FSF Receives One Million Dollars Worth Of Bitcoin

[polarathene]

involved with Bitcoin from the very early days and still happens to have his BTC (most people who were involved with bitcoin back in 2012/2013 ended up either spending their BTC on silly things

2012 is early days? I remember somehow finding out about bitcoin in 2010, mining 34 coins in 2 weeks in a mining pool using a AMD 4770 that burnt out after grunting along 2 weeks annoying flatmates. They were worth less than a cent each at the time, fortunately the price jumped up to $20 a coin(and later $40, $100 and so on until settling down around 2013-2014 prior to the big 2017 boom). I was studying computer graphics at the time and really needed a new GPU, didn't know that bitcoin would rise to what it is today, so I got a new GPU(switched to nvidia since AMD was having problems back then with software I'd use). Regret..

[oooverclocker]

mining bitcoins and using bitcoin is consuming so much energy. Energy that usually comes from countries burning fossil fuel. Yet it's cool that so much dirty money is going to fund something so valuable.

Yes, donating to FSF or EFF are very important things. I do it as well at HumbleBundle for example. But: Although Bitcoin etc. might probably kill us in the end, the miners haven't educated people that only money would make them happy and for all those who print 2-5% new money per year they should look at themselves why they force people to invest in more stable values.

Miners haven't caused destruction at first. The imbalances started at another position and it's probably too stupid to say, where - so I guess these guys know who I mean and it would be very fortunate when they could check their personal ethics.

[cl333r]

citation needed

It's common sense. "Mining" is another word for digital transaction processing. Believe it or not banks also do transactions, it's just that cryptocurrencies will typically take you less time, cost you a lot less, anonymous, don't have the bank's inefficient pyramid of employees from directors to janitors and lobbyists, and the only reason fiat currencies and banks reign supreme is because of the power of law.

Banks with their fiat currencies could only be as efficient as cryptocurrencies if they fired the board of directors and all their staff and only let the servers running for transaction processing with a minimal number of IT personnel.

[Guest]

Lol.
You have to take in account all the expenses of banking.
Every bank employee has to drive/get to work.

Yeah, except most bank employees don't have anything to do with transaction clearning, and generally a bank offers many more services than simply clearing some payment. That part is mostly done by automated servers.

[Staffan]

Bitcoin is the ultimate FIAT currency. A FIAT currency is a currency that is not backed up with any physical resource, for example gold.
Most currencies are FIAT but they have some backing in the form of GDP of the issuing country. Bitcoin has no such backing at all, is literally only backed up with other people's hope that its value will increase in the future and the assumption that there is no (currently unknown) technical flaw in the protocol.

[tajjada]

2012 is early days? I remember somehow finding out about bitcoin in 2010, mining 34 coins in 2 weeks in a mining pool using a AMD 4770 that burnt out after grunting along 2 weeks annoying flatmates. They were worth less than a cent each at the time, fortunately the price jumped up to $20 a coin(and later $40, $100 and so on until settling down around 2013-2014 prior to the big 2017 boom). I was studying computer graphics at the time and really needed a new GPU, didn't know that bitcoin would rise to what it is today, so I got a new GPU(switched to nvidia since AMD was having problems back then with software I'd use). Regret..

Yeah we all have our definition of "early". When it comes to Bitcoin, I tend to use the word "early" to refer to anything before mining ASICs appeared.

Of course, there is the tiny subset of people on this planet who were there even before GPU mining.

I remember the first big "crash" when it was around $20. I also remember when the price went from around $300 to almost $1000 literally overnight. That was also when I stupidly lost most of my BTC due to being an idiot, not having backups, and corrupting my filesystem. I still have mild PTSD from that event, which keeps me away from cryptocurrencies and trading in general. I've felt uneasy around this kind of stuff since then. It was a lot of BTC. Could have been rich, but I was stupid instead.

[Michael_S]

I think cryptocurrencies will eventually power big chunks of the world economy, if not all of it. But not today and not ten years from now either. Bitcoin itself is, I think, going to crash eventually. Transactions now take more than ten minutes to finish and some take days to finish, and transaction fees to convert Bitcoins to other currencies are too high. Maybe the Bitcoin Cash fork with its much faster transaction rate will catch on, maybe something else. I think it's inevitable.

And yes for now, people get cryptocurrency and then trade it for traditional government-backed currency to do transactions. That's going to be the standard for a long time, but if Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum or whatever stabilizes in price and grows in popularity and has consistent ultra-fast transaction confirmation times then people and businesses will conduct business entirely in that currency.

But I'm just some idiot making guesses, don't read too much into it.

They wont accept it since they cant see the source code of the bitcoins

?? I hope that was a joke, the code that mines and manages transactions with Bitcoin is open source / free software.

[cj.wijtmans]

I think cryptocurrencies will eventually power big chunks of the world economy, if not all of it. But not today and not ten years from now either. Bitcoin itself is, I think, going to crash eventually. Transactions now take more than ten minutes to finish and some take days to finish, and transaction fees to convert Bitcoins to other currencies are too high. Maybe the Bitcoin Cash fork with its much faster transaction rate will catch on, maybe something else. I think it's inevitable.

And yes for now, people get cryptocurrency and then trade it for traditional government-backed currency to do transactions. That's going to be the standard for a long time, but if Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum or whatever stabilizes in price and grows in popularity and has consistent ultra-fast transaction confirmation times then people and businesses will conduct business entirely in that currency.

But I'm just some idiot making guesses, don't read too much into it.



?? I hope that was a joke, the code that mines and manages transactions with Bitcoin is open source / free software.

XRP..

[Fernando Negro]

"PSYOP" from the people who created Bitcoin (and were the first to mine it, at a very cheap price) to promote this so-called cryptocurrency.

And, a way also to make people think that, if this Bitcoin phenomenon is Free Software, then it must be safe, right?

WRONG: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.p...131191#p637738 + https://twitter.com/BlackFerdyPT/sta...04533272879104

[Fernando Negro]

(To all those who are still naive about this phenomenon...)

From a very well-known Russian military counterintelligence officer:

https://twitter.com/EstulinDaniel/status/909789661748432897