Topic: Stop building mining rigs people!!!!! (Read 9030 times)

Don't forget to sell off all your old useless mining parts for BTC!

think you forgot including this in your picture:

  right .... Colossus displays a cryptic warning: "THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM"

Collossus we know you and GLaDOS are up to no good. How much she charge for a world domination lap dance?

These are the machines built by people and people can take away your precious anytime.

Is it me or is the bitcoin network now the most powerful supercomputer in the word?

No no, you got it wrong. They made it illegal for anyone except themselves.

Holy christ on a cracker, I never thought I'd meet another person who's seen Dead Alive in my lifetime. Or Braindead, or whatever you want to call it.

Heh.

Well, I'd prefer never to have to use my guns on anything except inanimate objects, of course. I just worry that when the state is essentially reduced to a very large criminal gang without any attempt at being "legitimate", some people may have little choice.

The remmy up top... .308 or .30-06?

A lot of ass-kicking for the Lord going on around here it seems.

Nobody can stop me from buying mining rigs. If I don't profit from mining directly I'll profit from trading.

If governments drop the pretense, they will no longer have a monopoly on violence.  Not in places wherein privately held firearms exist in an numbers anyway.  Whether those same firearms are "legal" or not.  And those that fancy themselves as a legitimate ruling class know this very well.

Religious gun enthusiast. You know I start to like you 

Hey, some of us are also gun enthusiasts.

And community activists, which is a good way to effect non-state organization. It might not be so bad. 

What bothers me is that bitcoin maybe the defining catalyst for the state to have its "crossing the Rubicon moment", shed any pretense of legitimacy and go completely feral.

After that, she's all on, as far as I'm concerned, with us or against times. And a bunch of computer enthusiasts are on the front-line of much nastiness, how sad would that be?

The fact that businesses are not prohibited from refusing legal tender doesn't mean the .gov is okay with them accepting non-legal tender. I'm not an expert in the matter, and I could be wrong. I just don't see how that quote from the Treasury's site shows that I am. I would be interested to see something that does.


Can't find any conveniently and I don't care enough to keep looking. Consider the point conceded in your favor.


If things get to that point, I expect that state will not be very concerned with retaining its image of legitimacy any more. They won't need clever arguments when they have a monopoly on violence. I mean, it's not like they don't already break their own laws with things as they currently stand. Though perhaps an event capable of causing such a crisis - such as widespread integration of Bitcoin into the mainstream economy - would render them powerless to prosecute anyone for using Bitcoin in the first place.

Screw them..I for one would not sell them..

Do you really think that all bitcoin  users are motivated purely by profit motives?

They'll look bad, but I doubt enough people will care to do something about it. The FBI actually (I'm not kidding!) raided university kids' apartment building because they alleged the kids were farming WoW gold. This was just a few weeks ago. Did you see any outrage?

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110408/03292413827/fbi-hunting-down-world-warcraft-gold-farmers.shtml

Very nice! So you're set for not only the robot uprising but also a zombie apocalypse

on new egg the 5970 comes with a gun  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150500&cm_re=5970-_-14-150-500-_-Product
Newegg has been preparing for this day a long time now

I agree 100% that 100 years ago the US was more sensible about taxation (income tax is a big point).  But the IRS has been co-oped as a pseudo-police force in recent decades.  Watching the raids where the IRS shows up swat team style and confiscates everything in sight based on a "tip".  Anything that makes wealth transfer hard to track has become illegal.

The post 9/11 "Know your customer" rules and the fact that you can be arrested and have money confiscated just for carrying a few thousand dollars shows a sad road ahead.  I wish my comment was purely a tax policy issue but like the "Interstate Commerce Clause" abuse that the courts seem to just let slide, I see the US government as willing to use any means necessary to stop something they don't like.

I need to read up on a liquid fuel tax structure, but I was under the belief that the US has most of the refining capacity so the oil producers ship crude here to be refined.  Not sure how that would work.  I just worry for the mining pool operators in the US getting a "No Knock" visit for supporting something the government doesn't like.  Hopefully it won't happen soon or at all.

yes, there is nothing quite like a good googling for the old girl ....

His endoskeleton has no match against my super-duper concrete donkey:

You should have replied, "we don't do that here", as if she asked for a happy ending of some sort.

Was this after she asked you to fix her cupholder?

Well... did you???

Today a woman asked me if I installed google on her laptop

they have to first make bitcoin miners look like criminals before they actually go after them or else they lose the public relations war with braindead mainstreamers ...

how's it gonna look if the goons are kicking in doors of geeks with gaming rigs on "COPS" shows .... those same geeks who bought us lovely toys like iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, email, internet porn ... notta good look ... they can't paint a 100,000 geeks as hackers.

it's much easier to kick in doors of some poor mexican immigrant worker's hovel in a huge over the top "drug raid" for half a bag of weed ... put it to loud thumping music, shakey, excitable, hand-held camera work and bright spotlights on scared "perp" shots and you got yourself a nice bad guy, good guy narrative and police state desensitisation all in a TV show ...

can't see it working with bitcoin mining rigs unless this society is even more far gone than my paranoid mind is imagining ... unlikely, but I've underestimated the depravity of the "state is god mentality" before

I doubt this really.  Governments everywhere had other methods of taxation before the income tax, which only came to the US in 1913.  Prior to that, the better part of the US federal revenue came from excise taxes on alchohol.  Bitcoin just makes the income tax difficult again.  It doesn't abolish a governments abilities to tax.  The US might end up with a liquid fuel importation tax, which would work similar to Europe's VAT taxes on fuel.  The results would be to vastly favor oil pumped and refined within the US is economicly favored, but it's impossible to supply the US on domestic production alone.  This creates a bottleneck that the government can watch (ports) and collect taxes.

I think the primary way the government might attack bitcoin is over taxes.  Converting USD to Bitcoin can be claimed as income on a tax form (investment profits) and should be fine.  But keeping profits purely bitcoin and paying for services the same way is bound to attract the IRS eventually.  Right now bitcoin trades as a commodity like gold.  

The perceived value of the item causes people to buy in (USD) and cash out (USD) like any other market.  Now you can trade real gold for services and goods but once again the tax man gets angry.

The buy in and cash out process can provide legitimacy since USD could be considered the currency and bitcoin the commodity.  Now I know the central idea is pure bitcoin transactions but that rainbow is closer to the 21million mark.  We need the difficulty to stop being a factor and the mining pools to disband once their job is done (I'm am not against them - I use them) to see bitcoin only transactions to become (a broad) reality.  Since all are real costs of living in the US are denominated in USD the price of a bitcoin (or fraction of) needs to find a stable point.

I don't think we will get there until we make the transition from a mining driven model to the transaction model that comes later.

As for my rig it is self aware and has decided since it is trapped in a black metal box the best course of action is buying it's freedom with Mh/hr.

how exactly does hashing result in intelligence? That's like saying all of the calculators in the world will become sentient.

That was the memoir of a former CIA operative.

Skynet killed because its designers killed and the tendencies emerged in the software (or if you wanna go scifi, the hardware).

Nothing to worry about.

If the mining rigs ever become self-consistent, they will attack the federal reserve and blame it on Anonymous, which Anons will have a hard time not agreeing with.

Thus driving the price up to astronomical levels and making mining insanely profitable.

From having worked with PayPal in other contexts, I can assure you that they will shut you down for sneezing funny, no matter what promises they have made in the past, and without explanation.

It was Johnson & Johnson. I'm sure others have done it, too.

They can only buy what people are willing to sell...

The current bitcoin owners could get rich if they bought it all =D

IIRC, the US Gov't did exactly that maybe a year or so ago one time when a book came out they didn't like the content of. I also recall a pharma company sending agents to purchase all of their products at pharmacies produced when one of their manufacturing plants failed to meet certain safety guidelines so they wouldn't have to issue a recall (or something like that).

Not that outlandish of an idea.

It is very easy to shut down bitcoin! they can buy it all! :p

All according to plan

Hmm, it seems the reasons for the raid and the charges actually brought are two different matters.

I haven't paid much attention to the liberty dollar but it was my understanding that the notes where perfectly fine, it was when they started passing off the physical coins as money that they broke the law legislation.

Popular misconception. From the Treasury's website.



Citation?


They shut down the Liberty Dollar under the premise that it was too similar to federal reserve notes. I'm interested to see what argument they use against Bitcoin...

Hey there, you need to syncronize your dogmas -- I thought AI was supposed to be our ally in the struggle for utopian anarchy?

If History is any indication, the state will make trading in bitcoin illegal at the same time it makes trading dollars for Euros illegal as well. Look at Zimbabwe's recent monetary collapse. They didn't just make it illegal to buy or use US dollars (which were the most popular substitute); they tried to nip any form of alternative markets in the bud by making Zim dollars the ONLY currency that could be used anywhere, by anyone, ever.

And there are already laws to that effect on the books in America. It is actually considered fraudulent to present non-legal tender as money. The fedgov doesn't tend to make a big deal about people using official money printed or minted by Canada, but there are cases of people using Mexican dollars in America being charged with fraud. Market currencies like bitcoin and the Liberty Dollar are far more likely targets then other state-approved currencies, but when things get really hairy they will probably regard ANY potential competition to the dollar as an actionable threat.

We trade them for EUR and then EUR to USD.

What hash rate are you getting out of that rig?

Additionally, the US might just collapse under its own weight before then anyway. Especially if bitcoin becomes popular enough that people start abandoning legal tender in its favor. (Oh please oh please oh please...)

The us government won't make it illegal the democrats will tax it to death

I think the legal implications and the infringement of the constitution such ruling could cause would evolve into such a long legal spiral that by the time the gov can bring in a strong enough case to outlaw Bitcoins, it will have taken over the USA already.

It's helpful to remember that when governments suppress markets, the markets don't go away. They just go underground. And they also grow the profit margins associated with those markets by doing so. I see black markets as a potentially good thing (as my custom title suggests). It depends on whether the people who participate them have conscious ethical goals or not. Which is why I encourage libertarians to embrace "counter-economic" activity.

No they didn't. They just gave themselves a monopoly on doing it.

That would slow the growth of Bitcoin a bit, but not to a halt. People would still generate the same number of new bitcoins each day (the difficulty adjustment takes care of that), and they're going to do something with those coins. Those who generate the bitcoins would trade them within an ever-increasing group of Bitcoin users. I think Bitcoin is already at critical mass and would cope with exchanges being made illegal.

Exactly.

What happens if/when all conversions from BTC to USD are made illegal?  If the mainstream can't do it easily, it will never catch on.  And the US will likely ensure that the mainstream can't do it easily.

I've seen it work with hot women and miserable looking toothless old men =O


The only made it illegal to get rid of the competition!!

Also, Sarah Connor anyone?

I think it works without assuming any sarcasm.

I'm surprised this isn't a more prevalent topic. Perhaps not Arnold (well, at least not now that he's been replaced as governor), but we should take into account the hoops the US Gov't & others could make us jump through if they started to more-openly attack Bitcoin, and it should be factored in to persons' decision to build a mining rig. Paypal fairly recently shut down arguably the most painless-to-use BTC seller, Coinpal, and I'm not entirely convinced Paypal came to the decision internally after giving it the OK multiple times. Other sites like Mt Gox (currently operating on a domain regulated by the USG's lap-dog, ICANN) are at risk of being shut down or at least having operations hindered if the USG decides BTC is a credible threat to their power. The Constitution hasn't been a reliable defense against tyranny for decades (at least), and we should give the proper thought to scenarios unfavorable to us the USG could create.

Can't tell if you're being single-sarcastic or double-sarcastic, but it doesn't take a government for a society to consider the use or threat of violence immoral. In fact, I would argue that governments by their very nature participate happily in the very behavior from which you think they protect us.

Youre absolutely right. Here a pic of mi gunning rig




(?)

They do. There's a very old and very efficient business model about that. Just ask, in a very polite way, people to give you all of their money. It generally doesn't work except if you have a gun in your hand at the same time. It's very efficient because you can re-use the gun as many time as you want.

Unfortunately, this was a so easy business model that most government made it illegal. Damn government, they are really abusing their power. We should be allowed to conduct any business we want between consenting adults.

My rig sits on a platform above a large bucket of water, and the platform is rigged to drop by pulling a string hanging down from my desk lamp.  You know, just in case.

Dooooooo theyyyyyy?

 

No.  Guns & Ammo don't make me money.

  mining rigs? ....what mining rigs ...nothing to see here, move along now. (large data center sound in the background) 

Hey now, we're behind schedule!  The difficulty is only projected to increase 28% this time around!

The network will soon be at 20 PetaFLOPS/s and ther doesn't seem to be any slow down in hashing growth.  The computing power is mind boggling!  Some one needs to alert the Govenator cause you poor bastards are building Sky Net.  Don't be surprised if Arnold kicks down your door and blows away your mining rigs w/ a shotgun.