Buttcoin

[sorry]

i live with two normalish non geeks who have just invested in dogecoin. one of their friends just turned a four figure sum into a five figure sum. this isn't going to end well or soon. it has become the venue for day traders, based on a meme, based on a guy starting a cryptocurrency on the net. i can't even say how depressing this whole venture is.

[Z%rø]

Personally I'm just mad I didn't get in on the ground floor and make millions

[Cthulhu-chan]

Were they able to actually cash out those dogecoins?

Anyway, it's just tulips all over again. A few people are going to get rich, or at least make a good chunk of change, over this mess, and the rest are going to get various degrees of screwed.

[Mongrel]

Unless governments work together to shut these things down hard, I think dogecoins might have legs, hanging around like a proverbial bad penny.

They'll still be like tulips, but we'll see people get burned over and over again.

[sorry]

afaik no one has cashed out yet, but they're canny dudes so i'd be surprised if they didn't have a way of doing so.

[TedBelmont]

A whole trashbag full of Amazon gift cards

[Angryoptimist]

I like the tech, but I'm not sure I like the implementation or agenda. Maybe I'm easy to persuade, but that Charles Stross article has given me some additional misgivings.

A crypto-currency doesn't have to be untraceable or uncentralized, as I understand it. I mean, you could just as easily have a government issue something like this, and simply build into it the signing and verficiation of a central authority. The big win for me in the idea is the convenience of data-as-currency and difficultly of forgery, not the untraceability.

[Blossom]

Not that bitcoin is in the slightest regard untraceable, of course.

[Angryoptimist]

Not that bitcoin is in the slightest regard untraceable, of course.

The claim that something is untraceable has become a bit more difficult lately, hasn't it? Same goes for claiming that something is truly anonymous.

If I recall correctly, though, Bitcoin is designed to be difficult to tie to a particular person--barring outside things that could connect a user and their currency. I guess the transaction chain is easy to follow though? Haven't looked deeply into the mechanics of Bitcoin.

[zaratustra]

The 'wallets' are just numbers. However, you can find a person's number by the simple expedient of sending them money, you can trace cash's origin as many steps as you want, and all this information is public and will never be erased because the currency's integrity depends on it.

[Blossom]

Short version, every single transaction in the history of bitcoin is stored on every running bitcoin wallet, and when you open bitcoin it has to download up to current before you can do anything. The blockchain is something like ... what, 16 gigs or so, now? In any case, you can find out through simple perusal of this data - hell, here's a site for doing exactly that - exactly how many bitcoins were sent from whom to whom, when. Each transaction stores the then-current IP of the sender, the wallet address of the sender, and the wallet address of the recipient. Since you can match IPs to wallet addresses, it becomes trivially easy for such as law enforcement or ISPs to match wallet addresses to street addresses and specific people.

This cannot be changed, because without this data, bitcoin doesn't work.

[Mongrel]

Oh right, the eventual collapse point is when that file gets OH SHIT HUEG.

[Blossom]

Well, that's one collapse point. The other collapse point is when a single mining pool contains 50%+1 of mining, at which point they can falsify verifications and claim all bitcoins mined thereafter forever. This is also very close to happening!

Oh, or the third collapse point. There are some 9 million bitcoin out there, but only about two million are involved in active trading. Those extra seven million are split up among about 20 wallets. So, the people who have those can pretty much crater the market whenever they choose.

[Brantly B.]

Good thing we don't have that problem with USD!

[Büge]

[pacobird]

Just seen on the subway news ticker: "Las Vegas casinos announce they will accept Bitcoins as payment, but only for food and lodging, not gambling."

I'm almost sorry we'll never get a chance to see how quasi-legal bitcoin laundering would play out.

[Caithness]

[Healy]

...I'm not entirely sure where you're going with that post.

[Caithness]

I just wanted to share an amusing Dogecoin gif. Would it have fit better somewhere in Your Facebook Timeline?

[Cthulhu-chan]

I guess his question is also my question, in that was there some sort of big dogecoin crash recently? I don't really pay attention to ultrafiat currencies.