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As someone who lost over 100 bitcoins in a sketchy mining pool, for the love of god, please be careful. I was in early on this madness, and dedicated my gaming

• ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  How did you lose money in a mining pool? Hopped in a cloudmining scam? Mining pools don't store funds, you tell them your payout address.
  • kobeya 9y ago
    Not all pool software was, or even still is so enlightened.
  • whyenot 9y ago
    I seem to remember that in some pools you had to initiate a payout to your wallet through the pool website. Payouts weren't automatic.
  • ww520 9y ago
    They used his machine for mining over the years but never paid?
  • pmorici 9y ago
    They used to store funds.
  • stordoff 9y ago
    In the early days, I fairly sure you had to manually request a payout. Even when automatic payouts were added, the default thresholds to trigger a payment were at what would now be a fairly significant amount.
• Nicholas7900 9y ago
  Some times, i don't code programs. I know that's a typical of someone perceived as a hacker, but my techniques have always been a typical. For instance, it might surprise readers to know that all of the widely publicized hacks I was involved in - let's call that the "Adrian Classic" period :p - were done using a web browser and Notepad, on dialup, on Windows 98. If you stop to think about it, this is really a true meta-hack. People who ask to learn how to hack are generally told to install Linux, learn how to code, and experiment with various hacking tools. Much how network administrators learning to secure their systems tend to get the same certifications, read many of the same books. This results in activity that's really more like jousting than hacking - a predefined pattern of attack taking place against a predefined pattern of defense. When i started Hacking, I learnt how to code, I learned to read code, and I learned how programmers thought, which assumptions they tended to make, and what mistakes their common training tended to cause them to make in common across completely different systems. One example of this is writing access code with the assumption that if failure = no then access = yes. On many systems, I found that by simply removing a username or password field, access would be automatically granted - because there had been no username or password failure, since there had been none to fail, so access was granted. Because my methods were and are unorthodox, they are rarely detected by intrusion detection systems. They don't resemble common attacks because they aren't common attacks. I often make them up on the spot. Which is why the question "teach me to hack" is so frustrating. This is particularly emphasized by a meme pic I got a Google Alert for this morning: I always give readers free Access to reach me for all kinds of Hacking Issues though : compositehacks@gmail.com
• tryingagainbro 9y ago
  eh, just 100 bitcoins (stop whining, back then).... $800K today. Damn! It's still the wild, wild west in that world. Those few that saw it 6-7 years ago, made bets that were relatively small, sorta buying lottery tickets. It takes a lot of "faith," for a lack of better term to invest serious money now.
  • sillysaurus3 9y ago
    It's not quite that simple. I sold 5 BTC at the $32 peak and felt smart. It crashed right after, and I paid a phone bill. The temptation to sell was far stronger in the early days, mostly because people were unprepared for the sheer volatility of BTC. It's been the most lucrative tulip farm in history, and unlike tulips BTC is useful. It's hard to know where it will top out.
    • dpiers 9y ago
      How is bitcoin useful? Other coins do exactly the same thing with faster transactions, more anonymity, and lower fees.
      • weddpros 9y ago
        the same applies to the dollar, which is useful, only not the cheapest, fastest or most anonymous...
      • davrosthedalek 9y ago
        So they are useful too?
      • golergka 9y ago
        Network effect. Try buying MDMA online with Dogecoin.
      • repomies691 9y ago
        Liquidity is the most important property of the cryptocurrency. Faster transactions, anonymity or lower fees hardly matter if there are no places where I can spend the currency. Or if I sell services with it, there are no customers willing to pay. It is a huge chicken-and-egg problem, but looks like Bitcoin has solved it at least some level, since it is accepted on quite many places. We might start seeing services and merchants adopting other cryptocurrencies as well, but currently those alternatives don't seem that widely adopted.