Lord Beria3 wrote:I know somebody who made so much money in bitcoin that he has been able to buy a house with his missus. Not bad.
If you're in at the start of a PONZI or pyramid scheme you can get rich very quickly as long as you get out soon enough. It's the sheeple who come in late who pay for your "insight" and profits there from. Your friend obviously had the insight and has made two wise investments, the second probably being the only one worthwhile in the long term.
A large scale theft of crypto currency has occurred.
The loss is reported to be as much as £380 million, and it is believed to be in excess of what the "bank" can repay and therefore be the loss of those who had invested/gambled. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-42845505
"Installers and owners of emergency diesels must assume that they will have to run for a week or more"
Despite the fact that a trillion-dollar cadre of corporate giants are moving aggressively into crypto-tech… nay-sayers still don’t believe it can stick around.
JP Morgan, Microsoft, IBM, Maersk, Kodak, NVidia and Intel are just some of the monoliths to put serious money into crypto tech.
And now, the world’s second largest tech firm are stepping in.
Samsung are developing processors geared toward mining cryptocurrencies.
According to The Verge, “as the valuation of cryptocurrencies has shot up, so has the demand for these sorts of chips.�
This new branch of the Samsung tech empire could add almost half a billion dollars to its revenue. Nothing to be sniffed at.
At least it might make the mining a little less energy intensive. One can only hope! Or will it just mean even more people mining but using slightly less electricity so more of the latter being used overall?
I don't claim to understand all this blockchain stuff but isn't the expense in mining part of the reason (or indeed the main reason) why crypt currencies are expensive. You are making it difficult to get by taking long and being expensive. In other words making it a scarce resource and giving it value. Just like other commodities.
I don't see how Microsoft could make a better software to do these sums. Perhaps a chip could use a bit less energy to do this but I have heard that Moore's Law is now no longer holding and chips are not doubling in processor power every two years. Just putting them in dual or quad cores.
Someone in my office proudly showed me a photo of his crypto currency mining computer with six graphics cards attached to the motherboard. It will give him one Etherium "coin" every three months, currently worth about $2500.
I think I will stick to using my computer to play World of Tanks.
Iceland is reporting on BBC news website that bitcoin mining is projected to exceed domestic electricity demand this year, and they may not have enough renewable supply to meet it.
Bitcoin presumably was an experiment in synthesising a resource backed currency. It may still be a sociology experiment. If they just wanted to limit the rate of supply increase, then they could use other ways - lottery, 1 per person at birth etc
And in the us, they are building natural gas powered , satellite connected drop in bit mining modules to ship to off shore and remote oil wells, to use flared gas as a free energy source, which would be otherwise entirely wasted
