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Basebf555 posted:I literally have no clue what it means to mine a bitcoin. I'm picturing a computer game where you play a mining minigame where you earn a bitcoin after like a week's worth of grinding. It's also designed that the more computer power you throw at it the harder it gets to keep someone from just throwing a bunch of processing power at it and getting them all at once. I've simplified a few things but that's basically it. The saddest part is it was clearly designed as a proof of concept idea and was never meant to handle the load that is being thrown at it. I stopped following it once it started to split into several competing formats to combat the daily transaction load. I don't imagine they've fixed any of the real problems and instead just made different formats that all don't work in different ways.
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Dec 5, 2017 21:04
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wayfinder posted:Did you mean ninja edit? No. I kept the edit window open and looked it up in google. It was a very tiny, unsuccessful joke.
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Dec 5, 2017 21:16
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Basebf555 posted:I literally have no clue what it means to mine a bitcoin. I'm picturing a computer game where you play a mining minigame where you earn a bitcoin after like a week's worth of grinding. Because bitcoin has no central authority (like a national bank) that creates and validates the currency, it uses a shared record of every transaction ever made with bitcoin (no, seriously) to allow people to track the movement of each coin back to the moment it was created, and thus how many bitcoins are in a given person's virtual "wallet." This massive record (144 GB as of this date) is called the "blockchain," and everyone using bitcoin reads from and writes to it. This is what the exchanges are doing when people complain that it takes ten minutes for a transaction to process. Obviously, the integrity of this record is critical to bitcoin's functionality. If someone sends you a copy of the record saying that they gave you a hundred dollars, and you accept that, but it was fake -- well you're SOL, just like getting a counterfeit bill. So transactions in the blockchain need to be continuously checked using cryptographic techniques that verify that you're working with the real thing. This is (by design) a time-consuming process, and with no central authority to do it, the bitcoin protocol needed some method of convincing people to donate their CPU time to the calculations. The method chosen was to create a small number of bitcoins for every block of calculations that are completed, and give those to the people who did the "work." This process of continuously verifying the blockchain and being given small amounts of bitcoin as payment is what people refer to as "mining," because it's the only way to get bitcoins de novo. As an anti-inflation measure, the payouts for blockchain verification get smaller and smaller as time goes on. Initially you might have gotten an entire bitcoin for a few minutes of CPU time; now it's down to tiny slivers of one for days of "work". This is why people keep buying faster and faster graphics cards -- the more CPU time you put in, the more money you get. But the more bitcoins that are "mined" and distributed, the less your time is valued. If you're wondering how this is "anti-inflationary," good question! Right now it costs more for the electricity required to do the calculations than you get back in bitcoin afterwards. The result is that right now, a single transaction in this "efficient" digital currency uses as much energy as it takes to drive a Tesla 600 miles, and it's getting worse every second. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change Basically it's the loving worst Sagebrush has a new favorite as of 21:30 on Dec 5, 2017 |
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Dec 5, 2017 21:28
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Bitcoin is Skynet. Our greed will destroy us. Ron Paul 2020!
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Dec 5, 2017 21:48
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And Bitcoin fluctuates wildly in value because nobody really accepts it (about 100,000 vendors accepted it as of February 2015, which seems like a lot until you remember that New York City has about 24,000 restaurants alone), so people usually have to exchange it for real money before they can spend it. This makes it act like a commodity rather than a currency, like precious metals or stocks. Bitcoin may be sailing over the $10,000 mark, but every time Bitcoin has increased in price it's been followed by a crash. Oh, and you occasionally get stuff like Bitcoin exchanges being robbed and shut down, or the guy you send Bitcoins to for something just takes them and ghosts. Unlike actual banks, there's no insurance that can protect you when the vault gets cleaned out. The cryptography that makes Bitcoins so valuable for illicit transactions also makes it virtually impossible to identify who stole your Bitcoins, so there's little to no chance of that money getting back. Because Bitcoin wallets are only accessible via a password, if someone dies without giving someone else their password the money dies with them. Bitcoin is at pyramid scheme levels of "Should I really get involved in this?"
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Dec 5, 2017 21:51
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Sagebrush posted:Because bitcoin has no central authority (like a national bank) that creates and validates the currency, it uses a shared record of every transaction ever made with bitcoin (no, seriously) to allow people to track the movement of each coin back to the moment it was created, and thus how many bitcoins are in a given person's virtual "wallet." This massive record (144 GB as of this date) is called the "blockchain," and everyone using bitcoin reads from and writes to it. This is what the exchanges are doing when people complain that it takes ten minutes for a transaction to process. When people unironically discuss how blockchain currencies represent a challenge to actual currencies this is the first thing I always bring up. Forget about the lack of security, forget about the currencies being derived from nothing but speculation, forget all of that. Even if a solution was found it will never work as a large-scale currency on any real scale because of this really simple bottleneck. Comparing bitcoin to actual traditional digital currency transactions from an infrastructure viewpoint gets almost farcical, it's completely unsustainable and a huge waste of real-world resources and infrastructure.
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Dec 5, 2017 21:52
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You learn more from your failures than from your successes. Other people failing is funnier than them succeeding. Win win. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9O21GDaQuE
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Dec 5, 2017 21:55
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The other fun thing about using the blockchain and majority-vote as a method of verification is that any actor who has access to 51% of the processor power currently used to verify the blockchain can theoretically build a fake blockchain and force it to replace the real one. Right now bitcoin isn't of much interest to governments, but if it ever did become really popular, your bitcoins are just one government-funded supercomputer cluster away from being seized by the PRC.
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Dec 5, 2017 22:01
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BovineFury posted:You learn more from your failures than from your successes. Other people failing is funnier than them succeeding. Win win. My favourite is the kid at 5:07 who takes a few seconds to realise that he got scared so he starts crying 
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Dec 5, 2017 22:20
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A dude at my work put all of his savings into bitcoins last week because he thinks World War 3 will happen in years, if not months and that way his money will be save. I didn't have the heart to ask him how he thinks he'll be able to access those bitcoins in that post-apocalyptic fantasy of his where there might not be an Internet or even reliable power. Or why a farmer in that setting would hand over food for bitcoins. Raygereio has a new favorite as of 22:39 on Dec 5, 2017 |
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Dec 5, 2017 22:22
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Raygereio posted:A dude at my work put all of his savings into bitcoins last week because he thinks World War 3 will happen in years, if not months and that way his money will be save. What I'm curious about is how someone acting upon this many levels of stupidity would at least not go for the old-time proven war-time classic hedge of gold instead of goddamn cryptocurrencies.
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Dec 5, 2017 22:38
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Every weirdo I've seen who's into Bitcoins is generally into "Technology is the way of the future, I eagerly await uploading my brain to the cloud after all the world governments topple and we form anarcho-libertarian states."
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Dec 5, 2017 22:41
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MiddleOne posted:What I'm curious about is how someone acting upon this many levels of stupidity would at least not go for the old-time proven war-time classic hedge of gold instead of goddamn cryptocurrencies.
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Dec 5, 2017 22:43
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chitoryu12 posted:And Bitcoin fluctuates wildly in value because nobody really accepts it (about 100,000 vendors accepted it as of February 2015, which seems like a lot until you remember that New York City has about 24,000 restaurants alone), so people usually have to exchange it for real money before they can spend it. This makes it act like a commodity rather than a currency, like precious metals or stocks. Bitcoin may be sailing over the $10,000 mark, but every time Bitcoin has increased in price it's been followed by a crash. And the thing is that basically none of those 100,000 vendors actually accept bitcoin itself - they use an intermediary service that accepts the bitcoin and pays the merchant in USD.
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Dec 5, 2017 23:05
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Raygereio posted:I think gold might be a US specific thing. From what I've see the same type of people in the Netherlands go for gems. And now bitcoins apparently. Perhaps they are part dwarf?
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Dec 5, 2017 23:13
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chitoryu12 posted:Every weirdo I've seen who's into Bitcoins is generally into "Technology is the way of the future, I eagerly await uploading my brain to the cloud after all the world governments topple and we form anarcho-libertarian states." I have never wanted to unplug an entire rack of servers so badly.
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Dec 5, 2017 23:20
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MiddleOne posted:What I'm curious about is how someone acting upon this many levels of stupidity would at least not go for the old-time proven war-time classic hedge of gold instead of goddamn cryptocurrencies. I know a couple that have a bunch of little gold bars in a safe, maybe 15-20 bars at 10 ounces a piece. They also have a set of tools in there so they can cut and/or shave individual bits of it off to "break" the bars for smaller transactions when the world inevitably crumbles. It's just that I can't imagine a doomsday scenario where putting what is in fact a couple of hundred grand into a safe and being able to use it to buy things when the world collapses is in any way superior to just spending that couple of hundred grand on the things you would otherwise buy. I'm Australian so they wouldn't be stockpiling guns, necessarily, but that sort of money buys you a solid property in the mountains with a freshwater stream nearby, and a whole shitton of dried food and farming supplies. And if the world doesn't ever fall apart, it would probably be a lovely place to take the kids on the holidays 
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Dec 5, 2017 23:31
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It's far less exciting to be realistic about the doomsday future by stockpiling toilet paper. It doesn't have the same 'rugged survivalist' feel about it.
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Dec 5, 2017 23:36
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Memento posted:I'm Australian so they wouldn't be stockpiling guns, necessarily, but that sort of money buys you a solid property in the mountains with a freshwater stream nearby, and a whole shitton of dried food and farming supplies. And if the world doesn't ever fall apart, it would probably be a lovely place to take the kids on the holidays gently caress doomsday, that just sounds nice. 
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Dec 5, 2017 23:42
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Raygereio posted:I think gold might be a US specific thing. From what I've see the same type of people in the Netherlands go for gems. And now bitcoins apparently. Gems and bitcoins are the easiest ways to transfer lots of money across borders with no problems. Bitcoins actually are fantastic for that.
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Dec 5, 2017 23:47
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Dec 5, 2017 23:50
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Solice Kirsk posted:Gems and bitcoins are the easiest ways to transfer lots of money across borders with no problems. Bitcoins actually are fantastic for that. I'm pretty sure everyone who uses Bitcoin for reasons other than "It's the money of the future, also gently caress governments" uses it because it's nearly untraceable. The same feature makes Bitcoin theft incredibly easy to get away with!
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Dec 5, 2017 23:50
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chitoryu12 posted:I'm pretty sure everyone who uses Bitcoin for reasons other than "It's the money of the future, also gently caress governments" uses it because it's nearly untraceable. Other way around. Bitcoin is incredibly traceable--everyone can see the complete trading history of every fraction of a bitcoin. The wallets are psuedononymous--they're just a number, but if that number is ever linked to you, everyone can see every transaction you've ever made.
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Dec 6, 2017 00:12
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Pyroclastic posted:Other way around. Bitcoin is incredibly traceable--everyone can see the complete trading history of every fraction of a bitcoin. The wallets are psuedononymous--they're just a number, but if that number is ever linked to you, everyone can see every transaction you've ever made. Just ask CARL MARK FORCE IV
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Dec 6, 2017 00:16
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GrandpaPants posted:Fairly certain the last time America said this, the trees bore strange fruit. I've got to say, though, as a non-American, that it's pretty perplexing to me that Pelosi is still in charge. Ignore her actual positions for a moment (I'm of the opinion that a representative's constituents should take priority over their national responsibilities except when said representative is in a position, as Pelosi is, of national leadership) and imagine some scenario in which she's the most left-wing representative in the House with exactly the same leadership record. She has presided over something like three straight congressional terms of consistent decline for her party at this point. In most other countries, the knives would've been out for her long ago. Disclaimer: I'm prepared to allow that this assessment of the situation is down to my ignorance of American politics. Wheat Loaf has a new favorite as of 00:56 on Dec 6, 2017 |
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Dec 6, 2017 00:53
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Wheat Loaf posted:I've got to say, though, as a non-American, that it's pretty perplexing to me that Pelosi is still in charge. Ignore her actual positions for a moment (I'm of the opinion that a representative's constituents should take priority over their national responsibilities except when said representative is in a position, as Pelosi is, of national leadership) and imagine some scenario in which she's the most left-wing representative in the House with exactly the same leadership record. She has presided over something like three straight congressional terms of consistent decline for her party at this point. In most other countries, the knives would've been out for her long ago. The US is the land of Victim of Circumstance and Externally Disrupted Potential. It's not that hard to get the public to apply that to the party as a whole. It's not Us, it's all the dastardly tricks They pulled. It's all deflection in an effort to avoid responsibility for their sins and keep control. And that applies to both parties.
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Dec 6, 2017 00:57
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Proteus Jones posted:The US is the land of Victim of Circumstance and Externally Disrupted Potential. It's not that hard to get the public to apply that to the party as a whole. It's not Us, it's all the dastardly tricks They pulled.  what jones said.
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Dec 6, 2017 01:03
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Wheat Loaf posted:I've got to say, though, as a non-American, that it's pretty perplexing to me that Pelosi is still in charge. Ignore her actual positions for a moment (I'm of the opinion that a representative's constituents should take priority over their national responsibilities except when said representative is in a position, as Pelosi is, of national leadership) and imagine some scenario in which she's the most left-wing representative in the House with exactly the same leadership record. She has presided over something like three straight congressional terms of consistent decline for her party at this point. In most other countries, the knives would've been out for her long ago. "Leadership" is dispersed in US politics. Pelosi isn't in charge of picking electoral strategy, writing the platform, representing the party as a whole, or vetting candidates. That's the DNC, the DNC again, the current president or presidential candidate, and fuckin' nobody, respectively. Pelosi's sole job (when the dems don't have a majority to write legislation with) is to keep her caucus in the House united and in good order, and she's done a surprisingly good job at that.
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Dec 6, 2017 01:12
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Sagebrush posted:Right now it costs more for the electricity required to do the calculations than you get back in bitcoin afterwards. The result is that right now, a single transaction in this "efficient" digital currency uses as much energy as it takes to drive a Tesla 600 miles, and it's getting worse every second. I don't particularly care about bitcoins one way or the other, but I love this claim as evidence of how a single failure of numeracy or comprehension can instantly become ingrained in the public consciousness: It doesn't take anywhere near that much energy to complete a transaction, that's just a reporter at Vice being a loving idiot. Let's check his math: quote:An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year. Okay. So first we have de Vries saying: 1. The price of bitcoins is X. 2. The price of electricity to mine is Y. 3. If X/Y=1 then a bitcoin will be worth the same as the electricity it took to mine it. That's literally what the estimation is: A bitcoin is worth this much money, electricity costs that much per kilowatt-hour, and so bitcoin mining would still yield a profit for miners if they consumed in the aggregate 24 TWh/year to mine them Note what this statement does *not* say: How much electricity it actually requires to mine a bitcoin, today. It doesn't even mention that, it's just a statement about the *relative* prices of bitcoins and electricity. It's the *upper limit* of cost of input where producing output will still be profitable. Now the Vice writer steps up to the plate. He does this: 24 terawatt-hours per year / 300,000 transactions per day * 365 days per year = 215 kilowatt-hours. He has converted the earlier estimate of the *upper limit* of electrical input to a claim about the *actual* electrical input. Presto, he has used a possibly-meaningful estimate to manufacture a completely fictitious claim. And then everyone sees "215 kilowatt-hours per transaction!" and runs with it. And it gets repeated over and over again, because people just don't read the damned article and think "Hey...wait a minute..." quote:Bitcoin uses x energy in total, and this energy verifies/secures roughly 300k transactions per day. Yes, absolutely true! But the value of x isn't 24 TWh/year! It's some other unknown quantity that your source didn't even estimate! He goes on: quote:It's impossible to know exactly how much electricity the Bitcoin network uses. But we can run a quick calculation of the minimum energy Bitcoin could be using, assuming that all miners are running the most efficient hardware with no efficiency losses due to waste heat. To do this, we'll use a simple methodology laid out in previous coverage on Motherboard. This would give us a constant total mining draw of just over one gigawatt. Great. Okay, constant total mining draw of a gigawatt. That's 8.76 Terawatt hours per year. 8.76 TWh/year divided by 300,000*365 transactions per year = 80 kWh/transaction. So even the simple methodology laid out in previous coverage on motherboard yields a per-transaction energy input of about a third of his earlier claim. In other words, the cost of electricity to mine could triple before mining became unprofitable based on input costs. It does not cost more in electrical input to mine coins than the coins are worth. Phanatic has a new favorite as of 04:35 on Dec 6, 2017 |
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Dec 6, 2017 01:16
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Sagebrush posted:The other fun thing about using the blockchain and majority-vote as a method of verification is that any actor who has access to 51% of the processor power currently used to verify the blockchain can theoretically build a fake blockchain and force it to replace the real one. Right now bitcoin isn't of much interest to governments, but if it ever did become really popular, your bitcoins are just one government-funded supercomputer cluster away from being seized by the PRC. I was just going to ask if it was possible for someone to "hack" the blockchain and send the whole thing tits-up. Hypothetical (for now) schadenfreude!
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Dec 6, 2017 01:27
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Keep bitcoins in the bitcoin thread until the entire thing collapses and there are libertarians weeping in the streets.
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Dec 6, 2017 01:31
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Volcott posted:Keep bitcoins in the bitcoin thread until the entire thing collapses and there are libertarians weeping in the streets. Bitcoins will never collapse completely because nerds are more interested in them for ideological reasons so they will continue to pump money in it no matter how many times they get burned.
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Dec 6, 2017 01:32
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Oh, man, the thought of all those neckbeards jumping off buildings and hitting the pavement like industrial-sized garbage bags full of spaghetti sauce.
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Dec 6, 2017 01:32
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Memento posted:I know a couple that have a bunch of little gold bars in a safe, maybe 15-20 bars at 10 ounces a piece. They also have a set of tools in there so they can cut and/or shave individual bits of it off to "break" the bars for smaller transactions when the world inevitably crumbles. I never got why apocalypse preppers think anyone would want gold or gems after the apocalypse. It wouldn't go back to like medieval times, we don't have those skills anymore. Doesn't a gold and gem based economy require a rich ruling class that gives a gently caress about pretty status symbols? and the ability to make something out of the gold/cut the gems? edited for spelling
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Dec 6, 2017 02:28
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From the GBS China thread, a Chinese airsoft sharpshooter.
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Dec 6, 2017 02:29
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She successfully ended the hostage situation.
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Dec 6, 2017 02:36
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littlebluellama posted:I never got why apocalypse preppers think anyone would want gold or gems after the apocalypse. It wouldn't go back to like medieval times, we don't have those skills anymore. Doesn't a gold and gem based economy require a rich ruling class that gives a gently caress about pretty status symbols? and the ability to make something out of the gold/cut the gems? There are plenty of stories of people trading their jewelry for bread during WWII, but I'm sure gold and silver will become edible by the time Trump drops the nukes
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Dec 6, 2017 02:37
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Solice Kirsk posted:She successfully ended the hostage situation. No, you're supposed to shoot the hostage in the leg  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzqVy69Hxzo&t=13s
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Dec 6, 2017 02:39
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Dillbag posted:There are plenty of stories of people trading their jewelry for bread during WWII, but I'm sure gold and silver will become edible by the time Trump drops the nukes In the land of the hungry, the baker is king. That's why I'm putting all of my money into Little Debbie snack cakes and a vacuum sealer. See you on the other side suckers!
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Dec 6, 2017 02:40
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Natron posted:My guess is the Karate genius is trying to break a piece of plywood, rather than the kind of wood you would normally break. Plywood is specifically made to not break that way, and performs admirably. No, I mean what's going on, there? That appears to be an office or school break room. Everyone else is dressed normally. There's a dude in a bad suitish thing standing in one corner. In the middle of the room is a guy in a gi ki-yiing and punching wood, and no one seems to think it's worthy of comment. There's no context. It's bizarre.
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Dec 6, 2017 02:54
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