Nah, the miners went away from graphics cards long ago. They went to FPGAs and then ASICs, so I guess you can get some useless ASICs cheap?
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Second person novels are so much fun!
I like Bitcoin.
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Also that last syllable is typically pronounced âgukâ rather than â'gookâ as in the slur your thinking of.
Bitcoin is crashing again? Must be Tuesday.
Meh, wake me up when all the libertarians who donât understand economics have cleared out of the comments and taken their variations on âThis is GOOD for bitcoin!â and âNah, look, itâs rebounding!â to the next post down the line talking about this weekâs crash.
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WTF are you linking to? Most of it is gobbledygook.
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Not when they have almost no assets and their annual income is not related to the total valuation in a rational way.
At a $40,000,000,000.00 valuation, Uber is Bubblicious. Thatâs not what the company is actually worth as a company, its valuation based on betting on the stock price going up. Itâs just gambling without the slot machine.
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Back in the late 90s, my wife described herself as being in the Tulip Bulb industry. (She was doing software quality work at various Silicon Valley startups.)
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Speculation does more than just give you a chance at getting rich (or poor) without doing any real work yourself - it allows businesses and individuals to manage the amount of risk theyâre taking.
Farming is an inherently risky business, because farmers donât know what the weather will be during the next year, or their crop yields at the end of the growing season, or the market price theyâll be able to get for their crops, but they need to buy and plant seed now and decide how much land to keep now. Bakingâs also risky, because you need to buy your oven now and set the price of your bread now, but you donât know what the price of wheat will be next year. Speculation allows the farmers to lock down a price for at least some of their crop, limiting the risk theyâre exposed to, and allows the bakers to lock down a price for at least some of their ingredients, and speculators can balance the risk that both producers and consumers are taking, by risking money they have in return for what they hope will be a profit. The biggest problems happen when thereâs too much speculation compared to the amount of real underlying business, or when the reality that everybodyâs speculating on is too far outside predictions (e.g. a really bad crop or a really huge crop), and of course also when speculators gamble with resources they donât have and arenât able to cover their bets if they lose.
Cryptocurrencies have at least two real uses - payment for black-market goods/services, and transferring money at a potentially lower cost than other money-transfer services such as Paypal, Western Union, hawaladars, loan sharks, and credit cards.
Black market goods/services are the easy target, because they not only is Bitcoin less risky than carrying a suitcase of cash into the park to exchange for a suitcase of white powder somebody else carried into the park, but itâs easier for buyers and sellers who donât live near each other and donât know each other to make contact, and to maintain reputations that make it easier to trust the other party enough to do business, and thereâs enough profit margin that both buyer and seller can put up with the risk of holding transactional quantities of Bitcoins for a short period of time while the goods ship, and that provided a bit more stability for Bitcoin values because there was somewhere to spend it (either for yourself, or selling Bitcoins to somebody else who wanted to buy drugs.)
But the real potential was replacing the other money transfer services, especially for online transactions, where credit cards and Paypal take a medium-sized cut for their services.
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Ah ha ha haâŚha haâŚha ha haâŚhahahahahahahahahaha!
Sorry. Too soon?
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Should I even bother to ask why youâre asleep?
Seriously, why doesnât a cryptocurrency tie itself to the US dollar (or other real-world currency)? It would retain the anonymous-ish aspect of the currency but not be so wildly speculative.
Then, other cryptocurrencies could tie themselves to other currencies and suddenly currency trading is taken out of the hands of the financiers.
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Uber is definitely Bubblicious, but its valuation isnât based on the stock price going up (its valuation is defined as the current stock price times number of shares.) Its bubbly stock price is based on the expectations of its income stream going up, way higher than the current assets plus net present value of the current income stream, because theyâre going to Disruptively Achieve World Domination.
Thatâs different from buying assets expecting a capital gain when the asset goes up (like most Bitcoin buyers, and Beanie Babies and tulip bulbs, and San Francisco real estate, and growth stocks.) You still end up with a risk of owning a .0000001% share in the sale price of a commemorative advertising sock puppet, but the underlying economic processes are different.
Only to the extent that pets.com was. Hell, overvalued Webvan, with its then outrageous $6 billion valuation, actually had vans and warehouses and stuff. They actually owned assets. Uber, not so much.
Letâs try a little hypothetical thought experiment. If Uber were for sale as a private company and you could purchase it but for hypothetical rrasons you would not be allowed to sell it, or any part of it, ever, and you would be responsible for the debt if it failed, and letâs say you had an enormous credit line, how much would you be willing to pony up to buy Uber based on its revenue and growth potential alone, and not any potential sales of the company or its stock?
Well, in comparison to most boingboing commenters, primarily timezones, but I mean because bitcoin is just so incredibly boring.
Itâs the same thing every time - bitcoin crashes again, people go into defense mode, claim it will rebound and that this is good for bitcoin, it eventually does raise a bit, they say I told you so, then it crashes again, rinse and repeat.
Basically the last interesting thing that came out of bitcoin was the shocking realisation that the main people making bitcoin ATMs were basically scam artists, and it was a long, long drought before that. Even the revelation that weâd supposedly found Nakamoto wasnât much to talk about - great, we found a secretive old libertarian dude who knew how to code, a decent amount about cryptography, and fuck-all about economics. So what? Find me any libertarian forum, and Iâll give you a dozen of them.
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Note that I very specifically did NOT say that I believed their valuation, just that comparing it to the size of the existing market is not a particularly useful way to calculate it.
Not what I thought. Although according to Dictionary.com and Merriam Webster the symbols for pronunciation are the same for âgookâ, âspookâ and âbookâ.
Unless youâre Scottish, in which case theyâre pronounced the same.
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I have cash from 1950 left to me. Cash. In 1950 it could buy a new car, now itâs a nice used car⌠maybe.
Pop goes the bubble.
Meanwhile the balance investors are up about 12% in 2014.
Itâs unlikely that the closing of SR2 caused the drop in BTC value. Everybody who didnât actually get arrested moved to other markets immediately. Closing darknet markets is the ultimate game of whack a mole.
If there is anything I have learned from criminal complaints against darknet vendors (Caligirl for example, and Ulbricht, and Benthall) itâs that making BTC is easy and cashing them out is hard. There are probably a lot of vendors out there sitting on tens of thousands of dollars or more in BTC, sweating this drop pretty hard. All those bags of white powder that sold for $100 a gram are suddenly retroactively reduced to $66.
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