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Genevieve wrote:We have Bluray now, that's the one that won in the medium wars. Currencies should be decided in a similar manner.

Bluray was a good example but there are plenty of examples where the most popular isn't the best option. Why should we let a thick as shit, in general terms, society decide something as important as currency? Just flick through the TV and see what drivvle the general public demand nowadays, I don't want those people deciding my currency. I agree the current system is far from perfect and these new ideas are interesting but currencies should be decided by popularity? No grazie.

Bloomberg have been on top of the debate quite a bit today:

but bluray is on the way out, as are most physical mediums.

i'm with lowphat, been on this for a bit

if you can spare the processing power, go for it. I used to give my spare processing power to folding@home, but I guess I just got a little more selfish

Muncey wrote:

Genevieve wrote:We have Bluray now, that's the one that won in the medium wars. Currencies should be decided in a similar manner.

Bluray was a good example but there are plenty of examples where the most popular isn't the best option. Why should we let a thick as shit, in general terms, society decide something as important as currency? Just flick through the TV and see what drivvle the general public demand nowadays, I don't want those people deciding my currency. I agree the current system is far from perfect and these new ideas are interesting but currencies should be decided by popularity? No grazie.

YOu let society decide through voting and politics. And that's how we get inflationary currencies. If you let individuals decide for themselves what they believe holds the most value, then time will tell how good that commodity IS at keeping value. And eventually, with more people buying into it, it will only gain value due the supply becoming relatively smaller to the demand. And a currency is strong because people want it. That's what currency is for, finding a middle ground where we can all collectively decide 'yup, that's valuable', so we have a way of exchanging goods and services that have a different perceived value.

Gold isn't 'better' than copper, it's different. It too won out as currency because more people valued it higher.

fractal wrote:but bluray is on the way out, as are most physical mediums.

As it should be if people decide that it's no longer useful. The Dollar's worth a FRACTION of what it did 100 years ago and Americans are still using it. Bluray's on the way out and we're not forced through legislation to still use it.

Society deciding through politics and voting is a lot better than letting them decide the actual currency (but I'm sure you'll disagree). You're making a massive assumption that society decides what is valuable and what isn't and that ultimately means thats the best for society. Unfortunately society is very prone to fads and move from one thing to another very quickly based mostly on popularity.. hence why Bitcoins value has shot up massively in the last few months.. with more news coverage and more people telling their friends its bound to shoot up again. But like social networking sites, game consoles or basically any commodity that society deems popular.. it'll change from one to the other due to fads. That just doesn't sound very reliable for something as important as currency. Seeing currencies rise and fall at a similar rate as websites like myspace because of fashion.. just doesn't sound like a brilliant idea to me. I could imagine there being huge currency crashes because loads of people jump ship cause a new currency called UberDollar has come out or something stupid like that.

But you're against all Governments so I can completely understand where you are coming from and I'm gunna quickly back out of this, could be an eternal argument.

I do think its interesting but there are many flaws that need to be overcome, the fact its hackable and finite could cause issues.. another huge issue with the fact not everybody can easily access the Internet, could be a massive problem for developing countries trying to get involved.

I'm not arguing specifically for Bitcoin, that thing is still a baby and instable atm. It may end up a disaster or the currency of the future. But I'm also skeptical of exactly how secure it is because I don't believe something is 'unhackable' and with processing power growing exponentionally, who knows how easy it is to hack shit in the future?

It was more directly about currency itself. The market decided on gold for thousands of years and it doesn't see the wild devaluation the dollar has seen. So I don't believe 'voting' has made for a strong dollar, while supply and demand and a finite amount of gold has made for strong gold.

It's not a 'massive assumption', it's te point of a currency! Why have currency if you don't uniformly agree on its value? One guy may have 2 sacks of corn and another may have a box of air freshners. If one guy wants to sell his air freshners but doesn't want corn, and the guy selling corn doesn't want an air freshner, how are they supposed to do business? They settle on a something they both feel has value for each other. This is why people are using money.

Never seen anything on bluray in my lifetime

And people, the major drawback is the power usage. Or are you all running your coin miners on 100% green energy.
It's a big source of pollution that only grows over time and the worst thing is, it's for 'pointless' calculations.

Or am I missing something? Not exactly an expert on the subject.

AxeD wrote:Never seen anything on bluray in my lifetime

What is this supposed mean? Are you suggesting that between HD-DVD and Bluray, HD-DVD won? You don't get the argument I'm making at all. And if non-physical formats are beating out phyiscal ones, then it's STILL proving my point that society settles on formats through a market without having a coercive government deciding for it.

AxeD wrote:And people, the major drawback is the power usage. Or are you all running your coin miners on 100% green energy.
It's a big source of pollution that only grows over time and the worst thing is, it's for 'pointless' calculations.

Or am I missing something? Not exactly an expert on the subject.

YOu don't have to mine bitcoins. You can buy them or trade them too. And how much of a dent do you think bitcoin mining has on the way we use energy is probably neglectable overall. It's a currency, it's something you place value on. I can give someone my headphones or a blanket for bitcoins.

wub wrote:So I get a fancy PC, install a mining program, point it at something and wait for the moneys?

(laymans terms/gist of it?)

Mainly you want specific GPUs and often the cost of electricity compared to actual clusters you mine is far greater.
Now that Bitcoin is in such the public eye... the bubble has burst.
It is a great concept and prevalent on the deep web for less than legal purchases (Silk Road) and other things on the tor network (seriously don't go on the tor network, it seems like oh cool deep web, hidden info etc, but it's just full of kiddie porn for the most part)

No idea what it should mean. I just never saw the point in using blu-ray for anything.

The bitcoins you buy still have to be generated through the processing though. I don't see how this can grow to be
an actual competitor as a currency without mass pollution. As do a few experts on energy, that's where I got the info from.

I do get your point on the fact that it doesn't matter what the currency is, as long as both parties agree on it's value.

See the whole mining bitcoins is where the mass energy usage/pollution comes from. So many people are aware of it now that actually finding legit clusters is the issue.
You have an over-saturation of miners who think it's free money, much like the gold rushes of yore, without realizing they're expending more $ on electricity trying to find a legit cluster.
The main issue with bitcoin is it's fluctuating value, and now that investment bankers and people from wall street are getting involved...

And blu-ray, well it's just the latest iteration of disk media that can store more data, that's about it.

I'm not sure if you realise or not, but without miners Bitcoin wouldn't work very well at all. The 40 TH/s or so of network power that Bitcoin currently has isn't just people mining, those miners are also processing and checking transactions (a security feature of BTC). Some wallets require 6 confirmations of a transaction before the transaction takes place, Mt Gox is 1 confirmation I believe. The miners also earn very small fees in transactions fees for doing the calculations. Having a big network is a good thing for Bitcoin and only makes it stronger, however, don't saturate pools please!

Also, I believe the transaction fees will prove to be very profitable in the future

lowphat wrote:Also, I believe the transaction fees will prove to be very profitable in the future

yup, especially because the number of new bitcoins that can be created decreases all the time. it'll cap at 21 million bitcoins

lowphat knows! also, the energy i am using in negligible, as i spend so much for my grow each week, I pay for the electricity with the profits from that. Next thing you know, you'll be telling me folding@home and Seti@home produce more pollution and cost more in electricity than they're worth, but again the value of that is subjective, not objective

what if you're broke and you have a shitty laptop with barely any processing power, and you need money, how can bitcoin help a m8 out?

JizzMan wrote:what if you're broke and you have a shitty laptop with barely any processing power, and you need money, how can bitcoin help a m8 out?

Bled dem get you mad dough if you start running computas 24/7.
Mining done on da gpu do m9

AxeD wrote:

JizzMan wrote:what if you're broke and you have a shitty laptop with barely any processing power, and you need money, how can bitcoin help a m8 out?

Bled dem get you mad dough if you start running computas 24/7.
Mining done on da gpu do m9

so basically, i'm still fucked

JizzMan wrote:

AxeD wrote:

JizzMan wrote:what if you're broke and you have a shitty laptop with barely any processing power, and you need money, how can bitcoin help a m8 out?

Bled dem get you mad dough if you start running computas 24/7.
Mining done on da gpu do m9

so basically, i'm still fucked

Nah, you can earn money too.

Get on Litecoin before Mt Gox picks it up fella I haven't read into LTC but I think it relies a bit more on CPU mining rather than GPU

lowphat wrote:Get on Litecoin before Mt Gox picks it up fella I haven't read into LTC but I think it relies a bit more on CPU mining rather than GPU

I have 6 litecoins sitting in a wallet, hoping to check back in a few years and sell them for $250 each
Their value seems to fluctuate in line with Bitcoin's. Might buy some more while the price is low and do the ol' pump and dump like everyone else!

With all the recent attention and coverage, it's almost like people are setting Bitcoin up as a new Ponzi Scheme of the Madoff investment variety.