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Was thinking of ordering it but not sure if it works with Macs. Anyone know? Thanks in advance.
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Thanks, very helpful!
Does anyone know if the USB coffee warmer thing will work with macs?
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ok thanks, but what does it mean in practical terms? why is everyone talking about it? what effects will it have on the bitcoin world? thanks in advance!
CPU : GPU :: GPU : FPGA :: FPGA : ASIC As the market matures, mining will progress towards more and more specialized hardware. This will allow for a greater hashrate given the same price. CPU is general purpose GPU is for several specific applications (mostly games) FPGA is for even fewer applications, great at crypto ASIC models will be made specifically with Bitcoin in mind Bitcoin ASICs are controversial because at first one company will have a temporary monopoly on their manufacture. Expect a big boost in hash rate, and more people complaining about that monopoly until more manufacturers enter the market. Since this makes CPU even MORE obsolete, expect fewer botnet miners and more professional miners with lower profits - which in the long run goes to zero. Really it sucks for miners but is great for users.  Ok, thanks. Very informative. Why is it good for users to have a boost in hash rate? Also, I still don't understand what ASIC is, it's better hardware that's designed specifically for mining bitcoins? It involves better software too or no? What makes ASIC so much better? How much faster will it be at mining? Is there some place where I can read lay discussion of this issue, I'm not that technically advanced. Thanks! |
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ok thanks, but what does it mean in practical terms? why is everyone talking about it? what effects will it have on the bitcoin world? thanks in advance!
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Sorry for my ignorance, but what is ASIC and why is it significant? In idiot-layman terms, please. Thanks!
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this may be a really stupid question, but what is ASIC mining and why is it important?
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Does anyone have up-to-date information on the correlation between cost of mining and bitcoin price? How much does it cost to mine 1 bitcoin? How has that cost changed over time?
Do people generally think there is a connection between mining cost and bitcoin price, or is that not considered to be relevant?
Thanks!
http://blockchain.info/charts/miners-revenueThanks, cool site! |
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Does anyone have up-to-date information on the correlation between cost of mining and bitcoin price? How much does it cost to mine 1 bitcoin? How has that cost changed over time?
Do people generally think there is a connection between mining cost and bitcoin price, or is that not considered to be relevant?
Thanks!
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How many blocks are you at? Did you erase your blkindex.dat file to make it download the entire chain again?
I've got them now, I don't know what the problem was, program kept stalling. I would quit and restart and get 1 or 2 more, and then nothing. Even if I left it running forever. Finally it fixed itself. |
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So this worked for me last time, and now it is not working, I try it and it downloads 1 or 2 more blocks, but not the whole blockchain.
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This isn't the stock market. The Bitcoin market, and its investors, are extremely fragile. It won't take much to topple the house of cards.
It depends, the stock market can get overleveraged and overbought also. It remains to be seen whether Bitcoins have hit that point. The real question is who is buying Bitcoins now and why? Many of the big early holders got their Bitcoins from mining, not through debt financed purchases. Are new buyers buying with debt? Are they buying more than they can afford, and will need to sell them soon? Or are they mostly people who are intrigued by Bitcoins and just buying a few to take part in this cool system with some spare cash? Once the suckers buy en masse, that's when it will probably crash, although whether it will be a mini-crash or a major crash will depend on who the majority of holders are. |
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Why is it so hard to believe that these "problems" are taken into account in the price of bitcoins. Why does everybody assume that the speculators are wrong? The increase in the price of bitcoin is not credit driven, nor even inflation driven. There is no reason for there to be a cluster of errors specifically in bitcoins. There are no policies favorable to buying bitcoins in place by the government. Nobody is giving out massive loans to people who aren't good debtors in order to buy bitcoins. All the reasons for a bubble are absent in bitcoin.
According to Austrian Theory. Mainstream economics has a different explanation of what causes bubbles, and it happens in a community of people who think prices can only go up. To some extent, there is truth in what both of you say. Government policies, excessive debt-financed purchases, etc., are not necessary for a speculative bubble to emerge. On the other hand, there may be some truth to the argument that a Bitcoin bubble is "less" likely to exist or crash hard if it is not debt-financed. If the Bitcoin "bubble" just represents a lot of reasonable speculation (lets say 100,000 people all put $1,000 of their assets, without using debt financing) into Bitcoins on the hopes of higher prices, the "bubble" or "price increase" or whatever you want to call it may be more sustainable and may not end as badly as it would if people are buying with debt, for obvious reasons. |
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Potential gains BTC vs Silver...
(IMO Silver is the better choice out of the precious metals because of its price, dual usage as a PM and industrial, and lastly growth potential compared to gold, platinum).
Which is the better speculative and which is the better investment? Silver vs BTC?
Historical returns for commodities are terrible. Especially if you buy at an historically high price like Silver is at now. Just look at a chart for the last silver bubble in 1980 and you will see what is likely in store going forward. The volume on the most recent selloff was enormous, smart money has left this trade. I would suggest staying far away from silver, as it is likely to fall to mid-20's/mid-teens. I know many silver bugs disagree, but there are two sides to every trade, make sure you fully understand the short silver rationale before you go long. Silver may or may not bounce up a little more to 40/42 spot, but will likely fall very hard at some point in the near future. As for Bitcoins, right now they are a great speculative pick, could easily go up a lot more, but just as easily could crash, very hard, so don't put any money in Bitcoins you wouldn't be fine losing 100% of. |
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Saving, on the other hand, merely involves guarding or preserving an asset for future use. It does not require an expectation of future windfall profits, or excessive acquisition of items that have little value in the market.
People save with the incentive that they will profit, otherwise there would be no saving. It seems to me to be a little disingenuous to suggest people save altruistically and hoard selfishly. There was no such intended implication, I did not suggest that saving is altruistic or that hoarding is selfish. Later I acknowledged that the term "windfall" was probably not as precise as "significant price increases". Savers do not generally anticipate significant price increases, although you are correct that they do have a profit incentive. They just do not anticipate their profits will deviate significantly from historical averages generally. Hoarding, on the other hand, generally entails an expectation that profits will be significant, for the reasons I noted above. I do not think hoarding is any more selfish or altruistic than saving. As many have noted, hoarded serves an important function for the market. |
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Thanks, you should of just pointed me to http://lmgtfy.com/?q=definition+of+hoarding Seriously though, is this the literature where you specifically draw your assumptions from? Perhaps I should of been more clear, if you believe that hoarding is quantifiably, objectively different from savings, where did you learn this? I looked over those sources and I can only conclude that there is no difference in their terminology between hoarding and saving. One source defines it as a variable that effects velocity of money, or "idle deposits", which could obviously be said of savings. The first source looks promising, but only alludes to definitions of hoarding, the closest thing to a definition was "actual holding of cash". Please correct me if am missing something though. No, I just found these today and haven't looked at them in depth but from the looks of it the definition I proposed is not what these authors are referring to. |
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I think we're not that far off. I think we both see hoarding as similar to saving, but different in degree. I don't think there's anything wrong with hoarding, and I don't think the definition I proposed implies that there is anything wrong with hoarding. As several posters have noted, hoarding can serve as a value to society, as the profit motive rewards people who recognize trends or future developments and accumulate/preserve the appropriate resources for later distribution.
The definition I proposed simply offers an objective way to tell whether someone is accumulating a significant amount of something for a particular purpose (expected significant increase in prices). What are normal uses of the word that my definition does not fit? Accumulating liquor and guns for an apocalypse would seem to fit, hoarding bitcoins with the anticipation of significant profits would seem to fit, putting 10% of my weekly paycheck in a CD would seem not to fit (and would be considered saving, which I think comports with the generally accepted use of the word)? What does my definition exclude that should be included? Again, I'm not looking for the bounty, just interested in pursuing the discussion at this point.
I still disagree, but since I worded the challenge poorly I sent you 5 BTC. Maybe this is more in line with my intention: What makes saving good but hoarding bad? Cool, thanks! I'm going to hoardsavespeculate with that... And thanks for the interesting question. I was looking at some economic texts today and they define hoarding with some convoluted formulas that if I had more time it would probably be fun to try to decipher. |
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But that's just it. Economics is the study of personal preferences, either in small (micro) or large (macro) scales. Personal preferences are how people make value decisions, which they express through trades.
Also, I should point out that no one else in the entire world would ever come up with your definition of hoarding, and you've really only twisted "saving that society finds distasteful" to "saving that society finds statistically abnormal".
I think it was a trick. I suppose it was a trick in that I didn't expect anyone to come up with a satisfactory answer. It wasn't a trick in the sense that I thought it was a self contradictory question or it was impossible to answer. There is a lot of talk of hoarding, especially revolving around the concept of deflation. The idea is that if the purchasing power of a currency is rising, people will hoard it instead of spending it, as if the only correct way to use money is to spend it. Hoarding, or saving as I prefer to call it, is merely the action an individual takes when they prefer a liquid cash balance as oppose to less liquid investments. When people refer to saving as hoarding, to me what they are saying is that the person is saving an excessive amount. Again, excessive is completely subjective. I feel like the definition that you presented was carefully crafted to exclude things that you do not consider "excessive", but does not fit the normal use of the word. That is why I do not feel obligated to pay you the bounty. I think we're not that far off. I think we both see hoarding as similar to saving, but different in degree. I don't think there's anything wrong with hoarding, and I don't think the definition I proposed implies that there is anything wrong with hoarding. As several posters have noted, hoarding can serve as a value to society, as the profit motive rewards people who recognize trends or future developments and accumulate/preserve the appropriate resources for later distribution. The definition I proposed simply offers an objective way to tell whether someone is accumulating a significant amount of something for a particular purpose (expected significant increase in prices). What are normal uses of the word that my definition does not fit? Accumulating liquor and guns for an apocalypse would seem to fit, hoarding bitcoins with the anticipation of significant profits would seem to fit, putting 10% of my weekly paycheck in a CD would seem not to fit (and would be considered saving, which I think comports with the generally accepted use of the word)? What does my definition exclude that should be included? Again, I'm not looking for the bounty, just interested in pursuing the discussion at this point. |
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I think I found the problem. You think that personal preference means what someone says about a good. This is incorrect. The preference is what they actually do.
In your goo example, if someone finds goo disgusting, but also feels that it is a store of value, then the accumulation by that individual is an expression of their personal preference for a store of value, in spite of their dislike of the goo. Trade is, in fact, the only objective way to measure preferences.
I think this is a stretch. The task was to find an economic definition that didn't rely on personal preference. I proposed one that looked at expectation of significant price increases and significant accumulation, as opposed to saving which has an expectation of non-significant price increases. To say this relies on "personal preferences" is only true if personal preferences encompass everything in the entire world, including economic predictions and warehouse inventory. If a company accumulates more goo than another company, because its computer price algorithm predicted significant increases, can you say that is somehow based on personal preferences? Only in bizarro-world. If you are correct, the request for a definition was just a trick to show that personal preferences accompany everything in the world. I think a more reasonable reading of the purpose for the request was to try to discredit the concept of hoarding as a descriptive term, saying that it was just a pejorative for saving. I think what I have shown is that hoarding is not without merit as a descriptive term, and is not just a pejorative for "saving that I don't like" or "saving that society finds distasteful". It is actually a distinct economic category that can be defined objectively, by looking at price expectations and extent of accumulation. A plain reading of the request and my answers will reveal that this is the case. |
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