the many possible mining infrastructures that satisfy the demands of such networks is the optimal one in view of the potential externalities (positive or negative) of the mining activities. The particular choice -- as the developer of the network, not a client of it! -- is arbitrary, or at least arbitrary within some constrained range. As a very simple example, imagine that one candidate hash algorithm favors hardware produced by a violent, morally repugnant regime and another favors hardware produced by a regime you want to support; why would you -- again, as the developer of the system, not a user of it! -- choose the former over the latter? You're perhaps hung on the title of the thread (and the word "pointless"), but that's a red herring, as I've already made clear. Nobody is suggesting that Bitcoin, in any form similar to its current one, could exist without the need for mining. The question is just "What kind of mining?" And again, since you seem to be misunderstanding, it's not "What kind of technology should a user of the Bitcoin network use to mine?" The question is one about how to design the network. Can there be positive externalities coming from hashing? rofl... Have you ever coded, have you ever looked at a cryptographic problem? Actually you don't need to, a little common sense will suffice. What other kind of use would you put the data resulting from the process of validating a unique cryptographic problem? Gimme a break... The energy used for hashing is a requirement, period. The difficulty is not optional, the security it engenders either.
Your disrespect is coming from ignorance of the economic point I'm making, even though I illustrated it with a straightforward example, so it's hard to continue the discussion in good faith. If you're interested, please reconsider the point I made earlier about the broad possible positive externalities from GPU mining. Who is to say that the present algorithm, which allows for GPUs to be deployed usefully for this purpose, presents the broadest, most positive externalities? For what it is worth, I am an expert in both cryptography and economics, and I have developed a widely used cryptosystem and written many academic papers on related topics. Now if you so wish, you can research fpga/asic hashing, smaller die process, supra conductors, better mining software, or hell, a way to recover the heat dissipated by the video cards. But your insistence in reusing the data processed for the hashes for some other benefit just indicates that you don't know what you are talking about.
I have not, anywhere, insisted on "reusing the data processed for the hashes," but your disrespectful tone makes it hard to continue the conversation. You might consider listening to what people are saying and possibly learning from it, rather than rejecting it jingoistically. Sounds like you think you've got a better way of doing this ... let's put some of those "supra-optimal, supervenient, potential positive externalities" into practice. Write your better software, put it up on git-hub and get some skin in the game, stop pontificating about it, just do it. We'll take it from there and let the free market decide who knows what they are talking about. My money's on satoshi for now. |
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