blacksapphire08
I've been hearing about these things more often lately so I decided to do some research. Basically you download and run a client that makes your hardware process a "block" of data to get a bitcoin. So this is similar to folding then? What is contained in this block of data?

Apparently a bitcoin is worth $10 or more, so they're just giving out free money then? There has to be something in the data that my hardware is processing to get the bitcoin that makes it worth any kind of monetary value right? None of this makes any sense to me and the whole thing smells like one big hacker trick. For all I know the client could be using computers for bot farms to break into secure databases.

 

CLL1990
legendary thread

This is so funny. "a bitcoin is worth $10 or more"
And the other guy that said it's a scam?  He's still right.

blacksapphire08
Apparently a bitcoin is worth $10 or more, so they're just giving out free money then? There has to be something in the data that my hardware is processing to get the bitcoin that makes it worth any kind of monetary value right? None of this makes any sense to me and the whole thing smells like one big hacker trick.

Think of it this way: mining one Bitcoin with a standard computer would take years and years and years.  It's definitely not free money.  If you wanted to do this as a business and make a decent living off of it, the initial investment costs $25,000 and it would take you half a year just to recoup your initial investment.  After that initial investment pays for itself, you could make $50,000 a year, which is a decent living, but then your $25,000 miner would eventually be antiquated and you would need to upgrade, or the cryptocurrency could crash at any point and you would be out of an income.  Cryptocurrency is only worth what someone will pay, yes, but it is also priced based on competition and real costs.  If there was a "one simple trick" to getting Bitcoin rich by mining for cheap, someone would be doing it, and the price would fall accordingly.  It's not magic money that you make for doing nothing.  If you are going to do it for a living, it takes a lot of investment and a lot of courage.  People are willing to pay a certain amount out-of-pocket for a face-value purchase as an investment today rather than waiting half a year to "earn" the cryptocurrency through mining.  If you could quickly "earn" the cryptocurrency by mining, more people would mine for cheap with cheap hardware rather than buy it at face value, and then the face value price would plummet.  As such, the face value is somewhat tied to the price of real hardware and real expenses.
 
But it is also really speculative.  And also really kind of useless as a currency at the moment.  So, who knows.

For all I know the client could be using computers for bot farms to break into secure databases.

It's open source, so rest assured that smart people have verified that this isn't happening.

Man hope the guy who did this held onto the coins til recently lol

lol talk about bringing a post back from the dead. I posted this like 10 years ago.

Chrome-M-Dragon
Meh. I have 2.5 Bitcoin somewhere in the void I can't access. How's that make you feel?
 

That really sucks...it's something like 120k bucks?

lol this thread gave me flashbacks of buying btc for 8 bucks a pop