Be Excellent To Each Other

http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/N ... y_Bitcoin/

House for sale for 10 bit coin.

I imagine the transaction itself would be done in £ though. I can't imagine the Land Registry are set up to support sales in Bitcoin, and you can be damn sure that if the sale was agreed for 10 bitcoin and then Bitcoin crashed the day before money was due to be exchanged, they wouldn't be so keen on accepting it.

If we'd spent $100 on BitCoin when itsallwater started this thread we could sell it today for $1,454.54

Oh, but wait! $100 would have cost you £60 instead of £80 (strong and stable).

I bought £81 ($100 at the time) of BitCoin back in September for a laugh - an hour or so before it fell off a cliff:



I sold it a couple of weeks back for £145, which is fucking insanity.

Money laundering?

Crypto currency mining currently used more electricity than Ireland.

Fucking hell, it's snapping at the heels of $10k now.

Best description of Bitcoin I've ever heard.

I've stolen that and posted it practically without comment on Facebook. Not because it's fair but because it'll probably seed fear in a lot of my idiot relatives, which seems to have become a weird hobby of mine.

If we'd have invested £100 in Bitcoin when this thread was started, we'd be sitting on £10,396 now according to a calculator I've just found.

I still don't get it...

A different calculator tells me that £100 worth of Dogecoin would now be worth £30,231.

Once more... I don't get it.

Hang on a minute... Does this mean you're rich now?

I'm no clearer with my understanding than I was 20 minutes ago.

These days it's more "imagine putting a brick on your car's accelerator and buying a second car so you can drive round buying the cheapest petrol in a ten mile radius to keep the first car running until it explodes after hopefully solving some sudokus, if you're really lucky enough of them to trade for a sublet on a bag of heroin."

I know 10-15 years ago governments wanted to ban cryptocurrency selfishly to avoid ruining their sovereign currencies but Jesus Christ would it have been better for the planet.

I exchanged the 12,000 DOGE sometime last year I think, converting them to Ripple (XRP) as that’s what I had most of and it seemed to be on the up.

My “stock” of XRP is doing well compared to the amount I invested in it, but I wish I’d kept the 12,000 doge after the events of the past few weeks.

As it happens, though, I put £100 into Dogecoin at the end of January after it hit 2 cents or thereabouts, so whilst I’m not exactly rich, the value has increased enormously!

Sorry if this is obvious, but can you cash this stuff out any way, into real life money that you could spend in somewhere like Morrisons?

Depends on the coin, but generally yes

Presumably to other people who are then lumped with said coins hoping they'll increase in value?
So I guess unless you're involved with the mining aspect it's like buying shares and hoping the value increases?

It"s exactly like that, although share prices tend to be guided by the successes of the company, coin prices are dictated by whether people want to buy coins.

So... what is the ‘mining aspect’ here? Is it a game where coins are buried?

And you can only sell your coins for real money if somebody personally wants to buy them off you, so you trade for real cash (let’s say GBP) in a private sale. Is that right?

It's complicated how it actually works (it takes large amounts of computing power and is very wasteful) but each of these digital currencies represents a finite resource that becomes more difficult to get at as time goes by. So it's a bit like mining precious metals or diamonds (though not as wasteful as that), except people keep inventing new ones.

You don't need to find someone personally who wants to buy your coins, what cras means is that the value of each currency as a whole goes up and down based on whether or not people want to buy them. So when Elon Musk tweets about dogecoin then that sends their value spiralling up.

That’s the simplest explanation I’ve ever read of cryptocurrency, so thank you for that, it’s extremely helpful.

I think I’ll always struggle to wrap my head around ‘mining’ an intangible resource, and I guess I don’t understand the need for the huge supercomputing power when they must be ‘searching’ for 1s and 0s somebody out there in the first place. I suppose I can’t understand, either, why anyone would still be holding onto their Dogecoin if they can swap it for more money, but that may be tied to the fact that I just absolutely do not understand the drive to/thrill of gambling in any form as a source of leisure.

If you want to sell crypto to someone, you have to do a really hard sudoku. People set their machines constantly solving those sudokus, so that when you come to sell they can offer you a solved one, rather than you having to do it yourself... for a price.

No, that’s confused me more

I don't really understand it either Mimi - I dabbled in mining the Dogecoins back at the start of this thread but these days I just buy coins from suitable providers (of which there are a LOT, and not all providers sell all coins)

Dogecoin was (and is, really) always intended as a joke, or a meme, it was never supposed to be worth anything really - which is why it's so surprising to people that it seems to be rising quickly. I toyed with the idea of buying a *lot* of Dogecoins years ago when they were worth fractions of a cent each - really wish I had, as it'd basically mean I'd be a millionaire today

In the simplest terms, "Mining" is just using your computer to run a calculation. As a reward for completing that calculation a new coin is created and given to you as a reward - a thank for you for acting as a payment processor. Technically it's not really "creating" any money as it will work the same way as real money - the more of it there is, the less it worth. It's just that these crypto have so much money pouring into them it massively offsets the deflation.

The supercomputers are because it's the first person/group to complete the calcuation that gets the reward - its a competition, there's many comptuers on the bitcoin blockchain doing the exact same calculation at the same time, which is why its considered wasteful from an energy point of view. A lot of wasted attempts as someone else got there first means a lot of wasted power.

I hope that makes sense? It took me ages to wrap my head around and I'm still not 100% sure on everything but this is as close as I've gotten.

Now lets talk about NFTs and digital artwork...

No, it doesn't make sense. It's a fucking huge Ponzi scheme, with some people making a killing, some eeejits
losing their wallets or forgetting their passwords and therefore all their dosh, or some losing their investment with that that foreign lady who took loadsa people's money and then just disappeared with it.

My money's under the mattress, where I can keep an eye in it.

And burning more and more fossil fuels while they do it. A Chinese coal-fired power station flooded the other week taking a *third* of the global bitcoin mining capacity with it. It's absolutely colossal polluter.

A company in the States has started installing coin mining stuff on oil sites, powered by the gas that normally gets flashed off. So no need to worry about doing anything expensive like put it in the natural gas market for some at least useful purpose then!

You should only be able to mine it if you power your rig from your overpriced Pelloton bike.

That does make sense (well... I understand it, but it still seems completely loopy).

These calculations they are doing; are they somehow useful/beneficial? As in, are they deciding genetic sequences or trying to find cures or something or is it just a sort of imagination game?

Completely agree with it seeming loopy, I don't understand how any of this really translates to it being worth money - especially with, as others said, the insane environmental impact (though to be fair other Cryptos such as Etherium are moving to a different model that should reduce this)

The calculations are done to verify "blocks" (or transactions) are correct, and add them to the blockchain (the ledger of all transactions in the cryptocurrencies history) I think of it as what Visa does.... Just much much less efficiently.

This does depend on the cryptocurrency. There is one (and probably more) out there that is actually all about dedicating computing power for research, and you get rewarded crypto for it - but I can't remember it's name at this time. But with bitcoin and Etherium being the dominating currencies, yes. It's all a bit of a waste in the name of making money.

Sorry for the word vomit here, I've been looking into it a lot the past few days and as weird as it is, I've found it super interesting.

It's no more loopy than tearing whole landscapes apart looking for diamonds, though.

Or gold, or any other physical resource that requires phsical effort to obtain. Diamonds will always exist, but they can be stolen or lost, of course. But I can see them and touch them. Cryptocurrency only exists in cyberspace and can just disappear or become locked away and unreachable, like the supposed £145m in QuadrigaCX that couldn't be recovered when Gerald Cotton died, as only he knew the password. I guess you could almost say the same about real currency that we use to buy stuff on-line, or in shops, etc. with debit/credit cards. No physical money moves around, but I could go to the bank and get it out as cash if I wanted to.

I freely admit that I don't understand cryptocurrency or blockchain, or currency being stored off-lne in cold storage. I've read various explanations as to how it works, but I still get lost part way through. One thing in particular that I don't understand is in this statement, "The first miner whose nonce generates a hash that is less than or equal to the target hash is awarded credit for completing that block and is awarded the spoils of 6.25 BTC.There's too much of smoke and mirrors about the whole thing for my liking." Who does the awarding? And from what reserve? If i mine bitcoin, apparently I don't get to keep it,so where does it go, and does my award come from what I've mined?

I was stuck with the exact same question as Mimi. Thanks for the answer Cookie. Also

Now, I'm pretty ignorant about the whole cryptocurrency thing but it sounds like the mining of calculations used to generate the currency are just to support previous transactions of the currency - so the currency only exists to serve the currency.... I've probably misunderstood but it seems strange to me

Well sort of. As long as everyone else doesn't want to as well. Banks are only required to hold a percentage of their available deposits as cash

And the value of cash is an illusion anyway. A £50 is only worth 5 £10 notes because everyone agrees that it is.

worth how much now? I hope you kept them??

Indeed, but I can get some Sterling out of my account, but I can't get physical Bitcoin to pay for something. That's all I'm sayin' bro.

Exactly - the phrase smoke and mirrors seems to fit crypto and share dealing etc well, but there's plenty of it in regular banking. UK banks were functionally insolvent for years, but it didn't matter so long as we didn't talk about it. And if you keep anything physically valuable, it is only valuable for as long as people think it is. A glut of gold, a change of bank note, whatever - any of it can be removed. Not letting any of that happen is the challenge of the fiscally responsible government, it doesn't just happen because of intrinsic value.