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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?
I officially declare Internet Bubble 2 as confirmed!
'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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.