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Have you guys heard of Bitcoins?

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Boing said:
Damn it's about to hit $1500.00 :sorry2:
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[h=1]If You Bought $5 of Bitcoin 7 Years Ago, You’d Be $4.4 Million Richer[/h]
[h=1]Bitcoin Is Expected to Surge 165% Thanks to Donald Trump[/h]
Bitcoin Price Could Triple Under Donald Trump in 2017 | Fortune.com

It's $2550 as we speak. But beware if you ever lose your password you will lose everything. They don't have customer service and password must be at least 12 words-numbers long.
 
Prim0 said:
Maybe I'm just old fashioned and destined to remain middle-class. I just don't see the value in something that doesn't really exist. Hype can cause just about anything to go up in value for a period of time. Maybe that's all that bitcoin is....hype. Maybe it does have real value and I'm just not aware of it.
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The major value of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrency is that they can't be traced by governments. It's basically like an electronic version of cash, there is an inherent anonymity there. With traditional cash, you can't tell one dollar bill from another (theoretically). So it's similar for Bitcoin. Electronic bank transactions are fully recorded and logged, because no actual cash gets transferred, just electronic virtual cash. Electronic bank transactions are limitless and virtual, unlike real cash, governments just have made an agreement to keep the amount of cash available limited, but they can easily virtual print new money.

Bitcoin is also virtual cash, but unlike virtual sovereign cash, it is highly limited in how much of it is out there. It's kept limited by hard cryptographic methods that prevent an unlimited amount of it from being created. They have to use superfast computers to mine new Bitcoins, they can't just decide to create a Bitcoin. So Bitcoins have something similar to gold, where there is a limited supply of it.
 
Prim0 said:
I can see the anonymity aspect. But with anything computer based, how long really before someone figures out how to hack it? In a real end of the world scenario, those technologically based assets won't be worth much if anything at all.

I'm not saying that we all need to hoard gold and silver, but I'd rather have things that I can use if things really go down the tubes.
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You need to be able to crack a pretty uncrackable encryption system, even the NSA can't crack it in all of the years they've tried. Also the logs of transactions are only stored by the two parties involved in the transactions, there's no central repository of the records. That's why governments are so worried about this system, they lose control over the transaction chain. It basically becomes like the olden days again, when people exchanged cash with each other, everyone wrote down in their own ledgers what they got in return for the cash.
 
Prim0 said:
Okay.....but ultimately there is someone out there who programmed how this works. If so, I'm guessing that they would have the ability to manipulate the system somehow. I'm not trying to knock the idea, I'm just thinking about downsides. The NSA not being able to crack something......I'm not sure if that's an endorsement or not. :) And how would you even know if they had or hadn't?
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There are two ways to crack encryption: (1) using brute force guessing or even just taking an educated guess about the password, or (2) to put a backdoor into the encryption system.

Regarding the first, password guessing, this one can be cracked with sufficient computer power, but the problem is that certain algorithms require more computer power than there is in the known universe! The earliest password hashes were no more than 32- or 40-bit, they are now completely breakable by a desktop computers. The latest ones go from 256- to 1024-bits! Brute force guessing won't work here, even if you took all of the supercomputers on the planet and worked together. So at that point, you would need to use more subtle techniques, like guessing common words, birthdays, dog's names, etc.

Regarding putting a backdoor into the algorithm, this is the most likely case to crack something nowadays. The NSA might take an existing algorithm and insert a secret master password that can unlock any ciphers encrypted with that algorithm. But for the most part, the NSA would have to get a cipher company to agree put this feature into their software. The makers of Bitcoin (who are still secret still, even after all of these years, BTW) used open-source off-the-shelf encryption techniques such as SHA. The source code for these algorithms are available for public view, and if a backdoor were put into it, programmers would discover it quickly. Bitcoin was developed in secret, released to the world, before the NSA could cajole the developers into putting backdoors in for them, because they didn't even know who the developers were. So Bitcoin is pretty safe from prying eyes. The new Ethereum coins however, I'm not so sure about. The developers are publicly known, which means they are susceptible to influence.

Also the passwords generated to protect cryptocurrency is not human-generated, it is machine-generated. That's why there is such a thing as Bitcoin mining, what they are mining for is Bitcoin passwords. When they successfully mine a password, they are awarded with a single Bitcoin for their troubles. Of course, each Bitcoin is worth $1000's!
 
By the time quantum computers are commonplace, all of today's ciphers will likely be hacked in a few seconds, but until that day arrives, we're safe from breaking in. I compare it to the days of when banking became a think, vs. keeping your money under your mattress. When everybody figured out that people keep their cash under the mattress it became really easy to figure out where to go in a house to rob it. Then people decided to keep the cash in a bank. With the idea that a large highly secure bank could keep your money safer than you could yourself. That's basically what's going to happen with all of these ciphers at that point, we'll be putting them in bigger repositories to keep them safer.
 
Bladdy said:
If You Needed a Great Reason to Avoid Bitcoin and Ethereum, This Is ItA recent flash crash just cost digital currency investors a boatload of money.

If You Needed a Great Reason to Avoid Bitcoin and Ethereum, This Is It -- The Motley Fool
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They all crash heavily and make it right back up again very quickly. Bitcoin went through several of them, and regained everything and then some since it was introduced. The reason it happens is because the market is so small, that a reasonably large investor can dump a ton of it on the market at the same time, and it'll crash the market quickly.
 
Anyone heard of hashblock.net?. Sounds TGTBT but I thought the same of bitcoins so just asking any experts here.
 
If China shuts down exchanges as they say they will do. I would sell now before you lose your profits. Over 90% of bitcoins trades the last 2 years has been done over China's 3 exchanges.
 
Worth almost $6000 a share.

[h=1]The first Lamborghini purchased entirely with Bitcoin along with 7 other cars![/h]
 
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