[olug] Fwd: [ArchChat] anyone else heard of bitcoins?

Luke-Jr luke at dashjr.org
Sat Apr 16 15:04:48 UTC 2011


...and we just hit mainstream media:
http://techland.time.com/2011/04/16/online-cash-bitcoin-could-challenge-governments/

I am not a financial advisor, but I will say /I'm/ buying. :P

On Friday, April 15, 2011 9:43:40 pm Luke-Jr wrote:
> On Thursday, April 14, 2011 8:39:36 pm Oren Beck wrote:
> > They generate their coins from solving complex math problems on your pc.
> 
> No, the SHA256 bruteforcing serves no purpose but to prevent someone from
> taking over the network. Basically, the idea is that by making it difficult
> to find blocks, someone needs to outpower everyone else on the network
> combined to effectively chargeback. In exchange for contributing your GPU
> power, you are rewarded with the newly minted coins. These days, you need a
> good Radeon to profit over the electricity costs (CPUs and nvidia GPUs cost
> more in electricity than they would earn mining now). So, the math secures
> the network's integrity, it does not itself create the coins.
> 
> On Friday, April 15, 2011 10:12:57 am Monty J. Harder wrote:
> > Look no further than the guy who was sent to federal prison recently for
> > "economic terrorism" by minting gold coins he called "Liberty Dollars".
> > The Fed has a monopoly on creating money in the US, and doesn't like it
> > when people try to compete.
> 
> He was sent to prison for counterfeiting, because his money looked too much
> like US Dollars, and he suggested people pass it off as such (eg, giving it
> as change). While one might try to argue that in the latter case, the
> person is getting the same value as real money, the fact is that his
> "American Liberty Dollars" carried a (significantly) higher face-value
> than their actual worth in metal. In any case, nobody can argue that
> Bitcoins can possibly be confused with US Dollars.



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