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from the everybody-like-bubbles-until-they-pop dept.
Something odd is going on in finance this week. One unit of BitCoin briefly exceeded the value of a troy ounce of gold before it fell back. However, this occurred during Ethereum rallying to its current peak above US$100. Perhaps this is like comparing apples, oranges, and dog-biscuits but — as of this week — we now have a situation where Ethereum is well above the US$1 credibility threshold of most alternative digital currencies and, to a simpleton, BitCoin was more valuable than gold.
What changed? Nothing obvious. Banks have teams of shirking resume builders working on trendy projects and they've been working on digital currencies for years. Likewise, tranches of investments funds have been going into technology for decades. However, after puffing and bursting a housing bubble and educational bubble, is this the next place to jub other people's money? Is it Charles Stross' Accelerando coming to life? I don't know but I'll be very concerned if there is a financial wobble within the next month.
(External hyperlinks via Vinay Gupta, an Ethereum contributor, Ethereum evangelist and all-around great guy who helps the homeless.)
[Ed Note: Asking what is Ethereum? Me too. Additional information on the above topic can be found at the IB Times]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by arcz on Sunday May 07 2017, @08:15PM (10 children)
Litecoin seems more promising than etherium. I think ETH is kind of a bubble, because ETH doesn't really provide anything useful. The ETH virtual machine can't really do anything useful, IMO. Litecoin I think, will be the currency of the future. Reason being faster transaction processing, and a better hash. Frankly, scrypt is just plain better than SHA256. The difference means a huge impact on the large scale economy IMO. First, scrypt is more memory limited than SHA, which means it benefits less from custom silicon. I.e. more mining power in the hands of average users than in the hands of silicon vendors vs bitcoin. This fact, alone, convinces me that scrypt is the better hash algorithm. I don't think bitcoin is a bubble, but I expect litecoin to overtake it eventually and become the new bitcoin.
Disclaimer: I own amounts of both bitcoin and litecoin.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @10:22PM (9 children)
Scrypt is asics mineable, AFAIK. Don't they already have litecoin asics available for preorder? antminer s3 i think? ETH and ETC are more memory hard and are not currently asics mineable, once again, AFAIK. Also, DAPPS on ethereum and/or ethereum classic could be an important usage. Anon(?), distributed web apps? oh yeah! screw your(not you, them) domain registrars and your thought police. just because there isn't much yet doesn't mean it won't grow. The good thing is that more and more money is coming into crypto(total market cap went from 30 billion to 45 billion in the last month), so as long as you pick something with solid governance and tech or usefulness then it should go up or stick around, depending on purpose/design. I like pivx for currency and etc and others for investment. hopefully we can develop a way for people around the world to do business without outside control.
(Score: 1) by arcz on Monday May 08 2017, @03:22PM (8 children)
Evrything in theory is ASIC minable. It's only a question of how much the design benefits from ASIC vs a regular Von Neuman design. Memory-hard problems like Scrypt benefit less from ASIC. In theory, ETH could also be ASIC'd. ETH does have some ASIC resistance but it is also I believe a Kekkack hash. I am not convinced that ETH/ETC cannot be ASIC'd effectively though.
ETH has a hash algorithm here(supposedly):
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethash-Design-Rationale [github.com]
I'm not super familiar with python or whatever they use but it looks to me like a case of a linear algorithm that could be made random access with some adjustments. (I'm not totally sure because I don't understand the programming launghe they used though.) Anyway, the use of a cache doesn't really make it a memory hard problem. Because it looks to me that the cache is shared between all invocations of the hash. So yes, it uses a lot of memory, but if you have a huge number of hashes sharing that same memory pool then it doesn't do very much good. Bottom line is that Kekkack is not a memory hard hash, Scrypt is.
I thought that ETH might be able to do anonymous web apps, but when I looked at the design it didn't seem to be able to do that. Maybe if they give us a better way to interface with it then it'd be useful. Maybe I just don't know how to use it, but I think ETH is not mature enough yet in design to call it anything but a bubble. In any case, I wasn't able to figure out how to use it, and I am a skilled C++ programmer and also have experience with server adminstration. It's definitely not user friendly if it is possible to do so.
I don't think Litecoin is perfect but I like it a lot better than ETH. TBH, I'd like a coin with a minting rate that better tracks population growth so that it avoids the deflationary spiral issue that modern cryptocurrencies have, and possibly a ramp up time to avoid early adopters dumping currency on the market to crash it, but it seems we aren't there yet.
Disclaimer: I own bitcoin and litecoin in significant amounts and not ETH/ETC.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday May 08 2017, @04:05PM (7 children)
I like Monero myself. The benefit of making SRAM the ASIC is that you can buy general-purpose equipment without making it obvious what you are doing.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 08 2017, @07:34PM (6 children)
Why would anyone care if someone is mining?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday May 08 2017, @11:57PM (5 children)
The exchange of money is heavily regulated. You are barely allowed to hold 3 months' emergency cash without being suspected of a crime and having it seized.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 09 2017, @03:54AM (3 children)
If it ain't got no server and ain't got no person to nail. Then they can crime it as much as they want.
I suspect this is the USA? the land of capitalism won't allow people to have massive amounts of cash on their bank account?
Values outside the bank system will as always be quite invisible.
(Score: 3, Informative) by archfeld on Tuesday May 09 2017, @04:43AM (1 child)
Actually these days it is the cash outside the banking system that is drawing the unwanted attention. The US has an ongoing issue with certain localities and civil forfeiture. Any large sum of cash that you can't provide documentation to can be seized as potential drug money and then you have to go to civil court to 'prove' you have the money from a source other than drugs or assumed illegal sources.
Papers please...
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 09 2017, @04:58AM
Salary checks?
Regardless, they can't have full control over what people do with assets not registered.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday May 09 2017, @03:07PM
And to be pedantic, concurrency does rely on servers. They are just distributed and redundant.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday May 10 2017, @08:05PM
In the kleptocracy former known as the United States, it works as follows:-
1702845791×2