Meanwhile you can watch Chia rise (and fall) here: https://www.okex.com/en/markets/spot-info/xch-usdt (or here: https://www.chiaexplorer.com)

Not very promising for now, but still better than most "alternative" coins.

Jorpho wrote on 2021-05-02, 18:22:

Fujoshi-hime wrote on 2021-05-02, 02:39:

imi wrote on 2021-04-29, 10:04:

I can't believe there's still people like this... on a computer forum no less... you'd think we'd be kinda scientific here.

Counter point: How many computer users do you know that hold weird illogical superstitions about how their computers work or firmly believe in computing urban legends? 😜

"This game runs completely indistinguishably on these two different computers, but I neeeeed the one that's 25 years old, the other one doesn't feeeel the same! The graphics output of Voodoo cards is imbued with mystical energies produced exclusively by the 3dfx spirits!"

😀 I do prefer to play a game on hardware that isn't way beyond its specs for some reason. but you're right, mostly it would be exactly the same experience even on a new machine, except maybe some ambient machine sounds and the like

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-05-02, 23:18:

Never would've thought that my 2.66GHz Pentium M and Radeon X600SE powered file server would be good at any kind of cryptocurrency mining

It isn't. You need modern multicore CPU and large capacity SSD (480Gb+, preferably NVME) for efficient mining.

that helps decide any purchases i might make, keep below the radar of 'miners' so as not to compete on price with them

irritating though, it's like someone discovered sports cars were good at ploughing fields and then all sports car enthusiasts get to watch their favourite cars being wrecked in various fields on top of being priced out of the market because of it

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-04-28, 22:27:

You can never go wrong with bottle caps.

Well you can buy cool things like .223 pistol, super sledge hammer, and Pancor Jackhammer with bottle caps, so why not.

I asked Vinton Cerf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf during a talk at our work about what he thought about crypto currencies and he was very adamant it is all a Ponzi scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
A friend was involved early on and was literally meeting people in dark alleys trading thousands of your favorite currency for BitCoin in suitcases.... does not seem legal to me....
He eventually got tricked out of 50kUSD$ so I can't think of any of this being good...

Look at BlockChain.... it is basically dead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain
I never got the point of that...

2,5 EB 😀

Carrera wrote on 2021-05-05, 09:41:

Look at BlockChain.... it is basically dead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain
I never got the point of that...

Wat?

I never got the point of blockchain. Why do you want people to see your transactions?

Carrera wrote on 2021-05-06, 16:00:

I never got the point of blockchain. Why do you want people to see your transactions?

The blockchain is integral. With a public ledger there is no central authority for the currency and there is also a reliable way to verify how much of the currency everyone has. It doesn't work without the blockchain. It might as well be monopoly money in its absence.

Allegedly, blockchain could be used as proof of ownership for such stuff like digital pictures - https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/ … sh=44c9193d24b2

There also were some movements towards digital game stores which could use it as basis for reselling licenses - https://www.robotcache.com
Fortunately or not, this stuff is cooking for more than 3 years already and most likely soon to be dead completely.

Members of the public who are generally quite far from being financial system and global economics experts, but consider their judgement sufficient to dictate the global worthiness of complex technical and business structures like cryptocurrency and blockchain, are like people who aren't computer experts, judging computer architectures and operating systems.

Opinions are great but each is only worth the weight of information behind it.

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:04:

Members of the public who are generally quite far from being financial system and global economics experts, but consider their judgement sufficient to dictate the global worthiness of complex technical and business structures like cryptocurrency and blockchain, are like people who aren't computer experts, judging computer architectures and operating systems.

Opinions are great but each is only worth the weight of information behind it.

Cryptocurrency is a commodity. It isn't controlled by anyone. The value goes up because more people think it's valuable. Not unlike any other commodity.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:10:

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:04:

Members of the public who are generally quite far from being financial system and global economics experts, but consider their judgement sufficient to dictate the global worthiness of complex technical and business structures like cryptocurrency and blockchain, are like people who aren't computer experts, judging computer architectures and operating systems.

Opinions are great but each is only worth the weight of information behind it.

Cryptocurrency is a commodity. It isn't controlled by anyone. The value goes up because more people think it's valuable. Not unlike any other commodity.

Oh the concept of control absolutely exists in crypto - it's controlled by money, like every financial product. More money, more control. Even merely the right tweet by the right person controls crypto.

The value goes up because people are using it. They can think all they want, but mental exercise doesn't change a price.

Blockchain is one part of a series of interlocking pieces that are attempting to democratize core parts of our society.

Namely those pieces are blockchain, proof of work, and a system of rules that encourages competitive enforcement of the networks rules.

So to pick off the blockchain, it's a cryptographically secured record of every transaction that has ever occurred on the network. If the rules are properly enforced, nobody can unilaterally steal your ownership of the assets it secures. Nobody can shut down your account. Nobody can silence you. You see a lot of tepid development for a lot of blockchain based commerce, dns, etc. Basically lots of areas where regulatory capture has resulted in a small number of duopolies. Duopolies increasingly flexing their muscle, to all our detriment.

I keep saying "If the rules are properly enforced", and that is where proof of work and competition come in. How do you keep the rules of the network properly enforced? Well, you reward people for doing it. With Bitcoin, if you add a block to the blockchain, you get rewarded in more Bitcoin. But you don't want this happening whenever someone feels like. So you have the proof of work. It's arbitrary, but it slows things down, and forces participants to put their money where their mouth is. If you take all this time, equipment, and electricity successfully completing a proof of work, and then you do something fishy, the rest of the network will reject the block you attempted to add to the chain and you get nothing.

Now, there are certain downsides we're all living with here. The competition to add blocks to the chain has gotten a bit out of control, and is sucking all the air out of the room. Outside of speculative investing, the use cases for crypto assets has come up significantly short. I'd love to see blockchain secured DNS take off, like Namecoin. But it hasn't done shit. The current, centralized, monopolized systems we have for money and information infrastructure are still mostly preferable to most people. Even with massive censorship and massive observable inflation. Normies just go along to get along.

I'm not sure how this ends. I don't know if stable, useful blockchain technologies ever take off. I don't know if they always lurk in the background, keeping the monopolies they seek to replace honest. Or at least slightly more honest than they'd otherwise be. I don't know they'll vanish completely. The cynical part of me says regulatory capture manages to subvert them, and chain them to the same institutions they were supposed to free us from.

The value of bitcoin aside, we'd probably all be a lot better off if our fundamental human rights were secured through a series of blockchain technologies than resting in the hands of SV to allow us to speak, Mastercard to allow us to conduct commerce, and Bank of America to not place bullshit liens on our properties to attempt to fraudulently steal our homes. But it could still be that the negatives of blockchain (consumption of resources) outweighs the benefits too much for it to ever really happen at scale.

Namrok wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:27:

Blockchain is one part of a series of interlocking pieces that are attempting to democratize core parts of our society. […]
Show full quote

Blockchain is one part of a series of interlocking pieces that are attempting to democratize core parts of our society.

Namely those pieces are blockchain, proof of work, and a system of rules that encourages competitive enforcement of the networks rules.

So to pick off the blockchain, it's a cryptographically secured record of every transaction that has ever occurred on the network. If the rules are properly enforced, nobody can unilaterally steal your ownership of the assets it secures. Nobody can shut down your account. Nobody can silence you. You see a lot of tepid development for a lot of blockchain based commerce, dns, etc. Basically lots of areas where regulatory capture has resulted in a small number of duopolies. Duopolies increasingly flexing their muscle, to all our detriment.

I keep saying "If the rules are properly enforced", and that is where proof of work and competition come in. How do you keep the rules of the network properly enforced? Well, you reward people for doing it. With Bitcoin, if you add a block to the blockchain, you get rewarded in more Bitcoin. But you don't want this happening whenever someone feels like. So you have the proof of work. It's arbitrary, but it slows things down, and forces participants to put their money where their mouth is. If you take all this time, equipment, and electricity successfully completing a proof of work, and then you do something fishy, the rest of the network will reject the block you attempted to add to the chain and you get nothing.

Now, there are certain downsides we're all living with here. The competition to add blocks to the chain has gotten a bit out of control, and is sucking all the air out of the room. Outside of speculative investing, the use cases for crypto assets has come up significantly short. I'd love to see blockchain secured DNS take off, like Namecoin. But it hasn't done shit. The current, centralized, monopolized systems we have for money and information infrastructure are still mostly preferable to most people. Even with massive censorship and massive observable inflation. Normies just go along to get along.

I'm not sure how this ends. I don't know if stable, useful blockchain technologies ever take off. I don't know if they always lurk in the background, keeping the monopolies they seek to replace honest. Or at least slightly more honest than they'd otherwise be. I don't know they'll vanish completely. The cynical part of me says regulatory capture manages to subvert them, and chain them to the same institutions they were supposed to free us from.

The value of bitcoin aside, we'd probably all be a lot better off if our fundamental human rights were secured through a series of blockchain technologies than resting in the hands of SV to allow us to speak, Mastercard to allow us to conduct commerce, and Bank of America to not place bullshit liens on our properties to attempt to fraudulently steal our homes. But it could still be that the negatives of blockchain (consumption of resources) outweighs the benefits too much for it to ever really happen at scale.

Blockchain will have a lifetime cycle, like everything else. Accurately predicting the length of that cycle is the domain of masters - we aren't armed to do it, it's safe to say. That's no denigration - I've watched the space for the better part of a decade, long enough to see the depth of the waters (for tiny example, I've owned Namecoin 😉 ), and still be a relative amateur. It encompasses finance, law, technology and politics.

Even at the simplest level, the economics of a marketplace ("the price of Bitcoin") and the merits of a product ("how useful a tool is blockchain?") are two quite different (and each themselves very complex) areas, as you've touched upon.

Or resource consumption, itself covering a vast swath of technicality, options, opinions, development and prospects.

We could write for days and barely scratch the surface. And ultimately, that reflects the sheer depth of human endeavour which has and is going into the space. Quite literally: that's "busy-ness".

A concept which is, in it's own way, an understandably challenging ethical paradox for some supporters of The Great Democratization. That financial success - and all it's trappings such as currency - seems to go hand-in-hand with, quite literally, "business".... so then, suddenly: "doh! we're back at Square 1!".

But hopefully, an incrementally-improved Square 1.

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:12:

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:10:

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:04:

Members of the public who are generally quite far from being financial system and global economics experts, but consider their judgement sufficient to dictate the global worthiness of complex technical and business structures like cryptocurrency and blockchain, are like people who aren't computer experts, judging computer architectures and operating systems.

Opinions are great but each is only worth the weight of information behind it.

Cryptocurrency is a commodity. It isn't controlled by anyone. The value goes up because more people think it's valuable. Not unlike any other commodity.

Oh the concept of control absolutely exists in crypto - it's controlled by money, like every financial product. More money, more control. Even merely the right tweet by the right person controls crypto.

The value goes up because people are using it. They can think all they want, but mental exercise doesn't change a price.

The only difference between what I said and what you said is the level of cynicism. It is a currency by definition. Of course it is controlled by money. All commodities are financial fads that go through boom/bust cycles. Cryptocurrency is no way any different.

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:48:

Blockchain will have a lifetime cycle, like everything else. Accurately predicting the length of that cycle is the domain of mas […]
Show full quote

Namrok wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:27:

Blockchain is one part of a series of interlocking pieces that are attempting to democratize core parts of our society. […]
Show full quote

Blockchain is one part of a series of interlocking pieces that are attempting to democratize core parts of our society.

Namely those pieces are blockchain, proof of work, and a system of rules that encourages competitive enforcement of the networks rules.

So to pick off the blockchain, it's a cryptographically secured record of every transaction that has ever occurred on the network. If the rules are properly enforced, nobody can unilaterally steal your ownership of the assets it secures. Nobody can shut down your account. Nobody can silence you. You see a lot of tepid development for a lot of blockchain based commerce, dns, etc. Basically lots of areas where regulatory capture has resulted in a small number of duopolies. Duopolies increasingly flexing their muscle, to all our detriment.

I keep saying "If the rules are properly enforced", and that is where proof of work and competition come in. How do you keep the rules of the network properly enforced? Well, you reward people for doing it. With Bitcoin, if you add a block to the blockchain, you get rewarded in more Bitcoin. But you don't want this happening whenever someone feels like. So you have the proof of work. It's arbitrary, but it slows things down, and forces participants to put their money where their mouth is. If you take all this time, equipment, and electricity successfully completing a proof of work, and then you do something fishy, the rest of the network will reject the block you attempted to add to the chain and you get nothing.

Now, there are certain downsides we're all living with here. The competition to add blocks to the chain has gotten a bit out of control, and is sucking all the air out of the room. Outside of speculative investing, the use cases for crypto assets has come up significantly short. I'd love to see blockchain secured DNS take off, like Namecoin. But it hasn't done shit. The current, centralized, monopolized systems we have for money and information infrastructure are still mostly preferable to most people. Even with massive censorship and massive observable inflation. Normies just go along to get along.

I'm not sure how this ends. I don't know if stable, useful blockchain technologies ever take off. I don't know if they always lurk in the background, keeping the monopolies they seek to replace honest. Or at least slightly more honest than they'd otherwise be. I don't know they'll vanish completely. The cynical part of me says regulatory capture manages to subvert them, and chain them to the same institutions they were supposed to free us from.

The value of bitcoin aside, we'd probably all be a lot better off if our fundamental human rights were secured through a series of blockchain technologies than resting in the hands of SV to allow us to speak, Mastercard to allow us to conduct commerce, and Bank of America to not place bullshit liens on our properties to attempt to fraudulently steal our homes. But it could still be that the negatives of blockchain (consumption of resources) outweighs the benefits too much for it to ever really happen at scale.

Blockchain will have a lifetime cycle, like everything else. Accurately predicting the length of that cycle is the domain of masters - we aren't armed to do it, it's safe to say. That's no denigration - I've watched the space for the better part of a decade, long enough to see the depth of the waters (for tiny example, I've owned Namecoin 😉 ), and still be a relative amateur. It encompasses finance, law, technology and politics.

Even at the simplest level, the economics of a marketplace ("the price of Bitcoin") and the merits of a product ("how useful a tool is blockchain?") are two quite different (and each themselves very complex) areas, as you've touched upon.

Or resource consumption, itself covering a vast swath of technicality, options, opinions, development and prospects.

We could write for days and barely scratch the surface. And ultimately, that reflects the sheer depth of human endeavour which has and is going into the space. Quite literally: that's "busy-ness".

A concept which is, in it's own way, an understandably challenging ethical paradox for some supporters of The Great Democratization. That financial success - and all it's trappings such as currency - seems to go hand-in-hand with, quite literally, "business".... so then, suddenly: "doh! we're back at Square 1!".

There are millions of copies of the ledger all over the world. That is what makes it public. There is no governing authority over crypto. That is by design. You don't need a giant hegemony of comic book villains to explain everything you see in the world.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:10:

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:04:

Members of the public who are generally quite far from being financial system and global economics experts, but consider their judgement sufficient to dictate the global worthiness of complex technical and business structures like cryptocurrency and blockchain, are like people who aren't computer experts, judging computer architectures and operating systems.

Opinions are great but each is only worth the weight of information behind it.

Cryptocurrency is a commodity. It isn't controlled by anyone. The value goes up because more people think it's valuable. Not unlike any other commodity.

And not unlike any other fiat currency.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-05-06, 19:08:

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:12:

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:10:

Cryptocurrency is a commodity. It isn't controlled by anyone. The value goes up because more people think it's valuable. Not unlike any other commodity.

Oh the concept of control absolutely exists in crypto - it's controlled by money, like every financial product. More money, more control. Even merely the right tweet by the right person controls crypto.

The value goes up because people are using it. They can think all they want, but mental exercise doesn't change a price.

The only difference between what I said and what you said is the level of cynicism. It is a currency by definition. Of course it is controlled by money. All commodities are financial fads that go through boom/bust cycles. Cryptocurrency is no way any different.

You say cynicism, I say supplemental information. We are not in disagreement.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-05-06, 19:11:

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:48:

Blockchain will have a lifetime cycle, like everything else. Accurately predicting the length of that cycle is the domain of mas […]
Show full quote

Namrok wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:27:

Blockchain is one part of a series of interlocking pieces that are attempting to democratize core parts of our society. […]
Show full quote

Blockchain is one part of a series of interlocking pieces that are attempting to democratize core parts of our society.

Namely those pieces are blockchain, proof of work, and a system of rules that encourages competitive enforcement of the networks rules.

So to pick off the blockchain, it's a cryptographically secured record of every transaction that has ever occurred on the network. If the rules are properly enforced, nobody can unilaterally steal your ownership of the assets it secures. Nobody can shut down your account. Nobody can silence you. You see a lot of tepid development for a lot of blockchain based commerce, dns, etc. Basically lots of areas where regulatory capture has resulted in a small number of duopolies. Duopolies increasingly flexing their muscle, to all our detriment.

I keep saying "If the rules are properly enforced", and that is where proof of work and competition come in. How do you keep the rules of the network properly enforced? Well, you reward people for doing it. With Bitcoin, if you add a block to the blockchain, you get rewarded in more Bitcoin. But you don't want this happening whenever someone feels like. So you have the proof of work. It's arbitrary, but it slows things down, and forces participants to put their money where their mouth is. If you take all this time, equipment, and electricity successfully completing a proof of work, and then you do something fishy, the rest of the network will reject the block you attempted to add to the chain and you get nothing.

Now, there are certain downsides we're all living with here. The competition to add blocks to the chain has gotten a bit out of control, and is sucking all the air out of the room. Outside of speculative investing, the use cases for crypto assets has come up significantly short. I'd love to see blockchain secured DNS take off, like Namecoin. But it hasn't done shit. The current, centralized, monopolized systems we have for money and information infrastructure are still mostly preferable to most people. Even with massive censorship and massive observable inflation. Normies just go along to get along.

I'm not sure how this ends. I don't know if stable, useful blockchain technologies ever take off. I don't know if they always lurk in the background, keeping the monopolies they seek to replace honest. Or at least slightly more honest than they'd otherwise be. I don't know they'll vanish completely. The cynical part of me says regulatory capture manages to subvert them, and chain them to the same institutions they were supposed to free us from.

The value of bitcoin aside, we'd probably all be a lot better off if our fundamental human rights were secured through a series of blockchain technologies than resting in the hands of SV to allow us to speak, Mastercard to allow us to conduct commerce, and Bank of America to not place bullshit liens on our properties to attempt to fraudulently steal our homes. But it could still be that the negatives of blockchain (consumption of resources) outweighs the benefits too much for it to ever really happen at scale.

Blockchain will have a lifetime cycle, like everything else. Accurately predicting the length of that cycle is the domain of masters - we aren't armed to do it, it's safe to say. That's no denigration - I've watched the space for the better part of a decade, long enough to see the depth of the waters (for tiny example, I've owned Namecoin 😉 ), and still be a relative amateur. It encompasses finance, law, technology and politics.

Even at the simplest level, the economics of a marketplace ("the price of Bitcoin") and the merits of a product ("how useful a tool is blockchain?") are two quite different (and each themselves very complex) areas, as you've touched upon.

Or resource consumption, itself covering a vast swath of technicality, options, opinions, development and prospects.

We could write for days and barely scratch the surface. And ultimately, that reflects the sheer depth of human endeavour which has and is going into the space. Quite literally: that's "busy-ness".

A concept which is, in it's own way, an understandably challenging ethical paradox for some supporters of The Great Democratization. That financial success - and all it's trappings such as currency - seems to go hand-in-hand with, quite literally, "business".... so then, suddenly: "doh! we're back at Square 1!".

There are millions of copies of the ledger all over the world. That is what makes it public. There is no governing authority over crypto. That is by design. You don't need a giant hegemony of comic book villains to explain everything you see in the world.

I tend to leave comic books out of business. Regardless, the financial status and successes of large corporations like Binance, Coinbase, Grayscale and Tether are very public knowledge. That's business, like it or not.

appiah4 wrote on 2021-05-06, 19:12:

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:10:

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-05-06, 18:04:

Members of the public who are generally quite far from being financial system and global economics experts, but consider their judgement sufficient to dictate the global worthiness of complex technical and business structures like cryptocurrency and blockchain, are like people who aren't computer experts, judging computer architectures and operating systems.

Opinions are great but each is only worth the weight of information behind it.

Cryptocurrency is a commodity. It isn't controlled by anyone. The value goes up because more people think it's valuable. Not unlike any other commodity.

And not unlike any other fiat currency.

The ways that cyrpto is different from fiat currency is what makes it valuable. Central banks and governments actively manipulate the value of currencies all the time by holding or releasing reserves of it. That is no secret, it is a matter of public policy that is debated on - out in the open - all the time.

You can print more dollars but there are a finite number of bitcoins. You can manipulate interest rates and influence inflation but no central authority has that influence over cyrpto currencies.

They are a thing of the internet - good and bad. What bitcoin does well is deliver on its promises of freedom and (albeit somewhat limited) anonymity. The reason it will never replace fiat currencies is for precisely those same reasons. With no central authority to stabilize the currency it will also be too volatile to deal in. No business can afford to spend 150 bit coins as an investment or save 200 bitcoins for a future quarter if they have no idea what the value of that currency will be in the future. Fiat currencies inflate at a rather predictable rate - especially stable currencies like the Euro and the dollar. Bitcoin does not.