Cryptocurrency Lolcows

[Strelok]

Can't forget that time Dogecoin straight up sponsored an entire NASCAR.

I don't have the links, but the realitive worthlesness of it also means its users are more likely to actually put it to good use instead of hoard it like an elderly woman does creepy dolls. Dogecoin has done stuff like paid for well drilling in impoverished African towns and such. It's not hard to get people to donate their "worthless" 20 cents worth of Doge to a good cause, and of course, that adds up.

Meanwhile bitcoiners will demand a 20% discount to use their funbox to buy things.

 

[JFKdestroyer]

I'm also no computer expert, so if I'm missing something blindingly obvious, please explain, but, it seems to me the whole blockchain is unsustainable. Eventually, as it grows, wouldn't it get so large as to become unfeasible? With it taking months if not years to be updated even with the most powerful computing power available to it?

Theoretically it's possible that the blockchain would grow to sizes that make it impractical to store on the type of hardware people tend to run miners on. I don't know a lot about Bitcoin, but it seems like its possible to more or less DDoS the whole Blockchain setup by sending fractions of bitcoins back and forth between accounts forever, causing the queue to continue to grow and grow.

 

[Cynical]

Theoretically it's possible that the blockchain would grow to sizes that make it impractical to store on the type of hardware people tend to run miners on. I don't know a lot about Bitcoin, but it seems like its possible to more or less DDoS the whole Blockchain setup by sending fractions of bitcoins back and forth between accounts forever, causing the queue to continue to grow and grow.

On that note, from what I understand, bitcoin is supposed to have a limited, finite amount of coins that can ever exist, essentially bringing the gold standard to the digital era, and considering how being chained to the gold standard left the money supply at the mercy of the fluctuating amounts of gold available, that's stupid, but in an even worse way than gold.

With gold, it's stupid because there is a limited supply of gold on the entire planet, but unless it's all dumped into the sun, it will still be worth something if the value is pegged to gold. Bitcoin is even more retarded because it's value is based on ephemeral crap like computer data, and if the computer fries, it doesn't even have the advantage gold has of still having a value of its own even when divorced from it's use as currency or being the foundation of a currency.

 

[DykesDykesChina]

...gold has of still having a value of its own even when divorced from it's use as currency or being the foundation of a currency.

In fact, it doesn't really. Gold in itself is near worthless, apart from some niche applications in electronics, it is just a soft, heavy, pretty-to-look-at metal which early in human history was given the attribute of being "valuable" due to its use in royal and religious decorations. This is purely psychological and artistic, though, industry has little use for the stuff.
If you want to tie your currency to some material that has real economic value, try oil, coal, uranium or some other energy carrier, as energy is the basis of any and all industrial activity.
</offtopic autism>

 

[TowinKarz]

Many a sane person has pointed out that if you emerge from your bunker with a duffel bag full of gold coins, the rest of the survivors are going to ignore you and go after the guy with the duffel full of canned vegetables instead. It's amazing how many don't grasp this simple concept, gold has NO intrinsic value, the only thing that GIVES it value is a marketplace where it can be traded, and that's going to be the FIRST thing disrupted by any major cataclysm.

And the guy who emerges with a thumb-drive full of BTC asking where he can plug it in? He's going to fare even WORSE.

 

[SlenderManBearPig]

I'm also no computer expert, so if I'm missing something blindingly obvious, please explain, but, it seems to me the whole blockchain is unsustainable. Eventually, as it grows, wouldn't it get so large as to become unfeasible? With it taking months if not years to be updated even with the most powerful computing power available to it?

I think you might have the wrong idea about the processing power needs, bitcoin is designed to make a new block every X minutes (which processes a certain number of transactions made during this time IIRC) so the more processing power you throw at it the more it ramps up the 'difficulty'. This is why an arms race developed as people moved from CPU's to GPU's to multiple gpu's to ridiculous homemade monstrosities with dozens of cards running off a single PC/server to dedicated 'mining' hardware, in an attempt to have the most power and thus highest chance of 'winning' a block.

Theoretically it's possible that the blockchain would grow to sizes that make it impractical to store on the type of hardware people tend to run miners on.

There are solutions for this, but it requires changing the code so it'll either never happen or someone will force it to happen (if someone changes the code enough to make it a 'hard fork' old versions will no longer continue to be compatible with the new blockchain, leaving people to adapt or stay with the old fork and declare it 'real' even though you've separated the network into pieces). One of the major early adaptions that people wanted but I don't think got incorporated was having online nodes that contain the entire blockchain, with users only needing to have the latest portions of it, since they can just check it against the node to ensure validity.

I don't know a lot about Bitcoin, but it seems like its possible to more or less DDoS the whole Blockchain setup by sending fractions of bitcoins back and forth between accounts forever, causing the queue to continue to grow and grow.

Similarly the DDOS plan could easily be worked around, but it would require changing the code. The last time I was following bitcoin they were arguing about changing it so that more transactions could be processed in less time, but it's a complex issue that I can't fully remember the gist of. In any case the existing defense was that transactions with higher fee's have more priority, so unless your open to wasting money a DDOS like this should only affect people that don't want to pay a fee.

So for some actual bitcoin retards content, I can't really confirm this but I'm pretty sure that several years ago a group of weed enthusiasts in NZ known as "the Daktory" were planning on attempting to switch everything over to bitcoin and have a bitcoin based vending machine for weed (they had a cash one, but the cops took it and seized all the money they had onsite) using bitcoin as an attempt to get around both money being seized and the illegality of selling weed. This doesn't appear to have taken off, probably because someone realized how fucking retarded the idea is, but for a while they were shilling bitcoin and talking about how it was gonna change everything, and they had 'big plans' for the future.

Many a sane person has pointed out that if you emerge from your bunker with a duffel bag full of gold coins, the rest of the survivors are going to ignore you and go after the guy with the duffel full of canned vegetables instead. It's amazing how many don't grasp this simple concept, gold has NO intrinsic value, the only thing that GIVES it value is a marketplace where it can be traded, and that's going to be the FIRST thing disrupted by any major cataclysm.

Mate clearly you never heard about the totally feasible and completely sane plan of sending multiple satellites into space so that the blockchain could be sustained in the case of an apocalypse and Bitcoin would become the currency of a glorious new world (I'm not even joking they had plans to do this and 'just needed funding').

 

[TowinKarz]

I can't really confirm this but I'm pretty sure that several years ago a group of weed enthusiasts in NZ known as "the Daktory" were planning on attempting to switch everything over to bitcoin and have a bitcoin based vending machine for weed (they had a cash one, but the cops took it and seized all the money they had onsite) using bitcoin as an attempt to get around both money being seized and the illegality of selling weed. This doesn't appear to have taken off, probably because someone realized how fucking retarded the idea is, but for a while they were shilling bitcoin and talking about how it was gonna change everything, and they had 'big plans' for the future.

If true, it shows how stupid the average bitcoiner is, and why they overlap with sovcits and the like, they fail to understand that the TRANSACTION is the illegal part, not the barter. You could still get nailed for buying drugs if you accepted them as payment for mowing someone's lawn, doesn't matter what you use as the proverbial poker chip, the fact you made the wager with the intent to win is all the law cares about.

 

[DykesDykesChina]

Many a sane person has pointed out that if you emerge from your bunker with a duffel bag full of gold coins, the rest of the survivors are going to ignore you and go after the guy with the duffel full of canned vegetables instead. It's amazing how many don't grasp this simple concept, gold has NO intrinsic value, the only thing that GIVES it value is a marketplace where it can be traded, and that's going to be the FIRST thing disrupted by any major cataclysm.

And the guy who emerges with a thumb-drive full of BTC asking where he can plug it in? He's going to fare even WORSE.

I remember seeing some Ancap Tard write on Twitter that he had stored "massive amounts of ammo, gold and bitcoin for the time when the great collapse comes". The ammo might even make sense -- if he had anything that other people would want after the "great collapse".

 

[Rou]

I remember seeing some Ancap Tard write on Twitter that he had stored "massive amounts of ammo, gold and bitcoin for the time when the great collapse comes". The ammo might even make sense -- if he had anything that other people would want after the "great collapse".

Yes, a digital currency is perfect for when shit goes wrong.

 

[DykesDykesChina]

If true, it shows how stupid the average bitcoiner is, and why they overlap with sovcits and the like, they fail to understand that the TRANSACTION is the illegal part, not the barter. You could still get nailed for buying drugs if you accepted them as payment for mowing someone's lawn, doesn't matter what you use as the proverbial poker chip, the fact you made the wager with the intent to win is all the law cares about.

If it works like it does in Germany, the illegal part is bringing psychoactive substances into your possession. That is, pulling on a joint someone else holds for you is strictly speaking not illegal, taking it out of his hands and holding it in your own would be illegal. Laws are weird.

 

[repentance]

Meet my favourite ever Bitcoiner.

http://www.buttcoinfoundation.org/bitcoin-community-spotlight-logansryche/

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49734.0

https://www.facebook.com/logansryche

 

[Cosmos]

I found a great bitcoin simulator to learn more about bitcoin with
http://www.beepboopbitcoin.com/

This pretty much sums up bitcoin and the community around it.

 

[Cynical]

In fact, it doesn't really. Gold in itself is near worthless, apart from some niche applications in electronics, it is just a soft, heavy, pretty-to-look-at metal which early in human history was given the attribute of being "valuable" due to its use in royal and religious decorations. This is purely psychological and artistic, though, industry has little use for the stuff.
If you want to tie your currency to some material that has real economic value, try oil, coal, uranium or some other energy carrier, as energy is the basis of any and all industrial activity.
</offtopic autism>

Good point, but maybe I should have elaborated: While gold is largely worthless outside of some niche uses, at least it still has a use of some sort if the economy goes to pot, and as long as it's tangible, some idiot will want it, even in post-apocalyptia, because, as you pointed out, people have been attracted to shiny shit for all of human history. Regardless, it still does make much more sense to tie a currency to a valuable natural resource.

However, taking what I said further, there will always be at least one person somewhere who would trade for gold even in a Mad Max style world, if only because of the "humans like shiny shit" rule. No one will give a shit about bitcoin because it won't even have a niche use in a world where even the raiders will want wealth they can show off.

Which is why I consider these bitcoin morons even dumber than the guys who pine for the gold standard, at least they have a marginally bigger chance they'll be taken seriously if the economy goes to pot.

 

[Andrew Noel Schaefer]

hilariously enough, theres a book on bitcoins in the current humble bundle. I'd get it and share it with you guys... but its 14 bucks.

...Yeah... No.

 

[Meatman]

hilariously enough, theres a book on bitcoins in the current humble bundle. I'd get it and share it with you guys... but its 14 bucks.

...Yeah... No.

buy it

 

[Andrew Noel Schaefer]

buy it

I mean I was. You telling me to fuck off convinced me otherwise.

 

[AnOminous]

hilariously enough, theres a book on bitcoins in the current humble bundle. I'd get it and share it with you guys... but its 14 bucks.

>selling book on Bitcoin
>but we only want U.S. dollars!

 

[TowinKarz]

Just like all those circa 2008 books and "investor guides" about how the dollar is dead, the economy is in the crapper for good, only gold can save you, and for $29.99 plus S + H we'll show you how!

 

[DragoonSierra]

They think a lot of things, like that gambling sites are somehow legal just because Bitcoin (they don't violate relatively new laws specifically against using banks but any existing state law still prohibits them), that you are allowed to run Ponzi scams (you aren't) and in general that it somehow makes you bulletproof.

The idea that Bitcoin is great for illegal transactions is also deeply dumb. To the contrary, the blockchain keeps a permanent record of every transaction. A lot of illegal activity will be on your permanent record and if you're ever caught with the relevant private keys associated with these transactions, it's good enough to nail you, as Ross Ulbricht found.

Also, large drug operations are going to have a physical presence in meatspace. If you are a buyer, you might not be worth going after then, but congratulations, if the dealer is busted you ARE going to be known by name and address as a purchaser of drugs to law enforcement. That can have all kinds of collateral consequences you can't really predict.

He should have fled the country like Snowden did.

In fact, it doesn't really. Gold in itself is near worthless, apart from some niche applications in electronics, it is just a soft, heavy, pretty-to-look-at metal which early in human history was given the attribute of being "valuable" due to its use in royal and religious decorations. This is purely psychological and artistic, though, industry has little use for the stuff.
If you want to tie your currency to some material that has real economic value, try oil, coal, uranium or some other energy carrier, as energy is the basis of any and all industrial activity.
</offtopic autism>

The Indians love it.

So Jeremy Bernal loves bitcoin too. https://www.dollarvigilante.com/blo...rrency-is-up-over-1000-in-the-last-month.html
Hes the owner of SexyFur.com, loves to sue people who pirate his art, is a tax evader(allegedly) and Ron Paulite, and had to call the US coastguard to rescue him on his houseboat. Hes a lolcow in his own right.

Has he posted in any of those forums you guys linked?

 

[Marvin]

>selling book on Bitcoin
>but we only want U.S. dollars!

Just like all those circa 2008 books and "investor guides" about how the dollar is dead, the economy is in the crapper for good, only gold can save you, and for $29.99 plus S + H we'll show you how!

Well, I mean, my bitch of an ex-wife won't accept child support and alimony in the currency of the future, bitcoin.