Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Nazi's, they ruin everything.
Who watches the watchmen?
betaalpha
I can't say I've caught any neo-nazi or alt-right sentiments on the (very few) Bitcoin
forums I lurk on (mostly it's trading / investment memes), but I'll keep an eye out.
A commenter on Charlie's page brought up Coinhive - negatively, but it made me think: what do folks think of using Coinhive and similar to mine crypto on people's machines - legitimately and consensually? (note Coinhive currently mines Monero, not Bitcoin, assumedly as that currently offers the best returns mining casually from a desktop CPU).
If, say, TV Tropes featured a toggle (off by default) that turns off ads and turns on a browser-based (and therefore non-malware) crypto-mining script? Would you approve? Or care? How about if Wikipedia used it to secure financing and keep adverts off their systems? Or if Netflix let you opt in to crypto-mining in return for a discount?
edited 30th Nov '17 12:42:45 PM by betaalpha
Lost in Space
I'd personally tell them to go take a long hike off a short pier, but not so much because of the idea of lending my computing power so someone else can play at getting rich as that I fundamentally oppose the ideology behind crypto-currencies.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Personally I think that both are equally valid reasons to tell them to take that long walk. I have no issue with distributed computing (I'm running SETI@Home in the background as I type), but using it to assist in scientific endeavours that require a lot of computing power is one thing, using it to help someone else get rich (or at the very least engage in highly volatile commodity speculation) off my CPU cycles... no way.
Pronounced YAK-you-luss
Plus, mining is an obscene power-hog - you’d basically be asking people to foot your colossal power bills on your behalf.
What's precedent ever done for us?
More like giant cherries
Yeah, at least ads are occasionally beneficial. Mining is a pure negative that is enormously destructive to the environment with no countervailing benefit.
Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play
A procrastination in of itself
Personally I wouldn’t want websites to be funding via bitcoin/similar anyway, bitcoin and other such currencies are basically stock market trading (in which case it’s a terrible way to fund anything) or strait up funding the drug trade (a huge use of bitcoin is the buying and selling of drugs online, possibly even other things like people, Ivory and other illegal goods).
I don’t want Wikipedia paying for itself by giving drug deals and slavers a way to stay of the police’s radar.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
Professional Forum Ninja
Steam will no longer support Bitcoin as a payment due to high fees and high volatility.
Oh, bother.
Bitcoin: $64m in cryptocurrency stolen in 'sophisticated' hack, exchange says
The marketplace suspended operations on Thursday while it investigated the breach, saying it was working with law enforcement as “a matter of urgency” while urging users to change their passwords.
The hack was “a highly professional attack with sophisticated social engineering” that resulted in approximately 4,700 bitcoin being stolen, worth about $63.92m at current prices, said Nice Hash head of marketing Andrej P Škraba.
Ouch, that's gotta sting.
Disgusted, but not surprised
No longer a forum herald
Games company Crytek will be helping to launch a new cryptocurrency "for gamers", called Crycash.
"You go to a performance marketing agency and pay $5 or $10 per user, and you never know the quality of those users," Crytek co-founder and managing director Faruk Yerli said. "With Crycash, you can set goals for the players to achieve certain milestones in your game before they get the tokens. They fulfill the objective, and their receive their rewards in Crycash."
Yerli is one of two people listed as an advisor on the Crycash website, along with Warface creative director Michael Khaimzon. (The size of Crytek's investment in Crycash, if any, is unclear, and a Crytek representative was unable to clarify as of this writing.) Crycash is expected to be integrated into Warface Turkey early next year, and Crycash is hoping to integrate the currency with games from other publishers as well.
The companies want to create an ecosystem around Crycash, starting with a mobile app called Plink. The app will allow users to earn Crycash by viewing ads, and they'll be able to see what developers are currently offering for the completion of specific tasks in their games. It will also include social functionality, allowing friends to message one another and see which game each other is playing. Crycash is also looking to build an esports betting platform based on Etherium with some Crycash-specific functionality, like earning Crycash for competing in tournaments.
The initial coin offering for Crycash will go live on December 12, with a price of .001 Etherium per 1 Crycash, and run through January 15. (A survey of multiple exchanges found 1 Etherium trading for between $395 and $439 as of this writing.) Crycash is offering an additional 15% Crycash for those who jump on in the first five days of the sale, and an additional 20% throughout the ICO for any transaction over 200 Etherium.
Crycash will make its money by charging fees for every transaction. By integrating the cryptocurrency into the CryEngine Marketplace, Crytek will be on the hook for a 1.5% fee for all payments made using Crycash. Developers that pay out rewards for gamers accomplishing tasks will owe a 20% fee, and dev-sponsored tournaments on the esport platform will pay a fee of 4% of the size of the prize pool.
Crycash has said that it will try to ensure the currency is stable and in continuous market demand by using 30% of the money raised during its initial offering and "up to 80%" of its profits to buy back Crycash on the secondary market.
It remains to be seen how beneficial Crytek's involvement in the cryptocurrency will be. The company's reputation suffered last year following reports that it neglected to pay employees over a prolonged stretch for the second time in three years. That was followed by the closure of multiple Crytek studios as the company said it was putting its focus on premium IPs and its CryEngine business. It again cited a desire to "focus on core competencies" when it laid off another 15 people from its Frankfurt headquarters earlier this year.
Given how bad microtransactions and the like have gotten in gaming in the past year, I'm not exactly favorably inclined here.
edited 7th Dec '17 12:56:08 PM by TotemicHero
Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)
Causing freakouts over sourcing since 2018
Never mind that, Crytek has been in persistent financial troubles for the past few years. This is even dodgier than microtransactions.
Oh, bother.
"Crycash". That's an ominous-sounding name if I ever heard one.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Causing freakouts over sourcing since 2018
The rate of increase of Bitcoin's value has now surpassed that of tulip bulbs. Yes, those tulip bulbs.
NEET Power
Professional Forum Ninja
People are taking out mortgages to buy bitcoin.
This feels increasingly like the end of the bubbles from 1929 and 2007.
"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."
I would not have expected crypto-currencies of all things to be the possible precipitor of a financial crisis.
How many people are actually involved in this?
Lost in Space
Not nearly enough to make more than a blip on news sites. It'd be interesting to see the total market value of all bitcoins, but I wonder if that data is public.
Edit: Oh, here we go. 275bn USD, give or take. Compare with the US mortgage market, per this site, at 9.9tn USD. It's off by a factor of over 30. So no, it won't kill economies if it crashes. It'll just wipe out a lot of starry-eyed fools.
edited 12th Dec '17 1:57:18 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
betaalpha
Many investors and Bitcoin fans are actually expecting Bitcoin to burst, but they reckon it will survive, recover and be all the stronger for it. I think (naively maybe) that it could do just that, but Bitcoin has too many weaknesses and it'll gradually go obsolete, and be superseded by a decentralised currency that has better tech (and,I really hope, ditches the calculation mining model).
Or alternatively, Bitcoin will retain value as an investment while others such as Ten X Pay will be more valid as an actual currency.
Those things are not possible. People did not reinvest in the south seas stock company after the bubble collapsed. That is simply not a thing that happens, ever. The only plausible outcomes are "Entirely classic burst bubble, bitcoin valuation effectively: nil." and it seeing adoption as an actual means of exchange. .. No, I cant keep a straight face. Not plausible either.
A procrastination in of itself
Remember a chunk of bitcoin users don’t care about the value of it, they’re just using it to buy drugs and other illegal goods, in such cases the value doesn’t matter as long as it’s stable enough for them to buy bitcoin, transfer it and have their dealer sell.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
Lost in Space
That demand is based on the seller getting real world value from the bitcoins. If they crash, they might stop accepting them, or they'll deflate so much that it'll cost an arm and a leg, relatively speaking. That'll break the currency's viability as well as anything else.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Causing freakouts over sourcing since 2018
Now you've got me wondering if Heckler and Koch takes payment in Bitcoin.
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot
A procrastination in of itself
Sure but the exact value doesn’t matter very much, $100 of bitcoin is $100 of bitcoin regardless of if it’s 5 bitcoin or 0.001 of a bitcoin.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
Lost in Space
Right, but then it depends on the buyer's willingness to part with bitcoin that they may have purchased when it was vastly more valuable. Also, the seller may not be willing to accept a currency in trade that it can't count on the value of into the future.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
A procrastination in of itself
I’ve been assuming a very short buy sell window, so the buyer buys the bitcoin, transfers it and the seller than sells the bitcoin, that still requires the price to stay relatively stable, but only over a period of a few days.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
Well, this is interesting.
Equitablog reblogs an article from Charlie Stross
about some of the global consequences of bitcoin, such as the fact that the mining is now consuming more electricity per year than the entirety of Ireland: or 0.12% of global energy consumption and rising.
Further, bitcoin and its libertarian origins seem to have been enveloped and subsumed by the alt-right and its Neo-Nazi ideology.
edited 30th Nov '17 7:32:00 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"