My advice to everyone: if an altcoin pops up, mine it for a day or two. Place the funds in a private wallet. Backup the wallet on a USB key and two hard drives. Do not access it for 2-3 years. Early on, farming a block takes no effort at all. Later on, if the altcoin succeeds, you hit a random lotto. Otherwise, you have a few encrypted wallets and probably wasted 15 minutes setting up the miner per altcoin. Be wary of the altcoins.
My advice to everyone: Existing cryptocurrencies and especially all the "i made a coin too" are a shady, complicated and potentially completely useless things. Consider them all schemes to lure money into the creator's wallets. That's the whole purpose. Now make the ethical decision if you want to support that for a chance on a questionable gain in $YourLocalRealMoney through shady exchanges. And if you feel stressed already that you missed the opportunity to be a fantastillionaire with bitcoin, you will probably get addicted to mining and feel miserable overall. Do you want to feel stressed and perhaps evil for a tiny chance of money or do you rather have a constant flow of secure meatspace money by working?
>Consider them all schemes to lure money into the creator's wallets
Some launches, like Dogecoin's, are done ethically with no pre-mining. Look at the coin creator's launch plan and if they violate (as the recent Coinye coin did) take them to task for it (Coiye crashed and burned).
It's effectively the same thing, except that the set of people at the top of the pyramid is larger. It's still most lucrative for the creators, it's just also highly rewarding for the earliest adopters.
I can see how my post left room for misinterpretation; my intention was to express that the creators are in the set {people for whom it's most lucrative}. The earliest adopters are in the set too, obviously.
Put differently, my point is that "ethical" launches are simply good marketing, and are quite compatible with the sentiment expressed upthread that "[altcoins] are schemes to lure money into the creator's wallets". If a given coin becomes popular, the creator is going to profit immensely from it whether or not they engaged in pre-mining. By doing an "ethical" launch, they're making it more likely that the coin gains significant adoption, albeit probably decreasing the expected size of their payout. That seems like a smart play, given diminishing marginal utility of money, etc.
>Do you want to feel stressed
and perhaps evil for a tiny chance of
money or do you rather have a
constant flow of secure meatspace
money by working?
Ignoring the "evil" bit, this sounds like a false dilemma. Running a mining "rig" is not a full-time job; the people I've talked to who are into mining treat it as either a hobby or a passive income-type side project.
Multiply those 15 minutes by the number of altcoins popping up every week. Then add the time spent in looking for altcoins early on. There are several who'd like to jump on it from day 1. They make their living by selling them on ebay.
Not to mention that your computer is unusable while it's mining. My point being, it's not a get rich quick scheme for everyone.
If you assume crypt coins are going to be pressed into wide-spread use, then it is akin to a land rush. Automating the process can be done quite easily by using something like Multipool's list of currencies and just running through the list with a script. Way less than 15 minutes per.
>Not to mention that your computer is unusable while it's mining.
Depends on your computer. I mine 42 coin and code/watch movies and there's no noticeable performance hit other than my computer being warmer than usual.
Thanks for supporting 42.. I stumbled upon this thread via Google Search. I am maco from the official 42 coin team. I want to know if anyone has questions about 42 coin so I can answer them! Yes, I hear that a lot of people do mine 42 while multi-tasking, it really depends on the graphics card you got. After all, 42 coin is still the highest valued crypto currency to date... and we increased the crypto communities average from $13 USD to $250,000 USD.
I'd rather advice on spending $20 on an Altcoin. Much less effort and more potential return, since several days of mining will probably return a few dollars of current value.
I wouldn't underestimate the effort of buying new Altcoins, especially with dollars. If you already own bitcoin it is easier, but buying new altcoins requires that you go through potentially untrustworthy channels on smaller exchanges as new exchanges generally won't have them available.
I'm honestly very interested by Dogecoin, the community enthusiasm and positivity seems to be it's wildcard. But I find the lexicon "so wow! to the moon!" et. al. just terribly grating. It honestly impacts my willingness to dive into the space.
Dogecoin is deliberately silly. It's based on the doge meme, after all. Have you seen the Dogecoin client? It's in Comic Sans, and includes buttons with labels like "Pls Send" and "Much Receive."
What's "awesome" about that? That's the "opinion" people have about every coin they hold that is dropping in price, because it is in their best interest to encourage people to buy more so they don't get stuck holding the bag.
Look at it this way: DOGE was worth 240 satoshis before, and now only 160 satoshis. You would think that this would make people sad, but no, it makes people happy because they and fellow shibes can buy more DOGE. Yes of course that will make the price go up again, but the price isn't really the deal here for the most people.
The grating lexicon is what kept me from getting into Dogecoin until this year even though I first ran into it no later than a few days after the initial release. As kbouw says in a sibling comment if you actively engage in the community you'll get over it pretty quickly.
It appeals to the most common demographic on the internet (idiots). As is usually the case when morons flock to something, there's money to be made from them.
I feel bad for the people who are actually putting real money in to this stupidity.
These things aren't really working out terribly well for the manipulators. There's not as much panic selling as their sub-market dump needs in order to turn a profit. (All they're really doing is relinquishing their market position.) It's pretty disorganized as well.
This is a good thing to put in there. Crypto-currencies are prey to all the manipulations of exchanges 100 years ago. Ya, that's what happens when you create unregulated virtual gold. A trader explains it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787375
It's also going to be much harder once the currency has any sort of significant financial value. This kind of manipulation is only easily possible at the early stages.
I continuously trade DOGE into BTC. Since starting a little over 4 weeks ago, I've made a significant amount of BTC via DOGE. I'm about 1/2 way through paying off my rigs, give or take. I also missed out by not holding DOGE before the massive run up, but I'm cool with that.
Nice, I just started looking into Dogecoin a few days ago. It's been two days now and my wallet is still doing its first sync (about 70%). I also set up a BitCoin wallet and it looks like that'll take weeks to sync. Is this a problem people starting crypto currencies are thinking about? Is it solvable or just how they work?
You can use a wallet like Electrum (https://electrum.org/) for Bitcoin. You don't need to download the entire blockchain then. You can be up and running in the time it takes to install it. And it is still a local wallet, so you don't have to trust an online service to store your wallet.
I suspect that every user running a full node is going to become a bigger problem as time goes by. Newer Bitcoin clients remove the requirement by communicating with a full node somewhere in the cloud and only storing the most recent transactions (a full node hosts the entire history of the currency; every transaction ever made).
Dogecoin has tremendous transaction volume, second only to Bitcoin some days, because of it's tipping culture. So, it's probably more urgent that solutions to the full-node problem get solved for more popular altcoins like Doge than for the less used ones.
When you're using an offline wallet like bitcoin-qt or dogecoin-qt, you have to download the entire blockchain for the cryptocurrency. This is what's 'syncing' and can take a while to finish.
You can bypass having to download the blockchain by using an online wallet instead, which solves that specific pain point but they're less secure than your local storage offline wallet.
Please, do not recommend that. Online wallets are first target for scams and hacks and should not be used.
If you browse /r/dogecoin, you will see that everyone is recommending to stay away from them. They were especially hit by the dogewallet.com hack.
An alternative is using the android wallet. It's been around for some weeks, now, and I didn't see any complains about it. It relies on no central server and it's code is opensource [1], so it can hardly be a scam, I think.
I remember reading something by its author saying that it won't download the whole chain. From my experience, it's faster to sync than qt client, so I suppose it's true. Also, some neat options like disabling sync when not charging and/or not connected to wifi, which make power / bandwidth consumption not a problem.
Anyway, the only official wallet is the qt / cli one [2]. If you want to be safe, it's the one to use. The sync thing may be annoying at first, but it's easily dealt with if you open your wallet once a day, or once in two days (it will take something like five minutes to sync).
Rendering a movie is not suitable as a proof of work function. It's probably very difficult to design a mathematical framework to verify that you really rendered the movie and not just send garbage back in exchange for coins.
At the moment most Coins use either one or multiple hashing functions¹ or prime chains² as proof of work system³.
I think one of the harder problems would be verifying that the render results from a distributed system are correct, and then Pixar would be a centralized entity doling out coin for correct output. Unless there's some decentralized way I'm blissfully missing.
What if people started a Pixar road, where drugs and guns would be sold for Pixar coins? Pixar would have no control over that what so ever. I don't know about the technical part however, it could probably be possible.
I'm skeptical of some of the hype around Dogecoin. The various stats sites are currently showing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Dogecoin transactions every day (http://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/sentinusd-doge.html). These are trivial to manipulate by sending transactions to yourself.
Where are all these transactions happening? Am I just out of the loop?
there is a big tipping culture in the community, especially on reddit. in addition to karma upvotes, people can use a tipbot to send doge to each other. the /r/dogecoin subreddit has 40k+ subscribers, with lots of tipping in each thread.
additionally, it may be that each transaction is counted multiple times. if I were to tip you, I would first send funds to the bot, who then sends funds to you.
Ok, lets be generous and assume all 45,199 /r/dogecoin subscribers tip daily, and there are 2 transactions for every tip. Each subscriber would need to tip an average of:
$427,079,860 / 2 / 45,199 = $4724.44
Not likely, IMHO, even if each tip required 10 or 100 transactions.
I haven't run any numbers (great analysis by the way). Other sources I can think of:
-conversion from other currency holdings (LTC, BTC), which some people have openly said they did
-recent run up / down of the value caused a lot of people who were previously holding to buy / sell (started around the time of the big news push with the Jamaican bobsled team fundraiser, right now it is dropping)
-general interest, people buying some amount to hold for the first time. i have had friends making their first crypto purchase in doge recently, who don't understand the technology and probably shouldn't (due to the news i think and not wanting to miss out on bitcoin 2.0)
-Chinese investors getting in / out? i think i saw a graph of cny to doge being a major part of the transactions
personally, i haven't looked into it that seriously because i haven't invested seriously. i put time in (especially for the site content), but all my coins are mined from an existing gaming computer. my total doge USD value is ~$50, which is probably lower than what people would expect of the dogecointutorial creator. my doge mining actually started because I wanted to cheaply explore how cryptocurrencies worked. then the tutorial site actually started when i was testing out aws / github pages for landing page hosting. originally i just had some sort of dogecoin index placeholder but found myself jumping around / searching for info as i learned about doge and cryptocurrencies...so i started my own guide. if you do more research, do share it!
Notably, the volume across all exchanges today is 562,124,614 doge, which is about $786,974, and mining accounts for another ~$1,000,000/day (500000 * 60 * 24 * $0.0014).
2x each of those to account for transactions into/out of mining pools and exchanges, and it's still only a few million dollars (plus a lot of trading never touches the blockchain)
I would assume much of this is done by speculators. iBit, a company that directly connects the bitcoin market with NASDAQ, enables high volumes of trade. Once you have bitcoin all other alt currencies are very easy to trade. Many speculators love the high volatility of trades as it gives them an opportunity to buy low and sell high, especially if you've got a high risk portion in your investment portfolio.
I'm also building a DOGE/USD (and other currencies) exchange, http://doges.org/index.php?topic=4435.0 It's tough work doing it legitimately since so far most banks have turned their nose up at my business, but I'll get there.
Yeah lol I read that article, hence the emphasis on making my company as legal as possible. There are banks in my country that will accept it, they just need persuasion.
At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite (I own some bitcoins and have upvoted some bitcoin threads here), I am getting tired of seeing dogecoin threads. They don't seem to contain very novel or insightful information. Also, how long can the doge meme honestly keep people interested in the currency?
we just wanted to get feedback on the site, like any other show hn. wasn't trying to provide novel or insightful information, other than a guide simple enough that my parents could follow.
Sorry, I didn't mean to single you guys out individually, it was more of a meta comment. Resources that make it easier for people to learn and do things are always helpful :)
The Dogecoin client is based off the Litecoin client. The Litecoin client is based off the official Bitcoin client.
Odds are, if a remotely exploitable bug is present in Dogecoin's network service, it will probably be present in Bitcoin's too, and every altcoin that is a direct fork of Bitcoin.
Cryptocurrencies require you to establish P2P connections with other people on the Internet, so if you want the network to thrive you do have to run it on a public network. There is always going to be a risk with any service you run, but Bitcoin's code has been audited by security professionals on quite a few occasions, so the chances of a critical bug that can be remotely exploited against someone simply running the client are fairly low. There's probably a higher chance of there being a critical bug in uTorrent.
Hmmmm, you may be right...i'm not super knowledgeable on this type of thing though. I'll update the picture, but can you give me a explanation I can use?
Basically, the Dogecoin wallet is going to attempt to punch a hole in your firewall with UPnP and any other NAT-busting techniques the author (of Bitcoin) has contrived to enable you to help new nodes to come to sync by sending them blocks from the winning blockchain.
The daemon mode (which listens on an RPC/HTTP port for commands like "send money here") is not going to attempt to run unless you enable a password in your .doge/config (just like bitcoind). RPC clients will need this password to be able to issue commands. If you have one node, then both the client and server will have the same .doge/config and it's secure, assuming they don't guess your password. If you have multiple nodes, this is the way to have a lightweight client that sends commands to your "heavyweight" wallet. If the client doesn't have your RPC password, the client can't do anything that any 'nobody' new node on the network should be able to do.
You can run Dogecoin on public networks, or the Dogecoin wallet has a bug that you should report. Whether it's wise to be in a position to be the first to discover such a bug (by losing all the coins in your wallet), that's another matter, but if there are such bugs in the wallet then it's really not viable, and you should therefore probably sell all your doges immediately.
(If you haven't ever looked at your .doge/config or attempted to run in daemon mode, you won't have an RPC password and your client is also secure, since it won't accept commands that are not authenticated.)
Such tutorial. very wow. <--- imagine this in Comic Sans
How dissimilar is the process for converting dogecoin to normal-people money? (I have no interest in Bitcoin except as a necessary stepping stone.) If very different, could you make a page for this?
The process is the same for converting doge to USD (which I should make clear in the guide, thanks).
There are a few exchanges with plans to offer direct exchange from Doge to USD in the coming weeks, which I will also be making a guide for when it's released.
You could alternatively sell your Doge for USD through a service like eBay and add a nice markup for convenience (doge is selling for 2x the value in some bids), although you chance dealing with scammers.
edit* thanks for the props, specifically in comic sans :)
YW and thanks. I'm the person who asked on reddit about converting to JPY. A Japanese shibe and I are trying to help Atsuko Sato, the owner of the doge, learn how to convert dogecoin donations. Since your tutorial is real clear I'll point my Japanese friend to it to translate.
co creator of the guide here, it is on my to do list. the guide in its current form isn't even close to complete yet, we just thought it was good enough to start getting feedback and be useful to the average person (who probably doesn't know Linux)
I just signed up ad still don't get it? I think it has something to do with communicating via email? I know
one guy who spent 50 plus house setting up a "developers"
site--just shut it down because of Hackers.
I think I go pan for gold, but won't dredge because of fish
eggs. Or, apply to McDonalds? Or, boom? No, I'll go back
to my f--ng website.
