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  • peevee - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    Turning real energy resources into fake currency. The most wasteful activity ever.
  • HighTech4US - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    I am able to trade your so called "fake currency" into US Dollars.
  • smilingcrow - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    Which is turning one fake currency into another fake currency.
    Crypto currency is a complete waste of energy.
    Then again the US Dollar is propped up by the US financial systems
  • smilingcrow - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    and political systems and military systems which consume vast amounts of energy and are morally bankrupt.
    So maybe Crypto, as pointless as it is, is the lesser of two evils.
    So it's simply a matter of which devil you prefer to dance with.
  • UnNameless - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    Unless you want to completely abolish all currencies and trade tokens (which I would agree in a Jacque Fresco type of economy), you are barking at the wrong tree.
  • smilingcrow - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    Ideas of trading and tokens are constructs of poverty consciousness.
    You can create a new form of these and impress your ego for a while but none of them are sustainable or inherently of value.
    We can bury you with as much Crypto as you can imagine and what good will that do you when your body has returned to dust?
    The only thing that truly endures has no price and can't be traded yet many can't even guess what I am referring to.
  • prophet001 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    Personally I would rather trust the US government and its accountability to its citizens than I would some random people in Russia, The EU, and somewhere in South Asia.

    o.0

    It's a no brainer for me.
  • GoGetMe - Monday, July 2, 2018 - link

    Heh... coming from the EU I really cant see that argument.... From which banks originated the financial breakdown just 10 years ago? I'd much rather have EU control the banking industry, although there is no perfect solution regardless of who is in charge.
  • FunBunny2 - Monday, July 2, 2018 - link

    not so fast. much of the money invading the US housing market to fuel the burn came from Germany, and Spain did its own housing boom, much of it coastal condos.
    Germany: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/10/02/2194387/gue...
    Spain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%93present...
  • prisonerX - Monday, July 2, 2018 - link

    Don't know why people are so down on the EU. Time and again they get themselves out of tricky situations using finesse and intelligence. Meanwhile the US is currently run by reckless imbeciles.
  • FunBunny2 - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    at least central banks, when they behave as authorized, create their fake currencies to benefit the population at large. and doing so doesn't divert gigawatts of electricity.
  • smilingcrow - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    How naive you are. They are controlled ultimately by their political masters who are controlled by their sponsors who have their own agendas which aren't aligned to those of the common folk.
    I am not talking about grand conspiracies but the multitude of everyday small conspiracies whereby power exerts itself in a myriad of ways.
  • R0H1T - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    And you think crypto isn't manipulated by the same (set of) people? The ones making billions from crypto are some benevolent lot who'll rid the world of US dollars or fiat money? Must be nice living in an alternate reality!
  • UnNameless - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    This is a valid question, however to manipulate a significant amount of say crypto "X" you'd have to own/buy that amount, empowering that crypto at first, while with FIAT you simply print money, as much as you like.

    Also price manipulation is completely different than currency manipulation. For example, say Mr. Filthyrich can manipulate the price of say BTC, by investing billions and billions of dollars into it, but even so it can't decide the path for the BTC, meaning it can't change the release curve, can't put a dent in the inflation curve, can't modify the algorithms behind it and can't change the blockchain (to a certain extent). Meanwhile, with FIAT, said person can have a much deeper impact in the currency, not only in the price.
  • smilingcrow - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    1. No.
    2. It is.
  • boozed - Saturday, June 30, 2018 - link

    Indeed. Fraudcoins are thinly traded on unregulated exchanges. It would be an entirely new level of naïveté to believe that they're not manipulated up the wazoo.
  • boozed - Saturday, June 30, 2018 - link

    Although it also seems silly to pretend that they're manipulated by "the same set of people".

    They're manipulated by whales, miners and the exchanges themselves (e.g. to blow out highly leveraged shorts and longs, among other practices such as painting the tape, front-running etc.) Highly illegal of course but that's your reward for gambling in the financial equivalent of the wild west.
  • FunBunny2 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    "How naive you are. "

    perhaps, but your ignorant. the Great Recession was caused by those "sponsors" during a Republican controlled DC. those same "political masters", at the direction of the "sponsors" blocked meaningful fiscal policy by Obambi. it was left to the Fed to try something to reverse the collapse. it did so. you'd best thank the Fed for what economy is left.
  • UnNameless - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    You are delusional if you think that central banks create the currency for the benefit of the population at large! That or you have no solid background economic education, and have no clue what an inflationistic debt based economy is.
  • FunBunny2 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    "You are delusional if you think that central banks create the currency for the benefit of the population at large! "

    I have an earned MA in econ. not that you'd care. the fact is that the 19th century, the Gold Bug's Wet Dream Century, was unremittingly awful for all but the .1%. since WWII, the US Buck has been the New Gold, aka the Global Reserve Currency. without an expanding store of US Bucks out in the world, the global economy will stagnate. there's a reason we run a trade deficit to the world: the rest of the world needs more reserve currency to forestall global deflation. you can thank Bretton-Woods for giving the US control of world reserve currency, and the primacy of the US Buck. that also means responsibility. you want the world's economy controlled by Australia?? here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/248991/world-m...
  • rocky12345 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    Yep it always seems no matter what happens in the USA that is good or very bad their dollar never really goes down much if at all. On the other hand here in CAD our own government likes our CAD dollar to be lower than the USA dollar and if it starts going up to far everyone starts yelling and screaming that we are doomed because we export a lot of stuff.

    The sad part is the rest of us get screwed because with our dollar worth less we then pay more for everything.
  • prisonerX - Monday, July 2, 2018 - link

    CAD is a commodity currency, so its tends to do that. USD is seen as a safe haven, with all the irony intact.
  • FunBunny2 - Monday, July 2, 2018 - link

    "The sad part is the rest of us get screwed because with our dollar worth less we then pay more for everything."

    you would do to look up "Bretton-Woods" agreement, and understand that Uncle Sugar's Buck is the New Gold (up to today, anyhow), so we get to set the rules. there's a lot of power in the power to set the rules.
  • deepblue08 - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    For now...
  • voicequal - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    By your generalization you could readily apply the 1 billion weekly hours of Netflix viewing or the 3 billion weekly hours of gaming with the label of "wasteful activity". Mining is a competition in the compute space, and consumes resources and drives innovation just like other competitive pursuits.

    There is a lot of work underway to find more energy efficient ways to secure blockchains. The motivation is to free up resources so they can be devoted to activities of more enduring value such as building transaction capacity and applications to grow user adoption.
  • smilingcrow - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    Some of the output Netflix shows can be considered artistic and has a value in of itself.
    Bitcoin has no inherent value.
    Look at it this way:
    If you had unlimited resources for whatever reason would bitcoin have any appeal to you?
    In that situation I would still value artistic endeavours including Netflix but bitcoin would have as much value to me as a bunch of random numbers scribbled on a piece of paper by a robot.
  • voicequal - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    Bitcoin was hugely innovative - a distributed, self sustaining, immutable database. Being a techie type, it's easy for me to find intrinsic value in the technology and mathematics behind Bitcoin. The fact that it is actually worth $$ is a welcome bonus.
  • smilingcrow - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    There are more interesting areas of mathematics than bitcoin that aren't reliant on the grubby world of currencies to give them a pseudo value.
    Take that element away and the whole fad side of it disappears as quickly as the assigned speculative value can.
    I respect the pure science but not pseudo BS that gets projected onto it.
  • UnNameless - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    True that but the world need currencies does it not? If so, do you really think the future should belong to the same old corrupt banking system? A corrupt debt based society that's only fueled by consumption?

    Unless you come up with a better alternative to the blockchain tech, so far cryptos are the best alternatives to the corrupt monetary system the world used. The state/central bank duopoly truly enslaves us and if you don't have a problem with that then I'm wasting my breath
  • smilingcrow - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    They are both the evils of two lessers. I trust neither of them.
  • FunBunny2 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    "A corrupt debt based society that's only fueled by consumption?"

    all economies are driven by consumption. lose it, and you get Depression. where do you think the Great Recession came from? most folks ran out of income. it doesn't matter how we keep score. gold has nowhere near the economic value it commands as a tradeable. not even close. almost all of it is fantasy. a UN run global currency, a Super Euro, would level the playing field. but that would be bad for the Trumps and Putins and Xis of the world. they want one world currency, but only if it's theirs. bitcoin is no better. and when new ones run out, then what do you do?
  • FunBunny2 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    just to confirm, the January Bitcoin conference:
    "bitcoin proponents got some unfortunate news this week as the event organizers have announced they have stopped accepting bitcoin payments for conference tickets due to network fees and congestion. "

    "Bitcoin settlement times, and the fee market associated with transactions, have become a hot topic these days as on-chain fees have risen to $30-60 per transaction. These issues have made it extremely difficult for businesses to operate, and many merchants have stopped accepting bitcoin for services and goods altogether. "
    here: https://news.bitcoin.com/miami-bitcoin-conference-...
  • FunBunny2 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    "a distributed, self sustaining, immutable database"

    hardly. it's just a translog missing a database. they've been around for decades, but normally with a database. using cryptopointers is hardly an innovation. that's been done before. and, by the way, how does it take to complete a trans in such a "database"????? last I looked, the crypto conferences stopped accepting crypto payments just because trans never completed. now, that's innovation!!!
  • dromoxen - Saturday, June 30, 2018 - link

    bLOCKCHAIN... was hugely innovative ....Bitcoin ..not so much
  • boozed - Sunday, July 1, 2018 - link

    Innovative? "Blockchain" is simply the renaming of a handful of decades-old concepts. It's also inextricably linked to fraudcoins. There's no other reason to run a blockchain.
  • prisonerX - Monday, July 2, 2018 - link

    I kind of thought that too, but there does seem to be some interesting uses, like public distributed ledgers used see: https://github.com/corda/corda
  • UnNameless - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    Not only that but do we have any idea what are the costs to run FIAT? For example USD? I mean what are the electricity costs for all the banks? Human assets? Then indirect pollution costs that result from humans working in this industry (humans need to eat, drive their cars etc).

    We never talk about that but we do talk how wasteful crypto mining is. What a bunch of hypocrites
  • boozed - Sunday, July 1, 2018 - link

    FIAT is a car company.
  • UnNameless - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    "Fake" currency? Do you even know what fake means? What is not genuine, or better yet what is a genuine currency?
  • Findecanor - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    Agreed. It is not the concept of a digital currency that is the problem but how cryptocurrency is created.
    By requiring more and more resources to "mine" the more there is and the value going up they in effect favour those who got in early. Existing stockpiles rise in value at the expense of miners who get in later. That is the same structure as a pyramid scheme!
    The thing with bubbles is that bubbles burst.

    Encouraging this development, and using so much energy during this climate crisis is just so irresponsible. Thus, making and selling equipment for crypto-mining is reprehensible. We must protest against everyone who does it and if they have other hardware on the market, boycott that until they stop.
  • FunBunny2 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    "favour those who got in early. "

    last time I looked, that was a pyramid scheme. great way to run a global economy, dontcha think?
  • bigboxes - Friday, June 29, 2018 - link

    It's a tremendous waste of resources.
  • PeachNCream - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    My cat sleeps on the dryer when it runs. Since its rather noisy, I'm not sure how trustworthy cats are when it comes to sound measurements. Still, its interesting to see more turnkey mining solutions. This would be for non-Bitcoin right since its GPU-based?
  • smilingcrow - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    One cat video is worth in real terms more than the whole of the Crypto currency shenanigans.
  • Notmyusualid - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    @ smilingcrow - you are not even fooling yourself.

    Cars, property, everything really, is being traded in crypto currency. And I think you know this.
  • smilingcrow - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    I am aware of that and I am saying they are all worthless.
    If you look at the larger arc of the evolution of consciousness you will see that all these things are mere baubles and trinkets that engage the attention of young children.
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    I'm not the right person to engage in debates about crypto currencies. Take it back up to the posts above mine to argue about it with them because I don't care about politics, fiat versus crypto, or any other aspect of that pointless debate. Thanks!
  • voicequal - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    Correct - Bitcoin would require an ASIC miner to be competitive. GPU mining is in a somewhat precarious state as ASICs are produced for more algorithms. Ethereum is propping up GPUs at the moment, but their roadmap calls for a transition to proof-of-stake, eliminating the need for proof-of-work miners. This may still be a year or more away.
  • UnNameless - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    ETH has been migrating to PoS for some time now. Soon ™ !
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    Thanks, that's what I'd been hearing so confirmation is good. I've been sort of curious about dabbling with mining something, not to attempt to get rich off it, but just to explore the technical aspects a little bit.
  • zodiacfml - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link

    Too bad for this company is crypto is down for months with no signs of recovery
  • Notmyusualid - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    What, like crypto coins have only been going for the past year you've managed to hear of Ethereum?

    Oh well, they are down a bit, cheaper hardware for me.

    Cry on...
  • DearEmery - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    40MH/s - $644 dollars for $425 return in a year if Eth freezes at its current price. The cheapest cloud miner I've found in my country and would trust is over $1500 for a full 2 year investment.

    I have several friends who went for a cheap rig with a 'consider it lost' attitude. This sort of thing does lower the entry point for these types of non-all-ins, and if cryptocurrencies take a year to recover to say 10k, you still make a profit. If the whole thing comes crashing down you're out 644 dollars and not stuck with junk hardware.

    But is all this worth being part of a group of people who are standing on the shoulders of toddlers, screaming about how they were told it's going to grow into a giant by John McAfee.
  • gfkBill - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    US$750 from Euros, so even worse. And given that two 1060's would hit ~44MH/s, you could just roll your own if you've got the free slots, and you own the cards at the end of it.
  • FunBunny2 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link

    RE: crypto

    "When you're buying nonproductive assets [bitcoin], all you're counting on is the next person is going to pay you more because they're even more excited about another next person coming along."
    -- Charlie Munger/2018
  • nerd1 - Friday, June 29, 2018 - link

    This will make a very nice deep learning server.
  • Arbie - Friday, June 29, 2018 - link

    There's pretty good evidence that the crypto spike in the last half of 2017 was manipulated via Tether.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/technology/bitc...

    If so, then values seem sure to return to what they were before the pump & dump. Meaning $400 for Bitcoin and $12 for Ethereum. That will be slow since interim buyers will not want to take the losses, but it seems logical. Absent equally good evidence to the contrary, this appears to be a very bad time to buy or hold crypto.
  • bananaforscale - Saturday, June 30, 2018 - link

    Screw that noise. Let GPU mining die a quiet death.
  • dasyrup - Wednesday, March 13, 2019 - link

    Don't buy anything from Comino. N1 DOA in 11 months. Contacted Comino tech support told them what was going on they responded and said was a loose USB connection. And then total silence. Ive sent them numerous e-mails for help. Warranty is one year. I was just under that as I took delivery of the N1 in early March of '18 DOA Feb 13 2019. Prolly has something to do with that. Worst investment I've ever made by far. If your smart enough in this field, build something yourself for half the cost and if your not that smart like I am and you buy this your out a cool 5k and in my case $5400. Because of the low cost of Ethereum I was out around $400 over the 11 months because of electricity costs.

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