minor correction: 1933, not 1968.

in simplest terms ... you buy a powerful computer. you download a program which is your miner. this program downloads chunks of data and performs billions of calculations on it, known as "work". as your computer hashes through these billions of calculations, it effectively finds tiny fractions of bitcoin (or monero or etherium or whatever you're mining). most miners operate in a pool, which means they pool their resources together and get paid in proportion to the amount of work they contributed to that pool's bitcoins generated.

i'm sure pedants will jump in eager to "correct" me by complicating things, but that's the simplest gist of it. if it sounds like the end user is just wasting tons of electricity to do pointless work to generate imaginary money ... you're not entirely wrong. but having said that, i do think cryptocurrency's importance in world markets will only grow in years to come.

great plan ... so long as the apocalypse strikes in your lifetime. in which case ... congrats?

i would definitely agree that one should know as much as possible about a thing before investing in it, and cryptocurrency is certainly fairly complicated and confusing. furthermore, anyone getting into it today has indeed missed their chance for a 10x ROI in a couple years or whatever, but that doesn't mean it can't be a good investment (that's not advice -- i have no idea what the crypto markets are going to do).

everyone knows about that. this isn't an irrational craze for an arbitrary product. it's potentially a revolutionary form of currency that can't be counterfeited or manipulated by banks and governments due to its decentralized nature. that's the intent, at least.

it's not nonsense -- but the question is still open whether it will be successful.

kinda seems like you don't know much about the subject.

no need for insults. it's okay, lack of understanding of cryptocurrency is nothing to be embarrassed about.

bitcoin is an attempt to improve on traditional fiat currencies by using cryptography to ensure the integrity of transactions. its decentralized nature prevents central banks or governments from being able to arbitrarily print additional units. also, bitcoin's blockchain is a ledger that is shared across multiple networks that is a permanent, accessable record of every transaction a bitcoin has undergone forever. it can't be hacked or stolen because of the distributed nature of its accounting.

you say that bitcoin is not backed by anything. well, it's backed by decentralized proof of its provenance (blockchain), and the proof of work required to generate it. that puts it two steps ahead of the U.S. dollar. remember that all currency is fundamentally only backed by a society's mass acceptance that it has intrinsic value. you can't eat gold, after all.

i don't know the future (and i don't have any money in bitcoin) but comparing it to the tulip mania fad is not accurate. there's certainly interesting underlying theories behind it.

rapid increase in valuation alone is not enough to justify the comparison. demand increased, and prices responded. that's how literally all markets work. some of them are bubbles, some are not.

it does your argument no good to propose your opinions and then declare them indisputable facts. of course it's deniable that bitcoin is a bubble or some kind of mania. the increased demand is due to increased awareness and liquidity through better online tools. i'm sure there are a number of people looking to get rich as with any market, but a great many advocates or buyers of bitcoin do so because they believe it to be on firmer ideological footing than currencies backed by a Federal Reserve. Do some research instead of committing to your first knee-jerk reaction. There may be more to it than you realize.

and that's different from dollars how?

Why did you fax that to yourself seven times before posting it?

this is complete nonsense. saying the sole purpose of bitcoin is so "bad people can pay each other for things that are bad" is as stupid as saying pinball's sole purpose is gambling.

you can't buy bitcoin stock. (although you could buy AMD/NVIDIA, the companies that make the hardware that mine the coins. those stocks have been killing it)

you can buy bitcoins themselves on an exchange such as bitfinix. https://www.bitfinex.com/

as with any investment, it's probably not a good idea to invest any money you can't afford to lose.

i suggest you learn about why it is unhackable. it uses a distributed accounting system that requires consensus from 10,000 distinct nodes across the globe. you'd have to orchestrate more than half of those nodes to conspire and cooperate with your attack without anyone noticing in order to be successful. It's not going to happen.

now of course an individual can always be scammed -- but that's a universal truth that has nothing to do with cryptocurrency.

true. but an exchange is not a bank. it's a marketplace. securely storing your currency is what digital wallets are for.

actually what's happening here is you're not understanding what i'm saying.

no. nobody can. and even if they could (which they can't) it would be noticed and blocked before it did any damage.

yes an individual can be hacked. yes a marketplace can be hacked, just like Yahoo or Pizza Hut or Equifax or Xbox or Arbys or any one of the thousands of businesses using U.S. dollars.

and of course people will never cease getting scammed, regardless of the currency they use. that has nothing to do with bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency.

but the bitcoin network itself cannot be hacked.

the encryption protecting digital wallets cannot be hacked.

(although they can be compromised through social engineering -- but once again, no system, no matter how secure -- and that includes money in a safe in your basement -- is safe if its owner is tricked into giving away the key. that's not hacking.)

i can't believe i have to explain this to you a third time. bitcoin cannot be hacked. if you store your digital currency in an encrypted wallet, it is 100% safe unless you personally mess up and give your credentials away.

an exchange is a store like any other. you don't keep your money in a store.

literally nobody claimed bitcoin makes someone immune to corruption or thievery (although it is immune to counterfeiting).

i'm not taking the debate personally (i mentioned earlier i own zero bitcoins), but i am getting frustrated trying to explain the same concepts over and over.

there are 21 million bitcoins and there will never be any more than that. approximately 16.7 million of those 21 million have been mined already. the remainder are still undiscovered.

like gold, there is a finite supply. new bitcoins cannot be created without re-writing the bitcoin protocol, which due to its distributed nature, would in effect require a majority consensus of all bitcoin holders, which obviously would never happen, since you'd be asking people to voluntarily devalue their own assets.

it's no more edible than gold or diamonds or dollars.

yeah i get that. all i can offer is that the only difference between bitcoin and traditional currencies in that regard is the number of people who agree it has value.

in my opinion, there are two main advantages bitcoin has over, say, the U.S. dollar:
- actual, enforced scarcity: unlike dollars, no person/government/bank can simply print a bunch of new ones when they want. there are 21 million and that's all there'll ever be.
- the blockchain: a permanent, unalterable, distributed public ledger of every bitcoin transaction. it's a currency that comes with a practically infallible accounting / trust / clearinghouse / verification system built in. it eliminates the need for trusted third parties, intermediaries, or central authorities to approve transactions.

sure, i understand that. as with physical security, in digital security, the only way to make something 100% secure is to do without it. but we are not talking about bitcoin in a void. we are talking about it in relation to physical currency, and the security risks associated with that.

true. security itself is not enough to guarantee the coin itself will retain value. there are lots of other factors at work and nobody knows the future. my point about the wallets was just to point out that you don't keep all your money at Wal-Mart, you keep it somewhere relatively safe, and you bring it to the store when you're ready to buy something. i was trying to clarify wallets versus exchanges, because people were talking about exchanges getting hacked.

fox news and other mainstream media giving it exposure.

If you're not going to bother understanding the points I'm making please do not attempt to describe them.

I doubt you'd think it was funny if someone showed no ability to understand what you were saying to them, and then went around misrepresenting what you said.

Your participation in this thread is adding zero value to the conversation. Your opinion was registered early on. People responded to it, and you've ignored every response and continued to harp on the same straw man critique repeatedly. It's boring and annoying.

i think most exchanges that accept US dollars from US citizens are trying to stay on the government's good side. it's not a way to cheat on taxes. at least, not without diving into the seedier side of things.

if you'd even bothered to read my posts, you would have seen i mentioned multiple times that i don't even own any bitcoin, and also said multiple times that i don't know if it will be successful or not. i get that you're not capable of understanding the concepts behind cryptocurrency, but statements like "i don't have any money in bitcoin" and " i have no idea what the crypto markets are going to do" should not be above your reading level.

also how embarrassing is it for you that you were so upset by someone's posts that for a moment you thought it was a great idea to take a magic marker, write their username on a piece of paper, stick it on a toilet, take a picture, and uploaded it to the internet?

Seconded. WindowsXP is not secure.

just tell your bank you're going to be wiring money first. wire transfers are red flags for scams these days, so unusual ones tend to get flagged.

well, part of that caution and concern is justified, but there is also the fact that secure digital currencies are a direct threat to banks, so you can expect a little fearmongering on their part. walk into any dealership in America and mention Tesla for a similar effect.

Crazy volatility the last few days. Right now Bitcoin is about where it was at the start of the thread, but it went way up, went way down, and then recovered a bit.

I started mining Monero ... i've been into computer hardware and overclocking and system management stuff since the 90s. So it's kind of fun for me purely as a hobby even if i just break even. It's some nice passive income, but to make a truly impressive amount of money, you'd either have to make a huge capital investment up front, have access to a shitload of free equipment, or deploy a botnet. And of course know exactly what you're doing, hardware-wise.

Monero's been doing very well, though. Up like 50% over the last 25 days. If the value holds (who the hell knows), my break even point on the hardware i bought will be about 3-4 months. It's interesting, if nothing else.

i'll PM you.

okay, okay.

I built a mining rig with five Radeon Vega 56's.

IMG_1827 (resized).JPG

Excuse the mess. That's not it's final resting place, that's just where i'm putting it together. It's not quite finished, but it does hash perfectly (so far).

IMG_1828 (resized).JPG

Here it is going full blast. those red and blue LEDs indicate the level of usage of the GPUs -- they're all pegged at 100% in that image. Hash rate is about 10k/second.

The rig is pulling a constant 800 watts. That'll add a little over $50 to my electric bill. (9 cents per kwh in my area)

Each Vega is currently netting me about 1 Monero per month apiece. For now, it looks like i'll break even on the hardware costs in about 3-4 months, but there are several variables. Worst case scenario, I can always sell those cards - they're desirable for gaming. So there's a bit of an escape hatch if things turn sour.

The rig is pretty loud and hot. I've got the windows open in my office, and even though it's like 40 degrees out, it's at least 70 degrees in here, haha.

well, in my opinion, the currencies aren't fake and the resources aren't wasted -- they are used to build something i believe has genuine value.

but yeah, in mining circles, i'm a gen-x progressive more or less surrounded by libertarian millennials. ugh, haha.

Monero (the coin I’ve been mining) ain’t doin too bad.

...? Who claimed the creator didn’t profit?

It's interesting to me how many people declare with absolute certainty that Bitcoin is worthless and imaginary and a bubble about to pop, and haughtily threaten that they'll be there to say "i told you so" when it finally does. The thing about that is, the same people have been making that pronouncement ever since bitcoin was worth $1, and $10, and $100, and $1000. It's now closing in on $10,000. Let me be clear -- I am not citing those figures to try to show it will continue to go up. I have no idea what it will do. It could crash tomorrow for all I know. Only one thing's certain - the skeptics have been wrong so far.

I mean, there is a Bitcoin ATM down the road from me, at a Shell station. If four years ago, any arbitrary Bitcoin skeptic, instead of typing on the internet that they'd be proven right someday, they had invested twenty dollars in Bitcoin instead, then they'd be able to walk up to that ATM today and withdraw ten thousand dollars ($200 two years ago would also be worth about $10,000 today). I mean i'm sure it's nice to have a strong, rational argument, an ironclad philosophy of what factors fundamentally imbue a currency with value, and even in the end be proven right years down the road if bitcoin crashes ... but personally, i'd rather have the ten grand.

Obviously, nobody should be putting their kids' college funds in bitcoin or whatever, and in my opinion a DIVERSE portfolio is the best defense against unforeseen future events. I'm just pointing out that between a hypothetical "TULIPS!" guy and a hypothetical guy who tossed a $20 bill at bitcoin 4 years ago ... well, who wouldn't rather be the latter?

would love to hear which part of that RonaldRayGun disagrees with.

I didn't hype up anything. You misunderstood my post. My point was that the skeptics have lost out on a ton of money already, which is a fact. I was talking about the past, not predicting the future. I feel I've been very clear on that.

The tulips aren't hypothetical. I was comparing two hypothetical PEOPLE -- a person who years ago decided bitcoin was fundamentally worthless for philosophical reasons, vs someone who invested $20 a couple years ago. Whether or not person one's arguments have merit, the fact remains they could have made a fortune instead.

This is not new information to anyone in this thread.

repeatedly saying "i have no idea if it will go up or down" and "i have no bitcoin" is hyping bitcoin?

i'm mining Monero, which is a totally different cryptocurrency not based on the Bitcoin protocol.

the point i've been trying to get across is that on one side of the debate you have people insisting their arguments are sound, and on the other side you have people whose investment has increased 10,000-fold. unless the latter are 100% invested and have never taken out a dime, they're the clear winners here even if bitcoin DOES crash. (which is a possibility)

i signed up for Kraken, and my experience was similar to yours. getting verified was a complete pain in the ass. in the end, i wound up not even using it for what i planned (depositing cash). You might try finding a bitcoin ATM and depositing cash that way. I'm pretty sure you can deposit straight to coinbase that way.

https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-atm-map/

Wrong link?

why the all or nothing strategy? why not only cash out half? you're still up like 50,000%, and still maintain a way to earn more.

right now approximately 0.1% of my total net worth is in cryptocurrency. i'm not sure i could even call it an investment. i'm going small and staying home.

right now everyone who had bought in over the last year and told themselves "ok if it ever hits $10k i'm selling" is doing just that. once the correction levels off, it'll be a good time to buy again -- maybe $8000 or so? just a wild ass guess.

i think it's possible there are more potential states to an investment than "100% guaranteed" and "40% chance of success"

yes! (2 years ago)

an exchange is not a bank. it's a store. keep your cryptocoin in an offline wallet. bring it to the store when you're ready to buy something.

agreed ... but so what? why is it important that it be a widely-used direct currency? (honest question)

also, there are many legitimate marketplaces that take bitcoin ... but they are definitely outliers for now. i'm just saying it isn't only drugs and illegal goods.)

transactions through Fidelity and other brokers can take days to settle, and have much higher transaction fees. plus, as long as the integrity and security of the transaction is assured (by the blockchain public ledger), then the delay isn't that big a deal.

i dunno, i think they are probably waiting for the price to stablize. that's probably more important to them than the potential upside of it continuing to inflate.

Depends on your definition of “have to”. You’re certainly legally obligated to.

i agree it's a speculative investment. that's definitely what i'm doing with Monero. But i disagree that the *only* force driving its value is speculation. also, i very much disagree that the product is without a future. i think the next 12 months will see a dramatic increase in the number of marketplaces that accept bitcoin as payment. i could be wrong. we'll see.

the blockchain was specifically designed to obviate the need for precisely those protections that middlemen provide. one of the main points of bitcoin was that it comes with its own built-in middleman protections in the form of a public ledger.

it reminds me of the early days of the internet, when people would wring their hands about how anonymous everyone was and how scary that concept was -- when in reality, the opposite was true. it's actually harder to be anonymous on the internet than it is in real life. same is true of bitcoin. if you want to launder money or do something shady, use cash. Bitcoin is neither anonymous nor untraceable, and people will begin to realize that eventually.

i literally just said that is probably the reason Amazon hasn't decided to accept bitcoin yet. i don't hope it goes up. i hope (and believe) it will find a stable spot so that businesses and consumers can actually use it as a currency with confidence. who wants to buy a pizza with an amount that might be worth $500 a week from now? at this point, stability would be better for bitcoin's existence as a currency than continued escalation would be.

i agree -- it's a very risky market and nobody should be investing money they can't afford to lose. it's brand new and there's effectively zero oversight, other than the protections built into the coins and protocols themselves, and basic corporate equivalent of survival instinct.

nah. there's more to a bubble than a thing rising in value.

John McAfee is a looney toon, and has been for years.

bitcoin was never intended to be anonymous.

ugh all anyone uses the stock market for is illegal purchases and speculation.

there is a bitcoin ATM a few minutes away from me at a Shell station. I could walk up to it right now and withdraw (or deposit) up to $9,999 USD per day. It's a pretty easy process. i've used it to deposit money to an exchange, where I bought a small amount of Monero.

It's a pain right now, but keep in mind the tech is in its infancy. It's really not super complicated once you get yourself set up. For me, depositing money at an ATM to an exchange turned out to be very easy. I then bought some Monero at the exchange, and sent it to my wallet. Done. I can reverse the process in a matter of minutes any time I want.

Note that nobody should be keeping the bulk of their money in an exchange. Exchanges are a marketplace.

Second -- yes, storage technology is a weak link in the chain currently. Hard drives are not a reliable long term store of data, and therefore they are not a reliable long term store of the keys to your wallet. It will be interesting seeing what (additional) tech solutions pop up to address that need.

NiceHash appears to have been hacked. They were by far the most user-friendly mining software out there. Apparently about $64 million in bitcoin that they were holding in pending payouts or NiceHash proprietary wallets were all transferred to a single account of unknown provenance.

I kinda liked NiceHash -- it is (was) a somewhat different approach ... when running NiceHash, instead of mining coin for yourself directly, what it did was run a benchmark on your computer to determine the most profitable algorithm (be it XMR, Etherium, whatever), and then run that algorithm on behalf of someone else. A third party receives the Etherium or XMR or whatever that you are mining, and NiceHash pays you in Bitcoin for letting them use your cycles. NiceHash was basically a middleman between people who would buy contracts of processing power from them, and people who would install their software and get paid in Bitcoin to run it.

It was great for people who wanted to mine, but wanted to end up with Bitcoin instead of whatever random coin their hardware was actually best at mining.

And now it appears they have had a catastrophic security breach.

Once again .. any NiceHash users who made a practice of keeping their bitcoin in their own offline wallet should be ok. What was lost was only what was in NiceHash's possession.

i take issue with the methodology there and i think it's hugely misleading. the energy consumption is huge, but it's devoted to mining coins, which will soon be a moot point (by 2020 there won't be any bitcoins left to mine). However, they are expressing power usage as a function of transaction volume -- dividing the energy used mining by the number of transactions, which is a false correlation. i mean, it's valid in that yes, bitcoin is using that much energy, and yes maintaining the blockchain is PART of that, but it falsely implies that all this energy usage is necessary just to perform transactions and maintain the blockchain. But the vast majority of that energy is being consumed mining, not calculating transactions (and yes i understand that miners are the ones calculating transactions).

i'm having trouble finding data on how much energy it will consume to maintain the blockchain (i.e. perform transactions) once all the coins are mined. it seems to me it will be a tiny fraction of the current amount devoted to mining.

here's an article that kind of explains what i'm getting at. it points out that you COULD run bitcoin's transaction network on a dozen old PCs, and get bitcoin to a point where it consumed less energy per transaction than a Visa card. it's the mining that's consuming all the energy, not the transactions themselves (although the miners are also calculating the transactions).

http://mashable.com/2017/12/01/bitcoin-energy/#ASHXxgJlEPqn

the NiceHash hack has resulted in a hundred thousand noobs who can barely install a video card driver suddenly jumping into Monero pools, drastically raising the difficulty of the coin i've been happily mining for the last month!

meh, if i'd spent that money on XMR instead of XMR mining hardware, i'd be up 300% instead of still waiting to break even. i mean i WILL break even and then profit, since i'm accumulating coins steadily, but it takes time.

utlimately, compared to simply buying coins, i think there is less risk involved with mining, but it also takes a lot longer to pay off, and there is less upside.

yep, i misread that.

i posted that two days ago.

Oh good another tulips post. Thanks for the original insight!

dude you are like the 10th person to show up in this thread and shout "TULIPS!" without reading it. it's annoying after a while.

it's not that it differs from my own opinion. it's that it is the number one knee jerk reaction that every single person who doesn't know what they're talking about tends to bring up. they pop in here without reading the thread and shout "TULIPS" as if it's some brilliant inside information, instead of the most superficial and obvious thing a person could possibly post.

it's not about your opinion. it's about not reading the thread, and busting in with the most superficial and uninformed possible take that has already been posted a dozen times.

because i simply can't leave a good thing well enough alone: out of boredom, over the last few days i've switched my mining rig over to mining Electroneum and then Karbowanec instead of Monero. The returns seem a little bit higher, but it's a lot more hassle, because i'm basically dumping the coins as fast as i mine them because i don't have the same faith in them that i have in Monero (which i just hold).

Just be careful, folks. Don’t goof around with money you can’t afford to lose.

Monero killin it.

it's going to be really annoying when bitcoin goes from $17000 to like $8000 or something, and some guy who's been shouting "SCAM" since it was $10 starts going "I TOLD YOU SO" even though the truth is he'd be a millionaire if he'd invested in it when he first started calling it a scam. i mean ... if you call something a scam and it increases in value 1000-fold and then loses half its value .. you were still wrong by a factor of 500.

and just to follow up on that thought ... if you DO know the market is about to crash, then i have to assume you bought in some time ago, in order to sell just prior to the crash and reap an incredible windfall from your foreknowledge.

Agreed, it's irresponsible to go around aggressively shilling for it, or trying to convince people to put money into it. I don't think i'm guilty of that. But it's hard not to defend it a little if i'm in a group and someone says "oh my god, bitcoin, what a scam, who are these idiots? Don't they know they're going to lose EVERYTHING! I'll be there laughing in their face" and so on.

I haven't recruited anyone. A lot of my friends have asked me about it over the last month, and unless they are just looking to augment their existing portfolio or already own hardware capable of mining, i've advised against it. You and i have a mutual friend who i suggested the latter to, since he already owned a high-end video card (actually, i suggested he try out NiceHash on his existing gaming PC -- lol. glad he never followed through!). Last week, he told me he's now thinking about building a dedicated mining rig, and if he does decide to do it, i told him i'd help him pick out parts and configure it, since i've been down that road already. I'm not trying to run a ponzi scheme -- i think offering help in an area i know about is just being a friend. I kinda doubt he'll do it, anyway.

i have a bit. i do believe blockchain-based digital currency has an amazing future for transactions. there are tons of advantages.

I’d respond, but I don’t wanna be a scammy shill.

....what authorities?

I’m not one to tell others what to do with their money and as I’ve said a dozen times on this thread I have no idea what the market will do, but personally I wouldn’t put $50k in this way at this point. Not that im some kind of expert.

i sold 80% of my monero and bitcoin yesterday. for once (and chalk it up to luck! i do not know the future!) i timed the market right.

i'm still mining, but right now i'm just converting anything i mine directly to dollars instead of holding it.

one of the benefits of mining is when coins go down in value, it reduces your profits, sure, but you don't LOSE money.

if you think bitcoin is anonymous, you probably think the internet is anonymous. in other words, you are in for a rude awakening.

if you want anonymity, use cash.

When the price plummets like this, the amount mined per hour goes up. It's a little like buying the dip without doing anything.

Granted it's small potatoes compared to actual investing, since mining is a constant trickle instead of a targeted injection.

for $127 million it's worth the one-in-a-million shot of looking.

people do the same shit on the stock market. are people really under the impression speculation and gambling don't take place all over wall street?

looks like bitcoin is stabilizing / recovering. it needed a dip. anyone who bought in more than a few days ago is still way up i think.

ugh trend analysis is 1000% bullshit. drawing lines and assigning fancy names to dips and peaks is no more predictive than reading tea leaves. pseudo-scientific pseudo-logic.

oh?

"All digital currency that Coinbase holds online is fully insured. This means that if Coinbase were to suffer a breach of its online storage, the insurance policy would pay out to cover any customer funds lost as a result."

"If you are a United States resident, your Coinbase USD Wallet is covered by FDIC insurance, up to a maximum of $250,000."

https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/1662379-how-is-coinbase-insured-

read the paragraph again. *all* the coinbase wallets are insured. the USD wallets are FDIC insured.

meh. don't run your power supplies at 110% and you're fine. it's consumer-grade gamer hardware with a half dozen thermal sensors per component. the PSU, motherboard, processor, and GPUs all shut down if they detect a short or excessive heat. keep everything within spec and there's practically no danger. my rig has two power supplies running at about 65% capacity each. i keep the video card GPUs at 45 degrees celsius, which is extremely cool (about 85 degrees celsius is the manufacturer-recommended max temp).

my setup's making about $65 a day at the moment (8x Vega 56, 2x Radeon 390) not gonna make me rich, but i'm happy for the extra income.

yeah that $65 is not counting electricity. so roughly $1900 or so per month gross, but it's highly variable. i'll probably come in a little below that this month, and over time i expect revenue to decrease as mining difficulty rises.

i undervolt the cards -- at stock voltages, they would use a lot more power. all told, i'm under 2000 watts for everything mining-related (i'm using kill-a-watt meters to measure). at 9 cents per kwh, it works out to costing me roughly $120 per month in electricity.

because of fluctuations in price and difficulty that happened to work out in my favor, the rig actually paid for itself in a little over a month. so at this point it's pure profit. and then when i do decide to pack it in (probably in the spring, but who knows), i can sell the video cards -- right now used Vega cards are going for $600+ apiece on ebay (that probably wont last, but they'll still be worth something in a few months). i will keep everything else (the frame, motherboard, processor, hard drive, fans, PSUs), and then maybe in the fall invest in another batch of the latest video card hardware, and plug them into the same rig ... depending on where the market is and so on.

yeah good question, i am honestly not sure.

90% of the time i'm simply mining Monero. my cryptonite hashrate is about 18khs (those Vegas are beasts). In the last week, the profitability of Monero has dropped, though, so right now i'm mining through NiceHash, which mines a variety of things but is paying me $65/day in bitcoin. (i hand-tune their built-in miners a bit to squeeze some extra juice out of them). that income more or less matches up with what i was making from Monero prior to this week.

Sure. Search eBay for Vega 56.

Not my job to punish them for getting hacked. They’re paying top dollar to get miners back so I’ll ride that generosity.

i don't think bragging about wealth is an effective move anywhere. i grant you Pinside is richer than your average forum, but i disagree that it's necessarily more intelligent. there is not as strong a correlation between wealth and intelligence as rich people tend to think there is. some of the smartest people i know are actually pretty poor (and i know a lot of very wealthy people).

"intrinsic value" is a loaded term. a dollar has no intrinsic value, either. do you avoid consuming electricity to make dollars?

and the truth that most people don't want to admit is neither does gold. gold's use in industrial applications is completely trivial relative to its market value. and you know what? a long history of being used as a store of wealth does not constitute "intrinsic value" either. that's just tradition. furthermore,"intrinsic value" is a completely useless term, wielded solely to hypocritically bolster older currencies against newer ones. it's also useless in practical terms: if the world ever reaches a cataclysmic point where financial system collapsed and the only currencies worth anything were those with "intrinsic value", then three quarters of us would likely be dead already from the nuclear holocaust anyway. i want to make it clear that my investment portfolio is utterly unconcerned with planning for that eventuality. similarly, my portfolio strategy is not based around the possibility of alien invasion, zombie apocalypse, or the sun spontaneously exploding, either. my future financial plans are for the world i'm actually likely to be living in.

gold is backed by nothing more than tradition. dollars are backed by the institution of the U.S. Government. Bitcoin is backed by the blockchain and its distributed public ledger. ultimately, though, all three only hold value as a result of abstract human concepts, and the truth is that worldwide momentum is, in practical terms, far more important to their value than any other factor.

this is wrong. there's no self-selection at work in this particular case, only because bitcoin has risen over 1,000% in the last year. just about anyone who has taken part is a wild success story right now. it's almost impossible, over the last few years, to have not made a huge profit margin on whatever you've put in. of course, past performance is not indicator of the future! i'm NOT saying it is impossible to lose money or that it will go up forever! and i want to re-iterate (for the hundredth time on this thread) that it's a high-risk investment that could go down at any time and in my opinion shouldn't make up a large percentage of anyone's investments. but the point is, there are probably very few people here sheepishly holding their tongues because they've lost money on bitcoin - if you've been in at all over the last few years, you're almost automatically up by a ton. (well, unless you lost the keys to your wallet or were the victim of theft or something).

edit: actually it has been down from its all-time high over the last couple weeks, but over the last year, it is still up over 1,000%.

dude anyone with the qualities you are describing is destined for ruin no matter what. yes, people with uncontrollable gambling addictions should not gamble. point taken i guess? most people aren't gambling addicts, though.

i hope you have the exact same level of absurd vitriol and fatalism for mutual funds and the stock market, because they are pretty much the same thing. retirement funds are all evil, deadly, suicide-inducing gambling addictions if you're addicted to putting all your money into high-risk ventures. yes, ANY market can go up and down. that's what makes them investments. there are plenty of high-risk mutual funds, hedge funds, and stocks available to anyone with a 401k.

the advice i've always received from financial experts is that a healthy portfolio contains a variety of safe and risky investments. if your friends lost their asses by betting the farm on all risky stuff, i'm sorry, but they're stupid. my mining represents less than one tenth of one percent of my total net worth. Do not blame me (or bitcoin) for dipshits being irresponsible with their money. I've been both preaching and practicing pretty responsibly, i think.

hopeless gambling addicts are not my responsibility, and are kind of irrelevant to this discussion.

investing in cryptocurrency is on the extreme risk / extreme reward end of the investment spectrum. nobody should be basing their future financial security on it. for me, mining coins has been a fun and extremely profitable endeavor. i'm happy to chat about it or share what i've learned. but if someone else ignores my advice and ends up broke ... i am not going to blame myself.

awesome. sincerely admire that.

this seems like a pretty significant mental problem. i don't really think it has anything to do with cryptocurrency. how does that dude deal with buying a car, or god help him, a new computer, and then seeing the next big thing come out for a lower price the following week?

and cryptopia plz thx.

jewelry and art have zero "intrinsic value". industrial and medical uses do not come close to remotely justifying its market value. the point is the term "intrinsic value" is pointless, has no practical application, and merely serves as a fallback argument that doesn't actually mean anything.

you can't eat gold.

Your definition of intrinsic value is nonsense. It has intrinsic value because people desire it? Wtf?

i think you're conflating commodities with the "intrinsic value" argument. gold, for example, has very little use as an industrial commodity. if its value were based solely on that, it'd be cheaper than copper.

100% agreed there. i think i've been saying that the whole time.

Way to prove you didn’t read the thread.

502? Must be Kraken. :p

I’ve sent funds to Kraken and had them get there no problem within an hour or two. Make sure your local wallet is fully synced after making the transaction request (if you sent it from a wallet). (Also there should have been a transaction ID)