And why exactly can't Bitcoin miners and networks run on clean energy?
...or get more efficient? The miners I bought a few years ago draw several times' more power than the miners you can buy today; their power draw is such that it no longer makes sense to run them for their primary purpose. I fired one up for a bit last year just to use it as a space heater; unlike a purpose-built space heater, it somewhat offsets the cost of its operation.:)
You can do the same with Bitcoin: make some of these, or print off a few paper wallets from here. Load them with value. Hand them off to people, who can either hand them off to other people or redeem them for their stored value.
How are you abusing them that they keep failing (or were you buying the cheapest Chinesium coffee makers)? The one I use at work is a 25-year-old four-cup Mr. Coffee (from when they were still made in the USA) and the one I use at home is an 18-year-old Krups. They've kept plugging away with minimal maintenance (and a new carafe for the Krups when the original was bumped into something and cracked).
Am I the only/. user that has a coffee maker at work?
I have one sitting on the dorm fridge next to my desk. A grinder, too, and lately I've been bringing in beans I've roasted at home (though it's been a while since I've done that).
E.g., if I have a wallet with 50 BTC and buy an ounce of a controlled substance, it should be really easy to figure out which wallet belongs to the me vs the seller because the change returned to me will be the much, much larger quantity.
Only if your 50 BTC happens to be in one unspent input (which, by necessity, is also at one address). If you have multiple unspent inputs that add up to your total or (better yet) if your total is spread across multiple addresses, the smallest input (or combination of inputs) that will pay for a purchase will be used.
I can actually imagine Tesla offering a feature to mine bitcoin with the car's automated driving system. The NVidia processor used is likely suitable for it and designed with at least some consideration for reducing power usage.
Altcoin mining with GPUs is done with high-end "gamer" GPUs. Among nVidia's current offerings, you probably wouldn't use less than a GeForce GTX 1060 if you were building a mining rig. (I currently have four 1070s in mine.) It's doubtful that Tesla is building anything nearly as powerful into its cars when something like a GeForce 210 or GT 710 (chips you'll find on sub-$50 cards), or the equivalent embedded into an SoC, would most likely be more than sufficient.
Has anyone actually tried to get $10k for a BTC? I'd really like to see someone post they actually cashed out BTC into US Dollars.
I can send some to Coinbase, have them convert it, and have money in my bank account in a few days. If I'm in a hurry and don't care about getting a suboptimal exchange rate, I can drive downtown and use the Bitcoin ATM at the D. There are probably other methods as well, but those are the ones I've used.
In any case, it'd be nice if you stopped telling me how much you've made with Bitcoin. It's already painful enough for me because I started mining back when CPU-mining Bitcoin was doable, and stopped at around 0.002 BTC because I got bored of it.
I had my VPS solo-mining in its idle time. At some point, it found a block. Back around 2012 or 2013, I spent the 50 BTC I'd received on a GPU and some of the first ASIC miners, thinking I'd mine it back. That ended up not happening.
At the time I cashed it out, Bitcoin was at $13. As of right now, it's over $7200.
I started mining again earlier this year, this time with GPUs so I don't end up with a collection of space heaters that cost more to run than they'll generate. They mine an assortment of altcoins at a pool that pays out in Bitcoin. I've also been buying Bitcoin for about a year now. So far, the purchases have been doing better than mining, though even the mining income has benefited from the run-up in value.
archive.is is, IME, a better way to break through paywalls. I use it all the time for WSJ links, and it looks like it'll also work for the Economist: https://archive.fo/4xW6A. (They have multiple TLDs, any one of which might be the one used for any given article.)
I'd rather have one device block everything via host names than having to configure every single device I own, some of them without that ability (ex: iPhone).
There are adblockers for iOS that don't need jailbreaking, just as there are adblockers for Android that don't need root. They work by setting up an on-device VPN and routing all traffic through that.
...or at least there were at one time. I had one on my wife's iPad 2. A quick search just now for them, though, indicates that Apple is weeding them out of the App Store in favor of something called a "Safari Content Blocker," which isn't likely to be systemwide. (I've not kept up with iOS and the devices it runs on much since switching my phone over to Android. I have an iPad 3 that I keep around as a PDF reader, but it no longer receives updates.)
In any case, I'm about to take you up on that Pi-Hole idea as soon as the parts for it arrive. You can't install an adblocker on a Roku, so the block needs to go somewhere outside the device.
If you're smart enough you'll choose a fee which will make your transaction be confirmed in under an hour.
...unless you don't care how quickly the transfer goes through, in which case you set a low fee. When I got my Trezor a while back and moved funds onto it, I set fees around 50-250 satoshis/byte, which I think worked out at the time to something like 5-25 cents for the transaction. So what if it took 36 hours to go through? I wasn't going to spend my stash on anything anytime soon, so I wasn't in a hurry.
I suppose there are instances where you want transactions to confirm in a more timely manner, but if those circumstances don't apply to you, you can still get cheap transactions if you have some patience.
Could be worse. Early on, I had my VPS solo-mining when it was idle...and I managed to find a block, but didn't notice it until a couple years or so later. When I discovered I had 50 BTC on hand, the value had already gone up to $13 each. I spent most of it on a Radeon HD 7750 (to get into GPU mining) and a couple of Butterfly Labs ASIC miners (something like 5-7 GH/s each). If I had just held onto those 50 CPU-mined BTC, they'd be worth about $300k right now.
I now have a rig with four GeForce 1070s producing maybe $40-$50 per week, and I've been buying $100 or $200 worth here and there (kinda getting it onto a monthly basis lately). So far, money invested in Bitcoin is showing more growth than mining, but then I have a $100 purchase from last December (when Bitcoin was down to about $775) whose growth is throwing the totals through the roof, while I've only been back in mining since June. (Still have the mining gear from the first time around, but except for the aforementioned Radeon, they're only useful as space heaters now.)
My friend would not sign his card, but instead write "please ask for photo ID".
Note that there's a line of text under the signature strip on all of your cards. It usually says something to the effect of "card invalid without signature." Merchants would have been well within their rights to reject your friend's card for missing a signature. Back when I wore the blue shirt and khakis on a daily basis, those were our instructions. If it was empty, you could just go ahead and sign it, but if it said "see ID" or something similar, it was to be rejected.
Many sites have apps for a smart phone which do the same thing. Otherwise you need a keychain for every site.
...or a device that supports a standard like U2F. There are at least a couple of options here; the Trezor that holds my Bitcoin stash is also currently set up as a second factor for Google and Dropbox. There's also a YubiKey that supports U2F.
Now, I do agree that there are problems with the OS. Even with a Bluetooth keyboard paired, Android wants to erroneously pop up the onscreen keyboard for no good reason when you don't need it,
I seem to recall using a sort of "null keyboard" in the past to deal with this problem...not sure what app it was, but this one came up on a search for "Android null keyboard."
How do you unpack and build flatpack furniture in a 475 sq. ft. apartment?
Your bed should provide enough flat area to assemble most things. I put together a 6-drawer Malm chest that way. As a bonus, it also keeps the finish (such as it may be) from getting scratched or scuffed.
Free electricity from sunshine negatively impacts gov't tax revenues
How.
Looking at my last electric bill, there's a 5% tax on the total value of the bill (labeled a "local government fee") and a $0.00039/kWh "universal energy charge." On one bill, that's not going to amount to much. On hundreds of thousands of bills (or more)? It'll add up.
So long ago, too. I've actually forgotten what my setup was, though I doubt it was archival quality
Last time I did a VHS-to-DVD conversion, I plugged a VCR into a Hauppauge WinTV PVR150 (or was it a PVR250?) and set its MPEG-2 compressor to the highest available framerate. Since I was also looking to convert from PAL to NTSC (for which I had borrowed a multisystem VCR), I slowed the video down from 25 fps to 24000/1001 fps and scaled the video from 720x576 to 720x480 before reencoding for final output.
Tell me a phone that doesn't have Facebook pre-installed, and you can't delete it.
It's never been preinstalled on any phone I've had in the past 10 years: iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, Moto X, Moto G, Asus Zenfone 2, Moto Z Play. The first three were sold carrier-locked to AT&T; the last three were sold unlocked.
Slashdot Mirror
...or get more efficient? The miners I bought a few years ago draw several times' more power than the miners you can buy today; their power draw is such that it no longer makes sense to run them for their primary purpose. I fired one up for a bit last year just to use it as a space heater; unlike a purpose-built space heater, it somewhat offsets the cost of its operation. :)
You can do the same with Bitcoin: make some of these, or print off a few paper wallets from here. Load them with value. Hand them off to people, who can either hand them off to other people or redeem them for their stored value.
How are you abusing them that they keep failing (or were you buying the cheapest Chinesium coffee makers)? The one I use at work is a 25-year-old four-cup Mr. Coffee (from when they were still made in the USA) and the one I use at home is an 18-year-old Krups. They've kept plugging away with minimal maintenance (and a new carafe for the Krups when the original was bumped into something and cracked).
I have one sitting on the dorm fridge next to my desk. A grinder, too, and lately I've been bringing in beans I've roasted at home (though it's been a while since I've done that).
You're joking, right? That's not coffee. Even Charbucks would be better.
Only if your 50 BTC happens to be in one unspent input (which, by necessity, is also at one address). If you have multiple unspent inputs that add up to your total or (better yet) if your total is spread across multiple addresses, the smallest input (or combination of inputs) that will pay for a purchase will be used.
Altcoin mining with GPUs is done with high-end "gamer" GPUs. Among nVidia's current offerings, you probably wouldn't use less than a GeForce GTX 1060 if you were building a mining rig. (I currently have four 1070s in mine.) It's doubtful that Tesla is building anything nearly as powerful into its cars when something like a GeForce 210 or GT 710 (chips you'll find on sub-$50 cards), or the equivalent embedded into an SoC, would most likely be more than sufficient.
I can send some to Coinbase, have them convert it, and have money in my bank account in a few days. If I'm in a hurry and don't care about getting a suboptimal exchange rate, I can drive downtown and use the Bitcoin ATM at the D. There are probably other methods as well, but those are the ones I've used.
(Hell, it turns out there are more Bitcoin ATMs around here than I thought. The one at the D was the first in town IIRC.)
I had my VPS solo-mining in its idle time. At some point, it found a block. Back around 2012 or 2013, I spent the 50 BTC I'd received on a GPU and some of the first ASIC miners, thinking I'd mine it back. That ended up not happening.
At the time I cashed it out, Bitcoin was at $13. As of right now, it's over $7200.
I started mining again earlier this year, this time with GPUs so I don't end up with a collection of space heaters that cost more to run than they'll generate. They mine an assortment of altcoins at a pool that pays out in Bitcoin. I've also been buying Bitcoin for about a year now. So far, the purchases have been doing better than mining, though even the mining income has benefited from the run-up in value.
One ad hominem after another. That's about what I expected.
Go away, snowflake. Adults are having a conversation.
Wrong:
https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDemocratsLogic/photos/a.1647169182167657.1073741828.1646874365530472/2001221336762438/?type=3&theater
archive.is is, IME, a better way to break through paywalls. I use it all the time for WSJ links, and it looks like it'll also work for the Economist: https://archive.fo/4xW6A. (They have multiple TLDs, any one of which might be the one used for any given article.)
There are adblockers for iOS that don't need jailbreaking, just as there are adblockers for Android that don't need root. They work by setting up an on-device VPN and routing all traffic through that.
...or at least there were at one time. I had one on my wife's iPad 2. A quick search just now for them, though, indicates that Apple is weeding them out of the App Store in favor of something called a "Safari Content Blocker," which isn't likely to be systemwide. (I've not kept up with iOS and the devices it runs on much since switching my phone over to Android. I have an iPad 3 that I keep around as a PDF reader, but it no longer receives updates.)
In any case, I'm about to take you up on that Pi-Hole idea as soon as the parts for it arrive. You can't install an adblocker on a Roku, so the block needs to go somewhere outside the device.
...or watch Iron Sky. :-)
The absence of Californians, perhaps?
OTOH, Arkansas did foist the Clintons on us...
...unless you don't care how quickly the transfer goes through, in which case you set a low fee. When I got my Trezor a while back and moved funds onto it, I set fees around 50-250 satoshis/byte, which I think worked out at the time to something like 5-25 cents for the transaction. So what if it took 36 hours to go through? I wasn't going to spend my stash on anything anytime soon, so I wasn't in a hurry.
I suppose there are instances where you want transactions to confirm in a more timely manner, but if those circumstances don't apply to you, you can still get cheap transactions if you have some patience.
Could be worse. Early on, I had my VPS solo-mining when it was idle...and I managed to find a block, but didn't notice it until a couple years or so later. When I discovered I had 50 BTC on hand, the value had already gone up to $13 each. I spent most of it on a Radeon HD 7750 (to get into GPU mining) and a couple of Butterfly Labs ASIC miners (something like 5-7 GH/s each). If I had just held onto those 50 CPU-mined BTC, they'd be worth about $300k right now.
I now have a rig with four GeForce 1070s producing maybe $40-$50 per week, and I've been buying $100 or $200 worth here and there (kinda getting it onto a monthly basis lately). So far, money invested in Bitcoin is showing more growth than mining, but then I have a $100 purchase from last December (when Bitcoin was down to about $775) whose growth is throwing the totals through the roof, while I've only been back in mining since June. (Still have the mining gear from the first time around, but except for the aforementioned Radeon, they're only useful as space heaters now.)
Note that there's a line of text under the signature strip on all of your cards. It usually says something to the effect of "card invalid without signature." Merchants would have been well within their rights to reject your friend's card for missing a signature. Back when I wore the blue shirt and khakis on a daily basis, those were our instructions. If it was empty, you could just go ahead and sign it, but if it said "see ID" or something similar, it was to be rejected.
...or a device that supports a standard like U2F. There are at least a couple of options here; the Trezor that holds my Bitcoin stash is also currently set up as a second factor for Google and Dropbox. There's also a YubiKey that supports U2F.
I seem to recall using a sort of "null keyboard" in the past to deal with this problem...not sure what app it was, but this one came up on a search for "Android null keyboard."
Your bed should provide enough flat area to assemble most things. I put together a 6-drawer Malm chest that way. As a bonus, it also keeps the finish (such as it may be) from getting scratched or scuffed.
Looking at my last electric bill, there's a 5% tax on the total value of the bill (labeled a "local government fee") and a $0.00039/kWh "universal energy charge." On one bill, that's not going to amount to much. On hundreds of thousands of bills (or more)? It'll add up.
Last time I did a VHS-to-DVD conversion, I plugged a VCR into a Hauppauge WinTV PVR150 (or was it a PVR250?) and set its MPEG-2 compressor to the highest available framerate. Since I was also looking to convert from PAL to NTSC (for which I had borrowed a multisystem VCR), I slowed the video down from 25 fps to 24000/1001 fps and scaled the video from 720x576 to 720x480 before reencoding for final output.
They all taste like ass. :-P
It's never been preinstalled on any phone I've had in the past 10 years: iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, Moto X, Moto G, Asus Zenfone 2, Moto Z Play. The first three were sold carrier-locked to AT&T; the last three were sold unlocked.