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Bitcoin Mining Startup Gets $500k In Venture Capital
Sabbetus writes "Seattle based Bitcoin startup CoinLab secured a $500,000 investment from various investors such as Silicon Valley firm Draper Associates and angel investor Geoff Entress. CoinLab is an emerging umbrella group for cultivating and launching innovative Bitcoin projects. CEO Vessenes said 'if there is a currency that can trade around the world, it's semi-anonymous, it's instant, it's not controlled by government or bank, what's the total value of that currency? The answer to that is, if it works, it's gotta be in the billions. It just has to be for all the reasons you might want to send money around the world.' This type of talk is common from Bitcoin enthusiasts but apparently seasoned investors are starting to agree. Forbes explains the details of their business plan but in short it has to do with tapping the GPU mining potential of gamers, more specifically gamers of free-to-play games. This would add a new revenue stream for online game companies that are trying to provide free games profitably."
Shouldn't that be BitCoin mining scam bilks idiots of $500,000?
When it comes down to it, am I going to be losing performance in their game because they would rather be making money? I hope they state plainly their intentions from the get-go, but we all know that won't happen.
I officially declare Internet Bubble 2 as confirmed!
In the 21st century, humans have invented fake mines to work in, and fake mining companies that mine in them.
Not fake mines likes the ones in Minecraft that might actually be interesting, of course. And not a side-effect of something else, like WoW's "gold farmers". Fake mines that exist solely and purposely to be tediously mined by fake mining companies! Now that's creating value. Value that's "gotta be in the billions".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I am going to laugh so hard the first time I see and hear someone playing farmtown while their video card is at 90 decibel turbo speed.
'if there is a currency that can trade around the world, it's semi-anonymous, it's instant, it's not controlled by government or bank, what's the total value of that currency? The answer to that is, if it works, it's gotta be in the billions. It just has to be for all the reasons you might want to send money around the world.'
It's also going to be top of the list of every law enforcement agency across the globe. Governments tend not to like their citizens taking part in transactions that don't have a paper trail.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I just don't understand Bitcoin and "mining" whatsoever.
Oh, you didn't recently invest half a million dollars in a start-up, did you?
there's a new dot-com bubble
congratulations on the investors here on seeding the hype to attract the rubes
just remember to step off the merry go round before things tank
i'd give it a few years
any VC want to fund my innovative paradigm shifter? i call it flooz. whoopi goldberg is going to help me spread the good word
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Forbes explains the details of their business plan but in short it has to do with tapping the GPU mining potential of gamers,
So 'in short', they're going to trojan a video game and turn a bunch of PCs into a botnet to generate bitcoins. But because it's a business doing this, and not some teenager in his mom's basement, they're going to make billions instead of go to jail? That sound about right?
If any other kind of software you ran was doing something in the background other than what you wanted to do, it would be called malware.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
never seem to understand the advantages of it is a form of exchange and yet they will cry and moan every time the government takes another one of their freedoms, another step into their privacy, another step towards authoritarianism.
Bitcoin is an incredible idea: decentralized exchange, totally anonymous, no central body to print it out of existence, no government to track who your exchanging with and for what, a limited stable inflation on the money supply with no one to dictate that "the crisis would end if we just gave the banks more money".
Would I want to store all of my wealth in bitcoin? No. Do I like the idea of being able to convert my money into an exchange medium that is untraceable? Of course.
How many stories have we read of governments steering us towards a cashless society where all forms of exchange are withing their monitoring (not to moention all forms of communication.)
To me bitcoin is the currency equivalent of TOR and shouldn't be hated on.
Control the 'net and you control bitcoin. Do you think pippa/acta / cispa and variants are limited to the riaa and mpaa agenda only?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
You don't understand the nature of fiat currency. Money (most currencies anyways) has a value because people want it to have a value. Bitcoin is no different.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Take a little time to read about it :https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/
If you like technology, there are many fascinating areas that Bitcoin brings together: p2p networks, cryptography, economics to name a few.
Regardless of the image problem Bitcoin has and people's propensity to denounce it based on what they've heard, it really is a revolutionary development. If the current Bitcoin network doesn't make it into your life, you can bet that one or many of its predecessors will.
One of the things it enables is fast global transactions. I created a site to sell digital downloads for Bitcoin called CoinDL: https://www.coindl.com/ and the processing time is averaging under 10 seconds which is pretty impressive considering there's no company, government or other centralized organization involved in the transfer.
This is the same kind of bullshit that was flying around in the late 1990's. Time to short the NASDAQ 100.
The difference is that there aren't anywhere near as many big idea/no income tech IPOs this time around. Groupon is the only major Web 2.0 (or whatever the buzz-phrase is these days) IPO. Facebook may be the next, and will almost certainly be over-valued and over-subscribed - but it'll wilt in isolation. The economy in general is in the toilet. Glencore (global resources - you know, mines and oils wells and such.) was the biggest, I think, IPO in history and they lost about 15-20% of their launch price when the economic slow-down hit resources. The world isn't awash in the kind of money for people to throw around at companies without a revenue stream.
You don't understand the nature of fiat currency
Money (most currencies anyways) has a value because people want it to have a value
Government back currencies have value because the government creates demand for those currencies through taxes. The US dollar has value because millions of Americans have to pay their taxes, and they cannot use Bitcoins, gold bars, or Tulips to do so -- they have to use US dollars to do so. Governments also create demand by charging for various services, assigning damages in court, etc. -- people are compelled to pay in government issued currency.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, has nobody creating demand for it, just a lot of hype and promises of secure and anonymous payments.
Palm trees and 8
Don't the editors read what they post?
We just had an article about billionaires funding a crazy mining scheme a few days ago.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
This must be the source of most of the Bitcoin hate. You're looking at how new currency units are created to the exclusion of all other aspects of the system.
To people who do not have any appreciable skills to sell on the open market would naturally see only this because the concept of being a producer of value that other people want to trade for just doesn't exist in their mental vocabulary.
If you have the ability to produce value that other people want to buy then decentralized currencies potentially can allow you engage in transactions that would otherwise be impossible or unprofitable. That is the real value of Bitcoin.
Creating numbers and telling people they have value is not being a producer of value.
The work that went into the crypto behind bitcoin was useful skilled work, that created value for society. Running a bitcoin mining operation is not.
One of the things it enables is fast global transactions. I created a site to sell digital downloads for Bitcoin called CoinDL: https://www.coindl.com/ and the processing time is averaging under 10 seconds which is pretty impressive considering there's no company, government or other centralized organization involved in the transfer.
Um... other way around. You'd expect anything going through a company or government to take time as they have legal requirements for verification and recording which they really really really can't fuck up.
When governments decide bitcoin is a giant scheme to dodge tax (note: I'm not saying it is, but governments will come to that conclusion eventually) it's going to get the beat down from all sorts of organizations. The whole premise 'idea of using cryptography to control the creation and transfer of money, rather than relying on central authorities' (as per your linked wiki) directly contravenes the charters of those 'central authorities' - as the sole provider of national currencies and sole arbiters of the creation of money.
It's an amusing theoretical project, but eventually bitcoins are either going to need to be adopted as someones currency or they're going to get run into the ground, or both. And any followup project will not survive nearly as long once the precedent is set with bitcoins. That doesn't mean some of the underlying technology won't transfer into real money trading, but when the government decides your bitcoin business is a scheme to dodge tax, and decides to tax you in british pounds or USD or Euro and you can't produce a trail of transactions which can be converted into one of those currencies you're going to find yourself in a world of trouble without any easy way out.
Also, a decentralized currency without a central authority controlling the money supply is a stupid idea. Bitcoin supply is regulated by a rate at which mathematical problems can be solved, and then a fixed exchange between problem solved and bitcoin gained. Which has absolutely no relationship to a useful supply rate for money. One can (as economists do) argue over which of the various competing theories for money supply a given central bank or currency authority should be using at any given time, but none of those sane options are remotely similar to what bitcoin is.
This must be the source of most of the Bitcoin hate.
Not necessarily, but it is the source of why most people realize it is a scam.
To people who do not have any appreciable skills to sell on the open market would naturally see only this because the concept of being a producer of value that other people want to trade for just doesn't exist in their mental vocabulary
What? Being the creator of a scam now is something to be valued?
If the creators of Bitcoin truly wanted to create some kind of new currency, they should have set it up in such a way that they didn't get the lions share of the bitcoins right away, signalling to everyone else that it's a fucking scam.
It is a scam. The value proposition is an utter fabrication that preys on people who have a poor understanding of central banking and currency valuation.
What exactly was Vanderbilt's scam? Did he lie about building railroads? Did Rockefeller lie about being able to use oil to fuel ships and vehicles? You're right that Zuckerberg doesn't have a scam either. He built a popular website that people want to use, and makes money by selling their data and advertising instead of an access fee.
Maddoff didn't get caught because he used an old scam. He got caught because he used a scam. He took investor money under the pretense that he was investing it, lied about where he invested it, and lied about his performance. Can you tell me the names of the people at "Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, etc" who did this? What exactly was their crime?
The creator of Bitcoin specifically included a newspaper headline in the genesis block in order to advertise the fact that he did not start mining Bitcoins before the code was publicly released. Everyone had the opportunity to start mining at the exact same time.
He mined the first 1.5 million or so Bitcoins, and as anyone can easily verify, has not spent the vast majority of them.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
What? Being the creator of a scam now is something to be valued?
C'mon, seriously, how hard did you need to try to miss that point?
The GP pointed out nothing more controversial than saying that the mint doesn't give your money its value, the fact that you can use it to buy bread and gasoline, and pay your rent and taxes, does. If you want to disagree with that, I can't stop you, but it just sounds deliberately obtuse at this point.
You guys need to go back to calling it a Ponzi scheme, at least then we can consider you legitimately ignorant about what that means.
If the creators of Bitcoin truly wanted to create some kind of new currency, they should have set it up in such a way that they didn't get the lions share of the bitcoins right away, signalling to everyone else that it's a fucking scam.
You mean, exactly like they did?
The Bitcoin block chain has exactly one "pre-mined" block, which remains unredeemed; and even if Satoshi himself someday shows up to claim it, at this point a mere 50BTC would have no effect whatsoever on the stability of the Bitcoin economy (currently with 8.8 million BTC in circulation).
You personally had just as much chance (adjusted for hardware) at mining every... single... block generated since that origin block, as all those who did so instead of whining about fairness; and your ongoing failure to do anything about it except sow FUD about the entire concept doesn't inspire sympathy.
It is becoming more and more obvious who is on which side of the bitcoin "debate". This thread honestly isn't even worth reading, everyone who knows what they are talking about is spending all their time explaining the most basic info to idiots. Admittedly there are a few lazy, but intelligent sounding posters mixed in, but this is mostly just troll FUD. 95% of normal people either think it is interesting or just don't care.
Congratulations: if you have now determined that any investment where the founders get the majority of the shares - Google, Microsoft, etc - are now scams! Do you wish to revise that definition?
In a scam, there's a promise of profits. The bitcoin creators have never made such promise, nor anything close.
Is it a stupid investment? Sure, and for that reason I don't hold any bitcoins. But it's not a scam.
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Yes, there's a lot of people who are in Bitcoin because of become-a-billionaire-overnight fantasies. Yes, they are silly. But you remove all that and you're left with a really fascinating system that should appeal to everyone on Slashdot. It's a mix of cryptography, freedom of speech, computing, networking, finance, economics, and even politics -- most of us here dig that stuff.
Get over the hype and take Bitcoin for what it really is: a fascinating experiment that has, so far, withstood the amazing barrage of publicity, hacking attempted, legal uncertainties, and remains valuable for reasons completely contrary to everyone that says it's worthless. It may become worthless one day, but consider the possibility that Bitcoin is disproving all your wildly oversimplified assumptions about what makes something valuable. It is completely different, and there's plenty of reasons to believe that it could succeed as much as it could fail.
I like to think of Bitcoin like gold. Nothing is backing gold. It's a material for which there is a limited supply in the world, and which is universally regarded as value because of various properties it has: perhaps beauty, fungibility, density, etc. Bitcoin is really the same, with a limited global supply, except that it has different properties, mainly ease of transfer over the internet, fungibility, storage efficiency, near-anonymity and built-in escrow.
I don't think it's any more ludicrous for Bitcoin to have value than it is for gold to have value. And in the end, when I want to sell WoW weapons, buy webserver space, or play a few games of poker online, why would I use gold, cash or paypal, which all require me to remember log-in creditials, give away information and/or a bunch of third party fees. There's plenty of value in being able to pay people across the world, instantaneously, without sacrificing your privacy, and without paying any fees. Why is that not valuable? Seriously... quit focusing on the get-rich-quick kids, and start appreciating Bitcoin for it's unique properties and philosophy.
The US government has shut down plenty of operations it sees as ways of dodging taxes, trade sanctions, etc . . . But all of those had something to shut down (eGold, Liberty Dollar). Now there is nothing centrally located to shut down. A government might be able to crack down on users of it, or even some of the exchanges, but this will be a much harder genie to put back in the bottle.
Whoa boy are you miss informed. money has value because it has supposed scarcity. Government backed just means that the government or one of their agents controls that supply and does or doesn't screw it up. Bitcoins are limited by a mathematical theory/proof.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin. I am confident that the Supreme Court would include Bitcoins under "foreign coin".
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
An unchanging money supply in a growing economy and population = automatic deflation. A simple example:
Suppose you and 3 of your friend create your own little currency. You each get two "favour tokens". Any time you want someone to do a favour for you, you pay them a token, and you get paid a toekn if you do a favour for them. This works so well that someone else decides they want in. You all say fine, but they don't get any tokens, they have to work for their first token. Soon, you have 10 people in your little economy.
However it is being badly hamstrung by the lack of tokens. At most, 8 people can have a token, there will always be at least two people without a token. So you start having lots of situations where people want to do a favour, but the person who wants it has no token.
That right there is deflation. It gets more complicated on a larger economy, of course, but if you have a fixed amount of currency and the economy grows, deflation is inherent.
Spending 500k$ just to troll Slashdot hard.
Huh.. FinCen just processed the registration for BitInstant. Sounds like a nod from the US Treasury department to me.
If no other currencies are allowed in the US, MS is going to be getting into a lot of trouble with all those XBox points or XBox live points that they let you buy stuff with... Not to mention all those frequent flier miles scams, and credit card points scams others have going.. You know where you can buy a stupid pocket knife for your points..
Awesome, so this guy has grabbed about 7% of all the currency there ever will be, and is sitting on it.
This gives me all sorts of confidence and reason to love bitcoins, oh yes.
How can there by any equivalency between these two as a vehicle of exchange? I'm not saying BitCoin is a scam or worthless. But to say it's anywhere near the level of gold is ridiculous.
I used to think Bitcoin was stupid because it's another fiat currency, no real value, poor store of wealth, etc.
Then I realized - its real value is not as a safe full of gold but as a replacement for Western Union.
Never store your wealth in Bitcoins, but always conduct your transactions in it. This mindset sets an upper bound on the amount of Bitcoin needed, but with a growing and developing world population, I don't see this as a real problem for its success.
It also speaks to tremendous opportunities for currency exchangers in and out of Bitcoin. Its real threat then isn't economic or technical, but from gangs who want a piece of the action (mostly governments).
Coins' value may well increase to meet demand, but focusing on the coins as a store of value is sure-fire way to miss the boat on Bitcoin.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)