Bitcoin

[gwa]

so where are these bit coins in a number? i want more of an explanation then that

i wasn't calling you batty cos you're into this shit. it was a legit question cos my mate saw your fb profile and asked

[gwa]

how much shelf do you / have you made?

[Phigure]

bitcoin stores and verifies transactions in what are called "blocks". mining is just generating new blocks, and when a new block is generated, there's a set number of bitcoins that are rewarded to whomever generated the block.

the key to the whole thing is that part of the block is encrypted. with the way the encryption works, if you feed it a number/value, it'll spit out a unique result in the form of a string of random looking numbers/values (called a hash). bitcoin has a target hash, and a new block is generated whenever a hash is lower than the target hash. the encryption is really secure, so it's impossible to say "i want a hash with the value _______" and find out what input you need to get that hash

basically your computer is sort of playing the lottery, it puts a number through the encryption, sees what comes out, and if it isn't below the target, then it'll change the input number by 1 (0001, 0002, etc) and try again. eventually it'll make a hash that's lower than the target, which will make a new block, which will reward you with a certain number of bitcoins.

so the more numbers you can put through the encryption in a given amount of time, the more chances you have of generating a block and being rewarded

and i see, i guess he's probably thrown off by the profile picture ive got right now

how much shelf do you / have you made?

i've made close to a grand probably, haven't kept exact track. i haven't really invested any money into it though, i was just lucky enough to have access to somewhat decent hardware in an industrial building where the electricity rates are like half of what they would be in a residential area.

right now there's machines that are about to come on the market built for this that cost $1500, and at an energy price of ~$.10/kilowatt-hours (for example), you could make 20 grand USD if you left it running for 3/4 months straight. but that's assuming that the price of bitcoin stays stable.

[gwa]

who invented blocks and shit? and thought like

uhhhh i'm gonna make a block and if someone decrypts it then they get a bit coin?

it just seems a bit bizarre cos there isn't a physical product. mining gold is like worth while innit. i used to go panning back in the day and it was alright you know! but i just don't see the whole point of this. i fully appreciate being rewarded for decrypting shit but i can't help but imagine some gadge that looks like wario fapping over creating a block or whatever.

unless the block isn't man made? i don't know.. explain more please?

[gwa]

when i say block i mean which gadge thought of making a lottery thing.

[Phigure]

who invented blocks and shit? and thought like

uhhhh i'm gonna make a block and if someone decrypts it then they get a bit coin?

it just seems a bit bizarre cos there isn't a physical product. mining gold is like worth while innit. i used to go panning back in the day and it was alright you know! but i just don't see the whole point of this. i fully appreciate being rewarded for decrypting shit but i can't help but imagine some gadge that looks like wario fapping over creating a block or whatever.

unless the block isn't man made? i don't know.. explain more please?

bitcoin was invented by some guy working under a fake name, no one knows who it actually is. he basically just set forth the rules for how the whole system works. what it takes to make a block, how transactions get stored, etc. and then he released the program, and people could start mining and sending eachother bitcoins.

yeah it is pretty weird tbh, makes you wonder what kind of motivation he had for doing all this shit. the big idea behind it though is that it doesn't rely on any sort of central authority that's controlling the money. it's designed specifically so that there CAN'T be a central authority like there is with pretty much all other forms of currency. so i guess he probably had some anti-authoritarian tendencies or something

the idea of there not being a physical product is a bit weird at first too, but i mean when you paypal someone money, there isn't anything physical being transferred either. as long as the system is secure and people can't forge bitcoins, the fact that there isn't anything physical is okay.

honestly i'm not gonna lie, i think they're pretty useless aside from buying drugs. i could never see them becoming actual competition to "real" money. whenever i generated bitcoins i just cashed them out for dollars in my bank account.

i think the only reason it's become anything more than silk road cash is because libertarians get a giant raging boner over them cause it's a decentralized currency

[Muncey]

yeah it is pretty weird tbh, makes you wonder what kind of motivation he had for doing all this shit.

Hates penguins.

[gwa]

nice one mate. i appoint you bitcoin ambassador for teamgwa

[Genevieve]

yeah it is pretty weird tbh, makes you wonder what kind of motivation he had for doing all this shit.

Hates penguins.

That's it, fuck bitcoin.

[test_recordings]

For everyone saying they'll stop being used, I think they will be, but only by people who like/need the properties of it. Can't imagine it becoming a general currency because of too many unpredictable factors, centralised currencies at least have some hold on things through the G20, IMF and so on.

I can imagine places accepting payment in them though, but with prices pegged to a regularly checked value (and maybe even suspension of acceptance at times of uncertainty).

[Mason]

yeah it is pretty weird tbh, makes you wonder what kind of motivation he had for doing all this shit.

surely he will have made a shit load of money? if he gave himself like couple thousand to begin with then cashes out when he pleases, bam rich.

[Phigure]

yeah it is pretty weird tbh, makes you wonder what kind of motivation he had for doing all this shit.

surely he will have made a shit load of money? if he gave himself like couple thousand to begin with then cashes out when he pleases, bam rich.

fair point, but when he started all of this it was really more just of an academic exercise

see the paper about it:
http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

and this from the wiki
"Version 0.1 was for Windows only and had no command-line interface. It was compiled using Microsoft Visual Studio. The code was elegant in some ways and inelegant in others. The code does not appear to have been written by either a total amateur or a professional programmer; some people speculate based on this that Satoshi was an academic with a lot of theoretical knowledge but not much programming experience."

he also didn't know if it would ever really take off, and especially not to this extent i think. it's been like 4 years and it's reached a market cap of 2.5 billion!

he definitely did make a ridiculous amount of money, but i dont think that was his motivation

[AxeD]

I was expressing concern about the power usage.
My point is that miners are using actual resources to produce an entirely useless product.

To me it makes more sense to award bitcoins to people who's computers are part of a researcher's cloud computing
project for example.

[Mason]

yeah it is pretty weird tbh, makes you wonder what kind of motivation he had for doing all this shit.

surely he will have made a shit load of money? if he gave himself like couple thousand to begin with then cashes out when he pleases, bam rich.

fair point, but when he started all of this it was really more just of an academic exercise

see the paper about it:
http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

and this from the wiki
"Version 0.1 was for Windows only and had no command-line interface. It was compiled using Microsoft Visual Studio. The code was elegant in some ways and inelegant in others. The code does not appear to have been written by either a total amateur or a professional programmer; some people speculate based on this that Satoshi was an academic with a lot of theoretical knowledge but not much programming experience."

he also didn't know if it would ever really take off, and especially not to this extent i think. it's been like 4 years and it's reached a market cap of 2.5 billion!

he definitely did make a ridiculous amount of money, but i dont think that was his motivation

fair man i'll have a read of the paper, tbh i don't really have a clue about this all haha.

[lowphat]

I was expressing concern about the power usage.
My point is that miners are using actual resources to produce an entirely useless product.

To me it makes more sense to award bitcoins to people who's computers are part of a researcher's cloud computing
project for example.

How is Bitcoin an entirely useless product?

EDIT: When or if these hit the market, power I don't think will be much more of a concern considering this is USB powered https://products.butterflylabs.com/home ... miner.html and would mine faster than the majority of PCs I'm sure.

[Dutchstep]

The only reason I got into bitcoins was to calculate the value on SR, they had some cheap ass cigarettes.
I forgot my password though.

[OttoMatik]

I'm sure some of you have heard of this, basically an online currency that uses people's computers to do the transaction work/number crunching (I believe?) similar to how torrents work for downloading. Correct me if I don't understand it correctly.

http://bitcoin.org/en/
http://litecoin.org/

Skip to 12:50 for a bit more info on bitcoin.


Anyone here interested in Bitcoin/Litecoin mining? Maybe we could make a DSF mining pool?

Just looked into this quickly yesterday and I haven't had much time to do a whole lot of research yet but seems interesting.

[EliteLennon117]

repost but I'm too lazy to find the thread. jah ups

[incnic]

thanks for the out of date repost mate

u arent going to be mining shit without specialized workstations with good GPU (expensive) anbd a high power bill

[Sexual_Chocolate]

search function once again goes unused.