Thanks for the links! I'm mostly interested in 2012 and whether the claim of someone mining Bitcoin with ASICs in 2012 is actually plausible, because from my anecdotal experience it was incredibly hard to get your hard on ASIC mining hardware until at least the latter half of 2013. And that is assuming you even bet on the right horse and not on one of the many ventures that failed to deliver.

Friedcat and Avalon having specifications as of September / October 2012 means they still had to get the chips produced, as from my little understanding of the chip design workflow you're still working with simulations at that point (either software simulation or hardware-based using FPGAs).

So at least according to the public record there were no (SHA256) ASIC chips until December 28, 2012:


And even then the chips were still to be tested.


So in conclusion -- Am I missing something or does it seem unlikely that someone was mining Bitcoin with ASICs as early as 2012? Because given the technical challenges and capital requirements it seems weird for someone to produce ASIC chips without scaling production for either themselves or for sale to the public, either of which should have made a splash back then.

While reading this thread about Mastercard acquiring CipherTrace I came across the following claim:


Which had me wondering -- is there any record of when the first ASIC miner prototypes started mining the Bitcoin blockchain? From what I remember the first to actually ship ASIC miners, albeit in a very limited capacity, was Avalon in early 2013. I'm aware of Friedcat / Bitfountain and Bitfury starting development on ASICs as early as 2012 but if I'm not mistaken even they weren't able to start mining before 2013? Not to mention Butterfly Labs...

Anyway, any insights on this? Was Shannon Holland connected to any of these projects or were early prototype chips made available to parts of the community before the blueprints hit the foundries? I'm genuinely curious as that part of mining history eludes me and I remember ASIC miners being kind of a big deal when they first entered the scene in 2013.

Sind sie, Danke!

That could be mitigated by working the other way round -- keeping the paper wallet by yourself and sending the wallet password by future email. Good point though.

Have you thought about giving a Python 2 to Python 3 converter a try? Since it's just a handful of files it could actually work pretty well:
https://dev.to/rohitnishad613/convert-python-2-to-python-3-in-1-single-click-2a8p

Here's the docs on the 2to3 library:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/2to3.html


Also of course there's the tool that the Python source is based on:
https://iancoleman.io/bitcoin-key-compression/

Use the above for testing only, for everything else fetch the source here:
https://github.com/iancoleman/keycompression

That was my first thought as well, I guess deep inside I have a higher confidence in Bitcoin's long term existence over Google's.

The other points seem rather likely as well though. Google has shown little qualms about shutting down projects and features in the past and many didn't live for more than 2-3 years. Accordingly that could happen even sooner than accounts getting closed for inactivity or providers becoming defunct.

Holy Shit!

Das war mega spannend! PM ist draussen, nochmal danke für das Gewinnspiel sam00!

Hut ab mole0815 und Soonandwaite, ein showdown zu high noon wär auch nicht ohne gewesen!

Not a fan, but it seems rather inevitable unfortunately. Banks have been put under a lot of regulatory pressure over the last few years so the market for blockchain analysis (assuming that's what they do, the information they provide in the link you posted is rather vague) does exist and will likely grow larger as more crypto-enthusiasts show up on their respective banks' radars. Currently banks tend to just kick people off since they don't want to bother with the regulatory overhead, however widely available blockchain analysis services may help with that. For better or worse.


Another thing caught my eye though:


Is that even possible? I just checked with the Avalon website, but even their first batches, which were already pretty much impossible to come by, weren't released until early 2013:
https://canaan.io/about

It smells rather bullshitty, but it also doesn't really make sense to blatantly lie about something that's so easily debunked, so maybe I'm missing a bit of early mining history? I'm genuinely curious.

Oh wow, I can't quite believe it! PM has been sent, thanks again cygan!

Zahl!

 

Aufteilen in 0-4, 5-9 und a-e und bei f reroll? Wir könnens aber auch gerne nochmal per pm mit neuen Tipps probieren

f - HeRetiK

Thanks for the raffle

████ 

EUR 49890,-

Username: heretik2

Irgendwas irgendwas Bill Gates und George Soros


Ich glaub tatsächlich das zu viele Leute für Dienstag mit einer fetten grünen Kerze gerechnet haben und deswegen entweder im Vorfeld gehebelt oder nach ausstehendem Pump in Panik verfallen sind (wenn nicht sogar beides). Das wir nicht sofort wieder über die 50k zurückgeschnellt sind spricht außerdem dafür das der Markt sich immer noch nicht ganz sicher ist ob wir gerade eine Rakete oder eine tote Katze reiten.

Junge junge diese Spannung. Die Recovery scheint trotz allem noch relativ okay zu sein.

What data do you mean? Blockchains mostly hold transactional information. Decentralized storage spaces such as IPFS may hold other files as well, but whether scientific data ends up there is unfortunately not a technological problem but rather a societal one. Even if you could just feed scientific papers into an AI to solve all the world's problems, the introduction of cryptocurrencies and decentralized file storage does not make the gatekeepers of academic publishing disappear. That's a problem to which blockchains unfortunately are not the solution.

That the Internet used to be far more decentralized can't be denied tho.

First people used to run private websites and exchange links. Then Blogs became a thing with people being on each other's blog roll. Now everyone just has social media profiles -- linking between people is mostly algorithmic and off-platform content is heavily discouraged.

Of course "old school" corners still exists here and there (for example forums such as this one) but overall the internet has been consumed by content-singularities.


A parallel to crypto would be personal cash trades vs buying crypto on an exchange. The latter is much more convenient and a maturing exchange ecosystem definitely brought more people in. However it also lead to cash trades becoming more marginalized with regulation doing the rest. Put differently, I guess one of the takeaways is to be careful that we don't end up in a world where the only way to get Bitcoin is through e.g. Coinbase with the altcoin market being reduced to a list of government and corporate approved currencies.

Leute, da schaut man einmal kurz weg...?




Ich fürchte fast an den 50k werden wir noch länger zu knabbern haben. Die rote Kerze kam jetzt nicht vollkommen überraschend (sell on the news...), ist dann aber doch um einiges krasser gewesen als erwartet. Leicht bärische Stimmung von meiner Seite gerade, wobei das jetzt natürlich noch das 2021 Equivalent zum 2013 Silk Road Crash sein könnte.

Rechts oben in der Leiste: "Wallet" => "Funding Wallet" und dann auf "Card" gehen (bzw. "Karte" falls du Deutsch als Sprache eingestellt hast)

I feel you and I very much miss the haphazard internet of the early 2000s as well. The consolidation of a lot of small websites into giant platforms, while probably more user friendly, came at a great loss of personality and freedom.



Hoarding is not the problem; not even the involvement of fund managers and banks in itself is. The danger we are facing is the cryptocurrency ecosystem itself turning into walled gardens. There's three fronts from which this can affect us and unfortunately there's activity on all three of them: (1) overregulation by governments and financial institutions, possibly followed by them trying to enforce their own centralized digital currencies, (2) consolidation into a small handful of exchanges and services that integrate themselves vertically into the ecosystem, possibly also followed by them trying to enforce their own centralized digital currencies (looking at you, Binance) and (3) end user complacency leading to a market focus on aforementioned centralized digital currencies or those that are pretty close to being centralized.

Right now the ecosystem still looks largely healthy, albeit arguably overvalued in some parts (the latter being nothing new for crypto). Some developments look rather worrying, then again Bitcoin has mastered worse. Overall all we can really do as a community is uphold our values, let our wallets speak accordingly and hopefully the rest will follow. Be the change we want to be, so to speak.



Bitcoin yes, the cryptocurrency market as a whole not so much. As long as Bitcoin remains king I'm not worried, but beyond that consolidation and platformization is just around the corner.



Wait, are we talking about the same internet?

In terms of being a time waster and spreading questionable information the internet was always bad; it's just that in some respects the mass consumed content got worse. However I believe that's largely due to the internet's audience having become larger and more diverse over the years, leading to a lower common denominator (e.g. cat memes and sexy selfies) which is further amplified by the consolidation of platforms.