Bitcoin: no angel investors, only Faustian bargains

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Bitcoin: no angel investors, only Faustian bargains

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Nessus posted:

If gold had been unknown until the 19th century (somehow) it would probably just be an industrial metal, which is I think what y'all are dickering over. There is no inherent quality to gold that makes it somehow the ultimate money other than cultural baggage - it has a couple aspects that make it a reasonable tool for coining money in antiquity situations, of course.

But it's historical value is due to it's limited supply, effort based extraction, and immutability. It wasn't accidentally a currency.

In the modern era even gold can be a poor store of value based on these properties because mining technology constantly devalues it and radiological processes are modern alchemy that can remove it's immutability. I propose we should find a better philosophical ideal store of value. Imagine if you will gold that we know was forged in the first supernovas of the universe. This fixes the supply across all of existence and we use our human rationality to rule other radiological processes as debasing the value of this purestrain gold.

Please stay tuned for my ICO on purestrain coin.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2018 17:46

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 14, 2024 17:45

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Stefan Prodan posted:

Can't we make like actual diamonds in the lab now? Why aren't drill bits covered in those?

Is it still really expensive to do?

They already are.

The diamond cartel has enough sway that in most markets synthetic industrial diamonds won't be cut into a gemstone by any volume jeweller without marking it with a worthless mark denoting it's synthetic because synthetic diamonds are cheaper and make better looking gemstones. It's a self policed system made to keep the cartel and jewelers getting fat cuts from natural diamonds.

It's like cubic zirconia part two.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2018 18:14

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Party Boat posted:

Do smart contracts offer any kind of advantage for businesses over, say, a dynamic purchasing system to establish a contract framework? DPS is pretty common in the public sector and as far as I can tell offers all the benefits of smart contracts with the added bonus of not having to gently caress around with blockchain.

In reality the use case for stuff like this is dropping the DPS ledger into a merkle tree that allows privileged access to transaction data depending on your held credentials. The difference from traditional credential systems being its theoretically easier to trust the software so that a seller or a legal entity knows they aren't getting the wool pulled over their eyes because the contracting authority owns the hardware and can control the software. Basically if its going to have value its in being able to convince your outside participants (sellers, auditors, etc.) of the ACID of your ledger while still securing it to standards required by law and internal policy.

Notice how it doesn't touch a publicly owned blockchain.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2018 19:28

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Durzel posted:

So it's neither a viable currency or something you should treat as an investment? What the hell is it?

How do I stick some money down on jQuery, the JavaScript library? I believe in it.

An unregulated low volume penny stock which allows gambling on bubble behavior.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2018 14:39

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Virtue posted:

Really all investing is gambling if you think about it. The only true fiat is gold and guns to take other peoples gold.

It's a slight difference with company stock. Like if you buy $5 of a large company's stock you could theoretically walk up to a stapler and talk to an employee about the work that stapler enables and how it's creating future value.

Buy then there's huge amounts of imagined value anyway so yeah instruments are made of dreams and farts and it works out because worldwide utility manages to keep increasing exponentially.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2018 20:04

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Alpha Mayo posted:

What is innovative about blockchain? It literally is just a sequence of data blocks with a signature in the header of the previous header. Hash trees have been around for 40+ years. Blockchain is nothing databases/transaction systems haven't done better for decades.

You can put block chain in a sales pitch on your xyz implementation with a cool 10% premium cause everybody wants block chain now that the crypto bubble has made it household. You know like hosting your butt on the cloud.

Seriously there's renewed interest in security schemes to try and ease outsiders into your walled garden. Like traditionally there's huge efficiencies if you can convince your suppliers or customers into your ERP totally but it's a hard sell when your security holds the one and only source of keys in or out. EDI interfaces are a good solution for the majority of relationships since you can hook together a couple ERPs or a ERP and a small sales offices manual book keeper with a mostly automated way. But there's some security schemes opportunities to make things like auditors happier about not having to get their access from your security department or getting real time inventory triggering replenishment orders without a layer of time through the EDI.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2018 14:29

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

turn off the TV posted:

I'm not sure what you think EDI is, but EDI in terms of Hipaa is standardized documents with faxing being the electronic transfer component, because when you send a fax you are sending one copy of the EDI compliant form to the destination. Emailing an actual file with the document would potentially allow it to be duplicated, which is illegal, because you're just downloading a copy of the file from an email that potentially anyone can read. This is why I think that blockchains would work, because (I guess?) the data could be encrypted and could be sent to healthcare providers as one time transactions.

This paper written by people without brain damage probably does a much better job of describing why it'd be a passable solution (although I agree that getting anything standardized would be hard since part of that in the ACA was killed by the GOP)

http://mcdonnell.mit.edu/blockchain_ehr.pdf

Speaking of standardizing being a bitch, system inplementers aren't even the safe investment because they are a little block chain gun shy for all their bravado until they can strongarm standards because the number one benefit of current schemes is they are simple and common. An EDI is just a read once email but it's got common bits to healthcare, finance, supply chain etc. And block chain is going to need the same commonality because the distributed version is poo poo so everyone's going to have their own local one and it needs to talk to everything just as easy as an EDI does now or else you just have a database that is fancy for no real reason because it's still talking to the world through an OCR on a fax machine.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2018 00:17

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

dick wizard posted:

Hate to get all, "my job title is senior EDI software developer at a healthcare company," on you but EDI ANSI x12 is a data format with enveloped transactions that, in healthcare, are used to transmit all manner of hipaa sensitive PHI like claims, enrollments, eligibility, etc.. between two trading partners. If the trading partners don't agree, or the file is formatted incorrectly the dataset is usually rejected as a whole.
The preferred method of "data interchange" in this instance is FTP since a eligibility file or claims batch could have hundreds of thousands of records and faxing something like that would be a loving nightmare.
What you're talking about with block chain already loving exists in almost all aspects of health care minus the GP from Cumfart Montana or wherever who can't be bothered to adopt because it's not practical for his office.

Business systems are a moving target and there's enough buyers in the market to mean there's always a system being installed or improved somewhere. So like there's regional hospitals (or banks or links in a supply chain) that are still the fax-into-an-OCR link in an EDI scheme looking to buy the newest and bestest. The number 1 and 2 costs in this sort of thing are internal change management and implementation consultants jerking off so you can ultimately get sold on the caddy of systems that might be slightly silly just cause the tech represents peanuts in the budget. But at the end of the day its in the implementer's best interest for someone to invent an alternative to sell to the new folks in the market and the tech cost isn't a worry in that sort of project and now you have a standard propagating so eventually the big fish need to buy a new implementation to talk to the Johnny come latelys.

It sounds real simple and why it might seem smart to bet on the tech or its developers and implementers but unless they get a critical mass of happy outcomes it'll get shelved because this is one of many piles of poo poo getting flung at the wall to see what sticks.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2018 05:56

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

TheBlackVegetable posted:

Pretending that's true for a second, what on earth is Warren Buffet getting out of this dea, to make daily $100m injections worthwhile?

Whether its an established institution or Bitfinex themselves they are after the same thing, pumping the market to make the illusion its healthy and growing to try and carve out some extra profit from a resurgence before the bubble pops. The difference is whether its real money or Bitfinex being able to decide their margin is unlimited, but in either case you are trying to churn the market up where you can buy a bunch at 10k and dump them progressively at it rises back up to 12,13k etc. effectively selling cheap coins to rubes reentering the market on the news that the fall stopped on the huge purchase.

Its not a healthy look and everybody but the true believers and the rubes know that but have been around enough to feel comfortable riding the bubble or day trading its technical foibles.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2018 17:05

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

QuarkJets posted:

I'd like to work through this logic for a moment. I've had a few tumblers at this point so bear with me

You say that goons are right that Bitcoins have no real use. Okay great we're starting from the same page.

Next you say that goons are wrong then they say that are worthless. Okay, they definitely have a price and I don't know anyone who would say otherwise, but they have no real value, deriving from how they have no real use. They're essentially pet rocks if pet rocks could be supply-constrained and there were thousands of people trying to pump the value of pet rocks specifically.

Next you say that the market is not going to completely crash. I don't think that the value of a bitcoin will ever hit $0. No one makes this claim. That bar is so low that it's not even really worth thinking about; there will always be at least 1 idiot wash trading with himself, and likely several idiots trading bitcoins between each other, giving bitcoin some price.

But what keeps the price of bitcoin aloft? New investors have to put in more money than is lost daily to bitcoin mining expenses. Old investors are selling to the new investors. What happens when there are no more new investors? Doesn't the whole thing just collapse like a ponzi scheme at that point, since bitcoin has no actual uses beyond a speculative investment?

The value of crypto in 2018 is that the popularity has metastasized it into literal Ponzi coin where bad actors can use every bad trick regulated out of mainstream markets. History bears that short of aggressive regulation, the tricks can be reinvented fast enough (not counting new ones being invented on the mainstream markets) that they can churn enough new rubes in to float it over and over.

So without that aggressive regulation crypto is probably here eternally rising and falling on people making money off the rising and falling. Just one more tool for people with more money to take the money off people with less money.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2018 15:53

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Hobologist posted:

Why did he have to mine the coins if he already owned the company?

Proof of work!!!!!!

What do you think this is, Amazon Gift Cards?

# ¿ Jan 29, 2018 01:45

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

QuarkJets posted:

Tether BUTT FUMES is backed by farts held in gas cylinders

Brb writing a white paper.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2018 14:46

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

VictorianQueerLit posted:

It's a different kind of comedy. The Wolves of Wallstreet are starting to come back due to the prices rising on everything.

I saw an argument earlier where supporters of the same coin couldn't agree on what it actually even does but were all completely sure that it is going to be added to coinbase and spike in value by 100-200x

It's pretty funny to watch people think they aren't the stupid irrational trader that is going to lose all their money before they come in by the hundreds doing "Research" and spouting market terms then buying whatever coin someone is shilling or rising in price so that they don't miss the boat, then melting down when it crashes in value and selling it for a loss. Repeat until they are out of money and disappear.

I'm the diversified portfolio of both pogs and slammers.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2018 19:12

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Salt Fish posted:

He's right imo, it's either fake or the dude was going to get fired anyway and they already had a nice case together in advanced. How would your automated threat detection system tell a real employee loading a miner apart from a compromised employee credential set being used to install a miner? You can't get through that process in 5 literal minutes.

He was sent home to prevent covering any tracks and they did the verification it was a physical log in from his workstation in between sending home and termination. Or any other number of send home/validation/termination scenarios when a watchdog is triggered on a monitored system.

The US has some hosed up labor situations by why is it controversial to terminate someone for running arbitrary code on a medical network?

# ¿ Feb 17, 2018 21:08

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Uranium 235 posted:

like i've said before, my default position is cash. i only hold crypto on the exchanges when i'm making a trade, and i only day trade. i keep tight stop losses so if the price drops significantly for any reason (just usual market movements, news-related crash, tether meltdown, or whatever) then i'll be out of my position and back in cash. so cashing out in the event of something like this isn't a challenge, because if there is a tether meltdown then the price of crypto on my exchange will drop.

what i described is how a tether-related meltdown will likely play out. everyone will run for the exits, but the people stuck on tether exchanges can only cash out by buying crypto, transferring to fiat exchanges, and selling there. that drives up the price on tether exchanges and drives down the price fiat exchanges. if anyone thinks this hypothetical scenario is incorrect, i'd sincerely like to hear why.

I think the controversial part of your reasoning is that its guaranteed crypto's next step is to have a nuclear meltdown thus your cash means you're never gonna lose. Instead there could be a series of slowly deflating balloons that cause each of your subsequent day trades to lose at which point maybe yeah you have the forethought to stop ahead and find the new bubble du jour or else you tell yourself well it hasn't melted down yet, press on.

Its ultimately a pointless argument because we won't even be able to compare final tots because the forum might blow up or the world might blow up before crypto does to compare your final position and whether it would have been more worthwhile to hold assets like a normal person.

e. also I'd argue that a day trader's biggest enemy is other day traders or market makers because there's a limited amount of fat to trim and you start losing out when the sharks start hitting it in addition to you, not when the bubble crashes.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2018 21:35

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

jonathan posted:

Pretty sure uranium isn't the guy to be jumping on. He's admitted to not believing in bitcoin's future and has been doing short term trading. He's just applied some higher-than-lowest-denominator Reddit logic to trading and risk management. Kinda feel he's being dogpiled on when he's one of the more rational posters in this thread. Second only to the butt guy.

His optimism that he will have a seat when the music stops is different but analogous to the optimism of bag hodlers in a ponzi.

Secondarily day traders are easy targets for a forum of left leaners because the sort of arbitrage they profit from is a symptom of the weirder parts of free markets and often represents taking advantage of the ignorant and the best explanation even the free market fanatics can come up with "well its profitable so it must be helping the market correct I guess"

Gumbel2Gumbel posted:

I'm assuming they had a "if you plug a USB drive into these computers you will be fired policy".

I remember reading that dropping USB drives into a parking lot is shockingly effective for accessing computer networks, according to people who test security for a living.

Yeah if you sharpie 'payroll' or 'promotions' or something similarly HR related and leave it in a parking lot that poo poo is getting plugged in immediately.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2018 22:24

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Uranium 235 posted:

it will only take one good trade to recoup my losses

Martingaling is only a sure thing if and only if your capital source is infinite.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2018 01:57

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Burt Sexual posted:

So any dB like sql server, Oracle, db2 or anything! Cool innovation guys. Disruptive and all that

Gumbel2Gumbel posted:

I still don't understand why an uneditable database that is spread to the winds is seen as a great thing.

No one in business wants their loving contracts visible either. That is a huge goddamn disadvantage. Everyone gets different rates for everything if you're smart.

The product that business software implementors are gauging interest in/trying to sell is more like an interface replacement. In a world where even business systems are getting widened like procurement networks etc. they are trying to sell the feature of your interactions on the network being as legally bindable as for example a signed purchase order. The individual transactions are definitely not public but can be served up to those with correct priveleges, for example the signing parties and any regulatory auditors.

Its basically finally trying to kill fax.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2018 22:15

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Gumbel2Gumbel posted:

You just described email tho

Legal precedents have not been kind to email.

EDI is basically legal quality email but it has it's own problems with retention/error validation that blockchain purports to solve.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2018 22:23

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

InternetJunky posted:

I wasn't going to bring blockchain up again, but since you guys are talking about it I have a question I can't find an answer to. If you use a blockchain for supply chain control or contract management (as are often cited as a prime target for converting to blockchains) who are the miners in this system and how do you protect against a 51% attack on the chain?

It's probably just a single blade of a cloud server that the syndicate agrees to use. No real reason to distribute beyond the end users at which point the maximum outlay is probably one blade ponied up per interested party.

It's a trusted system so you don't need proof of work and the transparency is from the validation available from merkle chains and source that is probably available for participants to inspect.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2018 01:36

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

comedyblissoption posted:

is git an example of exciting blockchain technology in your world

Nah, yesterday's technology so I can't sell it for markup for nothing.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2018 01:41

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

After your butt on the cloud, even replacing fax with a 35 year old ACID guarentee trick looks like high minded innovation.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2018 01:49

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

I don't know if I want to invest in my own rear end at this point. Is anyone interested in selling their rear end a service so I can pay for it on an ongoing basis but bow out if I find I'm not liking the rear end anymore?

# ¿ Feb 21, 2018 00:59

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Tetramin posted:

Yeah is the guy some big crypto money launderer for criminals or do the feds just go around reddit PMing weirdos?

There's every indication the feds do the latter hoping to get lucky making the former but if nothing else keeping their prosecutor's stats up.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2018 16:31

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Horrible Lurkbeast posted:

Well that is completely incomprehensible.
my jokes make better business sense and boner sense than this serious project.

You know those phone games where you would buy Twitter or YouTube personalities or movie stars and then someone else could buy them?

It's like that but a crypto ponzie. Don't worry though, if you end up the bag hodler at least you get to keep a titty picture.

# ¿ Feb 22, 2018 16:58

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Jombo posted:

Serious question: what does it matter how many coins there are? Any possible 'use' for cryptocurrencies can be done just as well with 0.00001 coins as it can be done with 1? (i.e. money laundering)

Crypto is like Highlander and there can only be one, each one absorbing the value of the other. In this case you should buy coins that have less total allotments because its like playing the lottery when its a normal price instead of when its high. If the lottery is high/the allotment is large the chance is you will need to share the payout.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2018 01:03

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

ilmucche posted:

So what checks if transactions are valid? How does the blockchain reject a transaction of x bitcoin from a to b if a doesn't have enough, or b doesn't actually exist? What ensures that whoever wins the computational lottery hasn't made a fake trasnaction that sends half of bitfinex's coins to them?

A block is a collection of transactions and a nonsense input that hashes to a valid number. This is just a proof of work game made by making the nonsense arbitrarily hard to guess by asking for hashes that look a certain way.

Transaction validity is sort of separate. A valid transaction is the output of a cryptographic function. This is the actual crypto part and you can only get a valid output when you know the private key of the source wallet.

You can redefine what a valid output is by changing what that crypto function is. This would then be a fork because you only gonna get consensus from people who agree on the crypto function used to define a transaction.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2018 13:57

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Bobcats posted:

I almost started mining years ago but I also laughed at Netflix so don't listen to me.

I had Beenz and Flooz too up until the services ended

Beenz and Flooz are hilarious in how caught up they were in a token economy that when a couple guys came around and said "what if money on the internet was, get this, money" they made enough money to launch rockets and be a literal vampire.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2018 17:26

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

PostNouveau posted:

I won $75 playing the pass line in craps, which I don't know how to play I just know the pass line is the best bet and all other bets are sucker bets.

Which altcoin should I buy?

You need to diversify imo. Put $45 on the pass line and $30 on don't pass.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2018 13:23

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

There Bias Two posted:

Australia does a poo poo ton of stupid things on a regular basis, esp concerning the environment.

Asbestos shoveling competitions arent stupid, how else will they tell who's best at pulling up by the bootstraps.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2018 16:53

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

I wholly believe bitcoins current value is anchored in that it's a commodity that is mostly unregulated allowing anyone with some starting capital and knowledge of scams to try their hand at a variety of ancient but usually illegal security scams. The bubbles might pop off and on, but it won't get driven to effective 0 without aggressive worldwide regulation.

Numbers only go up I also expect is because crypto key based currency is probably having trouble getting more coins made than are lost from losing keys. But that's wild speculation when the market has the depth of a puddle of piss under the urinal.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2018 13:15

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

kordansk posted:

How come companies sell asic mining machines? If they believe the market is there to make money from them clearly it's more worthwhile to not sell them and just manufacture them and hook them up themselves for months until they're barely profitable and then resell them to idiots (unethical). If they believe the opposite, aka the truth (that bitcoin and altcoins are a bubble waiting to burst and crash to zero value), they are just selling something that clearly they intend to take advantage of people for which seems unethical in general.

Besides the other points people mentioned like operational specialization, vertical integration is incredibly fixed capital heavy to reap a bit of cream off your working capital. Like even if you had a thought that it's going to the moon it's worth diversifying that much capital under one roof in case like Satoshi comes out as a socialist and turns on the secret destroy all wealth subroutine.

Maybe you float that extra bit of capital risk free by selling "new" miners that you actually used for a quarter. Just for quality reasons you see.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2018 00:48

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Need a tarrif on Bitcoin to really make America great again, edge out those Chinese made bitcoins and get real americans making them.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2018 19:29

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Risc1911 posted:

https://twitter.com/LaurentMT/status/943624312304611329

If this fragmentation is an indication of how most exchanges work then we are in for some really interesting times. Consolidating these would cost them a good chunk, not considering that fees keep going up and BTC value down.

No SegWit or LightningNetwork will change this.

Currency of the Future

PS: For those not into the crypto jargon: UTXO = An Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) that can be spent as an input in a new transaction.

This is good for Bitcoin because it encourages you to hodl.

Nessus posted:

Consider also that.

Many cults.

End up.

Cutting off they dicks and eating death pudding.

Sounds like I can't lose.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2018 13:44

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Heath posted:

I learned a cool phrase called "the dead cat bounce" that seems to apply to this recent uptick

Bitcoin been playing basketball with a dead cat for years.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2018 01:07

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

You're underestimating the amount of nerds who would have turned a miner on their media server or whatever spare box they had, forgot about it at some point because hey it's just a dumb fad, and it got stuck in the closet.

It's like finding out your slackware partition you installed on a lark had the lottery numbers in it.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2018 13:28

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Intelligent escalators sharing how many humans they have trapped and eaten, on the blockchain.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2018 13:30

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

It's not even really Bitcoin probably, the beaurocratic wheels don't turn that fast.

The IRS has a list of high risk of defrauding decisions on a tax return that they find worthwhile to audit. Short term capital gains outside a large stock market would make sense to throw in this bucket.

Also why you don't deduct a home office unless you have a personal accountant cause that will similarly get you audited.

E. Also that's not how capital gains work.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2018 19:12

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Tacky-rear end Rococco posted:

But aren�t fees supposed to pay the miners to secure the network? When there are no more new coins to be had, in the absence of high fees, why would people mine?

My friend, have you heard of rai stones?

The proof of work is done on enough bitcoins that we can just turn off all the miners tonight and trade tokens representing their value. Something like a piece of toilet paper with a guys face on it.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2018 00:25

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 14, 2024 17:45

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Krinkle posted:

no no no no no why is this commercial saying blockchain so many times
what the gently caress, IBM cloud?

Have you considered putting your butt on the cloud, but with blockchain? Have I got a deal for you!

While 10000 sweaty nerds trade e-pogs a dozen nerds looking to retire are writing standards so a business can be sold on doing xyz but with blockchain, and it's great because company ABC is going to have the same blockchain and now you can integrate your butt cheeks together.

# ¿ May 4, 2018 00:28

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Bitcoin: no angel investors, only Faustian bargains

«‹›19 »