Cryptocurrencies

What cryptocurrencies do you use/own?

  • Bitcoin (XBT)

    Votes: 30 27.8%

  • Ether (ETH)

    Votes: 16 14.8%

  • Litecoin (LTC)

    Votes: 15 13.9%

  • Peercoin (PPC)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Dash (DASH)

    Votes: 3 2.8%

  • Dogecoin (XDG)

    Votes: 4 3.7%

  • Blackcoin (BLK)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Zcash (ZEC)

    Votes: 3 2.8%

  • Other

    Votes: 14 13.0%

  • None

    Votes: 69 63.9%
  • Total voters
    108
I've helped some of my existing business customers to build and maintain rigs, charging only for my time, but I haven't gone so far as building and selling rigs to the public, mainly because I don't own a computer shop or do residential work.

kwest said:
What are your thoughts on Masternodes? I have a buddy that isn’t techie and someone sold him on it. He invested $10k with a guy doing it. He said he has a friend that invested 100k. Sounds like a scam.
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Masternodes can be a good investment, and a good alternative to mining, but they're not without risk of course. To buy enough coins to run a masternode can cost a lot and so you stand to lose a lot if the price of the coin plummets. I came close to owning a Linda coin masternode when Linda was a very new coin and the price was low, even so the required 30 million coins would've cost me around £15,000 -- a lot to risk on a new coin with no history and a very small community.

Instead I took a smaller gamble and bought about 7 million Linda coins. The price of LINDA has since risen sharply and, had I bought 30 million coins they would now be worth over £100,000. Still, the smaller investment I made (about £3K) is now worth about £30K and I've earned over 500,000 coins through staking instead. Staking is less profitable but doesn't require such large investments. My (now ~7.7 million) LINDA holdings makes around 100,000 LINDA each month through staking (approx £400-500).
 
i'm no expert but it looks like big money and bots have flooded the major cryptocurrencies.

Edit: i mean in response to why the markets been behaving like this, these major players only care about getting that .8-2% here and there.

Edit2: I say bots because of the speed at which huge orders are changing price on the gdax order books.
 
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Another thing that needs to change with bitcoin takes too much energy bitmain looked at Quebec they claimed they had lots of extra power but they don`t the amount of energy required is getting out of control hopefully bitcoin atom will help if it ever goes mainstream.
Fees are also out of control bitcoin atom should help here as well.

https://news.bitcoin.com/101054-2/
 
Galdorf said:
Another thing that needs to change with bitcoin takes too much energy bitmain looked at Quebec they claimed they had lots of extra power but they don`t the amount of energy required is getting out of control hopefully bitcoin atom will help if it ever goes mainstream.
Fees are also out of control bitcoin atom should help here as well.

https://news.bitcoin.com/101054-2/
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I think the challenges cryptocurrency mining presents are a good thing. Where there's money to be made, innovation is driven at a much faster pace. It's likely to indirectly lead to advancements in both renewal energy sources and more efficient computers/processors.
 
I found this an interesting read, and a good explanation of how Schnorr and SegWit fit into the Bitcoin scaling picture ...

The Power of Schnorr: The Signature Algorithm to Increase Bitcoin's Scale and Privacy
Link: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/article...rease-bitcoin-s-scale-and-privacy-1460642496/

So what, then, are Schnorr signatures?

Schnorr, named after its inventor Claus-Peter Schnorr, is a signature scheme: the series of mathematical rules that link the private key, public key and signature together. Many cryptographers consider Schnorr signatures the best in the field, as they offer a strong level of correctness, do not suffer from malleability, are relatively fast to verify, and ‒ importantly ‒ support multisignature: several signatures can be aggregated into a single, new signature.

However, until now it has not been possible to utilize Schnorr in Bitcoin. Another type of signature scheme, Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), is baked into the Bitcoin protocol, and changing that would require a hard fork.

That's where Segregated Witness comes in.
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And here's an interesting recent podcast discussion about Lightning (feat. Andreas Antonopoulos)...

Let's Talk Bitcoin! #352 - Lightning in Real Life
Link: https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-352-lightning-in-real-life
 
So much fake news on bitcoin as one person pointed out that south korea said it was going to ban bitcoin that was a misquote they said they were going to ban anon bitcoin transactions.
Now even the pope quoted don`t believe everything you read so much fake news out there question is how can fake news cause bitcoin to drop so fast there are other factors at work here such as corrections and futures.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/17/as-...s-expire-price-and-volume-concerns-arise.html
 
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Had kind of an ah-ha moment at the dentist yesterday. The hygienist cordially asked what was new and exciting in my life. I mentioned bitcoin and cryptocurrency and some of the small profits I had made. She actually wrote down a few notes (you can tell people are really listening when they write things down :D )

Anyway, I was thinking about how to explain what all the fuss was about. I mentioned how even IBM is advertising their supply chain services on TV that is driven with their blockchain. It occurred to me:

Bitcoin (blockchains, cryptocurrency, etc.) comes down to ONE THING: an electronic record that cannot be changed.

I think that's the biggest deal and so game changing. Prior to that there was no way to make electronic records unchangeable (save for maybe writing them to read-only media, but even that can be changed by copying and re-burning). All the other innards about how this stuff works is just noise when you're just trying to understand it's applications.
 
timeshifter said:
Bitcoin (blockchains, cryptocurrency, etc.) comes down to ONE THING: an electronic record that cannot be changed.
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That's certainly the essence of it.

I like to explain that a blockchain is a type of public ledger, which works like most physical bookkeeping ledgers in that the records (or transactions) are always appended and never amended.

The most remarkable thing about blockchain technology however, is that it does this without the need for any central authority to protect the data or prove the authenticity of each transaction, completely removing any possibility of forgery or corruption.

What was described in the Bitcoin whitepaper back in 2009 was nothing short of revolutionary. It proposed a solution to the age-old Byzantine General's Problem that could be used to develop a distributed ledger, secured by nothing more than encryption and consensus.
 
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timeshifter said:
The hygienist cordially asked what was new and exciting in my life.
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I'm sure it was a rhetorical question. You know, just making conversation.

timeshifter said:
I mentioned bitcoin and cryptocurrency and some of the small profits I had made. She actually wrote down a few notes (you can tell people are really listening when they write things down :D )
.
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"Note to self: In the future, do not ask patient about what is new and exciting in his life"

:p
 
timeshifter said:
an electronic record that cannot be changed
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Only if there are enough people interested in keeping it unchanged, I think. Otherwise anyone with superior computing capacity can re-do the calculations and change the record on you. The blockchain can be changed, you just need to do many computations for that.
 
Alexey said:
Only if there are enough people interested in keeping it unchanged, I think. Otherwise anyone with superior computing capacity can re-do the calculations and change the record on you. The blockchain can be changed, you just need to do many computations for that.
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Past entries cannot be changed. In theory, if a single mining entity controls 51% of all transactions, then current and future transactions can be manipulated and still confirmed. Those 'mal-formed' transactions would be entered into the blockchain - but can not be changed after the fact.

There is some extremely theoretical talk about being able to change the blockchain's "past history" using quantum computers. Because the blockchain calculates its' cryptography based on the past transactions, and fails if incorrect, the only theoretical way to change the blockchain is to be able to change it in such a way that produces the same cryptographic 'keys' in the end, although the equation has changed.
The real problem comes, I think, when you realize that there are only very limited "alternate solutions" to the cryptographic algorithm that produce the required answer. Therefore, even if you could change the blockchain, the changes you can make are limited and likely wouldn't produce a result favored by a bad actor... it's not like 'someone' could dictate to the blockchain, the blockchain will dictate to the 'someone', as what mathematical solutions are possible.
 
phaZed said:
Those 'mal-formed' transactions would be entered into the blockchain - but can not be changed after the fact.
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Should I have infinite computing power, what is preventing me from just recomputing the thing from scratch?
 
Alexey said:
Should I have infinite computing power, what is preventing me from just recomputing the thing from scratch?
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Well, that would be an option, however if everyone knows it was done, nobody would use it ever again and the value would be destroyed... making the whole thing a useless stunt. I suppose if the goal was to destroy a cryptocurrency, then that would be a good way to do it.

Since the blockchain is distributed, it makes it very difficult if impossible to recompute the entire thing - all other computers in the world would still have the old, valid copy. So, I suppose, in theory, you would need to control 51% of all transactions and have a quantum computer.
 
phaZed said:
Since the blockchain is distributed, it makes it very difficult if impossible to recompute the entire thing - all other computers in the world would still have the old, valid copy.
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As soon as I recomputed it, we now have two valid copies. Far worse, if I recomputed multiple different copies then we now have multiple valid copies, and proven by cryptography, they are all valid to the same extent. If you choose not to accept them all valid to the same extent, you have just reverted to physical security and/or naive majority voting. For this you do not need blockchain or enrcyption at all - you may as well just have everyone store plain copy of the data not hashed in any way.

Now see, if the application is Bitcoin, it will be difficult to recompute. But suppose North Korea decided to have their government property records (who owns which land and building) in blockchain, on the assumption that blockchain cannot be modified. Then China will order their bitcoin miners to realign themselves towards North Korea and in a couple of days China will with cryptographic proof own all of the North Korea. So as I see it using blockchain for any purpose of small scale record-keeping in effect puts your records at mercy of Intel, AMD, Chinese ASIC friends and similar groups. And by the small scale I mean not me and my roommates, but more like a small country.

Another factor is speed at which transactions arrive. There are hundreds per second money exchanges in the world, and these are difficult to keep up with if I'm to continue recomputing false copy. However, blockchain record of the list of Nobel Prize winners is a different thing, and there will be no problem recomputing it.

I wonder by the way... should Bitcoin miners with their accumulated computing power realign themselves toward some small-circulation crypto-currency, they can probably take over the thing in a matter of minutes.
 
@Alexey - I suppose that's possible, but implementing a scheme like that would be the challenge both socially and technically. How to get millions of independent miners, all at once, to change? It would be a grand conspiracy for sure.
 
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