BITCOINS...tax free money.

I'm going to tell you something that will blow your mind. All money is god damned imaginary. The dollar bill is backed by a promise from an almost fictional bank that isn't even the government. With a printer, you can make your own because it's paper.

And a lot of people hyped up on libertarianism talk about gold. Gold is a shiny piece of metal that was, up until the time of modern electronics has about zero functional value other than it being rare and pretty.

The value of all these things, gold, the dollar, bitcoin, relies on the imagination of those who accept it. So when people want to accept it, which a lot of people do, it has value. When people lose faith in the value of something it's worthless.

It's also not a scam mathematically. You would have to have more compute power than all the miners, which governments do not. If you want to read up on crytography before you post about how something "feels like a scam"

And I'm an environmentalist. All human actions produce greenhouse gasses. By far the cleanest source of energy is electricity, so if you're comparing a person who sat home all day and mined, versus a person who sat for 45 minutes in traffic, the person staying at home would have a smaller carbon footprint.

There is a bubble I suspect. But I will repeat, all money, including what you slave for at your job, probably for some jerk, is imaginary.

 

A countries currency is not completely imaginary. It is somewhat of a global assessment of their combined resources. Of course the politics and borrowing and everything else can make a mess of it.

Gold will always be valuable, don't fool yourself. Gold is an excellent conductor, easy to work, doesn't oxidize...

It's not a scam mathematically, it's a scam of accountability.

There's a big difference in surfing the web on a 250 watt desktop with the cpu averaging 5% load than what's going on with bitcoin mining. They're setting up racks of servers with dozens or even hundreds of processors maxed out drawing thousands of watts all day in this crazy mining competition. It is INSANELY wasteful. If it continues to grow it will be a catastrophe. No other currency comes close to such a huge cost deficit. I don't need my power bill going up because of these morons, and that's what it will come to.

If you need an unaccountable underground tax free currency, these crypto currency schemes are not the answer. You all have choices, you could be surfing this site with a 250 watt desktop, or a 90 watt laptop or a 10 watt tablet, you could choose to turn it off when you're done. You can choose what car you drive and and all sorts of environmentally responsible choices. Bitcoins are NOT anywhere near a responsible choice.

 

I think that you're really overestimating the number of people who actually mine bitcoins if you think that it is going to have any sort of measurable impact on energy consumption anywhere other than a handful of individual hydro bills.

 

No, you're underestimating the overhead burden and power consumption within this scheme. The power demand and infrastructure has to grow exponentially with any rise in popularity of these coins. I'm CCNA2 certified, I've worked for large IT corporations. I've got a fair understanding of the overhead involved in this scheme.

 

The amount of power on a sub local scale consumed by bitcoin mining is pretty negligible. Sure there are some mining rigs which use up some juice. And things are going the way of FPGA's and ASIC's which are more energy effecient. Because a handful of people are making a more industrial approach to this sort of thing, all industry creates a lot of carbon again, those big servers are a lot more energy efficient per hash than running it at home on your pc.

How about SETI at home? Are they irresponsible because 3 million people are distributed computing for searching the skies for aliens? What about people running folding at home for medical research?

Like I said, I'm an environmentalist, and your environmental concerns aren't particularly accurate in regards to carbon emissions. How about concrete manufacturing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concrete

What I'm saying is you read a blog about it on gizmodo and are outraging without much thought $150,000 a day of electric consumption is really small.

http://gizmodo.com/5994626/bitcoin-mining-has-an-absurd-environmental-impact

And honestly, buying PV cells for a mining rig would be a really good investment.

 

ASIC's and FPGA's are a short term fix because you are neglecting the fact that this scheme requires exponential growth on processing with growth in coins. There is a limit to the number of coins that can be made because eventually there will not be enough processors on the planet to support them. The value of the coin does have to go up with the costs of processing it, until it all crashes. In the end some will make money, more will have lost, and the whole world will have lost real resources for absolutely nada. Not even one cinder blocks worth of real value.

And this is a thread about bitcoins, not seti, or concrete or other irrelevant ways to waste resources. That is such a douchebag tactic.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/13/the-cost-of-a-bitcoin/

 

I think that you are really overestimating how popular these will get. They are completely fringe and I just don't see them ever becoming mainstream at all.

 

but the hope of bitcoin supporters seems to be for them to eventually become mainstream. so even if they don't succeed at it...i think it's the goal.

 

Russian roulette with an M14.

 

I posted an almost identical blog that was from the same day I think. I wonder who the original author was.

I don't think it's a tactic at all. I'm implying that bitcoins are a resource because they are valued by those who posses them, one that created by processing power, and that creation of that resource to make ends meat is the exact same as any other job. All jobs are a naturally entropic process where we waste a lot of resources, and this one, much less so than other.

 

And about more people losing money than making money off bitcoin, that's quite possibly true. I don't know if this will succeed in the long run, and I do think there's a bubble right now. My guess is it will pop and rebuild.

But a decentralized instant digital global currency is something that will eventually happen, and much like bitcoin, it won't be backed by gold, but by confidence in the system.

 

it took me about 2 months to get ~0.01 BTC on sites like bitvisitor

it took me less than a week to get 0.01 BTC at that poker site i'm loving right now.

 

anyone use bitcoin-brokers.org to buy bitcoins?

 

You dont sound like it.

This one sounds a little whack:

I'll forget what you said about Gold.

Explain exactly how anyone using more power would make your energy bills go up??? Contrary to the economies of scale.

Your main concern about bit coins is energy consumption of server farms? What the deuce?

Pretty much all intraday trading nowadays, whether it be forex, stocks, CFDs work on variations that arent real, or real in the sense of their being no single tangible reason for the variation, bit coins no different

Doesnt sound like you know what you are on about

 

When demand goes up then price goes up.

pfffft, I can't be bothered, believe what you want.
You'll find out.

 

bitinstant worked for me today. if anyone cares 100$ a coin now.

 

Bitcoins doing a bit of a freefall now. Been as low as 55$ today, but on the rise again.
On the bright side, I ordered myself a miner. Hopefully it will arrive somewhere this year....

 

I would say that their prior value was more to hype, and they are closer to their actual value now. Maybe a little lower actually.

I would love to get my hands on a few of those ASIC's once a new generation comes in and these things are on ebay.

 

So, are bitcoins some kind of get-rich quick scheme? These wild price fluctuations seem like an out of control stock market. I'm really confused as to what these things are and how they are useful. Can anyone shed some light for me?

 

I read an article a short while ago that mentioned something in regards to making e-money taxable.