There’s a hot new alt-coin on the market and it’s gearing up to set the bitcoin world on fire, finally pushing it to the mainstream!
This amazing new coin is called Lolicoin. Wait, what the fuck?
oh god oh GOD OH GOD!
Hopefully the community is against this.
Phew! Looks like this will be dead on arrival…
Dammit.
The Department of Homeland security has just blocked the most popular payment processor, Dwolla, from doing any more business with Mt. Gox. No word yet on why this was done (rumor is it’s due to recent Coinlab action) but as of now it’s becoming more difficult and more expensive to move USD in or out of Mt. Gox.
Text version:
DWOLLA
As of 12:13 PM on 5/14/2013:
You
Wired got sent a bitcoin miner from Butterfly Labs and they put it through it’s paces. Wired then decided to setup the most boring “Let’s Play” and start livestreaming the thing just hashing away, a mind numbing endless stream of random numbers on a screen.
Since Wired is a journalistic entity and it would probably be very unethical to profit off the mining of a free review unit sent by a company, Wired decided to destroy the keys to the wallet file used to store the bitcoins.
But in the end, the answer was obvious. The world
If, for some reason, you missed it, Forbes blogger Kashmir Hill spent a week using nothing but bitcoins as cash in what I can only assume was an experiment to prove that it can be done and to demonstrate the viability of Bitcoin as a currency. The true believers will inevitably point to this experience as an example of Bitcoin working in the real world, but their bias blinds them to the truth: it is not possible to survive using nothing but bitcoins. As a publication is totally unbiased and entirely honest with regard to bitcoins, we’re here to point out the things that bitcoiners ignored or glossed over.
Our heroine (or victim, depending on your viewpoint) began with a sum of five bitcoins (when they were selling for roughly $142.00,) purchased through Coinbase, since the Magic: the Gathering Online eXchange is awful and legitimate banks won’t allow funds to be transferred to a shady Japanese “business.” She immediately discovered that you can’t buy food with bitcoins unless you’re willing to buy questionable preserves from strangers or stock up on end-of-the-world survivalist rations. Someone eventually pointed her to a service which acts as a middleman, ordering things from local restaurants and then delivering them, adding a service fee for the convenience. For some reason, they accept bitcoins. She immediately handed over an entire bitcoin, giving them around $130.00 at the time for orders yet to be made.
We focus primarily on Bitcoin here because it’s the most prevalent, the most awful, and the most hilarious, but since it was released as an open source project, other developers were free to use its source and create their own versions of the cryptocurrency, offering what they considered to be improvements or extra features. Most of them are more or less pump and dump schemes and don’t actually provide anything useful or act as a viable alternative.
The general lifecycle of one of these altcoins is as follows (thanks to SA forums poster eames for the easily digestible info):
1. Copy-paste bitcoin-, litecoin- or similar code from github and slightly modify it, maybe even hire a coder to add an actual feature. The latter is optional because but it may make the marketing in step 4 easier.
2. Hire a professional web and logo designer… to make the whole deal look “trustworthy” to buttcoin investors. (MS Paint would likely suffice)
3. Start mining the new currency privately with a few… buddies until you all have a couple hundred thousand or whatever. This is called “premining”.*
4. When you have a large enough headstart, publicly release the coin, telling everybody that now is the time to become an early adopter. Your new coins are the future! Marketing! Hype! Since the community is full of people with more Buttcoins than brains, you’ll have no problem finding adopters who will gladly buy your useless coins. **
5. Once the coin has gained some momentum, tell btc-e.com you may accidentally send them hundred thousand of your coins if they start trading the coins on their site in return.
6. Very slowly dump your hundred thousands of coins after the IPO on btc-e.com, trading them into hundreds or thousands of BTC which you can sell for actual money.
7. Weeks later, by the time people realize that it is all a huge pump and dump, you have hopefully sold off a good chunk of your coins for BTC.
8. btc-e.com removes your new coin because the trading volume is too low and nobody is interested in it anymore. People forget about it and move on. You convert your BTC to USD and buy a nice house and car. A very nice house and a very nice car.
* Step 3 may not work anymore because the buttcoin community has realized that premining is not cool. You could still rent mining power for the very rewarding period right after the launch and/or DDoS any mining pools that may pop up during the first “land rush” to make sure the currency is not evenly distributed and you get all the initial coins.
Now that we’ve established how to make your own *coin, let’s take a look at a few of the notable failures.
Wired got to be one of the lucky few to actually get a Butterfly Labs miner. Hey, you gotta perpetuate the scam somehow!
Here’s what they had to say:
Wired has taken possession of a 5-Gigahash per second Bitcoin Miner, built by Butterfly Labs
Meet Patrick O’Rourke
He’s a tech “journalist” for Canada.com. I write “journalist” in quotations because it’s obvious he’s just a shill for the Fed, trying to spread FUD about the revolution known as Bitcoin.
You see, what our little narc friend here did was write a hit piece on bitcoins. A hit piece so scathing, so scandalous that it got Reddit in a a full on panty twist. Clocking in at a massive 250 words, this piece of filth got so much sand in Reddit’s collective vagina that they set out to destroy this very handsome and very very attractive man’s young career.
Thanks to the enduring popularity of our last showcase of horrifying mining rigs and our recent interview with the Daily Dot, I’ve been inspired to go on another Mining Rig safari. Here are the most recent trophies:
papamoi wants to mine bitcoins, and badly. In March he started asking around for info on some serious butt-mining hardware, looking for ASIC arrays and “super servers” that would feed his need for unbridled wastefulness. BFL wasn’t shipping, Avalon was only sending out orders in batches, and nobody else was producing comparable hardware, and his search had him running in unfulfilling circles until he found Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking.
Our story’s hero pestered the guys at Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking about building a custom mining server, and they responded that they could build him something that provided 1.7 terahashes of bitcoin-mining waste. Of course, he wanted proof, and they gave him the run-around several times, responding with jargon, claims of NDAs, and even appearing to confuse gigahashes with gigahertz. All the while papamoi has been scouring the BitcoinTalk forums for chips, PCB designers, and other high-performance hardware, to no avail.
Our intrepid hero was put off, but then the Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking team said the magic word: “Google.” Apparently Google has been buying “super servers” from Ed Trice in Philadelphia, instead of major, well-known manufacturers such as Dell, HP, or IBM. Lured in by the promise of amazing Google-caliber hardware, papamoi continued, and was surely happy to find that Google was totally cool with the fellows at Liquid Nitrogen selling some pubbie their exclusively designed servers.
