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Bitcoin Password Grab Disguised As DDoS Attack
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Brian.Dean
Brian.Dean,
 User Rank: Apprentice
12/5/2013 | 2:23:02 PM
Re: Misdirected Ingenuity
@Ariella, yes good point, when bitcoin is pegged to the dollar to pay salaries a bit of the volatility is finished, and that to only during the calculated interval, so if salaries were paid on the 2nd of each month and bitcoin falls in value by 10% by the 15th of the month, employees still lose. However at this point, bitcoin as a currency also finishes and the dollar becomes the prime currency again.

Generally speaking, the holders of capital want stability, overall 1% inflation can be good to create incentives to produce but it also comes with negative things such as money illusion.
Ariella
Ariella,
 User Rank: Apprentice
12/5/2013 | 12:36:32 PM
Re: Misdirected Ingenuity
@Brian exactly, that's why while such high prices make bitcoin appear attractive, in reality, it is detrimental to its use as currency. Before writing an article on bitcoin for CFO, I contacted the companies that made the news for offering to pay employees in bitcoin. One of them admitted that even he gave up on the offer to take a part of the salary in bitcoin when it proved very volatile last spring -- and that kind of movement is nothing compared to what we've seen in the past few weeks. The way he put it was this:

For example for us the payment of salaries as bitcoins want meant to help people spend bitcoins and get into the ecosystem. Now we feel like we are helping our employees to place bets in a casino. Owning and spending a currency that can double or halve its value in a month is very problematic.
Brian.Dean
Brian.Dean,
 User Rank: Apprentice
12/5/2013 | 11:37:27 AM
Re: Misdirected Ingenuity
Ariella, the way I see it is that the more bitcoin is in demand the greater becomes its difficulty, currently $1,000+ per 1 bitcoin shows that it is in high speculative demand. This has created a situation where it is only practical to mine it using ASIC however, the amount of variables that are involved that would allow an ASIC operation to be profitable are just as complex and speculative as would a 'bitcoin trading round' be using dollars, it would be the same as buying a high risk/gain/lose stock. 
samicksha
samicksha,
 User Rank: Apprentice
12/5/2013 | 2:39:39 AM
Re: Misdirected Ingenuity
Essence of Bitcoin is its fees are independent of the amount being sent, which makes it attractive for heavy transactions, but despite of this fact, the use of Bitcoin in the retail and commercial marketplace is relatively small compared with a relatively large use by speculators.
Ariella
Ariella,
 User Rank: Apprentice
12/4/2013 | 7:07:18 PM
Re: Misdirected Ingenuity
@Mathew Originally, the only way to acquire bitcoins was to mine them. Back in the early days, Im told that was a simple enough computational operation. But as the number of bitcoins diminishes, the mining gets that much more involved to the point that special mining rigs are sold for thousands of dollars. Now that bitcoin has reached such a high, some people who had given up mining when the exchange rate was under a $100 because they did not consider the payoff worthwhile may return to it. However, my guess is that the buying and selling that has sent the digital currency skyrocketing is not due to the activity of miners but to speculators who buy and sell the currency without mining. In any case, the way the Bitcoin system works, the block chain always has to clear any transaction in which the currency passes from one wallet to another in order to guard against counterfeit virtual coins. That's why it can take more than 10 minutes for the transactions to clear.
Brian.Dean
Brian.Dean,
 User Rank: Apprentice
12/4/2013 | 3:41:32 PM
Misdirected Ingenuity
If we assume that people that type their user names and passwords rather than using the 'remember me' function are going to be re-using user names and passwords the most, nice model however, extremely misdirected as this sort of ingenuity could have been used to create real value.

And where tool bars are being used to turn private computers into a decentralized mining operation, well again nice model however, it is theft of electricity. The difficulty at which bitcoin is at the moment makes it impractical for anyone to be paying for electricity by hashing through CPUs, GPUs (AMD 7000 series GPUs in particular) are better at hashing and only just manage to break even in terms of electricity usage and coins produced (hardware costs and overheads excluded). Either way, it is still electricity theft, create a decentralized cloud, give customers value and that is when I would appreciate this model.

My point is that individuals should also check their GPU utilization because most probably these tool bars are going to want GPU resources.    


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