I noticed we didn't have a crypto currency thread. Here it is.

Date: January 3rd, 2009
Bitcoin is an open source peer-to-peer payment network and digital currency introduced in 2009 by pseudonymous developer "Satoshi Nakamoto". Bitcoin has been called a cryptocurrency because it uses cryptography to secure funds. Transactions transfer bitcoins, the unit of currency, between Bitcoin addresses derived from cryptographic public keys. To spend the funds associated with an address, a user must broadcast a payment message digitally signed with the associated private key. Transactions are verified by a decentralized network of computers all over the world. Specialized computers use a proof-of-work system to prevent people from copying and spending the same bitcoin multiple times, a problem for digital currencies known as double-spending. The operators of these computers, known as "miners", are rewarded with transaction fees and newly minted bitcoins.

With this opensource project, many other crypto currencies have been developed.
http://coinmarketcap.com/

I've been a strong advocate of bitcoin since late 2010, during the start of spreadable silent miners. Does anyone else here mine or invest in crypto currencies?

I've been trying to get into mining. The only problem is I don't have a computer that is decent enough to mine on my own, and from what I've heard gains from mining in pools are negligible. I would like to do more of it, because it seems like some people are getting quite a lot out of it.

I'm currently mining Dogecoin, which started yesterday. It'd best for you to mine this new coin.

I'm at 23031.58691112 DOGE.

I've actually been interested in it, but haven't had the time to extensively research it, so I don't know much.

Another big crash today. Invested some into BTC and bought into WDC.

Too unstable for me. If I could mine a lot with a good computer, maybe, but now it would take too much time than I am willing to waste. Still a possibility in the future.

>>6 Of course you wouldn't mine BTC right now. You'd mine an alternative coin that could be possibly worth more in the future.
It's free investment.

>>8 How do new coins even gain value? Couldn't anyone just create a coin?

>>9 They gain value by people having faith that they will gain value. If it's a legitimate coin that people use, more people will use it.

Don't even try to fully understand it, nobody does.

>>10 But then, wouldn't the existence of more and more coins devalue all of them? I feel like if Bitcoin is more known, it would be more valuable, plus if everyone is mining it, it's more valuable as well. Of course, it's harder to get.

Ah, so that's why you mine other coins, hoping the same thing will happen.

Yes, economics. I thought it was a great field, until I realized it was essentially the study of people in a different light.

>>11 Having more requires having more people use them. There are only as many as can afford to be there, or else the market would be dysfunctional and collapse. Instead, it's like channels on Youtube; there can be many and many, it's just that some will be distinguished and others will be forgotten.

>>9 I will begin to explain.

Bitcoin was the first digital currency of its own kind.
At first, they weren't worth much at all. People would sell and trade for fun, or small items like pizza.

The small things built up. Overtime, it became harder to get these coins, mining. Computers were built, teams formed, botnets spread. Bitcoins then started to be used on small forums. From that, it spread to bigger real life things. Eventually, it became a reliable currency.

All of these new coins revolve around Bitcoin. The reason is simple. Since Bitcoin was first, and being widely used, coins are using it as value to compare coin value.

This sort of thing will soon happen with Litecoin, Bitcoin's successor.

>>13 There was that guy who bought like 5000 bitcoins for around 20 dollars when they were just starting out, forgot about them, checked back recently, and found that they had increased value to something like $800,000 worth of bitcoins. (link

At 400,000 DOGECOIN. Selling 200,000 for it might be at peak.

Was at 700,000 DOGE worth $800.
Lost it all.

Bitcoin is one of the first models of world computing corporation. The miners of the bitcoin network can be seen as employees rather than as humans were in the traditional corporate model.

Ethereum takes this development one step further. Interestingly, the role of the customer (which is currently populated by humans) stands to be overtaken by machine functionality as smart contracting systems enable end-to-end payments without requiring a human initiator.

As a relatively new development utilizing bitcoin technology, Ethereum aims to implement a globally decentralized, un-ownable, digital computer for executing peer-to-peer contracts. Put more simply, Ethereum is a world computer you can't shut down.

Ethereum differs from Bitcoin in 7 main ways:

1. In Ethereum the block time is set to 14 to 15 seconds compared to Bitcoins 10 minutes. This allows for faster transaction times. Ethereum does this by using the Ghost protocol.

2. Ethereum has a slightly different economic model than Bitcoin – Bitcoin block rewards halve every 4 years whilst Ethereum releases the same amount of Ether each year ad infinitum.

3. Ethereum has a different method for costing transactions depending on their computational complexity, bandwidth use and storage needs. Bitcoin transactions compete equally with each other. This is called Gas in Ethereum and is limited per block whilst in Bitcoin, it is limited by the block size.

4. Ethereum has its own Turing complete internal code... a Turing-complete code means that given enough computing power and enough time... anything can be calculated. With Bitcoin, there is not this form of flexibility.

5. Ethereum was crowd funded whilst Bitcoin was released and early miners own most of the coins that will ever be mined. With Ethereum 50% of the coins will be owned by miners in year five.

6. Ethereum discourages centralised pool mining through its Ghost protocol rewarding stale blocks. There is no advantage to being in a pool in terms of block propagation.

7. Ethereum uses a memory hard hashing algorithm called Ethash that mitigates against the use of ASICS and encourages decentralised mining by individuals using their GPU’s.

Companies which stopped using Bitcoin:
Expedia (flight ticket seller)
Dell (worldwide computer hardware seller)
TigerDirect (online retailer in North America)

Companies which used Bitcoin first and add or change for Ethereum:
Microsoft (in Azure)
Circle (money transfer)
AlphaBay (biggest dark market)
Mediachain (Spotify's copyright database)
Coinbase (in Token, mobile app for money transfer)
StorJ (most popular blockchain-secured cloud)
Brave (web browser made by a Mozilla's founder)

Companies new to cryptocurrencies and starting directly with Ethereum:
Intel
JP Morgan
Bank of America
ING
UBS
BP
Airbus
RWE (Germany's main electricity provider)
The United Nations (transferring money to third world countries)

Taking a look back at the brief history of the web, most would agree that Web 1.0 was epitomized by CGI scripts generating templated content on a server and delivering it to the client in a final form. This was a clear model of monolithic centralization, however, this basic form of interactivity was a huge improvement over the basic post-and-read format that comprised much of internet content at that time. Imagine having to reload the entire front page of Digg every time you wanted to click something:

Digg in 2006, a prolific example of “Web 2.0” interactivity not afforded by traditional CGI scripts
As browser technology advanced, experimentation with AJAX calls began, allowing us to asynchronously perform actions without having to reload the whole page. Finally, you could upvote without submitting an HTML form and reloading everything. This movement to separate content from presentation—aided by CSS—pushed the web forward.

Today we have technologies like AngularJS and EmberJS which ask the designer to generate a client template with specific data holes to be filled in by some backend. Although these frameworks facilitate some of the programming glue for seamless and live updates, they also nudge the developer to work in a specific way. But this is only a moderate step towards Web 2.5.

The real Web 3.0 has yet to begin, but it could obliterate the notion of separating content from presentation by removing the need to have servers at all. Let’s take a look at some of the underlying technologies the Ethereum Project aims to deliver:

Contracts: decentralized logic
Swarm: decentralized storage
Whisper: decentralized messaging


http://www.coindesk.com/whats-big-idea-behind-ethereums-world-computer/
https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/why-is-ethereum-different-to-bitcoin/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/68822h/a_list_of_companies_which_used_bitcoin_and/
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/18/building-decentralized-web/

http://coinmarketcap.com/

$ 75.08 at the time of thread submission.