re: Daily Bitcoin Article

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Sweetie, I know you think you're being helpful explaining something to us, but you're really not.....

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yeah, I know.

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Heading downtown in a bit to see how this BTC ATM works and buy some straight from the source

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So you are prepared to provide the ATM owners with all of the information necessary to access the financial account you will use to purchase the Bitcoins. What safeguards are in place to prevent misuse of this information? What makes you think you will get a lower purchase price via the ATM versus buying from an exchange operator?

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Was making out like a bandit all week, until the devs dumped about 800 million coins, and the market took a 85% dive over night. Luckily, I sell immediately, so I didn't lose any potential profit, but a lot of miners and investors lost thousands. I actually bought at the bottom after they dumped. I was thinking that the market would pump it back up for a bit, kind of like a death rattle, and it did. Then, I just said frick it and let it ride while I went to bed. Woke up and it was down %50 from the price I bought it at, with only 10 buy orders and thousands of sell orders.

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I lost just a couple of days of mining, but it is pretty disheartening to wake up and see that you have only 0.030 BTC worth of altcoins when they were worth 8 times that just a day or two ago. Essentially amounts to what I'd mine on a very bad scrypt day.

I really do hope adaptive-N catches on, but I'm afraid it will just become another scrypt as far as the market is concerned. A new coin released every minute and a community that pretends to support it up until the minute it's no longer profitable enough to mine.

the DOGE community has been an anomaly though. A really, really stupid anomaly.

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Sweetie, I know you think you're being helpful explaining something to us, but you're really not.....

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A cryptographic hashing function uses a hashing algorithm to take certain data and turn it into a fixed string.

For example. If the data were "This is data" the scenario would look like this:

Data --->

hashing algorithm (SHA-256, Scrypt, et cetra)


---> hash value:


30e34fce7ef264ca89a7ea7599f3240c6d6b6ea20b6746bc286880cdf4d5d27d


With cryptocurrencies, transactions are proved to be verified by creating transaction blocks (transactions [data] are paired and hashed and then those hashes are paired and then hashed until you have a hash that contains the data of all transactions).

The proof of work in this equation is done by taking the transaction block (which is a hash value) and pairing it with a scalable hash value (depending on how powerful the computation power involved is) and hashing the two values. The computers in the network are trying to find that hash value and when they do they are rewarded all the transaction fees in the transaction block plus whatever the block reward is (with Bitcoin, that is currently 25 BTC).


Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm. When bitcoin first came around you could mine a lot of bitcoin (but, obviously not make any real value) using nothing more than your CPU. Then as more computers entered the network and mining got more difficult, more powerful GPUs were used to mine bitcoin. As this continued on and there was more and more value was attainable from solving the hash value people started developing ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) who were only capable of finding this value, and because of that they were incredibly powerful and efficient. As the ASICs started being used, GPU mining became a waste of time.

Since Bitcoin was so popular relative to other developing cryptocurrencies, when a new currency was created, there was some emphasis to not use SHA-256 so as to eliminate the possibility of the ASICs used to mine bitcoins from mining the new currency.

Most notably, Litecoin uses scrypt instead of SHA-256. However, ASICs are now being employed to mine Litecoin (albeit not the same ASICs that mine bitcoin).

So there are some currencies (as mentioned Vertcoin) that have built on the idea behind Litecoin by using a version of scrypt that scales the amount of memory needed to mine. This is a larger barrier to ASICs obviously.


Sorry for the long-winded answer, but I hope that made things a little less confusing.

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Sorry for the long-winded answer, but I hope that made things a little less confusion.

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Thanks that was a lot less confusion.

I'm researching block chain technologies, not my previous purchases of bitcoins.

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I'm researching block chain technologies, not my previous purchases of bitcoins.

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This strikes me as like someone claiming to have expertise in American money because they know all the intracacies of cotton paper printing techniques and watermarks.

I'm not claiming expertise, I was simply trying to explain what one poster was referencing. (and in doing so explain some of the mechanisms of the PoW scheme and block chain).

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If anything, the resilience in price on the other major exchanges - even in the face of this Gox meltdown - should be taken as a hugely positive sign of the increasing strength of the protocol.

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Rubbish. The majority of Bitcoin owners don't give a rat's arse about the protocol, much less try to understand it. And I noticed you introduced a new descriptive term for Bitcoin aficionados to use regarding the price, resilience. Since Bitcoins didn't collapse completely they are now resilient. I guess stability is now passé.