Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Time To Get Into Crypto-currency? If So, Which?
Qbertino writes: With the ever-looming cyberpunk future in close proximity, I'm starting to wonder if it isn't time to get myself familiar with crypto currency as a means of trade. Bitcoin is all the hype, but the blockchain has flaws, in that it isn't as anonymous as one would hope for — you can track past transactions. Rumors of Bitcoin showing cracks are popping up and also there are quite a few alternatives out there. So I have some questions: Is getting into dealing with crypto currency worthwhile already? Is Bitcoin the way to go, or will it falter under wide use / become easily trackable once NSA and the likes adapt their systems to doing exactly that? What digital currency has the technical and mind-share potential to supersede bitcoin? Are there feasible cryptocurrencies that have the upsides of Bitcoin (such as a mathematical limit to their amount) but are fully anonymous in transactions? What do the economists and digi-currency nerds here have to contribute on that? What are your experiences with handling and holding cryptocurrency? And does Bitcoin own the market or is it still flexible enough for an technology upgrade?
Gonna go out on a limb and say maybe that boat left port sometime around March 2014.
I've been into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies since early 2011 after I saw one of the first Bitcoin slashdottings in late 2010. I went mostly "all-in" around 2012 after some trouble with my bank, never looked back, and have happily lived 90%+ crypto ever since. If I was a betting man I'd say look at Monero: http://getmonero.org/ It's definitely not "ready for primetime" just yet, but the foundation is there and is moving in the right direction. Reminds me of Bitcoin in 2011. Good luck.
If I’d started mining bitcoin back when it first started, I might have made a lot of money by now. But I kept procrastinating, and now it’s too late. It now costs more energy to mine a coin than a coin is worth.
Also, I should have bought Apple stock back in the 90’s.
Cryptocurrency is kind of like a Ponzi scheme.
I thought about buying some dedicated bitcoin mining hardware a couple years ago. By the time you factor in cost of electricity, probability of mining a valid coin, and the mechanism by which bitcoin increases the difficulty of mining every time a number of new coins are found, it's a losing proposition as it takes an ever increasing amount of compute power to find each new coin.
Unless you are mining bitcoin via a botnet and you are stealing the compute and electrical resources used by the mining, it's less than break even on average, at least from a pure production standpoint.
> Bitcoin is all the hype, but the blockchain has flaws, in that it isn't as anonymous as one would hope for — you can track past transactions.
Bitcoin transactions record sending and receiving addresses, and the amount sent, and that's it. Privacy depends on how careful you are outside the transaction itself. For example, if you buy something physical online, and give a delivery name and address, the store knows who those bitcoins came from. But compared to a credit card or paper check, which have your name printed on them, bitcoin transactions have the *possibility* of privacy. Cash is no longer anonymous, by the way. Banks and ATMs can scan serial numbers when cash goes out and comes in. Depending how many hand-to-hand transactions happen in between, they can figure out what you were doing.
> Rumors of Bitcoin showing cracks are popping up and also there are quite a few alternatives out there.
The Bitcoin Network is still running fine. They are getting close to a limit in the code originally intended to stop spam transactions. That limits the size of "blocks" of transactions to 1 MB. The current arguments are over how and when to raise that cap. A majority of the network has to upgrade to raise the limit. Yes, there are lots of alternatives, because all it takes is to fork the code and slap a new name on it (it's open source). But as this table ( http://coinmarketcap.com/ ) shows, Bitcoin is 7/8 of the market, and only three others have significant market capitalization and trading volume. Building a network of users, apps, etc. for an ecosystem is a lot harder than releasing a new cryptocoin.
> Is getting into dealing with crypto currency worthwhile already?
It was for me, but I started in mid-2011 (from an article on Slashdot, in fact). If it is worthwhile for *you* depends on a lot of things. If you send money to family in another country, or international wire transfers, it may be very worthwhile, because of the very high fees from the other methods. If you are an average US consumer with credit and debit cards and want to shop on Amazon, not so much.
> become easily trackable once NSA and the likes adapt their systems to doing exactly that?
The NSA can download a copy of the blockchain, just like everyone else. What they have, that the rest of us don't, is all the other data collection that can correlate a Bitcoin transaction to a person or place. Like if you are using a smartphone app to send bitcoins, they know who owns the phone and where you were at the time
> What digital currency has the technical and mind-share potential to supersede bitcoin?
What social network is going to replace MySpace? :-). What OS is going to replace Windows? Predicting the future is hard, especially before it happens
> Are there feasible cryptocurrencies that have the upsides of Bitcoin (such as a mathematical limit to their amount) but are fully anonymous in transactions?
Bitcoin can be anonymous, but you have to use it properly for that to happen. As I said above, data leakage *around* a transaction is how you de-anonymize it. The same would be true of alt-coins (the general name for cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin). If you use them to buy something, the seller may leak your info.
> What do the economists and digi-currency nerds here have to contribute on that?
Economists in general don't have the software chops to understand how cryptocurrencies work, and have religious beliefs on how economies and money *should* work. Not all of them, but a lot of them. My own opinion is bitcoin is the most developed cryptocurrency, with the most users, apps, mining hardware, etc. The direction in the future won't be replacing bitcoin with another coin, but building layers on top of Bitcoin. It's a communication protocol for scriptable transaction messages, and people have barely figured out how to make use of that. As such, it is similar to the IP protocol stack.
Milk -- in the US, at least -- is Vitamin D enriched.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1