Only just barely managed to make 50 posts in time and filled out the claim payment form so I should be OK. I'm guessing I don't need to enroll again since after clicking "submit", it said I don't need to enroll every month, right? If Stunna wants to continue the program then I'd be happy to stay for another month. So just for reference, my current total post count is 282.

Before Bitcoin, there was Bit Gold. Bit Gold had pretty much all of the the basic features that Bitcoin now has except for two few key differences:

1. The consensus group for Bitcoin is hashing power. Bitcoin relies on the idea that the majority of the network's hashing power is controlled by nodes that are not hostile to the network. In order to successfully execute a double spend, one must own a majority of the hashing power of the network. Bit Gold is different in that the consensus group is the total number of nodes. What is a node? Well, by running Bitcoin Core, you are running a node. Bit Gold relies on the majority of the nodes in the network to be non-hostile.

2. Bit Gold is not technically fungible. Unlike Bitcoin, it lacks a difficulty-adjusting algorithm which means that advancements in solving the proof-of-work calculations required to "mine" Bit Gold (e.g. by designing an ASIC) can result in more proof-of-works being solved and more coins gold being produced. Since each bit gold has a timestamp associated with it, it is thus expected that the cost of generating that particular bit gold will be taken into account and different bit golds from different time periods will be bundled together to create units of consistent value in a manner that all nodes in the network would agree to.

I think Nick Szabo's Bit Gold is sufficiently different from Bitcoin that it might be worth implementing his ideas into an altcoin. What do you think?

I entered a couple of numbers into the Nxt Forging Calculator which basically is an approximation of how much Nxt you can forge with your Nxt wallet. My goal is to have 10,000 NXT by the end of this year (and 1 BTC), but if I enter that number into the calculator, it turns out I will only get about 0.13 NXT per week (with 1 week being 168 hours).

Even at the height of Nxt's value, that is only 1 cent! Today, it's even much less than that!

So... What incentive is there for average people like me to forge?

Even a Nxt whale with 1,000,000 NXT would only get 12.96 NXT per week. At current prices, that is under 50 cents!

The article is correct in saying that Bitcoin prices have been extremely stable this year compared to previous years. The only year that comes even remotely close was 2012 - when the BTC price gradually rose from about $5 near the beginning of the year to about $13 by the end of the year. I wonder what the price will be a couple of months or a year or two from now? If it's still hovering around the $400 to $600 mark then perhaps it means that Bitcoin adoption has reached a plateau and it will forever be relegated to be the "Linux" of currencies.

Oh and for those who are into day trading/swing trading currencies (including Bitcoin), there is still plenty of profit to be made in a sideways market. Those who trade forex should already know this.

Edit: Not to mention a non-volatile Bitcoin exchange rate would also be ideal if we want businesses to accept Bitcoin directly instead of automatically converting it to fiat via a payment processor like BitPay. It would also help Bitcoin gain acceptance in remittance markets. For example, if you wanted to send a sum of money to another country, you would probably prefer to see the value of your funds remain stable instead of fluctuating wildly like Bitcoin did back in 2011 or 2013.

True, but I think there is a point where any additional wealth would have little benefit to one's lifestyle and finances and this combined with the inherent risk that cryptocurrencies have (e.g. recently demonstrated by Litecoin's plunge from $48 to $5), would make it the rational choice for even the most hardcore crypto believer to convert some back into fiat.

For example, if you had $5 million, would your quality of life really change if you had another $1 million? Someone who invested the full amount of 1 BTC in the NXT IPO back in November 2013 would have been sitting on a NXT stash worth $5 million during its peak. In this case, wouldn't you have converted, say $1 million of that to fiat if you could?

It's a known fact that the creator of Litecoin, coblee, sold much of his stash when it was still worth cents:


Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1rl63z/from_the_bottom_of_my_heart_thank_you_coblee/

So... It's finally payment time! I'm in panic mode at the moment because I only have 45 posts and will need to find a way to make 5 more in the next couple of hours.


I probably saw the Primedice signature link about a hundred times before I actually clicked on it. There were so many different signature campaigns running back then (and still are!) so I didn't really bother to click on any of them because it all just looked like spam to me. But the PD one kept popping up more often than the others so it was the first one I ever clicked on. And I'm glad I did! Have you ever been in a big city like Tokyo where there are hundreds of advertisements, signs, and billboards everywhere? That's kind of like how these forums are.

OK, so we all know that a whole bunch of people became millionaires from hodling their bitcoins. Litecoin prices jumped from $0.07 to $48 in the space of less than a year, so it's highly likely that there would have been a couple of millionaires created from LTC too. We also know that those who had invested over 0.2 BTC in the NXT IPO also became millionaires after a couple of weeks/months.

Have there been any other coins which made their early investors extremely wealthy since then?

So... How profitable was (is?) mining PMC for transaction fees anyway?

I've been semi-following this coin for a while and I know PMC was designed as an experiment to see what the future Bitcoin economy might look like once all coins have been fully mined and whether or not a community of miners can be supported solely through transaction fees alone so I'm interested to see how the experiment turned out now that it's coming to a close.

It is very strange. You don't need to do any of those things to buy a soft drink from a vending machine so the same should be true for bitcoins. Are they worried about counterfeit bills or something? I can understand why an ATM might demand ID if payment was done via reversible means or if there was the possibility of card fraud but otherwise, they shouldn't ask for ID, hand scan, photo, phone number, etc.

That being said, once you have the bitcoins in your possession, it should be easy to destroy the link between your ID and your BTC by sending them to a mixing service, right? Or just depositing them in an exchange might do the trick.

Interesting article. So it seems that the people who actually run the rigs don't actually own the operation. That makes me wonder... How was the person behind the whole thing able to buy so many miners in the first place? And pay for so much electricity? Was he a fiat whale or something?

Isn't there something about human-generated pass phrases having poor entropy/randomness compared to computer-generated ones that might be applicable here?


I'm not quite sure about this one. For example, my laptop is currently encrypted with a 40+ character password with symbols, uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and numbers. Part of it even incorporates a verse in a poem that I wrote in a conlang (a made up language) which only I can understand. It looks like complete gibberish but I've been using it on my laptop without a problem for over two years. I wouldn't use it as my brainwallet because I'd be worried about the above but even that being said, I'd still be surprised if it were easily crackable.

If you look at the older altcoins, it seems that most* were quite unique in some way. Namecoin had a decentralized DNS, Litecoin was GPU then ASIC resistant with faster transaction times**, Peercoin proved that proof-of-stake can be a viable alternative to proof-of-work, and Primecoin used computational power to identify prime numbers.

Also back then, you didn't have hundreds of altcoins flooding the scene every week. Coingen didn't exist and so every altcoin needed to be crafted by hand by a dev who knew what they were doing. Not many coins were launched solely to make a profit because the money in cryptos was so low that there wasn't much of a profit to be made anyway. Compared to today, more people involved in cryptos back then were hobbyists who weren't looking for a quick buck.

Then came November 2013 and when Bitcoin spiked, altcoins saw explosive growth as well. Soon there were animal coins, country coins, etc. Now take a look at CMC and it's flooded with hundreds of altcoins which don't really offer anything new. Most of them have been declining for much of the year. For example, Kittehcoin, Flappycoin, etc.

So what do you think? Has the average quality of altcoins dropped in 2014? Or was it the same shit back then and have we just forgotten about the ones that didn't make it?

*OK, some weren't quite as innovative. e.g. BBQcoin, Terracoin, Ixcoin, I0coin, Feathercoin, Bytecoin (the last one being a straight-up 1:1 Bitcoin clone). But the point still stands.

**Technically, Tenebrix and Fairbrix were older scrypt coins, but Litecoin was the first successful one.

Faucets can be useful for paying transaction fees. For example, Electrum demands a 10,000 satoshi transaction fee or otherwise your transaction won't go through. So if you had an address with 0.2 BTC and you wanted to buy something that costs 0.2 BTC or your friend wanted to borrow 0.2 BTC from you, what would you do? Well, you could use a faucet to fill in that extra 0.0001 BTC so that the deal can go through successfully.

Is it a good idea to use dice sites and exchanges to mix coins? I know there are legit bitcoin mixers out there but shouldn't depositing bitcoins in a dice site or an exchange and withdrawing them minutes later accomplish the same thing? I know that the bitcoins you get back from an exchange are not the same as the ones you put in, and I also know that exchanges pool their users' funds and keep both hot and cold wallets.

I'm not too worried about the exchange or dice site keeping records since I'm not doing anything illegal. But I would like to start off with a fresh address to receive payments that isn't connected to my previous transaction history and online persona.

It would be easy to check to see if the mixing worked by looking at the taint analysis on Blockchain.info.

Only reason I'm asking is because I've used dice sites and exchanges before and would rather stick with what is familiar. Also, I highly doubt a reputable exchange like Cryptsy or Poloniex or a dice site like Primedice would run away with users' funds.

So apparently now a hacker owns 5 percent of all Nxt that will ever exist. This is a greater amount than any of the original 73 stakeholders ever had. Heck, this is an even greater figure than the percentage of bitcoins that Satoshi will own once Bitcoin is fully mined (we're already over 60 percent there!).

Everyone likes to say that once Bitcoin goes mainstream, Satoshi will become the world's first trillionaire. There is also speculation that Nxt will replace Bitcoin as the dominant crypto. But if this ever happens, it seems likely that a hacker - not Satoshi would be the world's first trillionaire.

Even worse, because of the way Nxt is designed, now that a hacker has the world's largest Nxt stake, he will also gain more coins via forging. For every 20 transactions you make within the Nxt ecosystem, one would be directly benefiting the hacker via transaction fees.

On the positive side, Nxt still has a vibrant community and a skilled dev team. It is also the most established of the second generation alts and the only one to have a functioning asset exchange. Yesterday's hack was without a doubt, the biggest setback that the Nxt community and ecosystem has ever experienced in its 10 month history.

How will Nxt be able to recover from this incident? Will things ever be the same?

Thanks for that link. Looks like a Bitcoin version of Fiverr. I guess another possibility is to learn how to day trade and start trading altcoins or learning to use Photoshop and doing design work. The first option would be very risky however since I've heard that this is also a great way to lose money.

I can see how being a developer would be a nice job that would be well suited for someone like me but I fear that my programming skills aren't good enough. When analyzing code, I can see the gist of how the methods work and what objects go where and much of C++ and PHP looks very familiar to me but even writing something as simple as a chess program or a Tetris clone in Java would probably push the limits of my abilities.

Hi, since my goal is to make 1 BTC, and numerous posts around here say that getting a job and converting that fiat to BTC is the best way to reach this goal, I was wondering what jobs are the best for getting 1 BTC? I have some very basic experience in HTML and CSS and I also took introductory courses on Python and Java programming. I am also mid-way through a bachelor in biochemistry and a minor in computer science.

I'm currently living with my parents and my income is $0 a week. Some of the jobs that I'm considering right now include freelance web development, programmer, or perhaps something research-related.

Thanks.

Yeah, it does look like a very sophisticated phishing attempt. However, one thing that doesn't quite add up is that I just went on Primedice3.com and it is showing the exact same message as Primedice.com (i.e. the real one) that the website is currently down and there is even the same pug video (haven't watched it but it looks like a pug). If Primedice3.com is a fake website - and I'm still sure it is, then what are the chances of both sites being down at the same time?

Screenshot of the real Primedice 3:



Screenshot of the imposter:



EDIT: Both sites are now back up. Also it looks like my session on the real PD doesn't carry over to the fake one. So yeah, very suspicious.

Good news.

Seems like the hacker has agreed to return the stolen Nxt in exchange for 100 BTC. There will probably be no rollback. This way, everyone wins. Bter gets to stay in business, the hacker makes a tidy profit, and the Nxt community gets their stolen coins back. It will be done in parts, so Bter sends 10 BTC first, after which the hacker sends 5 million NXT, then Bter sends another 10 BTC, etc. and so on.

Latest message:


Link: https://nxtblocks.info/#section/txid/1998773042441769982

Edit: Fixed the link. Thanks rugrats.

Edit 2: Looks like the first payment is already in: https://nxtblocks.info/#section/txid/6198094150510358833

Glad I didn't invest in NEMstake back when it was still around $1,200-ish. It was only available via the Nxt AE and the fact that I was only just getting my head around Nxt might have been the reason why I didn't buy in back then. The price is very low now but rebounded slightly so I think I might buy 0.1 NEMstake just in case NEM does actually become big.

The success of NEM probably depends on the success of second generation cryptos in general. The relationship between Nxt and coins like NEM and Qora could be comparable to the relationship between Bitcoin and coins like Peercoin and Litecoin.


NEMstake isn't actually a coin. It just represents a stake. Those with a stake can claim coins once NEM is launched. Each NEMstake is worth 1 million coins so 1 NEM will still be much less valuable than 1 BTC. There are 1,000 NEMstakes and 4 billion NEM (not sure where the other 3 billion comes from but I'm too lazy to check).