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Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies
- QAPereo 9y agoSure, if you have more of a kitty than many countries to play with, an army of lawyers and an IT department... have fun.
- pfisch 9y agoI have all the computers in our office mining crypto when we leave for the day. It is pretty easy to setup.
- Waterluvian 9y agoI'd love to know what the electricity cost is to do that versus their immediate market value. Are you mining lottery tickets or do they have immediate worth?
- xur17 9y agoIf you're mining with gpus, it's likely still worth it. I have a 1060 and a 1070, and it's definitely profitable even after electricity.
- rashkov 9y agoWhich coins though? Can't imagine bitcoin is still possible to mine with a two card setup
- xur17 9y agoEthereum, Zcash, etc [0]. Bitcoin definitely would not be. [0] https://whattomine.com https://whattomine.com
- pfisch 9y agoYou can connect to hubs that auto switch the mining algorithm to the most profitable one at the time.
- hossbeast 9y agoSounds like he's using nicehash. Shameless plug, if you want to mine on nicehash using Linux, you can try https://github.com/hossbeast/autominer https://github.com/hossbeast/autominer
- pfisch 9y agoIt seems to be profitable. Electricity is cheap in New Orleans and we make video games so the computers all have decent gpus. You can connect to hubs that auto switch the mining algorithm to the most profitable one at the time.
- kondro 9y agoI hope you realise the product of your mining belongs to your company given its their electricity you’re using (compared to the computers just suspending).
- pfisch 9y agoI'm the owner.
- kondro 9y agoFair enough then! :-) Surprised it’s cost effective to mine with commodity desktops and retail power though. ;-)
- DennisP 9y agoCommercial rates are generally lower than home retail rates, night-time rates are also on the low side, and your hardware is effectively free if you're using idle time.
- pfisch 9y agoElectricity is cheap in New Orleans and we make video games so the computers all have decent gpus. You can connect to hubs that auto switch the mining algorithm to the most profitable one at the time.
- Blackthorn 9y agoWhoo boy. If you aren't the owner, expect them to fire you and replace your paycheck with the tiny bit that you managed to mine.
- bluedino 9y agoJust like people used to run SETI@home on their work networks after hours
- dreit1 9y agoWhat do you mine?
- Abtin88 9y agoDream of satoshi is dead now
- paulie_a 9y agoHow so?
- roarktoohey 9y agohttps://blockchain.info/pools https://blockchain.info/pools It’s not as decentralized as he/they hoped??
- atomical 9y agoThere will probably be more bad news from China this year. It seems very risky to do what they are doing.
- jliptzin 9y agoMaybe they're following Cuban's advice which is to invest heavily into anything China bans.
- dankohn1 9y agoI cannot imagine a headline that would make me more interested in investing with Vanguard.
- dmoy 9y ago0.005% lower expense ratios is what shifted my stuff from Fidelity to vanguard. Idk how much exposure they're putting into crypto currency based on this.
- dankohn1 9y agoCome for the lower expense ratios, stay for the focus on running low cost indexes mutual funds, as opposed to experimenting with cryptocurrencies.
- SilasX 9y agoOkay, but keep in mind Vanguard does offer and promote actively managed funds; whatever focus they have falls short of a tunnel. https://personal.vanguard.com/us/insights/article/active-funds-manager-052016?link=topStories&linkLocation=Position2 https://personal.vanguard.com/us/insights/article/active-fun...
- meowface 9y agoWhat's wrong with experimenting with cryptocurrencies? It's not like they're taking away resources from their main business to blow on bitcoins. (Though Vanguard is probably still a better choice regardless.)
- iancarroll 9y agoHow did this article just get written? Consensus happened in May...
- nkingsy 9y agoI like that the post mentions she's mined 200,000 Satoshis. Is this some kind of Bitcoin Shibboleth? I had to google it. It's about $8.
- zaptheimpaler 9y ago1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC (10^-8 BTC) It represents the smallest fraction of 1 bitcoin you can use as an amount in a transaction, so they are the smallest (indivisible) units.
- zghst 9y agoVery interesting name for a decimal. What an intricate community
- ufo 9y ago(Satoshi is the inventor of bitcoin, in case you don't know)
- sillysaurus3 9y agoNot quite. The central ideas underpinning bitcoin are very old, tracing back to hashcash and bitgold. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashcash#History https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashcash#History It's not really an important distinction, but maybe someone will find the history interesting.
- proofofstake 9y agoSee also this 1996 NSA paper "How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash", predating both Hashcash and Bit gold. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money... (and OP seems factually correct: Satoshi was the inventor of Bitcoin).
- proofofstake 9y agoROI of creating an investment portfolio 1 year ago, and selling today: - All Bitcoin: ~500% - Mix of top market: ~2800% - All Strat: ~13500% Meanwhile, stock investors call 12% a good year.
- mrb 9y agoYup. Few people realize Bitcoin has been literally the best performing investment in human history. One dollar invested in March 2010 is worth $1+ million today. 1,000,000× returns. But the downside of performing so well is that it is too easy to get distracted by the price and disregard the radical improvements that Bitcoin brings over legacy financial systems...
- joosters 9y agoWhat? Practically every day, someone wins $millions from a $1 lottery ticket somewhere in the world. That's the same or better returns...
- mrb 9y agoA "lottery ticket" does not quite fit the traditional definition of "investment". Besides, almost no one who buys a lottery ticket ends up winning millions, but everyone who bought and held bitcoins since 2010 is a winner.
- joosters 9y agoThey seem perfectly equivalent to me. Lottery winnings came from everyone else buying tickets, yes. So where are the 'winnings' of these magical 2010-era bitcoin holders coming from, if not from other people buying bitcoins?
- csomar 9y agoEh, I don't really know where to start to explain how wrong this is. The crypto market is still niche. There are stocks that make 100-1000% performance. But the stock market is "saturated" for representing assets, equities and companies. So its growth is limited.
- watertom 9y agoI can't wait until large firms, or very rich people start throwing a lot of money at mining and start co-opting cryptocurrencies
- kobeya 9y agoYou think they aren't? Mining is a multi billion dollar industry.
- thephyber 9y agoI think co-opting suggests attacks on the consensus mechanisms or figuring out how to exploit Satoshi's abandoned wallets.
- woodman 9y agoSuch a move would instantly make bitcoin worthless - it would be more profitable for the attackers to put the computing power to mining. The only kind of party that would pose such a risk would not be interested in direct profitability: states.
- cm2187 9y agoThe term "industry" suggests they produce something, which in the case of bitcoin mining is questionable.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- keymone 9y agothey produce security of distributed decentralized database and continued operation of payment platform on top of it.
- nosuchthing 9y agoThere's nothing really produced as there's no product, the software is running a service. Without the service, there is nothing.
- almostApatriot1 9y ago> Johnson said that the company had made several venture investments in bitcoin-related businesses and that the company was looking at applications of blockchain technologies alongside several leading universities. Every crypto article makes the same vague claims about the potential of non-specific blockchain technology. I'm surprised there was no mention of replacing Visa in this one as well.
- shimon 9y agoFacilitating inter-bank transfers is one promising application that's already operational: https://ripple.com/ https://ripple.com/
- nwah1 9y agoAre there any actual benefits to this over current methods of interbank transfers?
- lojack 9y agoHave you ever submitted a payment or received a payment and seen it marked as "pending". That's likely the result of a delay due to interbank transfers. Real time settlement is something theoretically possible with central banking using something like Fedwire, but in practice most banks use a third party clearinghouse like CHIPS. Additionally, if you have funds in USD and you need to make a payment in EUR, you'll probably need to work through a third party bank that deals with forex settlement. This all adds delays and costs. With Ripple, realtime clearing and settlement happens automatically even between currencies. If my bank and the vendors bank both use ripple, I can use USD to pay the vendor EUR in real time, and the transaction completes in seconds.
- z2210558 9y agoYes, but is there something that Ripple is doing here that could not be done by any non-blockchain distributed system? The chief value in blockchain seems to be in getting people to agree to do something at all.
- zghst 9y agoIt would be highly irresponsible not to do so
- nosuchthing 9y agoWhy? Artificial and delusional scarcity of software derived database entries, of which a multitude of newer alternative service networks are being created every day?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- 2close4comfort 9y agoSo someone at Fidelity watched Mr Robot I think they missed some parts but lets see how this plays out...(starts thinking about moving investments away from Fidelity).
- notadoc 9y agoIt sure feels like "blockchain" and "cryptocurrency" are the new misunderstood but mandatory usage buzzwords of the day.