Be Excellent To Each Other

I have cgminer running on my work PC. Actually, I've had it running on my work PC for about a year. The graphics card is shit - my decent card at home is roughly 4 times faster, so bear this in mind.

In that time, I have mined a grand total of roughly 0.13 bitcoins. My work PC has been running 24x7. Even if that was my home PC chugging the whole time I'd only be looking at maybe half a coin.

Of course, half a coin is now worth maybe £300, but that brings me to the second problem. Mining returns lately have diminished SHARPLY. I used to earn around 0.01 per month (the minimum payout from my pool), but my last payout was August and since then I have earned 0.036 of a coin. At the current rate I might get to my 0.1 payout some time in 2016.

The huge upsurge in Bitcoin popularity has rendered it fairly uneconomical for anyone not running dedicated machines. Even when I started I was too late to the party.

Final problem: Selling the fucking things. I sold my 0.1 coin at the end of November 2013 for about £68, a the peak of its value. I still haven't seen that money. It took around 2 months to get my account verified at Mtgox, and since then I've been trying to get the fuckers to actually pay me the money. I finally managed to initiate a bank transfer request at the end of January, and they still havne't processed it yet.

I opened a support ticket which took 6 days to be assigned to an agent, which replied and said 'We have a backlog'. No shit.

Unless you're shit hot, with decent hardware, and know what you're doing and where, don't bother with Bitcoin.

Oh, and with the miner turned on your graphics card is under the same kind of load as an incredibly intensive game. My home card pops to ~60 celsius within 15 minutes and stays there. I don't bother doing it on my home PC and I reckon it's not worth potentially shortening the life of the card and using way more electricity than I do already.

This is why I jumped on Dogecoin immediately after it launched. With every layer it gets harder and harder to mine any.

Thanks chaps, doesn't sound like it's worth the expense or hassle.

For a single home PC, I'd say don't bother.

If you control a network of 30 computers with decent cards and won't get questioned about electricity bills or hardware meltdowns, maybe try your luck.

I mine in a pool, as finding a coin mining by yourself is incredibly, incredibly unlikely. Of course, you'd bag 25 full coins for yourself (which now would be maybe £15k?) but you're probably as likely to win the lottery.

In a pool you mine with a load of other people, and winnings are split between all participants based on their contribution of blocks. It's a small payout, but it's something as opposed to the nothing you may get forever by mining alone.

The pool I use, should you care, is Slush's pool: https://mining.bitcoin.cz

Fairly well implemented, hosted on Amazon's AWS, and the guy running it has made it, over time, fairly resilient against the huge volume of DoS and intrusion attempts that have inevitably been made on it. The guy must be fucking loaded because the pool takes a nice cut from every block found.

Thanks, some useful info there. Will look into that.

GazChap introduced me to Dogecoin a few weeks back, and I've found it to be a good bit of fun. Mined about 13k coins before deciding to give it a rest until my next electricity bill comes through (rather dreading that) then may resume. For any rich generous shibes out there my wallet is at DTpKiGqyV1urpouAoaf6PZUQeKAFaXaHA5

Shit, I think something bad happened to Zeppo.

GazChap likes to lean across and mash my keyboard. Also, damn you autocorrect, shibe IS a word.

Mt. Gox has gone offline, apparently due to a massive hack/theft that's been going on for years.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/20 ... -implodes/

Wow, that is seriously inept.

So:

These virtual coins are 'mined'
Mining is a verification of transactions taking place
The fractions of the coin is a reward for using computer time to verify the transaction
These virtual coins can be sold for cash dollars
These virtual coins can be used to purchase things online that the users desire anonymity for

So, using verifying transactions for things being bought that require anonymity using a currency that can then be turned into real cash dollars is pretty much laundering the money for criminals, no?

I don't think your outcome is supported by your arguments there.

You should be presenting BBC Breakfast.

Actually, I'd like that! Give Malia the job!

How many people have actually sold their million pounds of bitcoins for actual money?

And to whom?

This is like a pyramid scheme in that at the end of it there will be someone left with Bitcoins, and nobody who wants to accept them.

I think the idea is that you wouldn't need to sell them for 'actual money' because BitCoin would become accepted in more places so you could just use it directly. How likely that is to ever happen, especially with shit like this going on, is questionable though. I think people are just sitting on their BitCoins at the moment because of all the chat about folk who bought a few when they were dirt cheap and who are now sitting on a (relative) fortune. Until the value stabilises there'll be this incentive not to 'cash out'.

There's some rumours now about this all being related to Mt. Gox being bought over:

http://www.engadget.com/2014/02/25/mt-g ... e-offline/

Well, yes The only way it will become accepted in more places is if you can cash it out for actual money.

Isn't that how all currencies work? Widespread trading leads to legitimisation?

No, actual items, not necessarily actual money.

If I wanted to turn 26 pallets of mid term test papers into cash without leaving much of a paper trail I'd look for something that is highly volatile, almost certainly short lived, outside of fisca lcontrols and had a line of people wanting to buy these digital trinkets from me for cash monies, or turn those digital trinkets into something like a car that can then be sold for cash monies. Nobody will turn an eye if you say "This cash? I just sold my car, here's the receipt and transaction documents", that'll do for most gatekeepers. The, when the Virtual Coin dies off, taking all records with it, I've turned my contraband into cash with a legit paper trail of having sold a car. The rests of the background noise in the transactions is just for the novelty of using something that isn't cash to buy stuff. If it is all above board, why the need for anonymous transactions? It's easy, convenient and pretty simple to launder things.

Yes, but the only way you'll be able to get someone to give you an actual item, is if the currency is backed by actual money.

Currency these days isn't back by real money, it's all paper, however to get the current currency model off the ground, the paper money had to be back by something that had physical value in the first place. This is trying to skip that vital step.

It doesn't need to be backed by something physical, it needs to be backed by faith in its longevity/stability. It's possible to get to that point (based on the enthusiasm of evangelists) without any collateral backing, but stuff like the Mt Gox hack really doesn't help.

This is like listening to that Philomena Cunk bit on Screenwipe. She discussed "what is money?"

I disagree. To get the faith it has to be backed by something physical.

And I disagree back. Otherwise people wouldn't be using it right now

Sure - to get the faith outside of the community actively involved in it there needs to be some greater backing, but get it solid enough in the enthusiast community and it can naturally spread from there.

And I disagree back *2, turn around, touch the ground, no returns.

People aren't using it right now though. People are talking about it, people are mining for it, people are doing publicity stunts around letting someone "buy" a car with it, but people aren't actually using it for a currency.

No, for people to have faith in it you just need to be able to exchange it for something they already have faith in (i.e. an existing currency) which is already possible. If that's the case and if you can actually buy stuff directly with BitCoin then people would not only feel comfortable adopting it but not then need to exchange it back to an existing currency. Obviously that situation is a ways off even without the current faith-destroying stuff going on but I can see how it could happens without anyone having to be able to say that, for instance, for every BitCoin mined we've got a gold nugget in a vault somewhere.

Apart from to buy illegal services and substances.

http://www.takeaway.com accept it. If you can swap bitcoin for pizza, it's a currency.

That's my original point. Show me someone who has converted their virtual fortune into actual money.

Only if it's laundered using ecstasy pipes!

Why? Who cares? The test for a currency isn't whether someone has exchanged it for something else. I don't need to swap my bank balance into Euros for sterling to be legit right now. Seeing as you ask though:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2 ... -oslo-home

The guy exchanged a small amount of his BTC stash for enough 'real money' to buy a flat.

You can buy BEER with BITCOIN in a PUB.

http://www.individualpubs.co.uk/pembury/info.html

Done.

You can buy wine with vouchers in a John Lewis.

Doesn't mean that JL vouchers are a legit currency.

Ummm... yes it is, that is pretty much the only test for a currency

Thanks for the link. I'm skeptical of the throwaway line at the end that he bought a flat with them, but at least it is something.

But you can buy Bitcoin with real money, just as you can buy vouchers with £ as well.

I had a point there, but I'm damned if I can see what it is now I've submitted my post.

I'm struggling to see what people might want from a currency outside of the ability to swap it for beer and pizza.

The ability to tuck it into a stripper's suspender belt?

Got you covered.

Just seen a tweet saying the stolen bitcoins have been found.

In the recycle bin, am I right?

Hello? I think Beex has gone down.

That's in Portland, fool.

ROAD TRIP!

Alex Salmond agrees.

And so, my £68 of bitcoin revenue, which I requested to transfer out of MtGox approximately one month ago, remains nowhere to be seen.

Strong odds it's lost. Given it was all virtualised jiggery-pokery I don't feel too bad about it, except a vague feeling of gladness that I didn't invest too much time into the nonsense.

Like a lot of things, there was a window to make a dickton of money before the bubble burst. I don't see how it can really recover from this. Even if the technical obstacles with coin security can be overcome, the trust is gone.

The potential for shouty people or large organisations with lawyers to make money remains intact.

There is still money to be made here. Trust is nothing in the face of avarice.