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Bitcoin for pinball

Rus121

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Jul 21, 2011
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Just wondering if anyone here would consider taking Bitcoin as payment for a pin? Thoughts?
 
Bitcoin is very high risk. There will be big winners and big losers.

Whether it is the next global currency, or the next Tulip bulb bubble is anyone's guess
 
I wouldn't take Bitcoin as payment for a secondhand toaster let alone a pinball machine.

Is that because you think its b*llocks? Or because you have no way of liquidating it? Genuinely interested to know.
 
Is that because you think its b*llocks? Or because you have no way of liquidating it? Genuinely interested to know.

Basically because it's b*llocks. The world is run by the banks, that's not going to change. Bitcoin is no more than a pyramid scheme.
 
Like it or not cryptocurrency isn't going anywhere. I used to think it was b*llocks too which is a shame, if you bought a fiver's worth when it first started you'd be a millionaire now. Regardless of what it may or may not be worth in the future, trading it right now can be extremely profitable. That's why I'm awake at such a silly hour!

To answer the original question, yea I'd take Bitcoin for a pin. Liquidating it is as easy as buying/selling any other currency. Japan even made it legal tender earlier this year. If you're still not convinced then you might want to check out QuickFingersLuc on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbcxHiowf0TSNKn3xVpGTiQ
 
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Cryptocurrency probably isn't going anywhere, but the banks will be forced to release their own version(s) to render Bitcoin and other unregulated currency obsolete. Something will certainly happen sooner than later.

I know a number of people who bought Bitcoin years ago...none of which are millionaires or could in any way be described as wealthy. Inexplicable.
 
Granted regulation is imminent but long term I think that will be a good thing for Crypto. Many banks and countries are working on their own versions right now but what becomes of them remains to be seen, the same as all of the existing coins. The way I see it, something has value for as long as people believe it is a store of value. What is it exactly that makes you believe GBP or any other fiat currency is valuable? The only thing that makes fiat currency valuable is the fact that people believe it is and the goverment/banks say so. There's plenty of currencies in modern history that have become worthless or at least seriously devalued.

In early 2010 you could of bought 1 BTC for a few pence, at the time of writing 1 is worth about £6300. That means that today around 160BTC is worth £1 million. Some lucky people become extremely wealthy out of basically nothing but sadly that time has now passed. There's still loads of opportunity in Crypto though if you know how to trade sucessfully. A rough estimate suggests around 90% of traders will lose money though. How much will one be 1 be worth in the future? I have no idea and anybody else who says they do is lying. What I do know is that today it is valuable and volatile which in turn means it can be traded for financial gain if you play your cards right.

Most of the coins about today will be worthless in the future but that doesn't mean they can't be used as a trading instrument in the meantime. I believe that a handful of the major coins have a bright future though and some are actually being adopted by major international banks for different purposes. Take Ripple for example which is now being used by Amex and Santander for GBP to USD payments: http://fortune.com/2017/11/16/amex-payments-ripple-blockchain/

Everybody is entitled to their own opinion but describing the whole thing as b*llocks is far from a balanced view as far as I'm concerned.
 
Problem with Bitcoin is that, like Ponzi schemes, it doesn't seem like it's a balloon until it bursts. Even with Ponzi schemes there are people that get in, ride the wave and then cash out, with the scheme still going, and from their perspective everything appears on the up and up. Several Ponzi schemes have lasted decades before imploding. I guess the bigger question in that context is that if a scheme that is ultimately unsustainable lasts for such a long period of time, to what extent is it much different than a more traditional investment in a company that abruptly collapses due to market conditions?

That being said there is clearly there is money to be made in it, particularly trading it for tangible appreciable assets (e.g. this).

Incidentally the value in fiat currency is that it's Government backed and accepted everywhere. The intrinsic value in Bitcoin is - in stark contrast - its relative untraceability, which makes it a boon for dark markets.

To write it all off as b*llocks is near sighted though, as you say.
 
Interesting thread this. Back to the OPs original question, why can't the buyer just exchange the bitcoin and pay for the pin in £££s or the seller accept the bitcoin and immediately do the same? I'm not following what's different here to dealing in another currency flat or otherwise:hmm:
 
I perfectly happy to be an old school luddite on some things

I bought some music on iTunes years ago that has vanished. Maybe one day bitcoins will vanish. Who knows?

I now buy used cds on eBay for pence in the pound.

There is doubtless a future for some form of computer currency. Folk are also trying to create a floating city that is beyond government control.

Most folk buying bitcoins do not understand what the hell they are buying. How safe are they ? What stops fraud ? ... the guy receiving dollars, pounds or Tulip bulbs in exchange for the bitcoin you are buying knows a hell of a lot more about it than you probably do.

Governments have a nasty habit of hammering stores of value when it suits them. In the USA after the great depression it was illegal to hold any significant quantities of gold for example.

Pension funds were effectively seized in south America when Argentina went bad.

Be very, very careful.
 
Bitcoin is just a way to encourage the masses to move to a cashless society. It's all about control. Then it'll be the chip implants.
 
Funnily enough sold some of my Bitcoin yesterday too. It seems to have gone up a lot and the golden rule of investing or speculating is buy when its cheap and sell when its expensive.

Bitcoin may or may not be here for the long term, but what's far more interesting is the blockchain technology that underpins it. This is truly an incredible innovation on a par with with the invention of the Internet, and I have no doubt that in some years time it will be everywhere. The likes of IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are already offering blockchain based products or blockchain as a service. And amazing to think that no-one knows where it came from or who invented it, beyond some mythical figure with a Japanese name.

Bitcoin is just an application that rides on the back of blockchain technology in the same way that email or the web rides on the back of the internet.

The blockchain used for Bitcoin can't be altered or corrupted unless the hashing algorithms used to sign blocks is found to be flawed (which is possible), or if more than 50% of the compute power used to carry out Bitcoin transactions is controlled by a single party. It turns out that more than 50% of the compute power involved is already controlled by a handful of giant Chinese mining operations, so they could in theory alter the blockchain and undermine the currency.

But doing so would defeat their own purpose, which is to to make money by mining Bitcoin. So they are unlikely to do so. Unless the Chinese government told them to, of course.
 
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Good to know others dabble. I just wanted to know if others would trade a pin for some of my digital thin air.
 
Found a pic of my old mining setup (12mh/s scrypt mining 3.6kw - Litecoin, Dogecoin, etc....) Originally setup in early 2013 (too late to be mega rich, sadly), but still have some of the coins. I joined forces with some friends and we went at it hard with a total hash power of 110mh/s (a puny number by today's standards). Didn't take long to realise the diminishing returns were going to eat us alive so when the leccy bill got too high at home, i moved into the unit you see on the pic. In that unit i had free electricity, well, until the landlord got the first bill....lolz. A few months later i got a bill that was too big to swallow so the mine had to go.

20140213_141445.jpg


The greatest thing to happen at that time was selling the altcoins on ebay. People munched them up faster than we could get them to the exchanges. It was glorious. After some time, paypal decided to shut altcoin sellers down because they were selling non physical goods and people started to figure out they could easily scam altcoins from legitimate sellers by opening a dispute in paypal saying they did not get the coins they paid for. (happened to me several times).

Got bored of the whole 'pump and dump' manipulation by serious altcoin traders on the exchanges after that so just lost interest, until recently when i realised that not only had Bitcoin gone up in value, but i had some free coins from the 'hard forks' which resulted in Bitcoin Cash, and Bitcoin Gold.
So, trying to get my head around the mining thing right now, as times have moved on, but i'm pretty sure its going to be at 'hobby' level for me if i decided to build another setup.

P.S: Why don't i liquidate the coins and buy a pin with fiat? - Its quicker and cheaper to pay with Bitcoin and there's no huge amount of money showing up on a statement the missus reads.
 
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I'm going to be the first in line for decent neural implant technology when it is developed, I live and breathe cyberpunk, I am a programmer by trade, and I don't touch Bitcoin.

It's just a fancy way of converting electricity into digital artefacts and there is precious little honesty and understanding of the core technology. I like it as a technical demonstration and as a curio but the near holy reverence using it as a currency is just beyond me. It's infinitely better as a new way of handling the web-of-trust problem of authentication, but that isn't sexy and doesn't threaten to make people rich, bring down governments, kick-start the next communist Utopia etc etc

There have been motions to try and curb some of the most severe and fatal technological flaws in the tech, but ultimately it is trying to apply a technology that fundamentally is not limitless to modern economics, and there is a very good and well established set of reasons as to why the big economies moved away from gold standards etc. to fiat currencies. Cryptocurrencies by their design are a finite in number and can only be ultimately massively deflationary when the difficulty of mining goes beyond the economic cost of paying for the fuel to mine any further coins in a given currency - and that deflation is a side effect brought on by the need to have a fiat currency in today's age!

All of that plus the gradual increased weight of the transaction log making wallets a serious disk space investment to deal with, their inability to perform in high-speed-trading situations, and their very nature as being totally outside of the economic control of each country's main managers of finance just spell a novelty for me. I also detect the large amount of cargo-cult mentality in most of the language of the most enthusiastic users and it doesn't reassure me one single bit. I'm not making any personal statement to the author of the following quote and I apologise in advance, but statements describing the concept of a blockchain like "This is truly an incredible innovation on a par with with the invention of the Internet" are almost laughable in their excess. Nobody that has been able to convince me on both a technical level and on the economic level of understanding has had anything so enormous to claim about cryptocurrency.

Very fair play to all of those that got rich off of the bubble from it exploding but people shouldn't act like there's going to be another one. And until my real-life worries are paid with this alternative currency I have no reason to dabble with it. And I can't ever see that happening in my lifetime for the reasons I listed above.

That's before you even discuss the issues of sharding, alternative crypto-currencies... the list just goes on and on for me. The fact that dogecoin, something I messed about with as a joke years ago, is actually in danger of people taking it seriously as a currency just paints the picture clearly in my eyes.

And finally, if bitcoin is so easy to sell back into good old Sterling, then the buyer can do that himself and present me with the Sterling I can pay my bills with.
 
If I had a pound for every get rich quick scheme people have tried selling me. "If you'd bought Bitcoin in 1956 you'd be a billionaire, wanna buy my Bitcoin? No of course its not a pyramid scheme. No I'm not a millionaire. Wish I was because my electricity bill is through the roof!", "Quit your job and become a gas reseller! Everyone who's done it is already a millionaire. No its not a pyramid scheme. Yes I still live my parents.", "Buy a huge shipment of detox tea and spend years trying to sell it to your facebook friends until they block you! Get them to do the same. No its not a pyramid scheme. #bossbitch". Etc etc etc
 
I like building fast PC's. Always have. Always will. This is the core reason i got into this digi currency stuff. Not for the promise of a future windfall, but for the joy of seeing something i built crunch numbers faster than anyone else.

The real sad thing about mining is the power wasted. Using the BTC network for protein folding would probably benefit mankind on a much greater level than blockchain technology ever would. Just no one pays for that.
 
I like building fast PC's. Always have. Always will. This is the core reason i got into this digi currency stuff. Not for the promise of a future windfall, but for the joy of seeing something i built crunch numbers faster than anyone else.

The real sad thing about mining is the power wasted. Using the BTC network for protein folding would probably benefit mankind on a much greater level than blockchain technology ever would. Just no one pays for that.
Now that's more my jam! haha.

Mmmm... I'd quite like to build a Threadripper machine one day... no reason other than sheer nerd porn. I figure an Epyc build would be too much ;)
 
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