PERSONAL VIEWS:

Namecoin: mined during subsidized periods, ridiculed during patsy only periods.  Made some BTC.
Ixcoin: Jumped on a bit late, but still made a few BTC.
i0coin: Jumped on early, made some BTC.  Still have some.
Solidcoin: Jumped in and out early, made some BTC.
Tenebrix: Jumped in fairly early, made a relative ton of BTC.  Still mining it until Litecoin shows up.
Fairbrix: Have a small amount of coin, not mining until an exchange shows up to allow me to make some BTC.
GeistgGeld: Still have a few.  Got in early, made some BTC.

I think you see a pattern here.  So far the approach of adopting *every* chain that comes along early (with the possible exception of Fairbrix) has been very lucrative compared to doing nothing.   The longer you wait to speculate (whether through mining or investment) the higher your risk and lower your reward, as it is with all pyramids.

It's getting a bit more difficult to choose now that multiple chains are being announced simultaneously.  But so far hopping on the freshest one has been an overwhelmingly winning strategy.

You also think Belarus is part of Japan, you're barely literate, and think an i7 performing differently on a computing workload than six core phenom is some sort of conspiracy. 

You're welcome to your opinion.  I'll stick with mine.

SC is dead before it launched.  It has too many drawbacks.

Now, the first alt currency I like and will probably speculate long on is "litecoin."  It's like bitcoin, but using a CPU friendly algorithm.  And without a ridiculous premine amount.  It's intended to be the silver to bitcoin's gold and IMO it's the first alt chain with a shot of making it.

As far as impact?  Short term positive, long term neutral.  To speculate on the various shitcoins people need to buy up bitcoins.  Those 2000 bitcoins up on the bid on btce are not in circulation, so every alt chain to come along is a slight, imperceptible boost to bitcoin price.

At least until that chain collapses.

My story is even simpler.  "I'm doing cryptography to secure a peer to peer network.  I get paid a few pennies for this, but I feel it's pretty important so I'm doing it.  Wanna learn more?"

Your cpu doesn't have the AVX instruction set, thus the core dump.  Try CFLAGS="-O3 -march=native -msse4.2", that should be good for about 2.8 khash/core.

PERFECT!  This looks like the CPU mining alternative to tenebrix I've been waiting for.  Will definitely support this chain with about 40khash out of the gate, likely far more later.

Gimme!

What does the eventual ascendancy of bitcoin or other decentralized cryptocurrency have to do with the current block chain and its exchange rate to the dollar?

To say this number has a massive error margin would be an understatement.  It's completely pulled out of my ass.  My model is based on 75% joining the bitcoin community w/ BTC at the high all choosing to build mining rigs rather than buy (rational choice with cost to produce of $1 vs cost to buy of $32), the number of 5830 cards it would take to supply current hash rate (the most popular card at the time, selling for $100) and a supposition that less money would be used to direct buy than re-create the entire current network.

The real number may be lower, higher, or about that.  I will state with 100% confidence it's not 30 million.

Right this second it's possible to get ~$4 per day on hardware that would have otherwise mined $1.50 worth of bitcoins using $1.20 in power.  You gotta love leveraged speculation.

P.s. Tulips were used as currency in Holland.  They were routinely exchanged for a far wider range of goods and services than bitcoins today.

Mmmyeah, I'd say you've got the cunt on that chart pretty much nailed.

It's just variance.  Deepbit is back to 4.4 terahash, no measurable decreases since $5/btc.  We've seen 5 blocks/hour before, it's meaningless.  Business as usual, everyone is feeling bullish again.

I am.  I send it to people willing to share dollars.  I trade those dollars for power, hardware and beer in order to support the network.

Once the power company, newegg/Amazon/Microcenter and my local liquor store are willing to take bitcoins instead of dollars I'll be able to reduce the number of tools used, but not before.

More likely if $ volume goes to the point where current and future operations are unlikely to result in any net profit -- claim to be hacked, keep the $, close up shop.  It's a completely opaque operation with no accountability and one guy running the show.  What would YOU do for a few hundred thousand dollars in your pocket weighed vs mounting losses for continuing operations?

That's what I suspect happened to bitcoin7.  Look to moonco.in and Bruce Wagner for other data points.

Still no worries.  I could satisfy the random proof of work when requested and use the hardware for mining during the other times.  Net result: no increase in security, slight increase in reward for me.  Higher cost for the policy because anyone providing the "insurance" would need to factor in doing work at random times.


Key words: vested interest.  Most of the population has no vested interest in bitcoin.   75% of the current hashing power could very well have low to no vested interest in the future of bitcoin.  From personal experience any hashing power I have is used to produce bitcoin so long as it is profitable.  And if it is not profitable I'm better off selling the hardware on ebay.

Look at namecoin if you want a guestimate of the ratio of devoted fanatics compared to opportunists.  It's about 1:20 fan to greedy SOB.

How many gamers would commit to their machine not being usable for gaming for a few cents to a few dollars a month?  I'm guessing not enough to make this worthwhile.  I won't even go into the entire technical nightmare of getting standby working across the gamut of hardware and software.  Out of 5 machines I have at home and at the office only one older one (Q9400(IIRC) CPU, P35 chipset, mature Gigabyte BIOS, Ubuntu 10.04, nvidia 8800GT) has flawless standby/resume, the other 4 exhibit various degrees of flakiness.  One MSI socket 1156 board has a 100% failure rate to resume from S3 suspend.

It's only a matter of time until APUs are as prevalent in low cost consumer boxes as CPUs are today.  Sure, they'll have 1/4 to 1/8 the computing power of a GPU, but that's about the same ratio as a crappy Grandma-suitable dual core vs a 6 core Phenom II today.  Specialized hardware is only protection today.

Because he couldn't.  I estimate less than 3 million dollars have been put up for grabs by speculators.  More has been put up by miners through hardware and power investment, but that's irrelevant.  Plenty of the cash has already been taken -- you can see many 10k+ blocks being sold all the way down. 

But had Satoshi tried to cash in for the whole enchilada you'd now see bitcoin back at pennies/BTC and zero chance for mass adoption.

Or maybe just because someone is a math, modeling and crypto wiz doesn't mean they're a trading genius.

Hashing power on deepbit starting to fall perceptibly.  We may be at a turning point of the bitcoin community going from bull (or closet bull) to bear.

We'll also get to see if the same dynamics which drove a positive feedback loop of price/difficulty during the rocket ride up are also going to work in reverse.  We're less than a buck or so price swing from very, very exciting times for many.

The long awaited capitulation may soon be at hand.  Good thing, I'm so tired of beating the "sell" drum over the past 4 months, I am more than ready to be a bull again.

Fairbrix lifespan is irrelevant, it uses equivalent technology to bitcoin.  What is relevant is the hashing power relative to value of destroying the network.  Sure, it's difficult at 1/10th of current hashing power (difficulty of 150k).  How about a difficulty of 15k?

If there is no income to be had from securing the bitcoin network people will flee.  The question is: are there enough believers and people with free power and hardware willing to do this for no compensation relative to those interested in imploding the whole thing for "lulz"?


This sounds like a wonderful idea.  I have 1337 googlehash of computing power that I'm willing to sell lower than anyone else.  No, I don't have photos of the hardware at the moment, my camera is broken.  But I'll get them to you just as soon as you pay me.

Aside from fraud and contract enforcement issues it'd be senseless to do this unless the cost of hardware is marginal compared to the value received.  In other words, if it's more profitable to turn the hardware on than leave it off it'll be turned on.  But if it's NOT on, the odds of receiving enough value to pay for hardware before it becomes obsolete are low.

Oh absolutely.  My "unlimited risk play money" portfolio is about 2 orders of magnitude (almost 3) larger than my bitcoin investment, and it's a prudent tiny portion of my overall net worth -- most of which is exposed to various (yet much lower) risks.

With bitcoin there is ONE exchange.  It's really one guy.  The others are so tiny they might as well be brokers trading out of inventory instead.  With the other markets there are millions of participants.  Here we have a few tens of thousands.  With other markets I have derivatives, with assignment ultimately backed by armed people and jails.  

With bitcoin my potential of losing 100% due to *a single guy* making a mistake or committing fraud is also 100%.  Over and above market risk.

With most other markets not so much.

TL;DR - while bitcoin trading is risky enough the rest of the ecosystem makes the total risk high enough to not be worth current rewards.

No.  Get 160 more friends.

In all seriousness, with balls that big I'm surprised you guys fit through doorways.  I hope you're billionares.  I'm well off enough having been a $400/hr consultant during the dotcom boom and to this day having a decent two senor techie income family, doing well enough trading and having two profitable businesses -- but I'd never risk more than pocket change on bitcoin.  Hat off to you.

It's at 3.x.  How much have you bought?