Anyone used cryptocurrencies?
morgurth
Villager
I've mined 1 whole Litecoin (~$25 at todays rate). I have a Nvidia 560 Ti, so GPU mining is slow. It took me around 10 days. At the current Litecoin exchange rate, that isn't worth the trouble. If you could get Radeon 280x's, each one generates hashes at 4x the rate of my Nvidia card. If you could get 3 - 6 of them and a cheap motherboard, it might still be worth it. However, they are always out of stock, or someone wants double the price for them.
The Bitcoin mining ship has sailed, unless you can sink a lot of dollars into an ASIC rig. Even then, I doubt it's that profitable. You could attempt to buy some coins on the inevitable downturns, and then try to resell them on an exchange. They are swinging all over the place. When China announced that their Central Banks couldn't trade in Bitcoins, the price dropped from $1200/coin to ~$550/coin. But then, a few days later, it was back up to ~$900. It would take a strong stomach for wild fluctuations and a good chance of losing all your money though.
The Bitcoin mining ship has sailed, unless you can sink a lot of dollars into an ASIC rig. Even then, I doubt it's that profitable. You could attempt to buy some coins on the inevitable downturns, and then try to resell them on an exchange. They are swinging all over the place. When China announced that their Central Banks couldn't trade in Bitcoins, the price dropped from $1200/coin to ~$550/coin. But then, a few days later, it was back up to ~$900. It would take a strong stomach for wild fluctuations and a good chance of losing all your money though.
How about Coinye West?
morgurth
Villager
If http://dogecoin.com/ can show up with nothing really new to add to cryptocurrencies, then I guess why not?
Kramodlog
Naked and living in a barrel
Speculation on the value of bitcoin is over for someone with little capital. It is just so volitile right now. I'm betting the smart money will move on to the next cryptocurrency like litecoin.
Dungeoneer
First Post
These currencies are great for speculators and terrible to actually use for buying stuff. If one zoom-buck is worth one regular dollar today, but it might be worth two regular dollars tomorrow, are you going to spend it today to buy a candy bar? No, you'll hang on to it to see if it goes up in value.
Not that you can use any digital currencies to buy candy bars, as far as I know.
Not that you can use any digital currencies to buy candy bars, as far as I know.
It seems like bitcoin and its ilk is over-engineered money.
I get the idea, that like a Monopoly game with 2-6 players, they wanted something with a fixed quantity, prevent injection of fake money, and somehow flexes as population/inflation naturally grows.
But we already have digital money in the form of debit cards and online banking. If we can keep Target from being hacked and debately restrain the Federal Reserve from over-printing new money (based on varying political opinions on the merit of the Fed's strategies that we won't go into here), then you've got e-money already.
What problem does bitcoin really solve?
Kramodlog
Naked and living in a barrel
Anonimity. Perfect for criminals, terrorists and those who want to avoid paying taxes to guverment.
The Silk Road used bitcoins. The FBI seizes like 140k bitcoins when they demantled the operation.
Dungeoneer
First Post
I think, besides being an interesting engineering problem, the idea is to get away from a centralized government having control over money. Some people really hate the idea that, for example, a dollar is worth a dollar only because the US gov't says so. Bitcoin has no gov't authority, no central bank. But it turns out those things provide stability for currencies. How to create a stable currency with no central authority is one problem they DIDN'T solve.
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