Bitcoin: it rocks

[Patrickssj6]

If hashing a bitcoin actually served some useful purpose, i.e. protein folding, I'd be okay with it.

Exactly what I said when Bitcoin first started.

But, isn't that true with all methods of attempting to earn a living? He who invests the most time/effort/energy/money into something will get the most out of it? Also, the main reason i don't buy an ASIC is because they're useless outside of their realm of mining bitcoins.

More or less our reward for living is creating a surplus for someone e.g. a product or a service.

In case of coins though there is no surplus and the countervalue is energy and time. The appealing thing about this is of course, that we do not have to put in manual labor; it is not our personal energy and time we put in.

The problem arises when you try to buy a real product with Bitcoins. If I work 1 hour on a product, how much work does a computer need to do until I see an equal in value? Or further: Do I even see a value in the coins? Would you sell something you crafted with your own hands to someone who just had his two AMDs running for 2 days? ^^

[Warsaw]

So what you're saying is that you're a bit of a hypocrit?

Never said I wasn't.

@Dwood: the problem with that concept is that not everybody is physically able to invest in bitcoin, unlike manual labor. It's a game of he who starts off with the most will always have the most. Does that seem right to you?

[Donut]

I thought about the protein folding thing a while back. I think there actually is an app (folding at home?) that allows people to get paid in USD for protein folding. I think it would only complicate things to tack bitcoins onto that. Also, since there is a definite and legitimate scientific goal to the number crunching, I would think that would make it a lot easier to cheat the system.

[Cortexian]

I have over 1,500,000 points in Folding @ Home, never heard anything about getting paid... I get over 110,000 PPD on my Titans while Folding @ Home.

As for mining... Seems like just the autotuning period has that huge performance hit on my system. After it finishes I'm given these results:

[2013-12-16 22:41:30] GPU #0:  130.41 khash/s with configuration T27x8
[2013-12-16 22:41:31] GPU #0: using launch configuration T27x8
[2013-12-16 22:42:21] GPU #1:  422.05 khash/s with configuration T51x5
[2013-12-16 22:42:21] GPU #1: using launch configuration T51x5

Gonna try:

-l T51x5,T51x5

[Dwood]

@Dwood: the problem with that concept is that not everybody is physically able to invest in bitcoin, unlike manual labor. It's a game of he who starts off with the most will always have the most. Does that seem right to you?

If you phrase it that way, no it's not right, but I'd say he who starts off with the most, and doesn't do anything with it, will always have the most. The point of crypto currency is to actually use them to DO SOMETHING with them. You don't have to use a gpu to earn bitcoins. you can simply spend your money on them, which may/may not prove to be more useful than mining them. If I was paying the electric bill in my house, i would buy bitcoins with cash occasionally in $20 chunks or so, instead of mining via electricity because i've mined about 50 cents' worth of bitcoins in my pool so far for the past 2 weeks (granted, i haven't had it on all the time).

"Do I even see a value in the coins? Would you sell something you crafted with your own hands to someone who just had his two AMDs running for 2 days?"

@Patrick- Those are very legitimate questions, which I have toyed with, wondering if there were some service I could offer for bitcoins or something like that. Then I realized, Bitcoins need to hit critical mass in certain areas where we could buy anything and be paid with btc without touching cash- gas, food, bill-payment, the list goes on.

How it hits that point is based on whether or not people continue to add value to the currency by accepting that form of payment, which is one reason why i would advise staying away from any cryptocurrency besides BTC or LTC if you want to see them propagate into legitimate currencies.

Edit-

A question I want to know the answer to is this: what happens if we lose btc's- like the ones locked on that guy's hdd- are they lost forever?

[Cortexian]

Dwood I hope you aren't actually mining BTC... It's not worth it for GPU's. You'd be much better off mining LTC or something and then selling THAT for BTC.

[Warsaw]

If you phrase it that way, no it's not right, but I'd say he who starts off with the most, and doesn't do anything with it, will always have the most. The point of crypto currency is to actually use them to DO SOMETHING with them. You don't have to use a gpu to earn bitcoins. you can simply spend your money on them, which may/may not prove to be more useful than mining them. If I was paying the electric bill in my house, i would buy bitcoins with cash occasionally in $20 chunks or so, instead of mining via electricity because i've mined about 50 cents' worth of bitcoins in my pool so far for the past 2 weeks (granted, i haven't had it on all the time).

"Do I even see a value in the coins? Would you sell something you crafted with your own hands to someone who just had his two AMDs running for 2 days?"

@Patrick- Those are very legitimate questions, which I have toyed with, wondering if there were some service I could offer for bitcoins or something like that. Then I realized, Bitcoins need to hit critical mass in certain areas where we could buy anything and be paid with btc without touching cash- gas, food, bill-payment, the list goes on.

How it hits that point is based on whether or not people continue to add value to the currency by accepting that form of payment, which is one reason why i would advise staying away from any cryptocurrency besides BTC or LTC if you want to see them propagate into legitimate currencies.

Edit-

A question I want to know the answer to is this: what happens if we lose btc's- like the ones locked on that guy's hdd- are they lost forever?

If spending money is a valid method of acquiring bitcoins, then why are we bothering with BTC in the first place? Doesn't that basically make it middleware that we can and should cut out? The type of scenario you are proposing is essentially the same thing as buying stock in a company; it still requires conventional money to do and the value of what you are buying is in a state of flux.

[Cortexian]

It would be neat if you could make a profit off the electricity you use for you entire house by mining. Free electricity by using electricity.

[Cortexian]

Zeph enjoy your DOGE.

[Bodzilla]

The cool thing about these virtual currency's isn't "COMPUTA DID THINGS AND NAO MONEH" it's that its a self sufficient economic system free of a central reserve banking system and most importantly it's free of inflation.

It's an amazing concept, i really hope it pans out.