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My perception is probably wrong but I see the cryptocurrency gold rush as already over. To mine bitcoins now is to already have lots of money on machinery or a

by sosuke 9y ago

My perception is probably wrong but I see the cryptocurrency gold rush as already over. To mine bitcoins now is to already have lots of money on machinery or a botnet to steal the machinery to mine the bitcoins. Do you feel that cryptocurrency is still available to the individual as a gold rush?

mobilemidget 9y ago
I might be the wrong person to ask, my personal opinion of cryptocurrency isn't a popular one. I have issues with the whole idea when I think about the power consumption to keep this 'alive'. And not to forget the 'early adopter' advantage. But the trade, and the price fluctuations aren't over by long, new cryptocurrencies launched daily by respectable instances and companies. So in this way, I still see a lot of 'rush' potential, even today. And like the goldrush, it was the people selling the shovels and things making the good steady profits. And there are also a lot of hardware things to change/improve on the cryptocurrency market.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  There was an article I can't find now, but it breaks down the cost of bitcoin's energy use relative to the whole world. The conclusion was something like, if bitcoin reaches a trillion dollar GDP, the energy usage would only be around ~1.5% of our total. I think I'm getting that number wrong, but the point was that we spend way more energy for trivial purposes compared to a trillion dollar GDP.
  - mobilemidget 9y ago
    By any chance would it be this site? https://realtimebitcoin.info https://realtimebitcoin.info
  - mcone 9y ago
    Maybe this site? https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
rublev 9y ago
Yes, crypto trading. Nobody is into mining anymore.
- nsxwolf 9y ago
  $600 AMD RX 580s tell me that someone is definitely still into mining.
ttam 9y ago
a lot of the altcoins are premined, so you don't really need to be mining there's a lot of money being made in ICO's
SadWebDeveloper 9y ago
Yes, there are tons of cryptocoins projects just right now besides of Bitcoin, even some of them almost reaching the level of Bitcoin (Ethereum) and with the ICO-hype trying to be next Kickstart/Sillicon-Valley on cryptocurrencies is basically like chasing digital gold. The question is what coin to mine, not what coin is popular right now... personally i made solid money with dogecoin, was able to buy 2 BTC's when mining that coin was super-cheap.
yesimahuman 9y ago
If you're willing to take risks, coins like NEO (antshares) would have been incredible investments as of a few weeks ago: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/neo/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/neo/
CryptoPunk 9y ago
$1.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency was raised in token sales in the first half of 2017 alone. While there are many opinions on the intrinsic value of this new sector, everyone agrees it's a gold rush. It doesn't require any mining to create a token and raise funds. Just copy pasting token contract and crowdsale code (generally on Ethereum), and putting up a website with a whitepaper. The total market cap of tokens is now approximately $10 billion: https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/ https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/
wsc981 9y ago
I feel the value of some coins, at least BTC and ETH stand to rise big time in the coming years. We're still in a phase of mostly early adopters (tech people), but slowly digital coins will become of use for 'normal' people. Banks are also starting to show an interest in digital coins. And at many online stores you can now pay with Bitcoin. In The Netherlands there are a few Bitcoin ATM's as well, though I have never used one. Of course, for governments these digital coins are problematic. It's much more difficult to estimate someone's wealth if one keeps coins in more or less anonymous digital wallets. Also, digital coins make it easy to transfer wealth oversees without fees, which is probably something that banks won't like (the usually subtract a fee through the exchange rate), so banks might try to lobby against Bitcoin. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future we don't use our conventional bank accounts anymore for payments, but use some ATM card connected to a digital wallet. Again, this would be bad for banks. A few weeks ago I bought my first digital coins as well for around 12.000 EUR. I expect the value of these coins to still rise quickly over the coming years. I'd say BTC, ETH, NEO and OMG are safe bets for now.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
The gold rush analogy is perfect for cryptocurrency. In the beginning, anyone with a pan/computer could go to a creek/their home PC and pull out gold/bitcoins. But now, the money's in selling shovels/ICOs/exchanges. You're not going to outmine a Chinese farm built at the bottom of a hydroelectric dam.
cableshaft 9y ago
There's still plenty of opportunities in the space. You're not likely to ever be able to buy a full bitcoin for $4.00 ever again, but there's other coins that might also find success. Ethereum has gone up 35x since the announcement that it was being added to Coinbase right here on hacker news back in February 2017. Litecoin has gone up 3x since the announcement that it was added to Coinbase here on Hacker News since then. Neo has gone up 4x since the beginning of August, Monero has gone up almost 3x since two weeks ago. But not every alt-coin will be successful, and figuring out which ones will go up, and when, and how long they'll keep going up, is the tough bit. And while it's hard to do, you could try riding the waves of bitcoin, sell when it reaches an all-time-high, and buy during the inevitable correction, slowly increasing how many coins you have without spending any extra money along the way. Bitcoin is volatile enough that it's difficult to time, though, and personally I just buy a little bit every week and hold. But that's the same in a gold rush, not every person who went to California to pan for gold found anything worth a damn. It's risky as hell, but if you can afford a little risk, and are willing to immerse yourself in the world a bit so you can increase your chance that the risk you take will be a profitable one, you could still make a lot of money here. And if you can build a service to wrap around cryptocurrency that doesn't already exist or has a bad solution, you could potentially make good money there too. (Sell the shovels, as it were). Coinbase makes a percent every time someone buys or sells coins on their service, no matter what the price is, they don't care, as long as people keep coming to them. There's also alt-coins that are low enough on everyone's radar that you can mine them, and hope that at some point they catch on, or get targeted for a pump and dump (which I've seen happen for many coins). Just mine coins in it and keep an eye on it and wait until it shoots up in price and sell before it has a chance to drop again. I don't really recommend this, but it's an option. And finally, ICOs are hot right now. Do your research, come up with an idea that could be funded with an ICO, and take a shot at building a company funded with your own ICO. Stupid risky, but yet another opportunity that clearly some people are taking advantage of and quickly getting a jumpstart on their companies with them. Just because one opportunity is no longer feasible doesn't mean that all opportunities have disappeared. In fact, there's a lot more different approaches to finding success with cryptocurrencies than there was 6+ years ago, where you pretty much could only mine a bunch of coins and struggle to find anybody who would give you money for them.

by sosuke 9y ago

mobilemidget 9y ago

I might be the wrong person to ask, my personal opinion of cryptocurrency isn't a popular one. I have issues with the whole idea when I think about the power consumption to keep this 'alive'. And not to forget the 'early adopter' advantage. But the trade, and the price fluctuations aren't over by long, new cryptocurrencies launched daily by respectable instances and companies. So in this way, I still see a lot of 'rush' potential, even today. And like the goldrush, it was the people selling the shovels and things making the good steady profits. And there are also a lot of hardware things to change/improve on the cryptocurrency market.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
There was an article I can't find now, but it breaks down the cost of bitcoin's energy use relative to the whole world. The conclusion was something like, if bitcoin reaches a trillion dollar GDP, the energy usage would only be around ~1.5% of our total. I think I'm getting that number wrong, but the point was that we spend way more energy for trivial purposes compared to a trillion dollar GDP.
- mobilemidget 9y ago
  By any chance would it be this site? https://realtimebitcoin.info https://realtimebitcoin.info
- mcone 9y ago
  Maybe this site? https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

rublev 9y ago

Yes, crypto trading. Nobody is into mining anymore.

nsxwolf 9y ago
$600 AMD RX 580s tell me that someone is definitely still into mining.

ttam 9y ago

a lot of the altcoins are premined, so you don't really need to be mining there's a lot of money being made in ICO's

SadWebDeveloper 9y ago

Yes, there are tons of cryptocoins projects just right now besides of Bitcoin, even some of them almost reaching the level of Bitcoin (Ethereum) and with the ICO-hype trying to be next Kickstart/Sillicon-Valley on cryptocurrencies is basically like chasing digital gold. The question is what coin to mine, not what coin is popular right now... personally i made solid money with dogecoin, was able to buy 2 BTC's when mining that coin was super-cheap.

yesimahuman 9y ago

If you're willing to take risks, coins like NEO (antshares) would have been incredible investments as of a few weeks ago: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/neo/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/neo/

CryptoPunk 9y ago

$1.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency was raised in token sales in the first half of 2017 alone. While there are many opinions on the intrinsic value of this new sector, everyone agrees it's a gold rush. It doesn't require any mining to create a token and raise funds. Just copy pasting token contract and crowdsale code (generally on Ethereum), and putting up a website with a whitepaper. The total market cap of tokens is now approximately $10 billion: https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/ https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/

wsc981 9y ago

I feel the value of some coins, at least BTC and ETH stand to rise big time in the coming years. We're still in a phase of mostly early adopters (tech people), but slowly digital coins will become of use for 'normal' people. Banks are also starting to show an interest in digital coins. And at many online stores you can now pay with Bitcoin. In The Netherlands there are a few Bitcoin ATM's as well, though I have never used one. Of course, for governments these digital coins are problematic. It's much more difficult to estimate someone's wealth if one keeps coins in more or less anonymous digital wallets. Also, digital coins make it easy to transfer wealth oversees without fees, which is probably something that banks won't like (the usually subtract a fee through the exchange rate), so banks might try to lobby against Bitcoin. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future we don't use our conventional bank accounts anymore for payments, but use some ATM card connected to a digital wallet. Again, this would be bad for banks. A few weeks ago I bought my first digital coins as well for around 12.000 EUR. I expect the value of these coins to still rise quickly over the coming years. I'd say BTC, ETH, NEO and OMG are safe bets for now.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

The gold rush analogy is perfect for cryptocurrency. In the beginning, anyone with a pan/computer could go to a creek/their home PC and pull out gold/bitcoins. But now, the money's in selling shovels/ICOs/exchanges. You're not going to outmine a Chinese farm built at the bottom of a hydroelectric dam.

cableshaft 9y ago

There's still plenty of opportunities in the space. You're not likely to ever be able to buy a full bitcoin for $4.00 ever again, but there's other coins that might also find success. Ethereum has gone up 35x since the announcement that it was being added to Coinbase right here on hacker news back in February 2017. Litecoin has gone up 3x since the announcement that it was added to Coinbase here on Hacker News since then. Neo has gone up 4x since the beginning of August, Monero has gone up almost 3x since two weeks ago. But not every alt-coin will be successful, and figuring out which ones will go up, and when, and how long they'll keep going up, is the tough bit. And while it's hard to do, you could try riding the waves of bitcoin, sell when it reaches an all-time-high, and buy during the inevitable correction, slowly increasing how many coins you have without spending any extra money along the way. Bitcoin is volatile enough that it's difficult to time, though, and personally I just buy a little bit every week and hold. But that's the same in a gold rush, not every person who went to California to pan for gold found anything worth a damn. It's risky as hell, but if you can afford a little risk, and are willing to immerse yourself in the world a bit so you can increase your chance that the risk you take will be a profitable one, you could still make a lot of money here. And if you can build a service to wrap around cryptocurrency that doesn't already exist or has a bad solution, you could potentially make good money there too. (Sell the shovels, as it were). Coinbase makes a percent every time someone buys or sells coins on their service, no matter what the price is, they don't care, as long as people keep coming to them. There's also alt-coins that are low enough on everyone's radar that you can mine them, and hope that at some point they catch on, or get targeted for a pump and dump (which I've seen happen for many coins). Just mine coins in it and keep an eye on it and wait until it shoots up in price and sell before it has a chance to drop again. I don't really recommend this, but it's an option. And finally, ICOs are hot right now. Do your research, come up with an idea that could be funded with an ICO, and take a shot at building a company funded with your own ICO. Stupid risky, but yet another opportunity that clearly some people are taking advantage of and quickly getting a jumpstart on their companies with them. Just because one opportunity is no longer feasible doesn't mean that all opportunities have disappeared. In fact, there's a lot more different approaches to finding success with cryptocurrencies than there was 6+ years ago, where you pretty much could only mine a bunch of coins and struggle to find anybody who would give you money for them.