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I'm old, and I don't get Bitcoin [Cryptocurrency and society].

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    discriderdiscrider Registered User regular
    The trick is to run an exchange and have people buy Bitcoin to give to 'your wallet' in exchange for 'services'.
    And then spend the money.

    Or at least that's what I assume all this ransomware is doing cause I don't see how you get the money out of the Bitcoin ecosystem otherwise.

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    Giggles_FunsworthGiggles_Funsworth Blight on Discourse Bay Area SprawlRegistered User regular
    Orca wrote: »
    Except even then it seems incredibly stupid since unless you never let it leave the system and you generated the coins yourself, there's a permanent, indelible record of every single transaction a wallet has ever made and every wallet a bitcoin has been through.

    Sounds fantastic for doing illegal stuff to me! Perfect traceability!

    Yeah. Monero's for crime.

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    [Expletive deleted][Expletive deleted] The mediocre doctor NorwayRegistered User regular
    Also funny: Bitcoin proponents argue that it is a way around the fees banks and paypal etc charge us. Why would anyone bother to process bitcoin transactions? Fees.

    Sic transit gloria mundi.
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    Commander ZoomCommander Zoom Registered User regular
    Turns out that if you want to actually do anything with your imaginary computer money, you have to turn it into/treat it like real money. Funny how that works.

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    TetraNitroCubaneTetraNitroCubane The Djinnerator At the bottom of a bottleRegistered User regular
    Not sure if this belongs here or the computer security thread, but I figure it's more relevant here.

    Hackers have been targeting supercomputers, with the end-goal of using those machines to mine cryptocurrency.
    At least a dozen supercomputers across Europe have shut down after cyber-attacks tried to take control of them.

    A pan-European supercomputing group says they seem to have tried to use the machines to mine cryptocurrency.
    Also on 11 May, another attack shut down five supercomputers in Germany.

    Others followed elsewhere in Germany in the following days, as well as in Switzerland, and reportedly Barcelona.

    They exploited an Secure Shell (SSH) connection, which academic researchers use to log in to the system remotely.

    And once inside, the attackers appear to have deployed cryptocurrency-mining malware.

    The security team at the European Group Infrastructure foundation said: "A malicious group is currently targeting academic data centres for CPU [central processing unit] mining purposes.

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    redxredx I(x)=2(x)+1 whole numbersRegistered User regular
    Hrmmm... How do I get shodan.io to filter by super computers?

    They moistly come out at night, moistly.
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    RMS OceanicRMS Oceanic Registered User regular
    redx wrote: »
    Hrmmm... How do I get shodan.io to filter by super computers?

    Hire a hacker to remove the ethical subroutines.

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    MayabirdMayabird Pecking at the keyboardRegistered User regular
    Remember Jack Abramoff, super-corrupt W. Bush lobbyist/crony who was in all sorts of scandals connected to all sorts of Republican leaders at the time, who then got thrown under the bus to protect the webs of corruption he'd woven and actually went to jail for a while? Yeah, I know, the Before Time when people pretended that anti-corruption mattered and didn't elect the Lord of Corruption as their messiah-president.

    Anyway, just brought that up as a reminder of who he was because he's just been charged with cryptocurrency fraud. The man can't stop doing financial crimes, and cryptocurrency is basically "hello please do financial crimes here" so of course he did.

    If you like, please feel free to join me in laughing at him for a few seconds.

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    manwiththemachinegunmanwiththemachinegun METAL GEAR?! Registered User regular
    So what you may not be aware of, is that not only has Bitcoin recovered nearly all of its lost value, many are anticipating it to reach all time highs. :D

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    Phoenix-DPhoenix-D Registered User regular
    Everyone hide your GPUs!

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    Jam WarriorJam Warrior Registered User regular
    A lot of rubes who fancy themselves as amateur traders stuck at home on their computers I guess.

    MhCw7nZ.gif
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    discriderdiscrider Registered User regular
    More like a lot more people attempting to work from home and getting scammed, I think.

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    Jam WarriorJam Warrior Registered User regular
    That's pretty much what I was implying by use of the word 'rube'.

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    SmurphSmurph Registered User regular
    People might be getting the slightest bit uneasy about JPow making the money printer go brrrr for the last 6 months with no end in sight. Precious metals have spiked as well.

    But yeah it's starting to feel like there is some 2017 crazyness on the horizon, if it's not already here.

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    BurtletoyBurtletoy Registered User regular
    Tell me if you've heard this one before

    Someone started a cryptocurrency and then quickly cashed out for $13million, which then cause the cryptocurrency to crash 80% in value.

    The new twist, I guess, is that the coin code was open source and was an exact copy of a different coin.


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    FencingsaxFencingsax It is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understanding GNU Terry PratchettRegistered User regular
    Fool and money something something

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    TetraNitroCubaneTetraNitroCubane The Djinnerator At the bottom of a bottleRegistered User regular
    This is my shocked face.

    Anyone who thinks cryptocurrency is a way to get rich quickly is right about what it is, and wrong about who's getting rich.

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    Donovan PuppyfuckerDonovan Puppyfucker A dagger in the dark is worth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered User regular
    Had lunch with my Mum the other day, and she asked me "what's this bitcoin thing I keep hearing about?"

    I did my best to explain about the similarity to ponzi schemes and the entire crypto market being absolutely saturated with corruption and fraud, and she got the hint.

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    MugsleyMugsley DelawareRegistered User regular
    This should be fun. Apparently the new 3080 cards are extremely good at mining Ethereum. Because we aren't fighting supply problems already.

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    dlinfinitidlinfiniti Registered User regular
    edited September 2020
    meh probably still not as efficient as a dedicated asic miner, in general crypto mining has moved beyond consumer GPUs
    especially given how much power these ampere cards require

    dlinfiniti on
    AAAAA!!! PLAAAYGUUU!!!!
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    Jam WarriorJam Warrior Registered User regular
    Years ago real companies flirted with taking Bitcoin payments (with the proviso that that was via real-time conversion to real money on an exchange). Are they still going or has that all dried up? I.e. is there any use for Bitcoin etc yet other than illegal transactions and selling to ‘investors’?

    MhCw7nZ.gif
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    bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    edited September 2020
    Years ago real companies flirted with taking Bitcoin payments (with the proviso that that was via real-time conversion to real money on an exchange). Are they still going or has that all dried up? I.e. is there any use for Bitcoin etc yet other than illegal transactions and selling to ‘investors’?

    some companies do but all they do is change it to USD immediately

    so expect to pay 25% above USD prices in bitcoin so they can hit the exchange quickly and actually try to get roughly the same amount of money in USD after paying fees and dealing with fluctuating value

    bowen on
    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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    CptHamiltonCptHamilton Registered User regular
    When I went to California last year I saw several "Bitcoin ATM"s, which I assume is some combination of immediate conversion on an exchange and a scam, so I guess there's that?

    The only big retailer I know of who accepts it directly is NewEgg, which I guess sort of makes sense given they sell a lot of video cards...

    PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
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    SmurphSmurph Registered User regular
    Years ago real companies flirted with taking Bitcoin payments (with the proviso that that was via real-time conversion to real money on an exchange). Are they still going or has that all dried up? I.e. is there any use for Bitcoin etc yet other than illegal transactions and selling to ‘investors’?

    The Bitcoin blockchain works pretty well when nobody is using it (most days) and like a turd on fire when there's actually any traffic going through it. The second case has happened like twice in its history for periods for like 2 weeks each, but $10+ transaction fees were normal during those times. And it can happen any time with no warning. So not worth supporting for most storefronts.

    Ethereum is even worse. There's a ton of shit being built on it right now and in the past few months there have been times where transactions were like $60+.

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    Jam WarriorJam Warrior Registered User regular
    So I can still fairly safely assume any enthusiast is a scammer, scammee, or drug dealer. Just checking.

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    HappylilElfHappylilElf Registered User regular
    So I can still fairly safely assume any enthusiast is a scammer, scammee, or drug dealer. Just checking.

    Hey, whoa, hey

    No need to discriminate like that

    They could also be a drug kingpin, a child pornographer, an arms dealer, doing murder for hire or just a god damned idiot.

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    HevachHevach Registered User regular
    edited September 2020
    That "just a god damned idiot" is doing a lot of work, too. There are a lot of enthusiasts who still believe this is the future of fiat currency. Even though every disaster, every exchange absconding with everybody's accounts, every million dollar transaction fee, every market manipulation, is explicitly working as intended, they write it off as just the actions of bad faith actors. Except with real money there is always recourse, and with cryptocurrency there is never recourse.

    Also, the reason you see crypto currencies on investment websites now is that they're being used like a stock market in the purest form. Investors are finally coming around to the fact that stocks that don't pay out some kind of revenue share have only the most hypothetical link to the companies they represent, their actual value is based on short term perception and expectation. Crypto exchanges offer a pure form of that, securities with no real connection to ANYTHING and with almost no regulation, allowing people with enough money in them to manipulate them like the vendors in Fable.

    Hevach on
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    bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    The entrepreneurs taking their money is better than the government (who they argue takes it by force) who gives them roads, fire departments, national security, legal systems to recompense people wronged... because sometimes poor people get food and medical coverage on their dime.

    In their eyes, the first one gives them more freedom because they can "shop around" even though when you're dealing with the black market your choices are essentially all the same, it's just the illusion of choice that they're after. Essentially, bitcoin enthusiasts are meat in the grinder like people hooked into the matrix.

    It's the same libertarian horseshit you see time and again, they want to pay individual at each junction of road because they never use the big highway arterial so why should they pay upkeep on it? Completely missing the forest for the trees because everything you do is connected with everyone else unless you literally buy a hunk of land and never leave or interact with other human beings.

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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    TryCatcherTryCatcher Registered User regular
    Libertarianism has pretty much been socavated from the left and the right. The left easily points up that is a bunch of sucking up to the rich:
    Libertarianism isn’t some cutting-edge political philosophy that somehow transcends the traditional “left to right” spectrum. It’s a radical, hard-right economic doctrine promoted by wealthy people who always end up backing Republican candidates, no matter how often they talk about civil liberties, ending the wars and legalizing pot. Funny how that works.

    It’s the “third way” for a society in which turning against capitalism or even taking your foot off the pedal is not an option. Thanks to our shitty constitution and the most violent labor history in the West, we never even got a social-democratic party like the rest of the developed world.
    Their whole ideology is like a big game of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s all make-believe, except for the chain-mail–they brought that from home. Elves, dwarves and fair maidens for capital. Even with the supposedly “good ones”—anti-war libertarians—we’re still talking about people who think Medicare’s going to lead to Stalinism.

    So my advice is to call them out.

    Ask them what their beef really is with the welfare state. First, they’ll talk about the deficit and say we just can’t afford entitlement programs. Well, that’s obviously a joke, so move on. Then they’ll say that it gives the government tyrannical power. Okay. Let me know when the Danes open a Guantánamo Bay in Greenland.

    Here’s the real reason libertarians hate the idea. The welfare state is a check against servility towards the rich. A strong welfare state would give us the power to say Fuck You to our bosses—this is the power to say “I’m gonna work odd jobs for twenty hours a week while I work on my driftwood sculptures and play keyboards in my chillwave band. And I’ll still be able to go to the doctor and make rent.”

    Sounds like freedom to me.

    And the hard right, well, Trump proved that you indeed can get away with saying the quiet part out loud. So a bunch of Ron Paul "Libertarians" went straight to the MAGA hordes.

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    OrcaOrca Also known as Espressosaurus WrexRegistered User regular
    This Etherium bug pretty much says why Crypto is stupid:

    https://github.com/ethereum/solidity/issues/10616
    I will payout 1000 LINK (13k $) for help in my problem.
    I'm just recovering from a terrible loss, I'm a father and husband, and a few days ago I lost my life savings due to one small mistake and rush. I don't want to bother you with my problems, so I'll go to the details. I accidentally sent 4,000 LINK worth $ 50k to the Ghst Stacking smart contract that does not support the LINK cryptocurrency chain. Theoretically, the contract is immutable, and even its creator Nick Mudge admitted it. However, when I launched the rescue operation, good people came to me who said that there should be a chance to add a LINK sidechain to it, which would allow me to recover all my life savings. All information is contained on this website www.aavegotchi.com, while cale Aavegotchi agrees to cooperate if it turns out that it is possible to do so. Of course, it will cover the cost of your work, I think that it is enough money that "hangs" there that we will be able to agree. I got a link to you as a group that can do Magic. I am begging you for help. Dawid Kaczówka from Poland.

    And of course the way to fix it is to:
    First, the Chainlink contract could give you your tokens back if it was designed for such an eventuality. Etherscan does not show me the code of their token (just a summary of available ERC20 token functions), but I'm pretty sure that the contract is some version of this: https://github.com/smartcontractkit/LinkToken/tree/master/contracts/v0.6. It's a dead simple contract (as tokens tend to be) and it's designed to do just one thing: keep a big list of which address owns how much. In fact most of the implementation is the battle-tested standard OpenZeppelin ERC20 contract. Chainlink added a few functions to support ERC-677 but that does not change much. I can see no functions that would allow anyone but the owner to transfer funds. And the owner in this case is the Aavegotchi contract.

    So the second option would be to make the Aavegotchi contract transfer funds back to you. And there's a ray of hope since the contract that owns the funds is a proxy (implemented as @mudgen's Diamond). If you could somehow get the proxy to register the transfer function of the Chainlink contract as a diamond facet, you (or anyone else) would then be able to call it via the proxy and move the funds as if you were the owner. Aavegotchi, as any diamond, has an admin interface for changing registered functions, called IDiamondCut. The thing is, that interface is disabled (commented-out so it can't really be enabled again). That's great for security of the contract but it's also bad news for you. You can't do it that way. You'd have to find and exploit a pretty serious security hole in Aavegotchi to make it possible and I know @mudgen ran a bug bounty on it so even if there were a hole, it would be unlikely to be an easy one to find.

    And hey, just in case you manage to find an exploit, buyer beware:
    One more thing. If, against all odds, you do find a way to recover the funds by registering the transfer function with the proxy, please be wary of frontrunners. You might think that if you just quickly enable it and don't tell anyone, you'll be able to quickly transfer it back to your account and no one will have enough time to even notice. This logic does not work on the blockchain. From what I've heard, generalized frontrunners that watch every transaction and check if replacing your address with theirs will benefit them, are pretty widespread. As I said above, the transfer function would be available to anyone so a frontrunner could easily snatch the transaction from you. You can fool them by obfuscating the transaction (e.g. splitting it into two parts in a commit-reveal scheme) but you have to be smart about it.

    Why does anybody use this shit again if they aren't trying to do illegal crap?

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    IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    Orca wrote: »
    Why does anybody use this shit again if they aren't trying to do illegal crap?

    Gambling addiction, paranoid delusion, and/or a lack of understanding of how money works outside of the abstract.

    The one person I know who tries to talk up bitcoin is a fan of the gold standard.

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    BurtletoyBurtletoy Registered User regular
    Is it weird that crypto currencies just, like, created their own language that looks like English but makes no damn sense?

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    ShadowfireShadowfire Vermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered User regular
    Burtletoy wrote: »
    Is it weird that crypto currencies just, like, created their own language that looks like English but makes no damn sense?

    They're the Sovereign Citizen of currencies.

    WiiU: Windrunner ; Guild Wars 2: Shadowfire.3940 ; PSN: Bradcopter
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    webguy20webguy20 I spend too much time on the Internet Registered User regular
    edited December 2020
    Speaking of, looks like Bitcoin is at an all time high right now. Wonder how high it'll go before dropping again.

    webguy20 on
    Steam ID: Webguy20
    Origin ID: Discgolfer27
    Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
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    CptHamiltonCptHamilton Registered User regular
    Burtletoy wrote: »
    Is it weird that crypto currencies just, like, created their own language that looks like English but makes no damn sense?

    Older-school ones like bitcoin were relatively straight-forward. You didn't need to understand the math, really, to use them.

    Etherium, and the etherium-based/etherium-like currencies are less a currency and more a computing platform for which the first use-case was building a cryptocurrency. I can kinda follow that post because I write software for a living but the details specific to Etherium are still opaque. And, like, as a software engineer I don't understand the initial statement. How can you send currency to a contract (a piece of software that acts like an automated account, in this case) that doesn't accept that currency? It seems like saying, "I accidentally paid the gas station attendant with $50,000 worth of casino tokens but the gas station doesn't accept casino tokens so now they're stuck in the cash register." I guess that's maybe the bug Orca was referring to? The whole post seems like a series of really dumb software engineering decisions.

    PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
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    L Ron HowardL Ron Howard The duck MinnesotaRegistered User regular
    It's a solution looking for a problem to solve

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    manwiththemachinegunmanwiththemachinegun METAL GEAR?! Registered User regular
    edited December 2020
    I think if anything the past 4 years has shown, you don't need to be smart, hard working, or even competent to be financially successful.

    You just need a bit of luck, and to not be the last one without a chair when the music stops.

    manwiththemachinegun on
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    SmurphSmurph Registered User regular
    Burtletoy wrote: »
    Is it weird that crypto currencies just, like, created their own language that looks like English but makes no damn sense?

    Older-school ones like bitcoin were relatively straight-forward. You didn't need to understand the math, really, to use them.

    Etherium, and the etherium-based/etherium-like currencies are less a currency and more a computing platform for which the first use-case was building a cryptocurrency. I can kinda follow that post because I write software for a living but the details specific to Etherium are still opaque. And, like, as a software engineer I don't understand the initial statement. How can you send currency to a contract (a piece of software that acts like an automated account, in this case) that doesn't accept that currency? It seems like saying, "I accidentally paid the gas station attendant with $50,000 worth of casino tokens but the gas station doesn't accept casino tokens so now they're stuck in the cash register." I guess that's maybe the bug Orca was referring to? The whole post seems like a series of really dumb software engineering decisions.

    I think you can send the coins to any valid address, including ones that have been set up specifically to do things other than accept coins. People not paying attention send coins to these addresses quite often, like the poor guy above who sent his life savings to one. Theoretically they should be lost forever when you do that because when they deploy these contracts they aren't supposed to be changeable on the fly for security reasons. But then the devs figured out that by bringing in another blockchain and <insert crypto technical jargon> they CAN recover the funds! Wait so the thing that was supposed to be secure and unchangeable can actually be changed easily? What's going on here?

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    DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    So when is someone going to make a cryptocurrency that doesn't require an obscene amount of electrical power to generate?

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    chrisnlchrisnl Registered User regular
    The thing that concerns me most about the final section addressing the guy's problem is the existence of these "frontrunners that watch every transaction and check if replacing your address with theirs will benefit them". That seems like a really big problem!

    It also disgusts me that bitcoin itself is apparently at an all-time high "value" on the exchanges. This bullshit wastes tons of resources to do something that other options do faster and cheaper (and probably more securely), yet tons of people are super into it regardless. The simple fact that you can send your crypto crap to an address that doesn't accept them, and then they are (theoretically) gone forever instead of bouncing back is a problem so basic that it should have never come up.

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