Posted on 01/18/2018 12:16:27 PM PST by C19fan
At the Golden Arcade at Sham Shui Po, a new product is creating a stir among the community of geeks, gamers and offbeat collectors that call this jam-packed shopping centre in Kowloon their haven. A banner that reads “Mining Specialist” stands out from among all the stores selling X-Box games, comic books, action hero figurines and video game consoles.
(Excerpt) Read more at scmp.com ...
It’s a deal,
We now have a virtual contract.
You noobs... I got my A.D.A.M., my TI99 and my 3 Vic-20’s on the job.
I was re-writing an old computer game that I coded about thirty years ago. Due to unexpected bugs the program didn’t work right. Instead of awarding points for winning the game, it started issuing bitcoins. I hope I can fix it.
>From what I understand these miners verify a Bitcoin transaction so as a reward if you verify enough transactions you get to birth a new bitcoin.
No, bitcoins are discovered through lots of prime number hashes. But since miners are already doing the work to find new bitcoins, they also lend out their mining gear to verify transactions for a cut of the transaction. However, as the blockchain grow(IE, the recorded bitcoin movements) the cost to process transaction increases.
Bitcoin operations require a lot of electric power for the video card bitcoin farms they run. Almost all mining is done in China today because China heavily subsidizes electric power to encourage economic growth.
Here's how it actually works. The miners test SHA256 hashes at 17 million trillion hashes per second. The miner achieving a non-random result, which is of course extremely unlikely, gets all the new bitcoin reward plus all the transaction fees for that roughly 8 minute period. The fees come from existing coin. The reward is brand new money from thin air, currently 12.5 bitcoins. The transactions fees paid to the lucky winner vary depending on the load on the network, but were currently about 4 bitcoins for a block (ranged from just over 1 to just less than 10 in December).
All rewards and fees are in the chain, and belong to the winner. The winner is always (statistically) going to be a pool, so the then the winnings are split among the pool members based on the work they did.
Your one correct statement: "Worth does not exist until a sell transaction is executed." May also be untrue if the sale is for a private key (e.g. a paper wallet). But generally true. Bitcoin is only worth something if a "gullible person" (your incorrect characterization) pays real money to receive a transaction at an exchange. But coin-to-coin prices are somewhat independent of that "real world" value, and that is the main reason why this bubble is just starting.
As for just electrons, sort of. A private key on the piece of paper is not electrons, but the transactions made to the corresponding address are stored on disk. So those are electrons or magnetic particles in most cases.
Since my bitcoin smelter runs on virtual energy, we can make these bitcoins to infinity and back. Lets get started. Send me a batch of ore, and I will send back the same amount of ingots. Then all we need to do is find a sucker ‘ahem’ a partner to take the ingots and them stamp them into coins and we are gonna be rich!!!
Just like the US dollar and much of the currency in the world. With a difference. The bitcoin has an associated cost of production sufficiently high to limit its availability. It is worth more than comic books.
That’s why they use someone else’s electricity or your computer when you visit their site
The computer I taught myself basic programming on back in the early 80s. Chiclet keyboard and external tape drive.
Now THAT’S an excavator.
You can tell just how big those things really are by comparing it to the large mining trucks parked next to it.
That is worth more than a bitcoin! :-)
LOL! RKBA! LOL!
>The winner is always (statistically) going to be a pool
Thus invalidating the root purpose of cryptocurrency, namely decentralization. Who cares if it’s ‘not fiat government money’ if, essentially, only a half-dozen mega-aggregates are actually controlling production, and everyone else is just trusting that they’re playing fair?
In its day, it is kinda amazing what the C-64 would do.
Why does this remind me of pokemon go?
Verifying transactions is harder but since I run a full node I get all of them just like the miners. It would be easy to run tests to make sure my transactions are getting through but not free (I would have to pay for each transaction). But verification can be done by any large non-mining player (e.g. any exhange).
So far nobody has been able to cheat, despite billion dollar incentives to do so.
It’s just starting to get into the pokemon space. But there are few differences, instead of one company controlling all the pokemon, there are millions of ordinary college kids creating them. The variety and aesthetic value will be amazing. It is just starting.
I used it for college using a 1200 baud line. Much faster than the 300 rate. Of course in today's world that is stone age.
Venezuelans are mining BTC & other cryptos to stay alive:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177/
Related:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3623730/posts
I don’t know for sure. Does Southern Nigeria contain oil?
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