Cryptocurrency

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dmitri said..

"How would a mining scam even work? Dad buys a miner, sets it up, and ...what? I'm genuinely curious. Please tell me."

The mining rigs sellers promise 350% return..
Dad (usually poor) needs about1,3M rubles to buy..he borrows or sells his parents home or sells his kidney etc..

Oh. So it's a mining rig scam. The people that sell mining rigs.

This boring video again:

^ Yep. Ethereum, specifically ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings, similar to Initial Purchase Offerings) are snake oil.

I've always said the same. Third comment on page 2 of this thread:
www.seabreeze.com.au/forums/General-Discussion/Chat/Cryptocurrency?page=2

The next drama on the horizon is Tether.

So looking at dipping my big toe in on the cryptos and wondering what exchanges you guys have ended up using. Initial looking sees the fees are pretty huge -

ie to get from AUD to a wallet means fees anywhere from 2% up to 6% via ccards or bank transfers
to actually get bitcoins on the couple exchanges ive looked at has buy sell spreads of up to $100.

So are there any reasonable sites out there that youve found or is pretty much the state of the market right now?

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Bara said..
So looking at dipping my big toe in on the cryptos and wondering what exchanges you guys have ended up using. Initial looking sees the fees are pretty huge

I use Coinspot & their Aussies, fees are fairly high but I think it's a good place to get started.

The people that take the loss are the ones holding the now weaker currency. If currency A goes up in value against currency B then whoever holds currency B has lost the value of their money, relatively.

The IMF had a very interesting talk about it a few weeks back: www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2017/09/28/sp092917-central-banking-and-fintech-a-brave-new-world

It is not a fad. It is not a ponzi scheme. It is not tulip mania. It is not going to go away. It is money 2.0

Call me up, put me down:
www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/033115/it-possible-trade-bitcoin-options.asp

I've had plenty an entertaining debate with traders. Man they boast and boast about previous successes. They almost always end up wrong. Especially the TAs. Don't hear from them again.

Bitcoin is a different beast for sure. It's not a stock, and it's not a currency that's "backed by" anything. It's simply an invention that could be used as money. "This could be used as money!" And it is a very good form of money indeed. Hell, it accounts and audits itself.

I have been using it more and more with colleagues. Like cash. Fixing up balances for drinks, shared accomodation and so on. Phone App to phone app. It's easy and it works. It's pretty good money.

If you'd bought the top 4 cryptos when this thread was started, your gains/losses would have been (based on $US prices)

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Bara said..
And if you buy them now what will they be in 6 months?

I'll update the table I posted on April 16

PS: Maybe buy the ones that aren't just clones of the original - those that are applying the blockchain model beyond currencies.

There are no bigwigs running Bitcoin. It's a technology not unlike, I dunno, bricks. There is nobody behind "bricks". People make and use bricks but nobody is controlling "bricks".

In a nutshell: Someone invented something that could be used as better type of money. Some people bootstrapped its value. Now it is money with value.

Here's a fiver that your fifty will be worth the same in two years.




As for other uses for blockchain technology they are limited. Don't fall for the hype. It's a big, very inefficient database. Money is its killer app because of the insane security a blockchain provides.

Who is to say Google Home 3 or Alexa 4, or your Samsung Galaxy 12, Apple Iphone 11.713 can't smash out 250,000,000 Exahash per second and destroy these simple blockchains in the future.

Oh you mined BTC and ETH. That's nice. I mined Virtual Carbon nanotube-based crystal honey dialectic vomit coins. I mined it on my IPhone 11.714.

At the end of the day Bitcoin has been a huge investment for so many people. Do you Holdr or get out? I only have XXXBTC.

Crypto is nuts.

I only started a few months ago with $10k. Turned that $10k to $52k profit. Basically a newbie can play this market if you do your research. That's like being paid $20,000/mo for spending a few hours a week reading/analyzing some alt coins to buy. Technically, it's not profit yet, since I haven't sold to aussie dollars but still :P

This whole thing sounds like dot com bubble but I've done some calculations and we are perhaps halfway though, so plenty of time left (a few years) before an epic crash that will only leave a few blockchain firms standing.

I find that just listening to what others are shilling on chat groups 80% of the time lead to big gains.

I'm a member of a couple of telegram groups and as a newbie I've made a lot of money just by listening to the crap people are shilling on the groups.

Just last week I made 20% profit just from putting some money on an alert from this free telegram pump and dump bot that showed huge volume being put into XLM

A consortium of ****wit investors, charlatans, and miners. Ver, Wright & co.

Let me just illustrate to other programmers out there how messy this was. They forked the code, altered a few lines, but reformatted all the code. Now, run a compare on that so you can support both chains as a wallet, exchange and so on. Sheesh.



Satoshi Nakamoto. But nobody knows who that is/who they are. Or, were.

Without a doubt he/she/they/it mined the first few blocks, and have not touched those coins since. If they did alarm bells all over the world would go off, including one on my phone, and ...I don't know what would happen actually. They haven't. It is widely speculated they lost or destroyed the private keys, and/or are dead.

It's very handy that bitcoin has no real inventor, just a faceless pseudonym. It matches the narrative of decentralised and trustless.



Yes.



It does, but it's limited. I can't do anything with it. Can you? Salt is more valuable to me.

Most of gold's value is because it is used as a store of value, because people believe gold is valuable. Notice that gold isn't "backed by" anything either.

If you lose a $50 note, and it is eventually found by someone (in the distant future), it is useless. And let's not forget that the vast, vast majority of our money is stored digitally, and is probably debt. What is that actually worth? It has no intrinsic value at all.

The Mona Lisa has no intrinsic value. It is priceless.

Nation states, religion, culture, and money are all stories we collectively tell ourselves and believe in. It's how we cooperate on a scale other animals can't come close to.



Indeed one of the features of Bitcoin is its low or even free transaction fees. There are many more.

Bitcoin's popularity has seen the mempool (new and uncleared transactions) fill up to maximum, first starting around the beginning of 2016. To say there has been heated debate about how to fix this is a massive understatement. Death threats have been had. The Bitcoin Cash fork was an attempt to simply use bigger block sizes, kicking the can further down the road. The Bitcoin Core team (what you know as bitcoin) are taking the approach of creating efficiencies instead, and a second layer.

At time of writing it was 135 bits to have a transaction in under 10 minutes; 50c. At time of writing there is a lot of trading going on. I've personally moved large sums for 10c over the last few weeks.

The second layer is the most interesting development by far. The Lightning Network offers to create instant transactions that happen "off chain"; they don't go into the mempool at all. At the end of the hour/day/week/month all transactions are counted up and done as a single transaction on the main chain. Not unlike balancing the till at the end of the day. This is where bitcoin will actually start to challenge visa, master card et al. There are betas already being tested, but realistically it's two or more years away because the development teams are, understandably, really, really, really pedantic.



Far from. There is more computing power put toward it than the rest of the computing power on earth combined. And it increases every day.

--------------------------

Links:

Bitcoin transaction fees: bitcoinfees.earn.com
Satoshi Nakamoto: www.linkedin.com/pulse/id-known-what-we-were-starting-ray-dillinger/
Lightning Network: bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/understanding-the-lightning-network-part-building-a-bidirectional-payment-channel-1464710791/
Hashrate: blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

All true. But gold is hard to buy, transfer and store. It's heavy. Damn heavy. It's not very good as a currency.

Bitcoin was certainly not intended to be used as a store of value, it's just turning out that way : \
Odd phase it's going through.