Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Discussion Thread

[Az_Rael]

I set up a miner back in 2012/2013ish and mined like 1/20 of a BitCoin or something. Spent more in electricity than I got out of it, so shut it down. Plus, my husband didn't like having the machine running at full bore 24/7, thought it might blow a power supply while we were out or something. Probably still have it in a wallet somewhere.

My only interaction anymore is annoyance when the prices of some video cards used by miners go to stupid numbers and regular gamers can't get a hold of them.



Hmmm. Looking at prices today, maybe I should find that account and see if its still there....

 

[BinaryField]

I set up a miner back in 2012/2013ish and mined like 1/20 of a BitCoin or something. Spent more in electricity than I got out of it, so shut it down. Plus, my husband didn't like having the machine running at full bore 24/7, thought it might blow a power supply while we were out or something. Probably still have it in a wallet somewhere.

My only interaction anymore is annoyance when the prices of some video cards used by miners go to stupid numbers and regular gamers can't get a hold of them.



Hmmm. Looking at prices today, maybe I should find that account and see if its still there....

I did the same during that time period. I remember that it was something like 1 BTC = 12 USD. Mined up a whole coin and bought some novelty goods with it and had a fraction of a coin left. Opened up that wallet again last week and found that I had .003 BTC. It's like finding a $20 bill in an old pair of jeans!

 

[Az_Rael]

Hmmm. Looking at prices today, maybe I should find that account and see if its still there....

Ah, just found the account. It was actually LTC, not BTC, and it appears the pool went dark unexpectedly earlier this year. So, whatever $$ I had there is gone. WeMineLTC just shut down their site and twitter accounts. • r/litecoin


Biggest reason why I haven't invested real sums of money into the game - lots of shady groups, etc.

 

[Skipdd]

It seems there are quite a few of us that are interested in what's happening in this space so I thought it was time to bring it to its own thread.

Personally, I am very interested but still learning. I have a small amount of my investment portfolio in Ethereum and a smaller amount in Bitcoin, both in Coinbase. I am probably up around 60% at the moment. As I learn more over the coming weeks, I will share it here.

More than only cryptocurrencies, the blockchain technology holds very interesting promise as investment opportunity (not advice...)

Some OTC stocks:
Top stocks, companies, and cryptocurrencies to invest in for the blockchain boom

More mainstream blue chip:
3 Ways to Invest in Blockchain Technology Without Buying Bitcoins

I agree with this approach. Investing in the currencies themselves feels a lot like commodities trading w/o even the underlying value of the commodity - way too volatile unless you are just "playing" with a pot of money for fun, like going to a casino. Just my view. Blockchain on the other hand, seems like it could solve a bunch of problems and also disrupt some industries.

 

[dhanson865]

Ah, just found the account. It was actually LTC, not BTC, and it appears the pool went dark unexpectedly earlier this year. So, whatever $$ I had there is gone. WeMineLTC just shut down their site and twitter accounts. • r/litecoin


Biggest reason why I haven't invested real sums of money into the game - lots of shady groups, etc.

LTC is still worth $55.55 per Litecoin (LTC) price, charts, market cap, and other metrics | CoinMarketCap

with BTC at $7400 at this time Cryptocurrency Market Capitalizations | CoinMarketCap

 

[avoigt]

I was investigating an engagement a few years ago and followed the development since. Most of the reasons why I did not buy any has been listed, like: not transparent, small group of people who influence it, not regulated, no authority with rules, unclearness about blockchain technology, lots of hype and less reasoning etc.

Nevertheless I decided later to be a part of that movement but only with an indirect investment. Thats why I bought Nvidia.

 

[GoTslaGo]

I was investigating an engagement a few years ago and followed the development since. Most of the reasons why I did not buy any has been listed, like: not transparent, small group of people who influence it, not regulated, no authority with rules, unclearness about blockchain technology, lots of hype and less reasoning etc.

Nevertheless I decided later to be a part of that movement but only with an indirect investment. Thats why I bought Nvidia.

Beauty about your choice for NVDA is that they are much more than just bitcoin:

I have struggled with this problem on NVDA. I am a programmer and I know a little bit...

NVidia was a sleeper hit... they make graphics cards that seemed like an unimportant PC subsystem... but it's turning out to be more important than the cpu... It can be used for games, crypto-currency mining, AR, VR and machine learning. The opportunity in front of them is huge. They may be bigger than Intel down the road.

Their advantage imho is CUDA. It's a proprietary api that runs on their cards and is considered superior (faster) to competitors and open standards like openCL/GL. A lot of open source machine learning software uses cuda at the lowest levels.... So it has an ecosystem around it that is going to be hard to overcome, much like windows operating system.

However, there may be competition. Currently AMD is their main competition. Intel also recently bought Nervana to compete with them.

Google has written TensorFlow, an open source machine learning library, which runs on cuda or on their own proprietary chips called TPUs. These chips are not available for sale but you can use them in the Google cloud. Google cloud has not really taken off yet and I dont know if it will.

Also, Tesla has been hiring people with expertise in chip making... so they may also build their own chips to process their self driving/machine learning apps. Tesla is buying chps from Nvidia in 2 ways. One way is in the cars... to do the self driving (inference) and the other way is the presumably have a data center that processes the (training) data from all the cars and generates the program that is downloaded to the cars. I suspect Tesla will also need the same chip technology in their factory automation.

Elon recently said that it was close when deciding between NVidia or competitors... I assume that was a bullshit statement for negotiation purposes... Here is a thread where machine learning programmers bemoan NVidia's dominance and links to papers that indicate CUDA is 4x faster than OpenCL

Deep learning is so dependent on nVidia. Are there any alternatives even on the horizon? • r/MachineLearning

Yep, I’m in NVDA too. Bitcoin was a secondary benefit for me. I’ve always liked their graphics cards. Only learned about their other advantages recently.

 

[Az_Rael]

LTC is still worth $55.55

Right, but the coins I had remaining were in that pool that I referenced. So they basically stole everyone’s money who was in that pool and didn’t cash out before they locked everyone out. (They locked out withdrawals before shutting the site down entirely)

 

[ulrichard]

Right, but the coins I had remaining were in that pool that I referenced. So they basically stole everyone’s money who was in that pool and didn’t cash out before they locked everyone out. (They locked out withdrawals before shutting the site down entirely)

Rule number one in crypto currencies: Hold them yourself.

 

[Az_Rael]

Rule number one in crypto currencies: Hold them yourself.

Which, as I said, is why I haven’t gotten into it with any serious money. If there are no trustworthy places to keep my assets except my own home or in a safety deposit box, then the whole market is too risky for me.

When I can add a crypto currency wallet to my Vanguard account, for example, I might look into it then.

 

[bkp_duke]

Mined about 125 BTC about 4 years ago. Have steadily been selling everything off over the course of the past 9 months.

REALLY REALLY wish I held them all till the past month and sold, but hindsight is 20/20, right?

 

[BinaryField]

Mined about 125 BTC about 4 years ago. Have steadily been selling everything off over the course of the past 9 months.

REALLY REALLY wish I held them all till the past month and sold, but hindsight is 20/20, right?

You should never feel bad about missed profits. The situation could have easily gone the other way with the price crashing. If you didn't lose money, I'd say that you were a winner.

 

[bkp_duke]

You should never feel bad about missed profits. The situation could have easily gone the other way with the price crashing. If you didn't lose money, I'd say that you were a winner.

Very true. I cannot sniff at a 16-fold return on my investment in 4 years time.

 

[Az_Rael]

Some news today

'Accidental' bug may have frozen $280 million worth of digital coin ether in a cryptocurrency wallet

 

[Ulmo]

Some news today

'Accidental' bug may have frozen $280 million worth of digital coin ether in a cryptocurrency wallet

I emphasize the word "ether" in the above link; that is, ETH (i.e., Ethereum). Bugs and those types of losses and freezes are common in Ethereum, due to the way it was designed, and the rest of us look at it semi-humorously as "see, they did it again" type event. To those with the stranded ether, this should show you to do your due diligence better.

The ideas put forth by those behind Ethereum are somewhat advanced, and most of those ideas and many more ideas not thought of yet are coming, definitely in the future, but not all of them at the same speed and implementation style as being done in Ethereum, which is way too immature, and doing some things just wrong. While I welcome the experimentation, they went too far incorrectly with some things over there. I personally stick with more conservative cryptocurrencies, that can bring most of those future concepts online using more maturity.

 

[dhanson865]

ETH might be younger, but make no mistake BTC isn't without risk.

Have you heard about the flippening? People first talked about ETH as the likely winner, now it's BCH. Either way if a fork takes off and becomes the dominant force and you don't maneuver through the transition properly you could lose some or all of your value.

If I had hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars worth of BTC it'd scare the heck out of me. All the ways you can screw up and get your bitcoin stolen or lose access to it and there is no FDIC style protection, no VISA/MC/Discover style protection. If you lose it, its gone.

And the ways it takes to convert BTC to USD in my checking account all involve giving my BTC to a third party that can walk away with it or driving to another city to hit a physical ATM and drive away with $10,000 in hand. What's the odds you get robbed or killed for that $10,000? I sure wouldn't want to go to a known location and then have to drive hundreds of miles home with a ton of cash on me.

 

[ZeApelido]

I threw in a "play money" amount a few years ago, some in BTC and some in ETH. I read a good amount about both of them, but I have no clue what's going to happen. I just cashed out 25% of my holdings for a nice 4x my original investment. Now I feel much better that even if they absolutely bust, I made a good payoff, and at the same time I can continue to root for their appreciation.

 

[ulrichard]

Have you heard about the flippening? People first talked about ETH as the likely winner, now it's BCH.

Wishfull thinking on their part. Nothing wrong with that.

All the ways you can screw up and get your bitcoin stolen or lose access to it and there is no FDIC style protection, no VISA/MC/Discover style protection.

Those protections are nothing more but promises. If they worked so well, Bitcoin would have much less reason to exist. Those protections didn't help Wikileaks nor the people of Cyprus who had their wealth confiscated. And that is even before looking at the slow stealing through inflation.
If you hold your private keys, and follow apropriate security protocols, nobody can steal your BTC.

And the ways it takes to convert BTC to USD in my checking account ...

Why would you want to convert large amounts of BTC into USD in the first place.

... all involve giving my BTC to a third party that can walk away with it ...

One paragraph earlier you were content with a third party holding your wealth. Promises or "protections" were enough to convince you, they wouldn't run with your money, and now suddenly you are concerned?

or driving to another city to hit a physical ATM and drive away with $10,000 in hand. What's the odds you get robbed or killed for that $10,000? I sure wouldn't want to go to a known location and then have to drive hundreds of miles home with a ton of cash on me.

Same with any ATM... I don't even know if they are usually stocked with that large sums.

 

[abasile]

Why would you want to convert large amounts of BTC into USD in the first place.

Why, to pay for Tesla vehicles, solar roofs, and Powerwalls! (unless Tesla chooses to accept BTC)

 

[bkp_duke]

That was yesterday, and basically I have no sympathy for people that don't keep proper backups and store their wallets in public systems.

Why, to pay for Tesla vehicles, solar roofs, and Powerwalls! (unless Tesla chooses to accept BTC)

Man after my own heart.