Bitcoin?

Clem72

Well-Known Member
I thought about jumping in fairly early, but passed because I didn't want to spend cash on the coins and it had passed the point when you could reasonably expect to mine coins without buying purpose built equipment or running high-end video cards 24/7.

At this point I wouldn't bother, as the blockchain increases the number of simultaneous transactions continues to lower and the cost per transaction increases. Pretty soon it will cost a ton just to bribe people to actually run your transactions.

It was a good proof of concept, but something newer/better will have to replace it before long.

Too bad it won't be Dodgecoin (someone gave me like 10k of those).
 

Starman

New Member
Don't currently have any BTC, but have had plenty in the past when I was mining on a cluster of GPU-enabled HPC machines. BTC itself is long-outdated. Transactions take too long and if you're still mining, it's not very energy-efficient.

I like NEM and Ripple currencies, the latter of which has been courting central banks around the world to evangelize. We'll see how it goes.
 

mAlice

professional daydreamer
In a SHTF scenario, bitcoin will not be any more accessible than your bank account.
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
'$300m in cryptocurrency' accidentally lost forever due to bug

More than $300m of cryptocurrency has been lost after a series of bugs in a popular digital wallet service led one curious developer to accidentally take control of and then lock up the funds, according to reports.

Unlike most cryptocurrency hacks, however, the money wasn’t deliberately taken: it was effectively destroyed by accident. The lost money was in the form of Ether, the tradable currency that fuels the Ethereum distributed app platform, and was kept in digital multi-signature wallets built by a developer called Parity. These wallets require more than one user to enter their key before funds can be transferred.

On Tuesday Parity revealed that, while fixing a bug that let hackers steal $32m out of few multi-signature wallets, it had inadvertently left a second flaw in its systems that allowed one user to become the sole owner of every single multi-signature wallet.

The user, “devops199”, triggered the flaw apparently by accident. When they realised what they had done, they attempted to undo the damage by deleting the code which had transferred ownership of the funds. Rather than returning the money, however, that simply locked all the funds in those multisignature wallets permanently, with no way to access them.

“This means that currently no funds can be moved out of the multi-sig wallets,” Parity says in a security advisory.

Effectively, a user accidentally stole hundreds of wallets simultaneously, and then set them on fire in a panic while trying to give them back.

“We are analysing the situation and will release an update with further details shortly,” Parity told users.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/08/cryptocurrency-300m-dollars-stolen-bug-ether
 

mAlice

professional daydreamer
Sofia

[video=youtube;YSn7Iomisyc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSn7Iomisyc[/video]
 

Starman

New Member
'$300m in cryptocurrency' accidentally lost forever due to bug

More than $300m of cryptocurrency has been lost after a series of bugs in a popular digital wallet service led one curious developer to accidentally take control of and then lock up the funds, according to reports.

Unlike most cryptocurrency hacks, however, the money wasn’t deliberately taken: it was effectively destroyed by accident. The lost money was in the form of Ether, the tradable currency that fuels the Ethereum distributed app platform, and was kept in digital multi-signature wallets built by a developer called Parity. These wallets require more than one user to enter their key before funds can be transferred.

On Tuesday Parity revealed that, while fixing a bug that let hackers steal $32m out of few multi-signature wallets, it had inadvertently left a second flaw in its systems that allowed one user to become the sole owner of every single multi-signature wallet.

The user, “devops199”, triggered the flaw apparently by accident. When they realised what they had done, they attempted to undo the damage by deleting the code which had transferred ownership of the funds. Rather than returning the money, however, that simply locked all the funds in those multisignature wallets permanently, with no way to access them.

“This means that currently no funds can be moved out of the multi-sig wallets,” Parity says in a security advisory.

Effectively, a user accidentally stole hundreds of wallets simultaneously, and then set them on fire in a panic while trying to give them back.

“We are analysing the situation and will release an update with further details shortly,” Parity told users.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/08/cryptocurrency-300m-dollars-stolen-bug-ether

This is not a problem with BTC per se, it's a problem with wallets. The BTC aren't lost forever, it can be fixed with a hard fork -- probably already has been fixed. This is discussed in more detail on /r/ethereum on Reddit.
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
Did Bitcoin Just Burst? How It Compares to History's Big Bubbles


Still, skeptics abound. Howard Wang of New York-based Convoy Investments LLC and Jeremy Grantham of GMO LLC have analyzed Bitcoin’s advance relative to past frenzies and concluded that it’s unsustainable. Grantham, who helps oversee about $74 billion as GMO’s chief investment strategist, summed up his concerns in a Jan. 3 letter to investors:

“Having no clear fundamental value and largely unregulated markets, coupled with a storyline conducive to delusions of grandeur, makes this more than anything we can find in the history books the very essence of a bubble,” he wrote.

The strategist has a mixed record of success with such warnings. While Grantham was correct to call the 1990s surge in tech stocks a bubble, he exited too soon and missed out of some of the market’s biggest gains.



$260 billion ‘cryptocalypse’ as cryptos plunge 30 per cent amid fresh China, South Korea fears

BITCOIN, ethereum, ripple and other virtual currencies have been smashed overnight in a bloodbath of Titanic proportions.


THE cryptocurrency market has lost $US206 billion overnight in what traders are describing as a “cryptocalypse”, with bitcoin heading back towards its $US10,000 milestone first reached last November.

But it was smaller currencies including ripple, ethereum and bitcoin cash that were the hardest hit in the latest sell-off, which was sparked by fresh fears of a crackdown on virtual currencies by governments in South Korea and China.

At the time of writing, ripple was down nearly 50 per cent on the previous day, ethereum had lost nearly 34 per cent of its value, bitcoin cash was down nearly 37 per cent and bitcoin was down 27 per cent to just under $US10,200.

The market capitalisation of more than 1300 cryptocurrencies has dropped by around 30 per cent over the past 24 hours, down from $US702 billion to $US496 billion, according to Coinmarketcap.

“It’s been a cryptocalypse overnight with bitcoin and other virtual currencies coming under heavy selling pressure as the regulatory scrutiny intensifies not only in China and South Korea but across the globe,” Greg McKenna, chief market strategist at AxiTrader, said in a note on Wednesday. “The debate over zero or $US100,000 for bitcoin this year continues, however.”
 
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