241

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Gramey hopes

« on: January 28, 2014, 07:16:55 PM »

Thrift Shop came out in August.

242

Technology & Information / Re: Ask Rushy about Bitcoins.

« on: January 28, 2014, 07:16:15 PM »

Why would anyone mine bitcoins if it's cheaper just to purchase them? Conversely, what happens in 2140 when mining stops, and nobody devotes any more of their processing time to bitcoin?

Also,

You mean the equipment or the electricity? At 1.5 W/Gh/s it costs roughly $16M to churn out $4.4M in Bitcoin. The equipment itself varies, based on the tech (65nm vs 20nm) and availability (preorder vs shipping).

1. ASIC miners make a shitload of money. They are literally money printers and people are paying through the nose to grab one.

How can both of these statements simultaneously be true?

243

Technology & Information / Re: Coinye, a Bitcoin spin-off, is being sued by Kanye West

« on: January 27, 2014, 11:31:14 PM »

Well I just looked at the KnCMiner Neptune that is supposed to come out soon (maybe it already has) and it looks promising. At 3TH/s it should be able to mine one block every 1.4 days. Using 3kW (est.) of power means that it would consume 2160 kWh/month and at 0.109$/kWh you are talking about $250/month to run it while earning 535 bitcoins a month on average. So unless there is something profoundly wrong with my calculations, or this miner is a bunch of BS, it already is viable.

In this case, a bitcoin would cost $0.47 to produce, plus whatever the cost of this Neptune thing is over its useful life, which if Moore's Law is correct should be about 2 years. The only thing I saw was that these things cost $10,000, so $420/mo, which would put the cost of production at $1.25/bitcoin. In which case, why would anyone pay the $800/bitcoin it costs now, when you can produce your own for $1.25. We now have a lower limit of cost at $1.25 per coin, which means that the difference between the cost to produce, and the cost to buy is a 640 times difference. Nobody in their right mind would pay that kind of markup, and if you're spending $3,200 to produce a bitcoin, as Rushy would have us believe, while someone else is spending $1.25 to produce the same product, you'd be better off putting your resources to something else.

244

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Gramey hopes

« on: January 27, 2014, 10:18:16 PM »

In regards to Mackelmore, how does a song/album released 3/4 of the way through 2012 get nominated for the 2014 Grammy award?

245

Technology & Information / Re: Coinye, a Bitcoin spin-off, is being sued by Kanye West

« on: January 27, 2014, 10:04:08 PM »

Or at least the FV of 1 bitcoin is worth more than the cost to mine 1 bitcoin.

No. As long as it's more expensive to mine a bitcoin than it is to buy one, rational people will choose to buy the bitcoin, rather than produce it themselves.

No. If you spend $400 to mine a bitcoin that you know will be worth $450 in one year, and your $400, invested will only garner $449.99, then you obviously should mine the bitcoin. It's called Future Value and is an extremely important concept when evaluating commodities and currencies.

But right now, I could spend $400, and get 4x the number of bitcoins without mining anything, as in this example, you can buy a bitcoin for $100. So now, instead of spending $400 to make $50, you're spending $400 to buy 4 coins, and making $1,400 ($350 x 4). The FV is only important in your decision to obtain bitcoins, not in the method you should go about getting them.

Yes, but mining is necessary if the currency is going to proliferate so at some point the value proposition of mining must be considered.

I've considered the value proposition of mining. Right now, if Rushy is correct with his numbers, it's 4x more expensive to produce bitcoins yourself than to purchase them. With this information, it's more rational to simply buy bitcoins rather than spend money mining them, and it will continue to be the case that nobody should mine them, until the cost  to purchase them exceeds the cost to produce them.

246

Technology & Information / Re: Coinye, a Bitcoin spin-off, is being sued by Kanye West

« on: January 27, 2014, 08:57:07 PM »

Or at least the FV of 1 bitcoin is worth more than the cost to mine 1 bitcoin.

No. As long as it's more expensive to mine a bitcoin than it is to buy one, rational people will choose to buy the bitcoin, rather than produce it themselves.

247

Technology & Information / Re: Coinye, a Bitcoin spin-off, is being sued by Kanye West

« on: January 27, 2014, 07:43:55 PM »

You've become a bit of a snob now that you have a few bitcoins on your harddrive. Virtual money changes people.

It's digital money. And yes, you are a poor peasant. 

I'd say worth more as a general rule.

Well, Enigma seems to think something is only worth the resources it requires to obtain it.

Well, if it would cost me 4 bitcoins worth of resources to mine 1 bitcoin, then I'd have been better off using those resources to buy 4 bitcoins. I don't know why anyone would choose to mine bitcoins at a loss if you can purchase them cheaper. Rational people would always make this choice, until the cost of a bitcoin is greater than the cost to mine it yourself.

248

Technology & Information / Re: Coinye, a Bitcoin spin-off, is being sued by Kanye West

« on: January 26, 2014, 05:32:04 AM »

So then how much would it cost currently? It can't be more than an order of magnitude off.

You mean the equipment or the electricity? At 1.5 W/Gh/s it costs roughly $16M to churn out $4.4M in Bitcoin. The equipment itself varies, based on the tech (65nm vs 20nm) and availability (preorder vs shipping).

The argument itself that bitcoin is worth what it costs to mine it is silly. Bitcoin is worth what people will pay for it.

From what you just said, it looks like people are willing to pay about 4x more than what bitcoins are currently worth. That doesn't make sense.

249

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Ask a Jew anything.

« on: January 24, 2014, 10:25:15 PM »

Why is completing an electrical circuit considered "work" and is forbidden by some on the sabbath?

250

Technology & Information / Re: Coinye, a Bitcoin spin-off, is being sued by Kanye West

« on: January 24, 2014, 10:21:44 PM »

http://www.butterflylabs.com/

That place there is charging about $9,000USD/yr to rent a machine which performs at 1GH/s for one year, which seems to be able to produce about 24 coins a day at the current difficulty level. It looks like that means that it's about $1.06/bitcoin to rent a machine for long enough that will produce exactly one bitcoin. That should be the current price of the bitcoin.

I wouldn't base anything on Butterfly Labs, considering its a well known scam among the Bitcoin community. It catches all the newbies in its crosshairs and its rather good at doing that. When it comes to bitcoin miners, if the website looks really nice, its a scam. If the website looks like it was cobbled together by a college freshman, its legit.

So then how much would it cost currently? It can't be more than an order of magnitude off.

251

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Michael Schumacher thread

« on: January 24, 2014, 10:18:21 PM »

With the new, lower, weight restrictions, steroids would be inadvisable in F1.

252

Technology & Information / Re: Coinye, a Bitcoin spin-off, is being sued by Kanye West

« on: January 23, 2014, 10:49:53 PM »

http://www.butterflylabs.com/

That place there is charging about $9,000USD/yr to rent a machine which performs at 1GH/s for one year, which seems to be able to produce about 24 coins a day at the current difficulty level. It looks like that means that it's about $1.06/bitcoin to rent a machine for long enough that will produce exactly one bitcoin. That should be the current price of the bitcoin.

253

Technology & Information / Re: Coinye, a Bitcoin spin-off, is being sued by Kanye West

« on: January 23, 2014, 10:21:08 PM »

The Daily Mash pretty much sums up my opinions on this pointless gimmick.

She added: “I suggested the value of Bitcoins seemed to be completely arbitrary and then asked why it was different from investing in a fictional Portuguese holiday village.

“He smiled at me and asked if I had heard of ‘electric wallets’ but he soon found himself circling back towards ‘the future’

The cost of a bitcoin doesn't need to be arbitrary. I would peg it at whatever the cost would be of renting out the cheapest supercomputer resources for however many cycles it would take to produce 1 bitcoin.

254

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Michael Schumacher thread

« on: January 23, 2014, 10:12:35 PM »

I heard about it the day of. I have an F1 RSS feed on my phone. I don't often get to watch the races, because there's precious little coverage if you're not watching live, and I don't feel like staying up til 2am to watch a race.
That being said, I hope he pulls through, and anyone should have the right to kill themselves.

255

Technology & Information / Re: Valve offers free games to Debian Developers

« on: January 22, 2014, 11:03:25 PM »

How do they know who are developers now?

256

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Return of the Messiah!

« on: January 22, 2014, 10:42:11 PM »

Apparently it happens with turkeys sometimes, but the offspring rarely survive.

Also, they've made viable mouse embyos in the lab using parthenogenesis.

Nothing you just said had anything to do with what you originally posted. You promised me lesbian lizards. You said nothing about parthenogenesis, nor did you talk about why you think it should be "a genetic clone of the mother" which doesn't happen in parthenogenesis even if that is what you were talking about.

I respect your ability to google things after you realize you had no idea what you were saying, but it doesn't really make up for the fact everything you said is wrong.

In some species, the female lizards will only lay viable eggs if they've had the equivalent to sex with another female lizard. Sounds quite lesbian to me.
There are 2 kinds of parthenogenesis, one which only uses half of the mother's chromosomes, and another which uses the full set.
Dolly the sheep was a clone of her mother, and was created using parthenogenesis in the lab.
I'll admit that I may be wrong in the "the earth is a sphere" sense, where it's really an oblate spheroid.

257

Technology & Information / Re: Valve offers free games to Debian Developers

« on: January 22, 2014, 10:22:55 PM »

How do you make money out of a community that wants everything for free?

Apparently you give the devs free games to make their product better, so more people will use it, so that your piggyback product will get to more people who will then buy games.

258

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Return of the Messiah!

« on: January 21, 2014, 04:25:55 PM »

This is really more of a question for David Icke. He's the expert.

259

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Return of the Messiah!

« on: January 21, 2014, 03:45:57 PM »

Are you claiming the nun is actually a lizard person?

There's strong evidence to suggest the pope is one.

260

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Return of the Messiah!

« on: January 21, 2014, 03:39:37 PM »

Biology's weird. It could be that an egg cell didn't divide properly, and somehow came pre-fertilized. If the baby is a genetic clone of the mother, then we know what happened. There are some lesbian lizards that use this method of reproduction.

No.

To which part?

Literally every sentence in that post is wrong or can't happen.

In some of the Cnemidophorus species, there are no males, and they reproduce through parthenogenesis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnemidophorus

Parthenogenesis is a form of asexual reproduction in which growth and development of embryos occur without fertilization. In animals, parthenogenesis means development of an embryo from an unfertilized egg cell

Apparently it happens with turkeys sometimes, but the offspring rarely survive.

Also, they've made viable mouse embyos in the lab using parthenogenesis.