Anyone mine primecoin?

Saylick

Diamond Member
Sep 10, 2012
3,532
7,859
136
Heh, the people who benefit the most are those who jump in early as the value of the currency grows only when the currency becomes popular. Imagine if you were "Satoshi" himself/herself; how much money do you think s/he made off the Bitcoin popularity?

I see the emergence of all these side cryto currencies as an attempt for their respective developers to get rich a la Ponzi scheme.
 

NaroonGTX

Member
Nov 6, 2013
106
0
76
Can someone explain to me the purpose of the bitcoin mining phenomenon? I read an article recently about people using these 'coins' to buy breast implants and other such procedures. What the eff?
 

aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 28, 2005
20,894
3,247
126
Can someone explain to me the purpose of the bitcoin mining phenomenon? I read an article recently about people using these 'coins' to buy breast implants and other such procedures. What the eff?

u can trade them for real currency.. or use real currency to purchase bitcoins.
The ransom virus required payment in bitcoins... lol..


I heard its going to be under review by SEC very soon, as its entrenching on the definition of "security" and also being used to exchange / purchase, and has the many many potential loopholes to be used as a money laundering tool.
 

aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 28, 2005
20,894
3,247
126
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-08/did-the-sec-just-validate-bitcoin-no-.html
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=269486.0

but yeah... SEC wants a piece of the pie... lol.. there also gonna regulate it as it can be a funding source for money laundering.

if your getting into it now... i would hold a bit until SEC has decided to do whatever they darn well please to do with it.

However once something gets into investigation with the SEC it can get very messy...

If your sitting on a lot of bitcoins... meh... cant advise you, however, the US government is well known to tell people "tough luck".
At the worst end, i predict, you will have all your bitcoins evaluated and then the government will add it onto your net income and ask for TAX on the value of the bitcoin u have horded. lol...

Basically u may get stung with a IRS 1099 on the full estimated value of bitcoins if SEC decides to regulate it.
(seeing how 0 dollars went into investment.. u will get a 1099 on 100% of the bitcoin value u own / have records of being traded / has been traded)

Anyhow i think i drifted off top... lol... i apologize for that.
 
Last edited:

Essence_of_War

Platinum Member
Feb 21, 2013
2,650
4
81
How many primepersec do you get with your cpu?

I am for funsies with the hp-client. :)

~2700 pps, but my understanding is that the better metric is actually chains/day, looking at ~1.5/day right now.
 

beginner99

Diamond Member
Jun 2, 2009
5,233
1,610
136
Can someone explain to me the purpose of the bitcoin mining phenomenon? I read an article recently about people using these 'coins' to buy breast implants and other such procedures. What the eff?

Transaction are also anonymous so they are often used for illegal stuff. The reason for mining is to pay for the GPU. If you bought a hd 7970 back when it came out, mined say 12 hrs a day your probably rich by now if you kept all the coins. A Swedish journalist bought few bitcoins for about $100 back in 2009 when working on a related article. He recently remembered them, found his wallet and bough himself an apratmetn for like $800000. ;)
 

sm625

Diamond Member
May 6, 2011
8,172
137
106
Damn... someone told me litecoins were just 1/100 of a bitcoin... (like pennies to a dollar) to make them easier to mine. I didnt realize they were a completely different currency. Damn moron...
 

BSim500

Golden Member
Jun 5, 2013
1,480
216
106
Heh, the people who benefit the most are those who jump in early as the value of the currency grows only when the currency becomes popular. Imagine if you were "Satoshi" himself/herself; how much money do you think s/he made off the Bitcoin popularity?

I see the emergence of all these side cryto currencies as an attempt for their respective developers to get rich a la Ponzi scheme.
Agreed. This has always been the drawback of crypto-currencies - they act (and people treat them) more like rare postage stamps than actual money, which encourages hoarding & volatile price swings. They're primarily a novelty which has avoided one extreme (inflationary bias by issuing too much money) by wildly swinging to the other extreme (strong deflationary bias = too scarce to function as proper currency and ends up with wild illiqudity based price swings). People seem to be backing "bitcoins" out of reactionary opposition to the way the Federal Reserve has devalued the $ to bail out the banks. That's fair enough as a belief by itself, but currencies need 3 things to sucessfully function - value, liquidity & trading stability (no short-term price swings as a medium of exchange) - and not just the first one. Unlike precious metals, etc, they have no more intrinsic value than fiat paper currencies.

Real currencies need a minimum amount of liquidity to function as currencies. A currency with a maximum 21m units isn't going to replace any national currency with a population of tens or hundreds of millions let alone a global 7bn. That for the USA alone would be like the Federal Reserve issuing only enough USD units in circulation for each American to have $0.07 each, it might be "valuable" as a fringe speculative investment (relative to holding other currencies like the Euro), but internally most Americans would end up bartering for nearly everything made in America due to a permanent currency shortage (made worse by a deflationary bias, ie, as time goes on it gets more difficult to acquire money - which is great if the world's population is shrinking, but the exact opposite of what you need when it continues to grow)...

Likewise with stability, short-term (<5 year) value changes cause a collapse in confidence. You see this regularly in 3rd world countries where the price of food doubles in a month results in "Dollarisation" (ditching the local currency in favor of $ or &#8364;). Bitcoin's $9 to +$1,000 in 4 years is not price-stable enough. It's the deflationary equivalent of +220% annual year-on-year price inflation which far exceeds even the worst $ devaluation by a +20x factor. It's value also recently crashed from $900 to just $460 in 48 hours.

Example : If you own a business buying say $100 widgets in bitcoins and selling them on for $130 equivalent in bitcoins, you'd have just made a massive loss paying out 217 bitcoins to acquire 1,000x widgets from a wholesaler only to be forced to sell all 1,000x 48 hours later for just 144 bitcoins with such a wild adverse currency movement spikes. In reality, most firms facing such a massive loss on the wrong end of such a spike wouldn't make the trade - they'd just close their doors to Bitcoins for the day... Earlier in the year many did just that when the "currency" hit an intraday high of $266 on a Wednesday, promptly collapsed to $105, rebounded to $180, then collapsed again to $120, etc...

Here's a July 2010 to Nov 2013 chart of "bitcoin vs gold":-
BTC-2010-lin.png


That's not what any currency looks like (except maybe Zimbabwe's inverse hyper-inflation chart :D), that's what a 1990's dot-com bubble looked like after a huge amount of media hype, but just before the "pop"... (NB: Chart is vs Gold not the USD).

The popularity of Bitcoin also means it's inevitable you'll get scammers creating a string of new crypto-currencies (benefiting from being an early adopter) with the same tactics that drive penny stock "pump and dump" / MLM scams (where the first guy wins, the second & third lesser so, and by the time the 4th & 5th guys come along, the 1st guy quietly cashes out, etc) but on a longer time-frame. Time will tell how many of these string of Bitcoin 2.0's are serious or just someone cashing in on a craze. Right now, Bitcoin's are mostly popular amongst geeks who understand the "what", but not "why" there's a lot more to currencies than just Forex rates vs the USD alone).
 
Last edited: