Bitcoin Tumbles From Record High After Exchanges Confirm Outage 130
Fearful of missing out on the frenzy in the Bitcoin world, several people were left disappointed on Wednesday noon after they were unable to buy some cryptocurrency because the websites of Coinbase and Gemini, two of the largest online exchanges for Bitcoin trading in the United States, were either down or taking too long to load, they said. In a statement, Coinbase said it was facing issues handling the overwhelming traffic it has been receiving on its website. Bitcoin surged past $11,000, the highest it has ever been, early Wednesday, though it has since taken a tumble as well, going as low as $9,290.30. Gemini said in a tweet it had resolved the performance issues, though some users continue to report delays on the website. Bitcoin's professional trading platform GDAX and exchanges Kraken and Bitstamp were also facing issues on Wednesday. The issues had been addressed, they said.
Maybe I should get into this mining thing... (Score:1)
How does one go about it on a mac? I mean, I'm not in a hurry and my computer sits idle most of the time anyway. And it's in a cold room that could use the heat.
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Google bitcoin mining my friend... There are many options.
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No one to blame but yourself.
Re: Maybe I should get into this mining thing... (Score:1)
That's why you don't leave your coin in an exchange or anyone elses online wallet. Keep it in your own paper wallet or electronic one if you can keep it secured. Keeping all your cash on an exchange is like keeping all your USD in Kmart gift cards. Once they go belly up, poof your USD is gone
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Google bitcoin mining my friend... There are many options.
None of the options involve a PC or mac. You need special ASICs to make a bit of profit.
But is that really the case (Score:3)
What if you are willing to assume that BTC will go to one million, or higher? Then the cost of electricity used now would be negligible compared to return.
I used to have a bitcoin miner on a Mac Mini some time ago, that I would turn on every now and again. It was slow, I think I ran it for a few months off and on, and acquired around 0.01 BTC. The thing is, at current prices I definitely made more than it cost in electricity to mine. If you think BTC will really go up, then as a speculative effort it mi
Re: But is that really the case (Score:1)
You'd be better off not paying the power company extra and buying Bitcoin now.
Another consideration (Score:3)
Bitcoin you mine is anonymous, bitcoin you buy generally not. If you think about taxes on a few hundred k even, vs no taxes... the electricity costs you may pay now seem negligible. Same goes for not having to pay the transaction fees for any purchase of BTC, especially if you can only afford to buy a bit every month.
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I'm not convinced the math would work out, but I'm too lazy to check.
If we assume Bitcoin will hit a million, 100x it's current valuation in 2 years (that's about 2 years of this year's growth).
Our options are to spend $1/day in electricity for $0.10/day in bitcoin (making a wildass guess that custom systems are 10x more efficient), or invest $1/day.
1) we won't be in the 100 thousands, and in most of the world, even if we were, that would need to be 90% taxed to matter.
2) the anonymity is a fair point, I'd
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No, you don't.
of course it depends on whether you are looking at making a large amount of money fast, making a large amount of money slowly or just making small amounts of money which you hope would multiply as time goes by.
I'm doing option 3. Made a couple hundred dollars in a bit over a month without buying hardware (just using the one I have).
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I'd suggest looking into Ethereum since that can be mined with a GPU.
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What? You don't take BitCoin? Shame on you!
[tongue firmly in cheek]
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It's not economic to mine Bitcoin on anything less than custom ASIC rig as far as I know.
It started off being economic to mine on CPUs. The Bitcoin algorithm increases the difficulty level automatically with time. Eventually it became uneconomic to mine on CPUs and people moved to GPUs. The difficulty level rose again. Now it is uneconomic to mine on anything but ASICs.
I.e. you'll spend more on electricity than you make in Bitcoins on a CPU.
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Careful or you'll fry the planet!
Also - not convertible to Flooze or Beenz [adage.com], so obviously a bunch of useless pikers.
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How does one go about it on a mac?
You don't. Bitcoins are mined on ASICs using wholesale electricity costing 3 to 4 cents per kwhr. Anything less, and you are not going to break even.
And it's in a cold room that could use the heat.
Buy a sweater.
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You don't. Bitcoins are mined on ASICs using wholesale electricity costing 3 to 4 cents per kwhr. Anything less, and you are not going to break even.
I did the calculations less than 2 months ago, using a pulled ASIC (fastest publicly available at the time) from one of the top miners... even with free electricity, it would have taken more than a month to recoup the initial ASIC cost. Those ASICs aren't cheap, even used, and they aren't reliable either with a lot of people complaining that the equipment fries within a couple of months. If you pay the electricity at public prices, I couldn't foresee a way to break even on the ASIC investment. Of course, wi
Re:Maybe I should get into this mining thing... (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry dude, it's way past the point it was profitable to use computer downtime for it. At this point, the ammount you'd get from it wouldn't pay the extra electricity cost, much less wear and tear of hardware.
Years ago, even before the value reached 2000 bucks, it was already only profitable for chinese farms running extremely barebones on junk parts inside warehouses using stolen electricity. You can imagine how it is now.
Well, unless you go for something other than Bitcoin I guess. Plenty hard to choose what will be the next successful blockchain currency though, there are just too many out there.
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How does one go about it on a mac? I mean, I'm not in a hurry and my computer sits idle most of the time anyway. And it's in a cold room that could use the heat.
To do mining today, you will need your own dam. Then you get a roomful of ASIC servers. It's like Breaking Bad, but a lot less plausible.
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If you want to use your CPU cycles for good, I suggest Folding@Home instead.
good luck trying to cash out that high number it w (Score:2)
good luck trying to cash out that high number it will drop and they will say at the time the order went though it's price was X and all sales are finale. Who are you going to call the SEC?
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Historically, it would not be unusual for them to not even have the BTC anyway.
If they're caught short, they simply claim a hack, say they're working to find the real killer, then disappear as quickly as they can.
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Who is 'They'?
It's Almost Like Some Kinf of Mania (Score:1)
Q: What's between your nose and your chin?
A: Two lips!
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Which never happened: https://www.smithsonianmag.com... [smithsonianmag.com]
Gonna have to do better than fictional examples.
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When it takes 7 or more minutes to confirm txns... (Score:5, Insightful)
When it naturally takes 7 or more minutes just to confirm transactions (depending on how entrenched in the blockchain you want the transactions to be before you consider them to be "confirmed"), how can delays be seen as being "outages"? Long delays considered totally unreasonable for credit cards and other mediums of exchange are perfectly normal for Bitcoin.
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Long delays considered totally unreasonable for credit cards and other mediums of exchange are perfectly normal for Bitcoin.
Credit card transactions can be reversed for months after the fact. Bitcoin transactions can be validated ("Yes, the signed transaction received has valid inputs.") almost instantly, and once it is included in the blockchain (Generally in minutes, sometimes as much as an hour.) it is irreversible. Much faster than PayPal or credit cards. As a merchant, if the value of the transaction is small, accepting unconfirmed transactions is an acceptable risk. If it's a high value transaction (For whatever value
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No argument, and likely why scams have and continue to be so prevalent in crypto currencies. It's digital cash, and transactions are not reversible.
On the other hand, it's quite literally programmable money. Escrow systems will make a resurgence. It is entirely possible to build a transaction between you, me and a third party where I commit to a payment, and you commit to ship me a physical item. Once I have digitally committed to the payment, I cannot reverse it on my own. On the other hand, you canno
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Sounds like VISA.
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Congratulations, you've just invented the banking system!
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Congratulations, you've just invented the banking system!
No, the escrow system is a way to get the benefits of a bank without involving a fully-trusted third party. A bank can refuse to process the payment even when the buyer and seller agree, whereas the escrow partner is completely out of the loop in this case. The bank can also take the money and run against the wishes of both buyer and seller, again something the escrow partner cannot do since at least one of them must sign off on the transfer. The only real risk is that the escrow partner fails to act impart
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minus the banks.
which is a big plus.
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A lot of people already have an account on the exchange with coins and or cash in it. You can trade those on the exchange without any confirmations or delays.
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But I buyed them at 11k now what I do? Shoot? Posin?
Cry or die I guess.
Enjoy losing money and not being able to get out by selling the asset..
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1929... they jumped from windows...
Also 1929: The volume was so high that the tickers around the country were running *hours* behind because of the spool of data to print.
Also 1929: Previous run up by speculation was a major contributor to high prices (bubble)
Also 1929: Crazy over leverage led to the contraction becoming a crash.
I see *many* parallels here. As to OP, don't jump mate, and panic selling is likely as bad as holding at this point in the game. If you can't live w/o the money sell, otherwise
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Yea, but 1929 was a LOT worse because folks where losing more money than they had invested because they where buying on margins and leveraging small amounts of money to control large blocks of stock. At the end of the day, margin calls where being made and you had to make your account good. Debt was pilling up faster than anybody imagined was possible.
BitCoin investors who actually buy them can only lose their up front money should BitCoin prove worthless before they can sell them, somehow.... Nobody is
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people *are* leveraged on BTC. There are many (no hard numbers...) who've maxed Credit Cards to buy more BTC.
Yes it's not going to have the power curve function that 1929 had (AFAIK no double or triple leverage like in 29), but there are plenty of people that will be ruined when (not if) the crash happens.
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The interest on those loans is probably a lot higher though. I don't know exactly how much a margin trading interest rate in 1929 was, but mid single digits looks like a reasonable guess. Most credit cards are around 20%.
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I'll buy at a 30% discount and use those profits to pump the price higher and make him buy back at 15k.
There seems to be some confusion as to how much money you'd need actually need to pump the price higher.
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For the most part, it's still a "small players" game at the moment compared to other world-wide markets.
In a bit more than two weeks, "CME Bitcoin Futures" will join the small players and they'll be able to either pump it back up at an even faster rate, or they'll be able to stabilize the value and let it increase slowly over time.
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You'll be fine, 10% loss or so.
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40K is more likely.
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Yeah, there is room to grow, but 1000% a year is not gonna happen forever.
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A dog having 10 puppies is a lot of dogs; but when those puppies each have 10 puppies...
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10 + 10 = You get 20 puppies!
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Sell them tomorrow for a profit; It'll be over $12k before the end of the week
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What the fuck? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because we're in some weird hype-mode for Bitcoins where 2-line summaries with no articles indicating Bitcoin's status is the bulk of what we're getting these days. To be fair, they tripled their efforts with the summary on this one...
Can't wait for it to vanish so we can go back to arguing about Trump and climate change. /s
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The source is a decentralized global network, if you can't figure out how to access it, WTF are you doing on /.?
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So while people like you can feel and smug and say "bubble" lulz. The actual smart people moved their money in a long time ago and are profiting pretty nicely.
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Who's doing that?
Plenty of people put in a month's recreation over a few months, pulled it all back out, and aren't exposed at all, but have some theoretical money to pull for a vacation or what not.
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So, mostly down?
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I'd like to meat both, please.
Bitcoin tumbles from record high (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh noes, it's still worth more than a week ago! Let's all panic!
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Hey, if you are day trading, a week ago doesn't mater. It's ancient history.
But who would day trade BitCoin?
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There was a major market dislocation on some alt coins yesterday - you think bitcoin is voltaile? It trades like a DJI stock compared to some of these alts, but people are jumping in with 4x leverage, and wondering why suddenly they have a zero or negative balance when there is a massive sell-off and the price crashes 90%.
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Woe is me (Score:1)
Time to get out (Score:2)
NASDAQ is considering opening bitcoin futures. If that's not a sign to bail, nothing is.
Eight orders of magnitude (Score:2, Informative)
Bitcoin (all cryptocurrency, really) is clearly in a bubble. (You did not need me to tell you this)
You can obtain Bitcoins three ways: by mining, by exchanging it for another currency, or in exchange for a good or service.
Outside of darkweb drug markets and ransomware payments, I don't see much exchange going on for goods/services. That raises some red flags, but isn't itself cause to write it off as a bubble - it can have utility value as an intermediate between other currencies.
The exchange rates, right n
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Ah, that would indeed throw my math off. I went through several different sources looking for one that actually defined their units, but the only ones I could find simply labeled the axis "TH", if they labeled it at all.
If your figure is correct, the gap shrinks to one order of magnitude, which is small enough that I'd want to redo the whole calculation with more detailed figures than one significant digit. But the rough figure puts Bitcoin's value distribution as 10% utility, 90% speculation, which doesn't
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Shesh.. Don't mine using GPU's the ROI is horrible..
In fact.. Don't mine at all because it may be profitable based on the electricity used, but you will be hard pressed to pay for the hardware.