A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
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@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The tweet amazed me because this dude thinks that cryptocurrency are less likely to fail...for some reason. At least the "fiat currencies aren't real because they aren't backed by gold" people sort of have a point. They just miss the overall picture.
Yeah. The fiat currencies at least have land and economies and armies behind them.
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@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
At least the "fiat currencies aren't real because they aren't backed by gold" people sort of have a point.
American dollars are backed by US gumption, which is WAY better than gold.
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Yeah. The fiat currencies at least have land and economies and armies behind them.
All of that is orthogonal to what gives a fiat currency value. Fiat currencies get their value from what gives everything else its value. Things have value based upon their utility or what they may be traded for. Gold has intrinsic value because it can be traded for things and it can be utilized for things. That's it. Full stop.
Fiat currencies have value because they can be traded for things. I can produce widgets and trade them for $3 worth of fiat currency and trade that $3 in fiat currency for two dozen eggs or a gallon of gasoline or several kilowatts of electricity, or whatever.
If I cannot trade that fiat currency for other things that I need, then it is valueless. Worthless. Just paper with dead president's pictures on them.
The fucking cryptocurrency people have not even really gotten to the "can trade for food" stage of developing a currency yet. Not really. I mean, there might be a few places in Austin that accept it at a grocery store. But really if you want to buy stuff with cryptocurrency you have to trade it for government currency first. It is not a real currency yet. It has value because currently you can trade it for American dollars, or Euros, or Yen, or a nearly infinite number of Bolivar.
Even trading it back for real currency is not at all easy. I have heard that you are limited in how much you can transfer per day and that it is less than $1,000 usually. They don't want to make that easy, because the ethereal nature of cryptocurrency is what is driving the bubbles right now. Once they say that X cryptobucks buys a gallon of gasoline and make it so that you can do so easily then the value with either stabilize or, more likely, it will plummet to Venezuelan levels of inflation. It is not in their best interest to make it easy to buy shit with it right now. When they do the whole pyramid crashes.
Tulips man. It is just like the goddamn tulips.
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@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
All of that is orthogonal to what gives a fiat currency value. Fiat currencies get their value from what gives everything else its value. Things have value based upon their utility or what they may be traded for. Gold has intrinsic value because it can be traded for things and it can be utilized for things. That's it. Full stop.
Yeah, but all of the things I mentioned go into that for the valuable fiat currencies. It's a shared "hallucination," but one that's based on actual stuff.
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@boomzilla meh. That matters for long term stability. The armies anyway. The land...well that matters because you can trade the fiat currency for land. With land usually comes shelter.
The most important part of a currency is that it can be traded for the essentials. Food, shelter, the ability to heat yourself, etc. If a currency cannot be traded for stuff, it has no value. That is why I say the gold nuts sort of have a point but they miss the overall picture. If all the world economies collapsed we would not be worried about procuring shiny metals, we would be worried about buying food to feed ourselves and our families and even then gold would be worthless.
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@polygeekery Sure, I'm not saying that a gold backed currency doesn't make any sense. I was just addressing why fiat currencies make more sense than the cryptocurrencies that exist.
Cryptocurrencies are valuable for the same reason that gold is, except that gold has a loooong history of value and it has actual value and is beautiful in stuff like jewelry and it's backed by physics.
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@boomzilla at this point we are both saying the same thing in different ways.
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@polygeekery These cryptocurrency nuts should re-read Cryptonomicon and realize that the cryptocurrency there was backed by gold. Also, I look forward to the future sequels of that series.
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
it's backed by physics
It's going to collapse at any moment! All this fiat “reality” will vanish in a singularity and spontaneously change into something else!
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
should re-read Cryptonomicon
I recently learned from an article @pjh posted that doing so could indicate I'm a hacker.
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
DogeCoin at $1 billion. This is a real life Poe if there ever was one.
Guys, I keep telling you, with our own WTFCoins we could have our own private islands already.
Looks like the potential for my favourite timeline, where Dogecoin somehow emerges as the leading cryptocurrency, is not as dead as I had thought.
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@dkf said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
it's backed by physics
It's going to collapse at any moment! All this fiat “reality” will vanish in a singularity and spontaneously change into something else!
What we need is blockchain based cryptophysics
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This guy is just so deeply in denial that he may never return to rationality.
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@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I can ... trade that $3 in fiat currency for ...
a0.968 gallon of gasolineFTFC
@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Worthless. Just paper with dead president's pictures on them.
But they're nicely printed pictures; the aesthetics should be worth something.
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@polygeekery
Also, I like the irony of "bitcoin has a limited supply" in the face of the fact that Bitcon itself has already experienced one hard-fork that doubled everyone's supply of coins (the Bitcon Cash situation), and anyone and everyone can and does start up new cryptocurrencies at any time for whatever reason they feel like.
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@dkf said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
it's backed by physics
It's going to collapse at any moment! All this fiat “reality” will vanish in a singularity and spontaneously change into something else!
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up.
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@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
he may never return to rationality
One must have been somewhere in order to return there.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@polygeekery It's a
200040-something year old ponzi scheme! It'll collapse ANY SECOND NOW!Up until the Nixon administration, most of the world was (theoretically at least) on some sort of gold standard or something very similar. Money backed by nothing but the faith of the issuing government (which is what these conspiracy-minded types mean when they say "fiat currency") is actually a very, very new thing, historically speaking.
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@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
All of that is orthogonal to what gives a fiat currency value. Fiat currencies get their value from what gives everything else its value. Things have value based upon their utility or what they may be traded for. Gold has intrinsic value because it can be traded for things and it can be utilized for things. That's it. Full stop.
Fiat currencies have value because they can be traded for things. I can produce widgets and trade them for $3 worth of fiat currency and trade that $3 in fiat currency for two dozen eggs or a gallon of gasoline or several kilowatts of electricity, or whatever.
If I cannot trade that fiat currency for other things that I need, then it is valueless. Worthless. Just paper with dead president's pictures on them.
The fucking cryptocurrency people have not even really gotten to the "can trade for food" stage of developing a currency yet. Not really.
By that measure, gold doesn't have value as money either. (Just try to buy two dozen eggs with gold! Current spot price: $1,320.70/oz. How do you even measure out an appropriately small amount of gold in the first place?)
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Shorter China: Stop the ride, we want off!
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Where does Bitcoin get its additional value from.
It has only investors.
No product or service.
The very definition of the Ponzi scheme.It's meant to be a currency not an investment. A Ponzi scheme charades as an investment in something. People speculate in other currencies, too.
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@masonwheeler said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
By that measure, gold doesn't have value as money either.
So? What's your point?
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@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
several kilowatt-hours of electricity
FTFY.
Kilowatts are a unit of power, not energy.
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I'm mildly intrigued by the whole thing, just by the simple fact that my graphics card, sitting at home, normally idling, has earned me $200 from mining fake internetcoinzz in cold hard cash (well, in cold hard bank account balances, but same thing, right?)
I'm fully expecting the market to completely asplode, so I'm not investing shit into it, but while the money's there to be made, might as well do it eh?
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@sloosecannon How much extra have you paid in electricity bills to get that $200? My understanding is that mining has got difficult enough that a normal home rig can't reasonably expect to be a net positive
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@jaloopa said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@sloosecannon How much extra have you paid in electricity bills to get that $200? My understanding is that mining has got difficult enough that a normal home rig can't reasonably expect to be a net positive
It's tough to judge, but the bill last month went up by about $30. I've got a co-worker who builds rigs (he has something like 30 GPUs right now) and I can assure you that based on his experience, you can net a positive on it.
It likely has to do with the stupid increase in price that Bitcoin (and associated fake internetcoinzz) have gone through. Earlier the net profits would have been far lower...
It's also worth noting, I'm playing this as safely as possible - taking out my earnings and turning them into real money ASAP. I could hold on longer (larger payouts have less fees), but I'm more interested in safely earning some extra money than I am in netting an extra 10% or something
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@sloosecannon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I'm mildly intrigued by the whole thing, just by the simple fact that my graphics card, sitting at home, normally idling, has earned me $200 from mining fake internetcoinzz in cold hard cash (well, in cold hard bank account balances, but same thing, right?)
What kind of coin are you mining?
I did the math for my area, and you can't even get close to profitability mining Bitcoin at Seattle-area electricity rates. (Unless you finangle some way to make the power bill someone else's problem, but then my awful sense of "ethics" gets in the way.)
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@sloosecannon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
It's tough to judge,
No it's not. Use some of that juicy $$$ and buy a $15 power tester. You could also get pretty far with just the diagnostics kept by your computer, the specs of its components, and some gasp math.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@sloosecannon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I'm mildly intrigued by the whole thing, just by the simple fact that my graphics card, sitting at home, normally idling, has earned me $200 from mining fake internetcoinzz in cold hard cash (well, in cold hard bank account balances, but same thing, right?)
What kind of coin are you mining?
I did the math for my area, and you can't even get close to profitability mining Bitcoin at Seattle-area electricity rates. (Unless you finangle some way to make the power bill someone else's problem, but then my awful sense of "ethics" gets in the way.)
It varies based on profitability. I'm using a program called Awesome Miner that picks the most profitable altcoin (of which there are like 54,721) for the amount of power invested and then immediately converts it into Bitcoin.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@sloosecannon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
It's tough to judge,
No it's not. Use some of that juicy $$$ and buy a $15 power tester. You could also get pretty far with just the diagnostics kept by your computer, the specs of its components, and some gasp math.
I... Do not know why I didn't think to do that...
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@sloosecannon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
It varies based on profitability. I'm using a program called Awesome Miner that picks the most profitable altcoin (of which there are like 54,721) for the amount of power invested and then immediately converts it into Bitcoin.
Hm. Interesting. I might have to take another look... if it's smart about picking the right coin at the right moment, it might make sense.
@sloosecannon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I... Do not know why I didn't think to do that...
Yeah and just FYI to get the power rates? Your power company sends you a document each month with those on it.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@sloosecannon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
It varies based on profitability. I'm using a program called Awesome Miner that picks the most profitable altcoin (of which there are like 54,721) for the amount of power invested and then immediately converts it into Bitcoin.
Hm. Interesting. I might have to take another look... if it's smart about picking the right coin at the right moment, it might make sense.
@sloosecannon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I... Do not know why I didn't think to do that...
Yeah and just FYI to get the power rates? Your power company sends you a document each month with those on it.
Yeah. I calculated my upper bound (750 watt PSU, with local prices), and it's about $2.11/day, and I'm making about $6 off of that machine. Unless I stupided something in the math...
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Interesting. My PC is mostly just idling, bot OTOH, I have quite an old graphics card.
I might check out that awesome miner thing and see if it would be profitable for me
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@jaloopa I'm running it on a lark, and it says Zpool mining on my GTX 970 is $3.31/day. I dunno. That's based on 10 accepted hashes.
I think I'll leave it running while I'm at work and see what happens. Problem is, minimum payout would probably require me having this thing on 24/7 for like 2 months. Not sure I can commit to that.
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@blakeyrat The other aspect is that I have no idea how electricity rates compare between the UK and the various parts of America you're in.
My electric tarriff is 13p per kwH, and I think my card is a radeon 5800. I'll have to check that when I get home.
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@jaloopa said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@blakeyrat The other aspect is that I have no idea how electricity rates compare between the UK and the various parts of America you're in.
My electric tarriff is 13p per kwH, and I think my card is a radeon 5800. I'll have to check that when I get home.
According to Google's converter, that would work out to about 18 cents/kWh in USD. I dunno what electricity's like in Blakey's neck of the woods, but here in northeast PA I'm currently getting $0.07463/kWh, so a little under half of what your electric charge is, though that doesn't take into account things like "retransmission fees" and "generation fees" and anything else.
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@e4tmyl33t said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
though that doesn't take into account things like "retransmission fees" and "generation fees" and anything else.
Yeah, mine's a fair amount simpler than that. I pay a standing charge per day, and a rate per unit.
I also get a couple of percent cashback on my utility bills, but that's probably not enough to change the calculations
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@sloosecannon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
and then immediately converts it into Bitcoin.
Can you disable this conversion? The fee for moving bitcoin around is ridiculous
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@jaloopa said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
My electric tarriff is 13p per kwH,
Wow. Mine's 9.7 cents/kWh for the first 600 kHw, then 11.6/kWh after that. I think Washington is still mostly dam-powered. I think I plugged 11 cents/kWh into the app.
@sockpuppet7 said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Can you disable this conversion? The fee for moving bitcoin around is ridiculous
If they pay out to like 800 miners all at once it's not so bad. The fee's per-transaction, not per-account-in-transaction. (It looks like the practical limit is about 1,900 addresses in a single transactions to still get the transaction processed relatively quickly.)
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@sockpuppet7 said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@sloosecannon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
and then immediately converts it into Bitcoin.
Can you disable this conversion? The fee for moving bitcoin around is ridiculous
I could, but then I'd be left with a bunch of random cryptocurrencies that I can't do anything with
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@sloosecannon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I'd be left with a bunch of random cryptocurrencies that I can't do anything with
Marking this in the book of prophecy, tags " worldwide, cataclysm, end"
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Serious question:
I have a friend who wants to get into bitcoin mining. (He did the math; he thinks it's profitable.) Does anybody on this forum know how to get mining hardware at a reasonable cost?
So far the best options I've found are:
- A datacenter liquidating Avalon6 miners at $1100 a pop (efficiency ~ 0.33)
- Used Antminer S9 from Amazon at $5100 (efficiency ~ 0.098)
- This obvious scam page selling a used Antminer S9 but they've either restickered a crappier version or won't deliver jack when you buy because how scammy is that
The interesting thing is that the S9 is far and away the most efficient model of these, so it's almost dumb to get anything else-- it's just that dropping $5100 is a huge initial investment if it turns out his math is wrong and this is all just a dumb boondoggle.
What I'm wondering is if anybody here has a line on, say, a data center that might be liquidating older models in preference to newer ones-- anything with an efficiency of 0.3 watt/gigahash or better would be fine? Drop me a tip if you have it.
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Here's something scary: a plausible scenario for Bitcoin causing the next major financial crisis.
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@polygeekery I thought the idea was to use cryptocurrency to buy drugs, then sell the drugs for fiat currency.
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@masonwheeler said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Here's something scary: a plausible scenario for Bitcoin causing the next major financial crisis.
Or rather: financial markets trying all their greedy tricks (like gambling other peoples' money) which lead to a crisis, this time using bitcoin as their excuse.
Article:
Remember, too, that bitcoin futures aren’t actually bitcoins. They simply track the currency’s price. The open interest in a futures contract can be many times the actual inventory of the underlying asset. So the fact that bitcoin supplies are limited isn’t necessarily much help.
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@adynathos said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Or rather: financial markets trying all their greedy tricks (like gambling other peoples' money) which lead to a crisis, this time using bitcoin as their excuse.
And that's mostly because financial institutions have a desperate need to provide return for investors who are used to growth rates that the economy can't really support without the sort of serious investment that hasn't been really happening for decades. That results in banks (etc.) jumping lots of money from one thing providing a fast (but risky) return to another, inflating bubble after bubble.
The real fixes for all this are political poison at the moment.
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Cryptonomicon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon ? Been so long since I read it that I don't even remember there was a cryptocurrency involved. But I do remember I enjoyed it a lot, maybe I should put it on my re-read list...
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@masonwheeler said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Here's something scary: a plausible scenario for Bitcoin causing the next major financial crisis.
I think all the stuff he talks about is a problem, but I'd need to see the sorts of volumes we're talking about. It's my understanding that bitcoin, for all the hoopla, is still a pretty small player when you look at other stuff. That said, it's possible that it could be a spark that lights some other conflagration waiting to happen that's much bigger.
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@ixvedeusi said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Cryptonomicon
The details were vague to nonexistent, but one of the main guys in the protagonists' company was a serious crypto guy and his stuff was the basis for their currency (which was still backed by gold ultimately).
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