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naturalplastic
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08 Aug 2021, 8:49 pm

Texasmoneyman300 wrote:
Tim_Tex wrote:
Does Bitcoin work much like the stock market?

not really......stock market is more legitament as investment than Bitcoin and crypto.Good investing in stock market is not a get rick quick thing like Bitcoin.Stocks are just pieces of ownership in a corporation that the public can buy and sell on exchanges.Some corporations even pay you to own their stock but I dont think people get paid to own bitcoin in cash or anything like that like it does in some stocks.I dont really undertsand Bitcoin but i know its based on the blockchain.Investing in the stock market is really useful for the public but I would not say the same of bitcoin.


Yes. In the stock market you buy equity in corportions and companies that make goods and services. And even if you dont buy and sell the shares, you earn dividends from the shares. Bitcoin is more like betting a pile of cash on the spin of a roulette wheel in Vegas.



aspiecoder
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09 Aug 2021, 6:25 am

I'm not sure about bitcoin's long-term prospects as a currency for the reasons mentioned by the OP. The transaction rate is too slow. That said, I think transactions sometimes can take much longer with banks. Perhaps this is a solvable problem. Perhaps another cryptocurrency will solve this and take over someday? I think Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general do have some utility.

Whether or not Bitcoin is here to stay, I think the blockchain and various technologies surrounding it will be around for a while. There are some really impressive innovations here. For one, anyone can verify the entire blockchain, which increases trust in the system. Then there's the way it resolves which new blocks are added and in what order, allowing it to be a fully distributed system with no central authority. The proof-of-work concept is also pretty interesting. Time-consuming for current hardware to do but easy to verify and it can't be faked (at least not with current technology).

I'm personally more interested in Ethereum. It seems to be more versatile. It's not just a currency but can support many more applications. And they're innovating in really cool ways to try to reduce the need for expensive hardware and power consumption.



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09 Aug 2021, 6:30 am

Are bitcoins round? If tey are bits of coins I doubt it. :D


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Sahn
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09 Aug 2021, 7:09 pm

Good in its day but I'd rather support a currency which is pre-mined as well as decentralised. I like the current ethos of the Cardano community but no doubt that will all go to s**t as soon as smart contracts, tokens and exchanges pop up on the blockchain.



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11 Aug 2021, 4:57 pm

aspiecoder wrote:
I'm not sure about bitcoin's long-term prospects as a currency for the reasons mentioned by the OP. The transaction rate is too slow. That said, I think transactions sometimes can take much longer with banks. Perhaps this is a solvable problem. Perhaps another cryptocurrency will solve this and take over someday? I think Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general do have some utility.

Whether or not Bitcoin is here to stay, I think the blockchain and various technologies surrounding it will be around for a while. There are some really impressive innovations here. For one, anyone can verify the entire blockchain, which increases trust in the system. Then there's the way it resolves which new blocks are added and in what order, allowing it to be a fully distributed system with no central authority. The proof-of-work concept is also pretty interesting. Time-consuming for current hardware to do but easy to verify and it can't be faked (at least not with current technology).

I'm personally more interested in Ethereum. It seems to be more versatile. It's not just a currency but can support many more applications. And they're innovating in really cool ways to try to reduce the need for expensive hardware and power consumption.


It seems to me that in many cases, the blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but for a blockchain, there has to be ample reason for there to be miners out there on that blockchain. There has to be some kind of payout for them to spend their costly resources on doing that mining. A great many of the problems for which some people think it is the solution are hardly problems that are going to attract many, if any, miners at all. For most of them, it would come down to the company with the problem doing it all in-house.

Sure, it might help in a handful of cases, but for most, it certainly isn't the answer.



DuckHairback
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14 Aug 2021, 2:52 pm

I'm 'mining' Pi. I like the fact that they're building a userbase around their network prior to launching the actual coin.

I don't expect to become a millionaire when it goes to mainnet but it's an interesting approach I think, and more likely to have a sustainable future than these coins that launch and then try to build value.

As for bitcoin, it's such a pain in the backside to use that I only use it when I want to buy something illicit.


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Texasmoneyman300
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14 Aug 2021, 8:40 pm

My biggest goal is for bitcoin to become the next big thing by becoming a serious legitamite competetior to fiat currency such as the U.S. dollar but i think its prolly a pipe dream.I am indirectly profiting from bitcoin because some of the natural gas i produce is used to help power bitcoin mining.I think if you want to buy bitcoin try to wait till it crashes to buy and sell when everyone is hyping buying bitcoin.

I wish bitcoin could replace the dollar.....maybe some day.I was listening to Greenspan and he said that there is a potential for a infinte numbers of crypto currencies so bitcoin could become obsolete.Also, if i was going to stay in this country and i wanted to hedge against the dollar i would be stacking gold and silver and not crypto.Bitcoin would be good if you had to move internationally sudddenly because people have been arrested for smuggling their gold with them.

I just hope it does not turn out to be like the dot com bust.I think bitcoin has its place for some people but dont bet the farm on getting rich quick with it because you will more likely go broke.Bitcoin needs to stop being so volatile in order to have a prayer of competing against central banks like the Fed.I think there needs to be more regulations and laws regarding bitcoin.I dont think bitcoin is the ulimate inflation hedge.It would be West Texas Intermediate Crude for me.I like to go on asset classes that have proven track records.Bitcoin just is not there yet.My favorite way to short the dollar is investing in oil wells not bitcoin.I think bitcoin is even more high risk than most oil drilling going on today and I am just not willing to take that chance yet.Maybe someday.I would leave bitcoin speculating to the professional wall street traders.Its just outside my area of knowledge although maybe a bitcoin or crypto ETF could work.

However i think the blockchain and bitcoin has almost limitless potential to be a real game change because the future of currency is digital.



aspiecoder
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20 Aug 2021, 6:28 pm

kokopelli wrote:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but for a blockchain, there has to be ample reason for there to be miners out there on that blockchain. There has to be some kind of payout for them to spend their costly resources on doing that mining. A great many of the problems for which some people think it is the solution are hardly problems that are going to attract many, if any, miners at all. For most of them, it would come down to the company with the problem doing it all in-house.

Sure, it might help in a handful of cases, but for most, it certainly isn't the answer.

I think you might be misunderstanding how public blockchains work. Mining isn't costly at all actually, if there's no one else using the blockchain. The cost is driven up by competition, so it will only become costly in response to lots of other people using it. It basically operates like a free market (supply/demand). You only need expensive mining equipment if everyone else has it. If you're already the fastest, there's no point buying a better mining rig.

Not sure if you're aware but bitcoin (and others) have a "difficulty" associated with the mining algorithm and that is tunable in order to keep the mining time roughly the same. In the early days the difficulty could have been much lower, meaning the cost of mining would have been lower as well (although some of the increase over time is due to increased hardware capability not necessarily the number of miners, but it's related). The "difficulty" is essentially the number of zeros required at the start of the hash for a new block. To modify the hash you insert a "nonce" value which is some number of random bytes. Change those random bytes and you get a new block hash. Mining is the process of continually doing that until you end up with a block hash starting with the required number of zeros. As you can imagine, since the algorithms used are cryptographically secure, there is no known way to reverse engineer them. Thus the only way we know to end up with a hash with more leading zeros is to just try it over and over with different random nonce values until we get one. That's what the expensive mining rigs do. More powerful mining rig means faster "hash rate", and thus they'll arrive at the magic hash value sooner. Once you've got your block with the required difficulty (number of leading zeros), you can submit it to the blockchain. If accepted, you get paid (in bitcoin).

So hopefully this explains why it is actually the competition that makes it expensive. The more people who do the mining, the more expensive it is to be the fastest.

To your other point, blockchains are only really useful for distributed/decentralised systems with no central mediator. Otherwise a database is much faster and better. And yes if someone chooses a blockchain instead of a database it's very likely they're using the wrong tool. You may be interested to know that bitcoin and other blockchains actually use a regular database alongside the blockchain for indexing and searching. You can rebuild the database from the blockchain easily, but having the database makes lookups much faster. Bitcoin uses leveldb (a key/value store).

Another potential use for blockchain is where you need to formally verify every item in the chain. Every block contains the hash of the previous block (look up "merkle tree") so you can verify the entire chain. This is why bitcoin is popular, but you can also use blockchains for a range of other things, like a public vaccine register or anything where you need everyone to agree on some public register of information. Privacy in blockchains is also possible, but more complicated. Anyway, hope that helps...



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20 Aug 2021, 7:26 pm

unless you can make it powered with solar or wind, the electricity for this operation is going to run up a lot of amp-hours, no? also the computers powerful enough for this are going to cost many thousands $$$$$?



aspiecoder
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21 Aug 2021, 6:09 am

auntblabby wrote:
unless you can make it powered with solar or wind, the electricity for this operation is going to run up a lot of amp-hours, no? also the computers powerful enough for this are going to cost many thousands $$$$$?


Actually if anyone has access to a large solar or wind farm they will have a unique long-term advantage over miners who rely on coal power. The price of solar especially will drop as technology gets better, whereas the price of coal power will rise as coal becomes more expensive. If it eventually turns out that mining is only cost-effective when powered by solar it may actually be a good thing. I'm not holding my breath though. I know miners are increasingly turning to renewables but there's still a large percentage powered by coal/gas.



kokopelli
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16 Sep 2021, 8:14 pm

aspiecoder wrote:
kokopelli wrote:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but for a blockchain, there has to be ample reason for there to be miners out there on that blockchain. There has to be some kind of payout for them to spend their costly resources on doing that mining. A great many of the problems for which some people think it is the solution are hardly problems that are going to attract many, if any, miners at all. For most of them, it would come down to the company with the problem doing it all in-house.

Sure, it might help in a handful of cases, but for most, it certainly isn't the answer.

I think you might be misunderstanding how public blockchains work. Mining isn't costly at all actually, if there's no one else using the blockchain. The cost is driven up by competition, so it will only become costly in response to lots of other people using it. It basically operates like a free market (supply/demand). You only need expensive mining equipment if everyone else has it. If you're already the fastest, there's no point buying a better mining rig.

Not sure if you're aware but bitcoin (and others) have a "difficulty" associated with the mining algorithm and that is tunable in order to keep the mining time roughly the same. In the early days the difficulty could have been much lower, meaning the cost of mining would have been lower as well (although some of the increase over time is due to increased hardware capability not necessarily the number of miners, but it's related). The "difficulty" is essentially the number of zeros required at the start of the hash for a new block. To modify the hash you insert a "nonce" value which is some number of random bytes. Change those random bytes and you get a new block hash. Mining is the process of continually doing that until you end up with a block hash starting with the required number of zeros. As you can imagine, since the algorithms used are cryptographically secure, there is no known way to reverse engineer them. Thus the only way we know to end up with a hash with more leading zeros is to just try it over and over with different random nonce values until we get one. That's what the expensive mining rigs do. More powerful mining rig means faster "hash rate", and thus they'll arrive at the magic hash value sooner. Once you've got your block with the required difficulty (number of leading zeros), you can submit it to the blockchain. If accepted, you get paid (in bitcoin).

So hopefully this explains why it is actually the competition that makes it expensive. The more people who do the mining, the more expensive it is to be the fastest.

To your other point, blockchains are only really useful for distributed/decentralised systems with no central mediator. Otherwise a database is much faster and better. And yes if someone chooses a blockchain instead of a database it's very likely they're using the wrong tool. You may be interested to know that bitcoin and other blockchains actually use a regular database alongside the blockchain for indexing and searching. You can rebuild the database from the blockchain easily, but having the database makes lookups much faster. Bitcoin uses leveldb (a key/value store).

Another potential use for blockchain is where you need to formally verify every item in the chain. Every block contains the hash of the previous block (look up "merkle tree") so you can verify the entire chain. This is why bitcoin is popular, but you can also use blockchains for a range of other things, like a public vaccine register or anything where you need everyone to agree on some public register of information. Privacy in blockchains is also possible, but more complicated. Anyway, hope that helps...


Suppose you set up a block chain for a public vaccine register. What benefit would there be for others to set up and operate computers to mine the block chain?



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18 Sep 2021, 10:28 pm

As I stare down the possibility of being unemployable for the rest of my life, I wish I'd discovered cryptocurrency a lot sooner. Rather late than never, right? so far the first month has been full of trial and error with my $1k stack, involving a lot of swapping to decide which projects I have long term faith in. As prices are too sky-high for my liking right now, a potential looming crash in December triggered by the collapse of Evergrande presents a golden opportunity to bide my time, hold my stack and explore ways to increase my position in 2022.

1: Bitcoin. If whale rumors in the twittersphere turn out to be true and Bitcoin crashes to $10k before it climbs above $200K in 2024, this bear run will provide one last chance to catch the rocket before it's gone forever. Given it's longstanding dominance and main driver of the market, it's a solid foundation of any balanced portfolio.

2: Ethereum. The grand-daddy of smart contracts. While not as crazy-expensive as BTC, the bear run presents another chance to stack up as the rocket makes a return trip to pick up more passengers

3. Algorand. I don't see this as an asset, but a stable transitory coin that will net me 5.2% yield in my Exodus wallet as I plot my next move

4. Shiba Inu. A relatively new coin borne out of the success of Dogecoin but nonetheless a highly ambitious project with a huge vision. It's recent price action would suggest that it's starting to stand out on its own. Given it's stupidly low price, owning millions of tokens for practically peanuts is highly appealing to newcomers looking to get their beak wet in the market (myself included just for "teh lulz").

5. USDT: Again, not an asset but somewhere to park my profits during

That's it for 2022. Since my aim is to build long-term wealth a rather than day trade, a lean-and-mean portfolio is easier to keep track of


NOTE: ALWAYS do you own research and practice due diligence. Crypto is a HIGHLY erratic and volatile market so only invest within your means