Silk Road collected 9.5 million bitcoin—and only 11.75 million exist
http://qz.com/131084/silk-road-collected-9-5-million-bitcoin-and-only-11-75-million-exist/
Some 'schoolboy errors' in there for sure, revealing his identity.
That's a lot of dough he accumulated, that sunny beach and drink in hand must have seemed so close
From what they seized, the FBI now have 0.22% of the total Bitcoin currency (probably more if you take into account lost wallets and other recent raids). Especially important as there is a finite amount of bitcoins.
It is an interesting foothold into something which they must be either trying to kill or use to their advantage.
On the upside the price has come back up very quickly which hopefully points to a healthy market without the need for crime (well, no more than cash anyway).
I still dont get it, Bitcoin.
Even tried to read Shak's site about it but I'm still clueless. Might be that I'm just dumb ;)
Don't worry Rumbas, I don't either.
It appears that by generating a bitcoin you are creating a "proxy coupon" for money laundering.
<added>
With the above, it's starting to make sense to me. People are willing to pay for the (supposed) anonymity. They do it all the time, in various forms, to avoid the taxman or the law. Simple bartering is taxable here in the US, but no one reports it.
Lucky man
Bitcoin: Man Buys Flat With Forgotten Fortune
http://news.sky.com/story/1161340/bitcoin-man-buys-flat-with-forgotten-fortune
QuoteA Norwegian man who bought £15 worth of bitcoins and then forgot about them for four years has been able to buy a flat in Oslo thanks to the huge appreciation of the virtual currency.
....
His 5,000 bitcoins were suddenly worth around £430,000.
....
After spending a full day trying to remember his password, Mr Koch cashed in £116,000 by selling a fifth of his newly-acquired fortune.
luckily he remembered his password
That's a hell of a lot of appreciation in a short amount of time. I am sure this will drive up Bitcoin even more in the short run.
I started to read up on it and "think" I get it now.
Might even buy some just for the fun of it. Dont know where spent it though, but with that increase and more focus, it might be good investment?
i think the better investment is in the hardware to roll your own. i know some guys i trust who do are building cheap-ish supercomputers to do this. they've already produced a few BC's and are sure they can get it down to hours rather than days for around $8k hardware. these guys deal in petabytes for their day jobs, so that's why i'm considering buying in.
Good point RC, I was thinking the same. Maybe a talk with our tech and hosting guys and see if they have any iron around they're not using. I know they get electricity at very low price..
I haven't heard back yet. Very quiet ...and you know what I've always said about guys that go quiet; they're either bust or making big money.
>iron
From what I can tell, there is a special/custom chipset needed to really go high-speed.
> From what I can tell, there is a special/custom chipset needed to really go high-speed.
the maths behind Bitcoins is based on the SHA512 checksum - it's very easy to compute but the specific of Bitcoin are that you can compute lots (many thousands, millions, billions) before you might get one that "pays out"
Originally these sums were done on standard CPUs
then they scaled by using GPUs and got order of magnitude better throughput
then they scaled using FGPA (Field Gate Programmable Arrays) - think about them as hardware you can program for diffrernt tasks, and the throughput went through the roof
then they scaled using ASIC ( Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) IE - Custom hardware.
That's where we are at the moment and most of the ones that are being touted out there atm seem to be vapourware - Money taken, no product exists yet, apart from a few small players and those that have it, also have the ability to control the market.
It's interesting -:)
>using ASIC ( Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) IE - Custom hardware.
>That's where we are at the moment and most of the ones that are being touted out there atm seem to be vapourware
Sounds like what one of them was telling me. These guys work in various departments a heavy-duty research division of a top US hardware and corporate/government services company --their customers are major banks, visa, mastercard, us treasury, etc. I've known one for years, and that's really the only reason I'm interested in buying in.
I have a bunch of USB ASICs running controlled by Raspberry Pi's.
I originally started with Graphics cards, but they are no longer up to mining bitcoin. They are useful for other coins such as Litecoin though. Well, they would be if the bloody fans would stop burning up!
The price of Bitcoin has doubled since the start of this thread. I'm not saying that it is a trend that will continue. I personally feel the current price is too high and will come down. However, over the long term (I am in for at least 10 years) I feel it should rise (assuming it continues to become more widely accepted).
I'm happy to help out if anyone want to have a go at setting up their own mining experiment. I have learned more about Linux, power monitoring and networking doing this than any other single job/experiment. I have just been asked to help out setting up with a new client. I hope it might be the start of a new and interesting sideline.
I would probably say that you might be just as well off if you just invested in the coin at the moment (high risk money you could live with losing of course).
I was in the market for an ASIC miner and put in the order. At the time I did the difficulty was low enough where I would have made like 10x my investment on the miner.
Then a few months went by and I would be maybe 2x my money... while still waiting on the miner.
Then difficulty made it about 1x. At this point I cancelled my order or tried to. The company was not very cooperative, however my bank was very happy to step in.
Now it would be -1x since the power of the chips is not enough. I do not think the miner could ever break even.
If I would have just purchased $400 in coins they would be worth like 1k now.
thesaintv12 - are you able to make any coins / money with your equipment anymore? or is the new difficulty too much?
Quote from: werty on November 05, 2013, 11:09:43 PM
thesaintv12 - are you able to make any coins / money with your equipment anymore? or is the new difficulty too much?
Yes, if I sold now I would be in up. It would only be pocket money though. My plan is to hold long term. I also use 10% of my bank to trade with.
If I was getting in now I think I'd look at just buying the coins rather than mining them.
I'm not under the impression that it will make me rich, I tend to approach projects like this with a view that they might each pay off a bit of the mortgage.
What Graphics cards do you have and if you're no longer using them would you be willing to sell them?
(Yes, I am playing with non Bitcoin, GPGPU based parrallel processing)
Quote from: JasonD on November 06, 2013, 10:52:37 AM
What Graphics cards do you have and if you're no longer using them would you be willing to sell them?
(Yes, I am playing with non Bitcoin, GPGPU based parrallel processing)
I only use GPU's for scrypt based coins (Litecoin etc). I use radeon 7950's. If you are buying then I'd advise you buy new and not second hand from another miner, oh and get the Saphire Vapour X ones. The reason is that they are running flat out 24/7 and the fans are not built for it. I keep a stock of replacement fans now and expect them to last 4-5 months in the spahires, and maybe 3 months from the other cards.
For bitcoin I use USB ASIC's now. Cheaper to run, more powerful AND have pretty blinking lights! I use headless raspberrypi's to control them.
It is an arms race though, hardware ages quickly in this game.
My interest in bitcoin was more as a fun/high-risk investment than in mining (I can't be arsed with hardware these days).
My problem is that the risk seems to have moved from being a risk of the value dropping, to a risk of never getting your balance back from an exchange. The biggest exchange mtgox has been having all sorts of problems thanks to a pissed off US government. Lots of people struggling to get funds out which is also impacting prices on the exchange. Bitcoin-24 seems to have hit a similar issues in Poland with users unable to get to their funds since August.
Most of the other players require a US bank account. That isn't a problem in itself, but the US is not high on my list of places that I would want to have a bank account for bitcoin trading.
I know that you technically don't need any of those things in order to trade in bitcoins. But until Nationwide start accepting bitcoin as mortgage payments I'd want to see it turned in to cash.
I think you are right Rooftop. There must be a lot of money to be made for the people who can start to solve that problem though ;)
First Bitcoin ATM Installed in Vancouver Coffee Shop
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/bitcoin-atm-conducts-10000-worth-transactions-day/story?id=20730762
'...saw 81 transactions during the first day of operation on Tuesday, totaling over $10,000. And it's not just the diehard bitcoin users that used it.
"Over one-third of customers were bitcoin newcomers" '
But now drug users can rejoice, because Silk Road is back, promising to provide the same level of reliable service as it did before it was busted. The site's new leader – who's taken on Ulbricht's title of "Dread Pirate Roberts" (DPR), the name Ulbricht supposedly used while allegedly helming the site – was kind enough to grant me early access to Silk Road 2.0 ahead of its launch today
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/good-news-drug-usersthe-silk-road-is-back
1 bitcoin is worth over $370 now, which must be more than the cost of renting a botnet to mine that amount :P
www.theverge.com/2013/11/22/5133362/richard-branson-endorses-bitcoin-says-virgin-galactic-will-accept-the
I knew I should have tried to mine more...
Bitcoin hits $1,000 for the first time (http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/27/5151396/bitcoin-hits-1000)
lol
www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site
The prefect set up to mine bitcoins - http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/2/5165428/bitcoin-mine-in-hong-kong-uses-jelly-to-keep-cool
(https://th3core.com/chat/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn3.sbnation.com%2Fentry_photo_images%2F9508155%2Fbitcoin9_large_verge_medium_landscape.jpg&hash=95527779f10e39b4bd26e39cc8ad0a06ea4ce117)
QuoteThe mine is the size of a shipping container, and filled with 1-meter-high glass tanks in which banks of blades are immersed in roiling liquid. Each tank can hold 92 blades; the blades themselves are kept at a temperature of 37 degrees Celsius or below by "open bath immersion" technology.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/another-bitcoin-gets-completely-wiped-thieves-160233294.html
NOT A GOOD THING, ME THINKS