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Bitcoin
Who'd have thought that a not-real currency run semi-anonymously over the internet could be so fraught with uncertainty.
If I hadn't plowed my life savings in the hammers.com startup (Nailed It TM), I'd be all over this as the next big thing.
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Bitcoin
Yes, back then you could mine a few thousand bitcoins if you let your computer continuously work at it for a few months on end.
A few thousand bitcoins times $1000 is quite a bit of money.
I have known about bitcoins since 2010 but never took it seriously, I thought it was some meaningless hobby for computer geniuses. So did this guy, apparently.
I also considered investing in Apple about 10-12 years ago but figured that nobody would buy an iPod because it was (and still is, mind) a shit product.
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Bitcoin
Bryaniek wrote: I have known about bitcoins since 2010 but never took it seriously, I thought it was some meaningless hobby for computer geniuses. So did this guy, apparently.
I also considered investing in Apple about 10-12 years ago but figured that nobody would buy an iPod because it was (and still is, mind) a shit product.
Could you tell us a few more things that are useless and not worth investing in?
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Reed John wrote: Other companies made similar, maybe even better devices, but didn't have the iTunes set-up.
But then again, that's also why it made so much money for Apple, and that was the genius vision of Steve Jobs. He created the Apple "ecosphere". You had to use iTunes to load the songs, which exposed you to the iTunes shop. The lack of FM radio made you more likely to buy songs in the shop. The poor batteries meant you were more likely to go out and buy a battery iAccessory. And the poor battery would eventually go bad, and you couldn't replace it, so you'd go out and buy a new iPod, because all your music library was on iTunes.
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he battery life is poor and the sound quality isn't great
Both have improved markedly in recent generations, FWIW. And you can do a whole bunch of cool stuff with "smart playlists", which is keeping me pinned to iTunes even though i have to keep a windows box around basically devoted to it.
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Bitcoin
Reed John wrote: In what Universe is an iPod a shit product? It plays music without CDs. It was a huge advance. Other companies made similar, maybe even better devices, but didn't have the iTunes set-up.
And that's before mentioning that my MP3-player can play music directly off SD-cards, so it has potentially infinite memory. "A shit product" is a bit third-world-problemy, but I can see how an iPod is theoretically by far not the best deal on the market.
Smart playlists? I make my own playlists, and they're smart enough.
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Bitcoin
Tough to fault Apple for 'breaking' the technology in the marketplace though. They made something potentially-daunting into something easy to use. The complaints that most people have are fairly advanced ones. And most people don't really care about that last 5% of sound range like audiophiles bitch about. Same as when that complaint was made about CDs over records.
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Bitcoin
Interesting story on how Bitcoin mania is disrupting the use of processing power.
The combined amount of processing power now being devoted to Bitcoin is now greater than what the top 500 supercomputers combined are capable of, according to Forbes' Reuven Cohen. BI contributor John Aziz recently discussed the moral implications of this, addressing the argument that all that computing could be more usefully directed at any number of pressing world problems.
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Bitcoin
What WOM said, and I fail to see how iTunes is a grueling horror. No worse than any of the other sites like that I've experienced.
I don't really see the point of bitcoin other than to create a bubble or be something for criminals and dorks. It seems like something Comic Book Guy would be way into and talk about like using it makes him intellectually superior.
What is so wrong with dollars and Euros that Bitcoin can fix? I'm not sure I like the idea of an unregulated currency. I may not like exactly how its being regulated, but bitcoin seems like something that libertarians and Ayn Rand types like, which is a pretty clear sign to me that it's a bad idea.
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Bitcoin
alyxandr wrote: I'm surprised, and a little impressed, that the sheer ad-hominems-per-byte density of that post didn't break the forum software.
But still, I don't see the non-criminal upside of a completely unregulated currency. I'm not entirely sure I see the criminal upside of it either. Don't they already have shady banks in the Caymans, etc?
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I don't really see the point of bitcoin other than to create a bubble or be something for criminals and dorks.
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Bitcoin
Reed John wrote:Originally posted by alyxandrI'm surprised, and a little impressed, that the sheer ad-hominems-per-byte density of that post didn't break the forum software.
But still, I don't see the non-criminal upside of a completely unregulated currency. I'm not entirely sure I see the criminal upside of it either. Don't they already have shady banks in the Caymans, etc?
The Silk Road (for example) would automatically route any transaction through a cryptographically secure sequence of wallets so that it was impossible to tell where a transaction had been made from and where it was going to (in much the same way that Tor routes network traffic).
To do the same thing with dollars or euros requires a network of shell bank accounts and either access to Swiss/Cayman anonymous bank accounts which require, effort, contacts and sums of money beyond the reach of most ordinary people.
If you have an electronic transaction you want kept secret from law-enforcement in your country, bitcoin enables that. If you're a serious criminal, bitcoin isn't that much help because you still need to launder your bitcoins into dollars or euros.
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