SUPER MONEY!

The post Move over, Bitcoin, SUPER MONEY is here appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

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.

Bitcoin savings account

This brings up a point that few have acknowledged: budgeting. Throughout this entire adventure, Kash makes terrible budgetary decisions. She’s already dropped over a hundred dollars on restaurant dining, which won’t go far, instead of spending wisely and stocking up on several weeks’ worth of groceries. This will be a recurring theme and ultimately leads to the failure of this experiment. Kashmir has jokingly referred to this week as the “Bitcoin diet,” since she ends up walking and biking in order to get to wherever she’s going, and can’t get sufficient or healthy food.

Before we move on, I must bring up the next salient point: the “price” of bitcoins is fantastically unstable. The alleged value of bitcoins is driven entirely by speculation and is prone to wild oscillations. During the week, Kash’s initial “investment” of around $735.00 shrank to somewhere around $395.00 and bounced unpredictably up and down in between. Any business with an ounce of sense and a desire to make reliable profits will price their products in dollars (or whatever other national currency their location requires) and then adjust the Bitcoin price for the goods based on the current exchange rate. To do anything else would be astoundingly foolish and an invitation to financial losses.

Coming back to the subject at hand, on the second day of the week of Bitcoin, Kash finds (or likely already knows) that her landlord, who she usually pays through PayPal, doesn’t accept bitcoins. Her landlord, in actuality a friend, offers to let her pay rent with real money later on, but Kash is committed to her suffering and “[i]n an act of desperation,” sends her landlord two of her bitcoins via Coinbase email and, realizing the futility of this action, begins to search for lodging that will accept bitcoins. At the end of the second day, she’s only got 1.75 left, which at the time amounts to a little over $150. She mentions that she has been receiving “tips,” the Bitcoin equivalent of change dropped into an empty coffee cup on a street corner, but doesn’t reveal how much these equal. To celebrate lack of foresight, she spends another $30 on coffee and wine.

On day three, nothing terribly notable happens. Kash goes to an odd production in which people are locked in a room, but had purchased the tickets months beforehand with filthy fiat money. Feeling guilty over this, she works out a way to justify using them, letting her date buy them from her through a convoluted process involving a Bitcoin ATM of sorts, hosted by The Internet Archive in their offices. This gives her an additional 0.6757 bitcoins to spend later. She pays for a partially-comped meal and then walks two miles to the show. The day closes out with 1.9931 plus undisclosed tips, $181 at the time.

On a typical Friday night…

Day 4 opens with an even lower price, as CoinLab’s lawsuit against MtGox�was announced late the previous evening, along with the revelation that there are links to child pornography embedded in the blockchain, panicking “investors” and leading to sales and drops in the market. It’s a Friday, so Kashmir struggles to find something entertaining to do during the weekend that doesn’t require real money and settles on a family birthday party, to which she takes 0.5896 BTC worth of cupcakes. Before hitting up the party though, she purchases around a hundred dollars worth of groceries at an artisanal (read “overpriced”) market, her haul appearing to be sufficient for two or three days’ worth of meals. $100 at Costco can keep me fed for a month if I plan it out just right.

She outlines meeting with the entrepreneur who runs the market and somehow comes to the conclusion that bitcoiners are akin to vegans, probably because they can’t eat much in the way of healthy food and end up pale and malnourished, but with a higher concentration of fedoras. She pays him and he immediately spends it on something else rather than risk losing value during the price fluctuations. She goes home and spends the evening in, finding later that her landlord has rejected the two bitcoins because they’re an awful hassle, bringing her balance back up to 2.2397.

The next day she pays the man who delivers the wine she’d ordered a few days before to drive her to her family BBQ, giving her brother-in-law the worst gift imaginable: 0.34 BTC. She spends the rest of the party evangelizing about bitcoins and people there allegedly want some of their own. Someone else drives her home. Aside from the 0.34, nothing is spent.

Photo credit: Kashmir Hill

Sunday arrives and Kashmir must move out of her condo and into somewhere that accepts bitcoins for rent payments. In lieu of an earnest search, she posts on reddit instead, inviting the worst of the worst of the Bitcoin community to meet her in person and eat sushi, then buys more expensive groceries from Buyer

The post Living on Bitcoin for a week: What we should have learned appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

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.

Solidcoin

Solidcoin was an alternative to Bitcoin in which the developer (going by both�CoinHunter and RealSolid) forked Bitcoin, pre-mined several million “coins,” and included a killswitch that could halt the entire network, ostensibly to protect against the dreaded 51% attack. Of course, bitcoiners adopted it in droves until someone broke its blockchain with “low-fee large-sized transactions.” It was given up on and shut down by RealSolid on�September 13, 2011, after backlash from the Bitcoin community and the aforementioned exploits. Someone has revived it, but it’s more or less dead.

Litecoin

Litecoin is the current favorite of those who missed the Bitcoin boat and can’t afford to throw their dirty fiat at MtGox to buy any. It was designed to have a faster rate of block generation (one every two and a half minutes) and to decrease the effectiveness of GPU mining (and eliminate the resulting hardware arms race that’s brought us such gems as Butterfly Labs) by using�scrypt for the primary hashing. Currently Litecoins can be had for about $3.50, and many bitcoiners seem to think that it would work better for smaller transactions, as a sort of penny to Bitcoin’s “dollar.” Note that this view is often espoused by advocates of Litecoin. It really adds nothing to the scene, aside from another pointless thing to excite nerds.

Feathercoin

Feathercoin is just Litecoin at quad speed. Watch it pump and dump here.

Terracoin

Terracoin appears to just be Bitcoin with a cap of 42 million “coins” and faster difficulty adjustment. Yet another attempt to capitalize on trading a worthless thing for a slightly less worthless thing.

PPCoin

I don’t even remember this one being announced. According to the Bitcoin wiki, it’s the “first known implementation of a combined Proof of Stake/Proof of Work system,” which, if I’m reading all this garbage correctly, means those who have more PPCoins will generate more PPCoins than those who have fewer. I could be wrong though, and chances are nobody cares, because who’s even using this?

Namecoin

Namecoin is an attempt at decentralizing and distributing DNS, which is what makes the web convenient. DNS happens to already be distributed to a degree, and is incredibly well-established and widely used, making namecoin seem kind of pointless and arbitrary. Its primary use appears to be allowing nerds to create website domains with the “.bit” TLD.

IxCoin

�IxCoin was just Bitcoin with the FastForward button pressed. The block reward was 96 instead of 50, and the creator mined over 400,000 “coins” for himself. As originally designed, once the network reached 21 million coins, it would just shut down. It’s since been abandoned and appears to have been a pump and dump scheme.

Freicoin

Freicoin is a special case, and we’ve actually had the opportunity to speak with one of its developers. According to the person or persons who created it, “Freicoin is a decentralized, distributed electronic currency designed to address the grievances of the 99% movement and correct the excesses of the 1%.” The project aims to disincentivize hoarding and act as an actual unit of exchange, by “destroying” coins that are saved for too long and then redistributing them to the miners.

Freicoin was brought to our attention when one of its developers stopped by our IRC channel, linking to an entry in the “Your Kickstarter Sucks” tumblr and incorrectly assuming that the FYAD posters mocking him were in fact secret bitcoiners. After totally misinterpreting their mockery, he went on to explain how he co-opted the language and mission of the now-defunct Occupy movement, going so far as to display images from Occupy events on Freicoin’s website and claim affiliation with Occupy when it appears more like they were trying to pitch their knockoff bitcoins to protesters, much like Bruce Wagner before them.

In the course of speaking with this gentleman, we found that not only is Freicoin not connected to or endorsed in any way by Occupy, but that the developers are misrepresenting other aspects of the project. Half of the funds collected by the Indiegogo campaign were donated by none other than the developer himself, who then worked for free, as the small amount of funding that was collected through misrepresentation went to another dev in another state.

Furthermore, it was found that our guest’s Sonichu Coins are totally not a copy or fork of Bitcoin even though it’s just a version of Bitcoin with various tweaks to punish hoarders. Instead it’s a TOTALLY ORIGINAL CHARACTER DO NOT STEAL�and we should feel bad for even considering that, even though it uses Bitcoin’s technology and terminology, it’s tied to or related to Bitcoin at all. After, during the course of our conversation, it was shown that the Bitcoin Foundation had no members who were women, we posited that “since Freicoin is left wing and endorsed by the occupy movement [we] assume it has 50% women on board.” Of course our dev doesn’t know if that is true or not, and then slipped up, admitting that the hilarious and awful “Men’s Rights” movement is justified.

At this point he backpedaled furiously, realizing that he’d made a fool of himself and his project. Do not use Freicoin: the misrepresentative, Kickstarter-defrauding, MRA currency. Don’t use any of the other pump and dump currencies either. Hell, don’t even use Bitcoins.

The post When the mining gets tough, the (not so) tough get forked appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

One Bitcoiner almost gets it:

So, it’s just like paying with your credit card the way you do now, except more complicated, involves you paying more than what you actually need to buy, forces you to trust someone else to hold on to your money, and gives you coins that you can’t sell back, which are completely useless outside of Amazon. Is it just me, or does this seem like a totally useless idea that misses all the points of having a virtual currency?

They are so close to understanding…

The post Amazon introduces not-Bitcoins appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

It’s a good thing he mentioned that it’s a “high risk currency” or else some mod might have been forced to wade through the Bitcoin forums to figure out what this asshat is blabbering on about.

Another Steam member offered a better solution

At least bottle caps are of more use than a crypto-currency no one wants to use.

The post The buttcoin is a lie! (insert Portal reference here) appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

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Yeah, sorry about your “paper currency” dudes, buttcoin has officially put you on notice!�

The post The dollar? Banks? Heh, that’s cute. appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.