Slashdot Mirror
Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner
An anonymous reader writes "There's a popular discussion happening at the Bitcoin forums about a new browser-based bitcoin miner released today. This lets people mine for bitcoin straight from the browser. There's talk of making an embeddable version. How long until websites start using CPU power from their users to create Bitcoin for their owners?" As Bitcoin gets more attention, I foresee malware with payloads promising to do the same thing.
Bitcoin Slashvertisements remind me too much of Glen Beck's gold hocking. Have fun with that.
The level of slashvertisement on these things is seriously getting retarded. Stop publishing this crap!
I think most of the merchants that accept Bitcoin do so for the express purpose of giving it value.
What, exactly, have merchants been told that has convinced them that Bitcoin currency has actual value?
Belief that it has value, the same illusion that makes our USD based economy run :p
At least if we all had the same faith in bitcoin it would be impossible for the government or central bank to devalue our currency, effectively robbing everyone of their savings.
The Pirate Bay is my App Store.
The podcast called Security Now featuring Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson (famouse for that the "Shields Up!" web page) dedicated episode 287 entirely to bit coin.
I thought steve gave an incredibly well thought out, clear, concise explanation of what bit coin is why it is apparently impossible to "game" the system in anyway. The following episode (288) was the "listener feedback" episode with many listeners expressing doubt and even more excellent explanations from Steve.
Here are the convenient transcripts of these episodes, linked here in the hopes perhaps it will be useful to the slashdot community.
http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-287.htm - main episode
http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-288.htm - Q-and-A episode
In my mind if Steve says it's trustworthy and not a scam, that's good enough for me. But then I've listened to all 300+ episodes and am a big fan so I may be biased.
In fact there was a spike in use after the SN bitcoin episode. It may be wholly or partially due to Steve's apparent endorsement (he says he's going to make his software purchasable via bitcoin).
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
Bitcoin is a stupid idea with excellent PR. Up to and including a weekly slashvertisement.
What's this thing with regular promotion of bitcoins on /.? Shouldn't it be in advertising box or something?
Site uses only CPU mining, and I can guarantee you that you will be spending more on electricity than gaining in bitcoins with the current valuation. You need a powerful GPU or some other specialized hardware to do it profitably. It's cheaper and easier to just buy bitcoins.
That said, if it works as a steppingstone for you to get interested in Bitcoin, and actually familiarize yourself with the system, before coming to the wrong conclusion about its validity, then go for it.
Here are some places you can start with:
http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf for the original whitepaper that everything is based on (internalize this)
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths for some of the more common myths flying around about bitcoins
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses for some ACTUAL weaknesses in the system, so you don't have to come up with the same old false ones that come up with these thread all the time.
Arrr. Pieces of eight (decimal places.)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
So, essentially, we're burning CPU cycles (and thus, electricity, and thus, fossil fuels in most cases) simply to give an electronic currency scarcity?
Sounds like a fine use of resources to me!
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Yes, which is deflation from the perspective of someone holding bitcoins. The value of bitcoins rises, massively, people hold on to bitcoins instead of spending them because they'll be worth more later, the value then rises further due to scarcity, causing a feedback loop.
Sure, these sorts of things have a limit, somewhere. I'm not quite sure how the people at bitcoin think this is going to work though.
For some reason, the only way I can analogize bitcoin to people is "it's what you'd get if you explained Star Trek's energy credit system to a stoner, who then ran for US congress and implemented it." I write science fiction constantly and would be hard pressed to come up with a zanier scheme.
Great Intellect...
That's where they'll get you. Or Visa/Mastercard will stop processing for wherever bitcoin.org is hosted after a friendly call from a Senator.
Bitcoin.org could be lawyered right off the face of the Earth and it wouldn't make any difference. You'd still be able to trade BTC for USD (or vice versa) with any of the thousands of other Bitcoin owners. It's all P2P, remember?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Both as a technical concept and as a social phenomena. Quite a lot of people using Bitcoin are not doing so for practical benefits.. they're installing the software and promoting the concept as a sort of protest against the fiat banking system. Oh, and because they hate paypal.. but that's mutual.
http://susansayler.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/bitcoin-p2p-currency-the-most-dangerous-project-weve-ever-seen/
That's a pretty interesting article.. and it demonstrates the power of portraying yourself as persecuted to attract new members.
However, I think they're pretty delusional about the robustness of the system. From the paper that started it all:
This obviously assumes the attacker is interested in profits that can be extracted from the system. An attacker who is already wealthy, and has a greater interest in undermining the system than extracting profit from it, can trivially overwhelm the network by assembling processing power - especially if the attacker already has a stockpile of processing power.
National governments obviously fall into this category, so if they ever decide to destroy Bitcoin they won't need to issue any bans or even tell anyone.
I'm sure you can think of some other potential attackers who have the capability.
How we know is more important than what we know.
So Bitcoin is basically a mechanism for converting electricity into an asset which is worth less than the cost of the electricity used to produce it, and which can only be used in trade with other people who are stupid enough to have not thought this through? I think I'll pass.
No, that's what a speculator is.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't see enough people ever taking it seriously enough to matter. I ignored BitCoin entirely for a year, simply because they did such a poor job of explaining (in user-facing content, at least) just exactly what the fuck the clients were doing and the fundamentals of the process. You can watch their promotional video, which amounts to "install a client that does magic and makes money appear".
The reason I ignored it for over a year is that it just instantly hit me as a garbage. As a scam. As those companies that used to ask you to install a client that would do distributed work and would pay you for your CPU usage, but never really actually accomplish enough work per user to ever bet any money back (especially when counting the energy your system used to do the work). With this, the starting user is left wondering "okay, what am I doing? is my client doing computational work that is being sold by bitcoin to companies and institutions and they're giving my bitcoins in return for that?" but you never really know, until you start digging around in white papers - which most users aren't going to do.
And if you check out the forums, there's even more scammy sounding things. Like advertising sites that sell pre-built computers made just for running your own bitcoin farming machine. Or guys offering to contract to you for a certain amount of work, etc, etc. It all just rubs even the experienced person as shady and scammy. You really have to overcome a lot of mental hurdles to stop and give it a real look.
I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening?
Tulips.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The few people who found out about bitcoin back in 2009 were able to mine a very significant percentage of all the bitcoins that will ever be created, just because there was no competition yet (back then you could create a block with on average 4 billion sha-256 hashes; now it's about a quadrillion). If they hold on to their bitcoins, and bitcoin trading becomes big, they'll be filthy rich just because they found the website before slashdot did.
I'll be staying away from doing any bitcoin transactions. Humanity does not need any more undeserving elites.
The illusion is that it's not a pyramid scheme for the creators and early adopters. The mailing list in-crowd creates a few million easy coin first (out of a total of 6.2 million coin currently created, total market cap $49 million), then opens up the service for speculators. The speculators drive up the exchange value against real currency and the original 'investors' cash out their imaginary bits.
It's like how an IPO makes the original owners wealthy on the back end - they sell 49% of the company and keep a majority stock themselves that they can divest under the radar at a later higher market valuation. The only difference is there's no immediate cash infusion from the IPO and there's no company.