Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin Mining Tests On 16 NVIDIA and AMD GPUs
Vigile writes "For users that have known about the process of bitcoin mining the obvious tool for the job has been the GPU. Miners have been buying up graphics cards during sales across the web but which GPUs offer the most dollar efficient, power efficient and quickest payoff for the bitcoin currency? A series of tests over at PC Perspective goes through 16 different GPU configurations including older high-end cards through modern low-cost options and even a $1700+ collection with multiple dual-GPU cards installed. The article gives details on how the mining programs work, why GPUs are faster than CPUs inherently and why AMD seems to be so much faster than NVIDIA."
How much is that in Bitcoins?
The CB App. What's your 20?
How much *official currency* are they paying for all these bitcoin articles?
Did you know that it's been nearly a week since the last Bitcoin story on Slashdot? I was worried that the standards were changing and blatant slashvertisements for bitcoin were no longer getting through! Never been happier to be proved wrong.
With all that computation power being used I can't help but think about projects like Folding@Home and think it's a bit wasted on the sort of margins you'd be getting back - even at the optimistic high end (which don't factor in power costs).
jaymz
Given that the difficulty increases exponentially you're not going to be making their calculated B$/day for the whole year, so while the quickest to pay of is 70 days if the difficulty increases at the usual rate, you'd probably want to add on another month or two.
For the ones taking nearly half a year to pay off at the current rate, you'll probably spend closer to a year before you'll even break even.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Other than being a decent applied cryptography experiment, BitCoin has no real use in the real world. It isn't anonymous, it isn't backed by anyone that matters. The currency is too unstable to trust for anything. Its architecture gives a lot more power to people who come on early, and whom likely are going to cash out if people catch on.
I'd rather hear about an Amiga emulator, checkered ball spinning while formatting an 880K floppy disk running on the nVidia hardware than yet another BitCoin article, because BitCoin reminds me a lot of the old MAKE.MONEY.FAST posts of yore.
So now it induces nerds to stock op on GPU hardware? I get it! BitCoin is not currency at all, is just a new game genre: MMOM (pronounced like "mom"), Massively Multiplayer Online Money. The hottest MMOM in town. Spread the word.
I dunno if this is supposed to be goatse or what, but clicker beware on parent.
I keep wondering why do BitCoin articles keep showing up here. Any given article doesn't really seem quite nerdy enough to be real 'News For Nerds' (and yes, I agree that most of the articles here haven't been News For Nerds for a quite some time), and it's kind of a weird topic.
I kinda feel like "BitCoin articles is to Slashdot as gold advertisements is to the Fox News Network".
So I'm going to coin a term that we can add to the Slashdot Taxonomy (or the 'slashonomy', as I like to call it: :) ): Slashgold!
As in:
Random dude: "So, was the article good?"
You: "Naw, it was just another fluff piece promoting slashgold"
I've always thought Bitcoin was stupid, but let's do some more analysis on the energy costs here, which this site really should have included.
The best GPU perf/watt was the 5870x2 (Ares OC) at 1.584 (Mhash/s)/watt. Not sure where they got their total watt figures from, but from a review site, it is 500W, unoverclocked. This site says it's 50W more overclocked. I'll be generous and not include this since the CPU isn't being taxed as much. So 500W power consumption.
So, typing 500 watts * 1 year * (10 cents / (kilowatt*hour)) into Google: about $482. Taking their $1,666 one year profit figure (mining profits - cost of card), it is now really a cost of $1,184. Which isn't as bad as I thought it'd be.
They didn't include the effect of increasing difficulty on decreased mining speed, but theoretically the currency should become more valuable as it goes on.
The performance of GPU-based codes is highly dependent on the video cards. I highly doubt the dismal performance of NVIDIA cards. I think the authors most likely optimized the kernel code to AMD cards. This is evident when you look at the CL kernel code and you see that there are so many hardwired constants and fixed arrays (aligned to 128 ints or longs). Moreover, the authors GUIMiner don't seem to take advantage of NVIDIA's more local workthreads (compared to AMD's).
I'd say that declaring AMD a victor is premature.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Yes mostly. Your best bet at this point if would be to (in true Slashdot list style)
1. Create a rival currency.
2. Get a lot of 'miners' to jump aboard hoping to get in early enough and maximize profits.
3. Dump your hidden cache of new-bitcoins oops I mean ????
4. Disappear with your profits
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Nobody cares about bitcoin. We don't give a rat's ass about bitcoin. Please stop posting stories about bitcoin. I don't know how many other ways there are to say it, but we don't give a fsck about bitcoin.
I'm going to issue my own Fiat currency, backed by Fiats (the automobile). I still haven't worked out how much the average Fiat should be worth. There's no real purpose in this, other than to confuse the hell out of people who think I'm issueing a fiat currency (illegal) rather than a Fiat currency (perfectly legal, AFAIK). BTW, I'm not even sure if Fiat is still making cars, and they have a repuation for being a real POS. Therefore, it shouldn't be too hard for me to fill a lot with rundown Fiats to back my currency.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What's to stop a large corporation with a lot of computing power to generate bitcoins? What if I have a cluster doing the work?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Please don't start mining Bitcoin. You will not turn a profit. It's hard work. It's no fun. Don't do it.
(the difficulty is high enough, we don't need another influx of miners)
Nvidia may be the best for games but ATI/AMD clearly kick Nvidia's ass for bitcoin mining. It's not about optimized code, it's about ATI having a lot more shaders. Nvidia may be able to do a lot more per cycle with their's but in this case it's the number of shaders that determines how fast the card can generate the sha 256 hashes.
It is goatse. It's always the same link or an easily recognizable variation of it.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Two months ago you could buy a couple cards, turn a significant profit, plow it back in, repeat, and make a bundle. I think bitcoin has hit a magic mark of some kind... you no longer produce a -number- of bitcoins that it pleasing, even though they might have almost no value ( because hey, if it goes up, I'll be rich! And it did go up! ), and after a brief spike, it also no longer produces enough money per-small-number-of-generated-coins that you can justify doing it for -actual- money instead of speculative future-money.
In theory, for bitcoins to represent the sum of the world's wealth, they would have to be worth something ridiculous, like one million dollars per bitcoin. In reality, that seems... profoundly unrealistic.
you forgot about the power use cost
All this hype is not coincidence, and it is not because bitcoins became useful suddenly. It is people hyping it to try and get others in to the market. They want to cash out, but can't in any large amount without tanking the value. Need to get new suckers lined up.
Rival currency being share certificates.
Miners being traders leveraged to their eyeballs.
It's all a big ponzi.
Deleted
I think that if there's any likelihood of Bitcoin becoming significant, there's also going to be an increasing likelihood of someone dividing the problem space in such a way that it's addressable with appropriately-designed FPGAs and thereby killing that likelihood of significance. Right now it's unlikely to be worth anyone's time & money (unless it's being examined in classes), but if there are significant $ there someone's going to be pursuing them.
fencepost
just a little off
McAfee has detected GUIMiner as a trojan.
I have been selling items for BitCoin for a few months now. It allows me to sell 10 cent LED's and other low priced items as well as more expensive items like Arduino boards without much in the way of fees. By using the exchanges for groups of orders ($200 at a time) my fees are less then 1% TOTAL to my bank account. Selling multiple $3 items on paypal would have fees closer to 10%. BitCoin is useful for me.
The assertion that early adopters have an unfair amount of bitcoins is on the one hand completely irrelevant to the issues of usability, and on the other hand is completely typical of all inventions, commodities and the world in general.
This continued repetition of this idea stems from the misconception that Bitcoin is a Ponzi, pyramid or other type of scheme designed with the intent to defraud later adopters. That is not the design intent of bitcoin. It is an online medium of exchange that compensates people who improve it's security. The fact that people improved the security early on helps the security for everyone later. They got paid pennies at the time, and people who are helping now are getting paid pennies too. It has turned out that those pennies (if they kept them) have become valuable now. This is EXACTLY like being an early adopter of Apple stock, and could just as easily not have happened.
The reason bitcoin is being talked about so much is not because someone is trying to scam you and "cash out" their early adopter advantage. People are talking about it because regardless of the value of a bitcoin, it is a frictionless* way to exchange value over the internet. You needn't hold bitcoins to participate in bitcoins. You can change them to cash the second you receive them. Bitcoins are useable now. They are a currency now.
I would respectfully recommend that people who want to talk about what's wrong with bitcoin do their due diligence, before commenting on something that they clearly have little understanding of.
*frictionless means: 1) you can open a business and start excepting payments this very second anywhere in the world, with customers anywhere else in the world, (excepting money is no more difficult then paying money - try that with credit cards), 2) money you transfer to anyone in the world is instantaneous, in as little as an hour you can be 100% sure that you have received bitcoins that can never be taken away from you or reversed in any way. 3) It cost almost nothing to pay anyone any amount with bitcoins.
All of these elements provide value whither you call it currency, commodity or just software. I use it to do work, and I find that valuable to me right now. The value of bitcoins is not a theory, predictions of it's failure are what is theoretical.
currency! First one to post a verifiable signature on a Slashdot story gets a Slashcoin. Taco and crew are then our new federal reserve--they can inflate the currency to pay our debt to China by posting more duplicate stories!
Our problems are solved!
This sig is false.
You can buy drugs with them, and also socks with the bitcoin logo on them.
Their value is backed by internet drama.
Because I really don't know, how does one program for GPU's? If for learning purposes I decide to go buy some graphic cards as the summary states, where do i begin to learn how to write an app to use the GPU's power for whatever purpose?
...even when they're not its victims.
So as I've been reading on bitcoin for the last hour - I think I realized something that I have not heard really in the criticism of it yet.
So - a lot of people are thinking bitcoin will be REALLY huge in the future, so let's pretend it does get really huge - let's say it's the only currency that the entire world uses, for example. What would happen is... as soon as I do a single transaction with an individual, I would be able to use sophisticated software (just bear with me) to figure out their entire self-worth by looking at the database-thing, is that correct? Because you could see the entire bitcounts that have went to, and came from that address.
Wouldn't this be a single point of failure for bitcoin - because most people probably wouldn't want their entire self-worth being on display for the whole world to see.
Any thoughts?
I see no evidence of this at all. No major stores take it, so you can't use it for any kind of serious commerce. It isn't exchanged on any reputable currency exchange. I've seen nothing done to address some serious flaws brought up (like the possibility of spending a coin multiple times before it is noticed or the built in deflation). I've seen no analysis of the cryptography by leading authorities.
All I see is speculators playing around and people who think Cryptonomicron is an instruction manual not an entertainment novel.
You compare it to Apple stock, I compare it to Flooz.com stock. Sure, there was a time when it was "worth" something and if you had gotten in and out in the right time you could make money. However as it was a stupid idea with nothing really behind it, it collapsed to nothing.
Actually, I'm not sure it ever HAD relevance, but I think that it could possibly have gained some. But then we got reports about people's bitcoin purses stolen. Now, maybe that was due to lax security on the part of the older of the purse. Or perhaps it was a flaw in the design of the bitcoin system. Either way, all of those organizations that were once dabbling with bitcoins have since changed their minds. They have no real-world monitary value. At one time, I was considering doing a bit of bitcoin creation of my own, on my own computers. Now, what's the point?
Where can I spend bitcoins? The places I shop online, Amazon, Newegg, Steam, they don't take them. None of the stores I shop at take them, none of the companies I pay my bills to take them. So where should I spend these?
Then the next question is why? Why would I want to use them instead of a credit card? A credit card offers me a good deal of known security, there's a lot of legislation that protects purchases with it and Visa really is "Everywhere I want to be." Why should I use bitcoins to purchase things, particularly in light of their heavy price volatility?
We should care because it has all the potential to be a pyrimid scheme that will suck in the technophillic and may cost them a lot of real money, resources or jobs. For an example of harm it's already causing, an IT guy at a TV station near me will probably lose his job very soon for getting caught using the studios servers to make bitcoins and getting the incident mentioned in the press. If I ran the cluster here flat-out making bitcoins and drove up the power bill I would deserve to be dumped into deep shit.
Burning a bit of extra coal to drive a pyramid scheme seems to be a bit irresponsible to me even if you own the equipment and pay the power bill yourself - it may be a truly elegant and geeky way to rip off suckers but it is still the age old crime of fooling others to give you something of real value for nothing but a dishonest promise.
Can a true believer help me out here--why on earth would I, after performing a service for you, take payment in the form of bitcoins instead of the legal tender for the country in which the service was performed?
I mean, seriously. Until I can purchase groceries, or pay my mortgage or utility bill, with this stuff, it's about as useful to me as WoW gold.
I've heard a lot of stories about people hoarding and collecting bitcoins, but few about anyone selling something with bitcoins. And zero about people exclusively accepting bitcoins, meaning I can still choose instead to pay with the coin of the realm. You may as well try to pay me with fairie kisses for services rendered, I'm still going to call the cops.
--
$tar -xvf
hm, could someone abuse the CPU power of bitcoin botnet to crack passwords, or find hash collisions or similar?
I have mixed feelings about bitcoin. On one hand, I really like the (supposed) anonymity, distributed infrastructure, and open source nature of bitcoin. However, I cannot pay my property tax with bitcoins. And as much as I love the romantic notion of a society totally free of government control, the reality is that we really do need some form of central organization to administer justice. And that organization must collect taxes in order to function.
So the question is, do I ignore alternative currencies and use the dollar for better or worse because that is what they collect taxes with, or do I go off the libertarian deep end and totally embrace bitcoin just because I like the implementation?
I think it is great to watch a Ponzi scheme in action without being directly connected.
Well, finally! It feels like it's been almost 24 hours since the last BitCoin story.
Probably hasn't, but you know, feels like it.
sic transit gloria mundi
Surely if you want to build a strawman to attack bitcoin you can do better than a centralized system with no scarcity, and little if any transferability.
As a parody of the myriad frequent-flyer like reward schemes out there that may have delusions of grandeur - you're on the right track.. but if you want to poke fun at bitcoin, can you at least join the same ball park?
People aren't good at math and they don't consider all the costs. They see a get rich quick scheme and/or think that Cryptonomicron will be a reality and forget to check their figures and make sure all costs are accounted for.
I'm amazed how many people forget power costs for things. I've got that for things like F@H and distributed.net. People will say I should do it because I have a very high end computer at home, or suggest I set the lab system at work to do it at night. They can't understand why not since I've "Already bought the hardware." The idea of power never seems to occur and they usually say "But it can't cost that much." I explain that when you take in power usage, and then again more usage for cooling costs, it adds up fast. It is not a cost I care to bare.
1) A system that was financially sound. Deflation, which is guaranteed in a fixed quantity system, is not. A currency with built in deflation is not useful. If you do not understand the reasoning then I suggest you retake ECON 200. So for any sort of success, I first need to see a solid system, from a financial sense behind it.
2) A solid security analysis. If there is to be no agency that monitors everything, I have to be absolutely convinced it is secure. When there is no one to mind after things, the system must be perfect. You'll also have to forgive me if I've enough experience with human endeavors to be very suspicious of claimed perfection and need a lot of proof.
3) Most importantly though, I'd need to be able to use it. I'd need some demonstration that it could actually function as a currency for me, which means I could spend it on something I'd want. Money is only money if you can spend it. Doesn't matter how much value something supposedly has, if you can't spend it it isn't money. Nowhere I shop takes bitcoins.
Success isn't a bunch of hype on tech sites. Success is when it is useful.
If BitCoin is a threat to conventional currencies, that would seem enough of a reason to attack confidence into the currency. You don't even need to actually attack the currency, it would be enough to seed rumours about its deficiencies.
What are dollars? Do they have any value (like being able to exchange them for gold or bitcoins)?
FPGA's are the new miners tool.
10x faster, runs the algorithm at HARDWARE Speed like an ASIC.
So, the value is limitless? BUY BUY BUY!!!
The obvious reason for BC's attraction is that it shares the same properties as gold: limited supply, inoxydable, barely falsibiable (except for gold plating of tungsten ingots).
...
*PLUS*
In some respects, BC is even better than gold: zero weight, invisible, unseizable.
It can still be (slowly) mined at no cost, in winter as a byproduct of heating.
It is a tax haven, immune to government greed.
*BUT*
Unlike precious metals, BC is artificial: Science and technology will never create new precious metals, but Computer Science can create infinitely many clones of bitcoin, so that the claimed rarity is an illusion.
I expect the birth, within a few months, of some new BC look-alike, easier to mine, backed by some wealthy individual able to offer a large choice of goods and services: enough to start a real ecosystem, but of course, imitations will emerge to compete.
The original Bitcoins will then be forgotten, and by the way, so will be the dollar.
My two cents
It's a perfect illicit currency. Once the coins are fed through various mixers they can be fairly audit trail free and, more importantly, it can't be shut down centrally like egold et al.
Get yourself tor and on silkroad if you don't believe me - http://ianxz6zefk72ulzz.onion/index.php/silkroad/home
While people can still exchange bitcoin for drugs the much touted bursting bubble isn't going to happen.
The name makes sense I suppose but has a different sort of meaning if you consider the British slang that has spread to everywhere that BBC TV programs have gone.
When I go for a slash I expect the liquid to be gold.
Pyramid scheme: A system of selling goods in which agency rights are sold to an increasing number of distributors at successively lower levels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme
A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves promising participants payment, services or ideals, primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme or training them to take part, rather than supplying any real investment or sale of products or services to the public. Pyramid schemes are a form of fraud.
No real investment, products or services? Check.
Promising participants payment? Check.
Priority in enrolling other people into the scheme? Check.
Non-sustainable business model?
Hmmm... Converting electricity into ones and zeroes of highly volatile value and no practical use beyond said value, which can't be readily converted to goods, services or even monetary units...? Oh, SO check.
There's no hierarchy of "agency rights", and, even metaphorically, bitcoins have never been sold as "a remedy for all diseases." It's like kids don't know what words mean.
Seriously?
You'll be the one to pull the "kids don't know what words mean" AND "metaphorically" card(s)?
When arguing about lite-FUCKING-ral meaning of a meta-FUCKING-phor for a FUCKING SCAM?
For fucks sake... Kids these days...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Pyramid scheme. On a computer.
I wonder if someone will be able to successfully sue Slashdot for promoting this particular pyramid scheme once the bottom falls out of it?
Now THAT would be a perfect Slashdot story.
Well... if it somehow managed to include Apple and Microsoft hate and Linux. In that order.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Look, Bitcoin is just an excuse for busytechers to do busytech. And you people overanalysing their activities are busythinking the busytechers. If all the thinking power put into this useless subject could be harnessed, Amazon would not need a single server farm power supply.
E Proelio Veritas.
I hear this a lot, but it's not true. They are faster at highly parallel tasks (like mining Bitcoins I guess), slower at highly serial tasks. They're simply tuned differently.
For example, CPUs have a lot of transistors dedicated to cache memory. This is because they can't know in advance what data they'll need, the instruction which computes an array index may be right before the access to the array.
On the other hand, GPUs rely on highly predictable code, where threads in the same group are all doing the same thing at the same moment. Memory operations always have a very high latency on GPUs, but they hide these latencies by switching the core to running another thread while the memory operation is pending. Latency doesn't matter much for GPU operations, there are thousands of threads waiting to run to cover the latency. This is definitely not the case on a CPU, instruction latency is very important there and this takes extra hardware.
GPUs are not inherently faster, they're simply oriented towards different tasks.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
A currency with built in deflation is not useful. If you do not understand the reasoning then I suggest you retake ECON 200.
I never got that far in economics when I was in college; I majored in something else. Can you recommend a freely available ECON 200 textbook on the web for me to look through tonight?
Nowhere I shop takes bitcoins.
Have you mentioned Bitcoin to the small independent online stores that you use most frequently?
I'm glad slashdot hates bitcoin. You guys hated the first-gen iPod too. Thought it was too bulky, shouldn't have used a hard drive, and proclaimed loudly that it would never sell.
You were wrong.
Guess what you're wrong about now? :)
MMILF
... deflation is probably not a big deal unless you have a loan denominated in Bitcoins, and none of those are likely to be made, well, ever. Which leads to the larger point: there's never going to be a Bitcoin dominated economy. To provide sufficient money supply to do anything with, you need demand deposits, which means you need banks that deal in Bitcoins. But Bitcoins were designed to cut banks out of the picture, so no checking accounts, so not very much money supply, so no possibility of a Bitcoin economy of any size.
The whole saga of Bitcoins is a classic example of developer hubris. Nakamoto didn't really know anything about economics, but hey, he was a hotshot programmer, how hard could it be? Bitcoin could have been a much bigger deal if it had been thought out more, but as it is, it won't amount to much beyond a pyramid scheme combined with a method of buying weed online.
Riiiight, I just won't use my AC. Got it.
for this pump and dump to crash and hopefully take all of the promoters on slashdot with it.
I feel that Bitcoin discussions always fall apart because people cannot make a distinction between the Computer Science of Bitcoin and the Economics of Bitcoin.
The Bitcoin Algorithm is a peer-to-peer transaction protocol. The algorithm was self-published by S Nakamoto as "Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system" in 2008. To my knowledge, the paper has not been accepted in a peer reviewed Computer Science journal. Nevertheless, there appears to be growing acceptance that the underlying technology is sound. However, that says nothing about the validity of applications based on the peering transaction protocol.
The Economics of Bitcoin is about how the original coins are generated, how new coins are minted, how the currency is regulated, etc. Nakamoto's paper has nothing to say about these issues. In particular, many people feel that Bitcoins have been distributed in a manner that makes them a Ponzi scheme. I am not aware of any paper published in a peer reviewed Economics journal that contradicts this.
The lack of a peer reviewed CS publication is terrible, but not fatal. Bitcoin has enough popularity now that we can expect crypto researchers to be looking at it as an easy target for a quick pub. The lack of a pub on a flaw in the technology of Bitcoin is not bad. This technology might be useful for something.
However, the lack of a peer reviewed Economics pub addressing the Ponzi Scheme issue is fatal. In addition, I'm pretty sure that there are other important things that need to be investigated by Economists. I can't say much more about this since I am a computer scientist.
I hope people will understand that there is a distinction between Bitcoin technology and Bitcoin coins. It is possible to have a different opinion on each and an opinion on one does not imply anything about the other. I urge people in future Slashdot discussions to take care to make it clear in their posts whether or not they are talking about the technology or the coins. Thank you.
that the algorithm used by bitcoin won't be outdated by advanced computer power?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How do you solve:
1) Centralization - Slashdot servers can be shut down with a court order
2) Double spend
3) Controlled Inflation - How do you determine the rate at which new articles are published?
Since I can't seem to engage anyone on the issue of _why_ bitcoin is a ponzi scheme other then "early adopters get a huge advantage over later adopters" which does not uniquely define ponzi schemes, I will try to argue it myself. Please help me find my errors. I’m am not being facetious, this is a real argument that I’ve outlined for myself. I did not cut out any counter argument that I could think of.
First. What is a ponzi scheme?
[Wikipedia]
"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors."
As I understand it this means:
Person A buys $10 of a Ponzi scheme X,
Person B then buys $10 of X.
X has $20. (and is only worth $20, because it doesn’t do anything)
X pays it’s owners $1.
X pays Person A $1 (dividend interest).
X pays Person B $1.
X has $17.
This can go on for a while if no one withdraws their capital, but at some point someone is going to have to buy $10 worth of X to pay A or B. If it doesn’t happen it collapses. Ok, I think that’s clear, and correct.
Now let me see if I can understand how this differs from say Apple stock.
Person A buys $10 of Apple stock
Person B buys $10 of Apple stock
Apple has $20.
Apple pays it’s expenses
Apple earns profits from doing things.
Apple’s worth is it’s profits minus it’s liabilities.
Apple is profitable, so apple has $21
However, Apple does not pay dividends. How does Person A or Person B make money from investing in Apple? At some point someone is going to have to buy $10 worth of Apple to pay A or B. That is A and B need a third party to realize the value of their investment. Ok, this is confusingly similar, let’s me see if I can understand the differences.
1) X pays dividends, Apple does not.
2) When you buy shares of X you buy them from X, when you buy shares of Apple you buy them from A or B, i.e. other share holders.
3) So this means that there is no set number of shares of X, X wants to keep selling as much as it can. There is a fixed number of shares of Apple.
4) Apple makes a profit, and therefore has a ‘demonstrable’ value. X can only operate at a loss, it’s value is it’s total deposits minus payments.
Ok I think I understand some differences, but what if Apple was operating at a loss? How is that not like X? I guess because each share of Apple is a fixed percentage of the total value of Apple, whereas you don’t have any real percentage of X. So if Apple operated at a loss your share value would go down. That means that another key feature of Apple is that it is transparent, you know it’s value, you know how many shares there are and you know how many shares you have. With X you don’t know it’s value, the number of shares there are or the number of shares you have.
I think I understand these differences. Do I have something wrong?
So which of these two systems is bitcoin most like?
1) Bitcoins do not pay dividends.
2) You buy them from other holders, there is no X to buy them from.
3) There is a set number of them.
4) It is transparent, you know how many shares there are and you know how many shares you have.
This all looks like Apple stock to me. That seems to leave the issue of value.
X is only the value of all deposits minus payments.
This does sound a bit like bitcoin without the payments part. Isn’t bitcoin just the value of all the money that’s been put into it? No wait, there is no X in which all the money spent on bitcoin is being held. Hmm this is a tough one, does that mean that bitcoin is actually worse then a Ponzi scheme? let me try it with apple.
Apple’s value is what it does.
This sounds like bitcoin too. Bitcoin is software that has some unique features. So then is bitcoin m
BitCoint is only the mechanis of value transfer betwen an open network of unregulated brokers.... much like (the now mostly banned in europe) hand made money transfer notes used by the network of arab lenders around the world
Next up;
A new currency based on the effort it takes to dig a hole while filling out your previous hole with the dirt from the next one.
Start shoveling 4 $$!!
It's a shiny attractive pyramid scheme with a price of entry out of reach without misusing company resources and currently seen as enough of a grey area that such a thing is seen as a minor corner to cut instead of a potential crime. The real problem of course is the whole idea of selling something of no intrinsic value to enough suckers until money is made.
Hey, you know the difference between a unicorn and a horse? One has a horn on its head, and the other exists.
Nicely put.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens