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Bitcoin Businesses The Almighty Buck

Bitcoin Tumbles From Record High After Exchanges Confirm Outage 130

Posted by msmash from the down-time dept.
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.
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Bitcoin Tumbles From Record High After Exchanges Confirm Outage More

Bitcoin Tumbles From Record High After Exchanges Confirm Outage

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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.

    • Google bitcoin mining my friend... There are many options.

      • 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.

        • 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

          • You'd be better off not paying the power company extra and buying Bitcoin now.

            • 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.

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by AvitarX ( 172628 )

                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

        • 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).

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Holi ( 250190 )
        Pretty sure a Mac is not going to be your best bet for mining Bitcoin.

        I'd suggest looking into Ethereum since that can be mined with a GPU.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Send me a check and I'll send you all the hardware you need. Just enter your credit card info into this website and it'll be shipped right away, complete with instructions [youtube.com].

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Thud457 ( 234763 )
        Bitcoin is a Cananadian global warming conspiracy.
        Careful or you'll fry the planet!

        Also - not convertible to Flooze or Beenz [adage.com], so obviously a bunch of useless pikers.

    • 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.

      • 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)

      by XSportSeeker ( 4641865 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @08:15PM (#55647351)

      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.

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Trogre ( 513942 )

      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 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?

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

      Who is 'They'?

  • It's Almost Like Some Kinf of Mania (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Q: What's between your nose and your chin?

    A: Two lips!

  • When it takes 7 or more minutes to confirm txns... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @04:48PM (#55645943)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by JcMorin ( 930466 )
      Bitcoin Cash is a fork that occurred on August that can be accepted instantly because transactions are reliable. If you have a perfectly signed transaction you can be pretty sure it will be included in the next block or so. Unless you trade a huge amount of money for everyday purchase 0-confirmation transaction is safe to accept. This was the case on Bitcoin SegWit until they voluntary prevent to raise the limit, jammed the mempol and started to drop transactions because there was no enough room to confirm

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by grnbrg ( 140964 )

      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

      • From the consumer side, this a huge negative. Charge backs are the whole reason I use a credit card instead of debit. I would NEVER buy anything online without the ability to reverse the transaction if the product is unsatisfactory.
    • That is not the outage. The outage is the exchanges that allow you to trade. Bitcoin network is running just fine.

    • 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.

  • What the fuck? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by o_ferguson ( 836655 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @05:11PM (#55646141)
    Why is there no source article for this "story." What the fuck, Slashdot. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

    • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

      The source is a decentralized global network, if you can't figure out how to access it, WTF are you doing on /.?

  • Bitcoin tumbles from record high (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @05:22PM (#55646233)

    Oh noes, it's still worth more than a week ago! Let's all panic!

    • Hey, if you are day trading, a week ago doesn't mater. It's ancient history.

      But who would day trade BitCoin?

      • There are plenty of day traders, including some using margin.

        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%.
    • I suppose the complaints on lack of growth will be ten times louder when it's fluctuating 10k usd a day.
  • Darn, now we're only at 1000% gain this year instead of 1200%. How will I feed my children?

  • NASDAQ is considering opening bitcoin futures. If that's not a sign to bail, nothing is.

  • 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

    • That difficulty is hovering around 10 billion GH/s right now, not 1TH which would be 1,000 GH/s. So, yeah, you're off by some orders of magnitude.

      • 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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