Bitcoin etc

Haha, did think about running some mining software on the servers at work. But without a dedicated ASIC still not worth it.

What’s the fees like?

About $7 per transaction. Which is small for investment, if just buying and selling currency, but using it to buy other goods makes it too expensive to use as a currency. That to me means it’s a massive bubble.

Yes, far too much for a pizza…:grinning:

Haha! Far too much for Colombian goods even. And that’s where the market is.

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This. This. This. It’s the hardest bit to understand, but it becomes a (crudely) exponentially more difficult process as more are created.

Mining rigs are the provenance of the @cragger tier geek upwards, and have become a virtual monopoly as the technology required to have any hope of recovering the rig’s cost has hurtled skywards leaving only one credible player in the consumer market - pretty much forget mining unless you’re Craig or Chinese - where the rigs are way, way cheaper.

It’s a bubble, of course, but it seems cyclical, and it should be possible to predict the cycle to some extent, so may be worth putting in what you can afford to lose at the next crash and sit with it until its recovered. It won’t spike like it is now again, though.

I love these kinds of statement. They totally fail to account for the stupidity of humankind.

Indeed, if you don’t already have the hardware, I wouldn’t recommend anyone bought PC hardware or mining specific hardware to make money, the chances are that you won’t. Half of the time, the software doesn’t run quite well enough, if the hardware fails, you then are out of pocket when you come to replace it.

Some people have made a lot of money through it, but us average folk won’t. If you take a look at some of the mining farms abroad, you’ll quickly see why.

2 year old video, but interesting to watch.

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I thought Bitcoin had planned to stop creating blockchain by now and let the currency “float”.

Is there a secondary market for the blockchain and crypto created? I assume this is a saleable commodity to other users.

Blimey, I had no idea, certainly opened my eyes.

It’s hard-coded into the algorithm that creates Bitcoins. A finite number can only be created. On current trajectory the last one will be mined around 2049.

Yup.

The bit which makes me twitch a little is the sheer consumption of energy.

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I understand nothing about this thread,so i’m out.

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Thing is it’s gone mainstream - the clued-up will move on to the less well known cryptos (Craig’s abreast of the game with Ethereum), so while Bitcoin will no doubt boom and bust for the foreseeable, I just don’t see it getting this silly again now normies are priced out of mining etc.

Fuck knows of course - this is now just gambling on a semi-chaotic system…

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Deadly boring post warning

I’ve just downloaded some monthly bicoin/usd exchange rates and the S&P500 index from January 2016 to December 2017. Fuck knows how accurate the bitcoin exchange rates are, but hey-ho, lets treat them as accurate and do some simple analysis.

The mean return, on a continuously compounded basis, for the last 2 years is 7.06% per month on bitcoin while the S&P500 returns 0.59% per month on average. Annualising these returns suggests the bitcoin yield is 84.83% per annum, which compares favourably to 7.04% on equities. Obviously buy-and-hold returns would be higher, especially over a longer horizon. However the standard deviation on bitcoin is 8.126% per month against 0.779% per month on the S&P500 in the same interval.

The Sharpe ratio is defined as the excess return per unit risk, which when we ignore short-term interest rates as they are effectively zero, means that the Sharpe ratio on bitcoins is 0.87, while that of US equities is 0.75 over the last 24 months.

I’m not sure I would want to load up on bitcoin given the inherent illiquidity and the massive transactions costs inherent in that investment when the risk adjusted return is not really that much better than equities. It is important to bear in mind that one can unload equity at pretty much any time and buy and sell for buttons using ETFs. Adjusting these returns for transactions costs and brokerage fees would reduce the bitcoin yield considerably. I would be unsuprised if equities were not a better bet.

I would chose the equity position over the bitcoin given the events in the last two years, not that the past is a reliable guide to the future. The golden rule is:

If you had to earn it, you can’t afford to lose it

The risk adjusted return is simply not high enough on bitcoin for me to be interested. The massive volatility does interest me though. It should be possible to exploit that. :money_mouth_face:

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^^^

Websites stealing your computing resources and electricity to mine bitcoin:

You make that sound like it’s an exception :smirk:

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Fuck.Off. That was more deadly than usual in terms of boring…

Troo dat, but…