ok so the past couple of updates i sent out i mentioned that there's no longer sufficient funds in the current campaign to further pay accommodation or any other living expenses. thus it is *really important* that i find sources of funds, immediately. beyond that, i may have found something that's worth exploring that has the potential to fund pretty much absolutely everything that we want to achieve, if it is leveraged correctly.
one of the options that i am exploring is bltclub. i happened to have 0.65 BTC available, the price of bitcoin happened to be rising such that it was worth around USD $5000 at the time, i happened to hear about bitclub from a friend, and my prior experience with bitcoin mining i'd already done the preliminary analysis so it was an extremely easy and fast decision.
bitclub - a group of like-minded people who happen to share a common interest - mine three percent of the world's bitcoin. three percent. at today's market rate that's twenty four ***MILLION*** US Dollars being generated by this group, every month. that's a staggering amount of money which immediately made it worthwhile investigating.
the members basically make their money in two ways:
(a) mining (of which they receive A HUNDRED PERCENT of the bitcoin mined - unlike many other mining clubs which take say 10%)
(b) multi-level marketing. this is by far and above the more profitable method and the fact that it exists is precisely why the club can provide 100% of the mined bitcoin to people who *only* wish... to mine bitcoin.
if you have ever done bitcoin mining, you will know that it is an absolute pain in the neck, and you will also know that you cannot get the equipment now for love nor money. not even bribes will work because you still have to out-bid everyone else who's offering bribes as well. and once you GET the equipment, if it breaks you lose downtime... that's if you can actually get the person you bribed to honour the warranty.
by using a *POOL* of people - buying in bulk - the "share" of the *POOL* is available to you. one piece of equipment fails, so what, that's amortised across thounsands of people. you also don't pay for electricity or cooling. or have fans whirring 24x7 in your house.
now, i *already have* two other people signed up: i am a few points away from hitting the first MLM milestone which would result in me receiving TWO HUNDRED US DOLLARS A DAY in *addition* to the bitcoin mining which is coming online in the next 48 hours.
i have two separate and distinct questions:
(1) is there anyone who does NOT wish to put their own money into buying bitclub shares who would like ME to sign them up, and, over the next few weeks and months, PAY their membership AND pay for their equipment.
(2) is there anyone who CAN put their own money into bitclub who would be interested to know more. if yes, and you already know about bitcoin mining and about MLM etc. the link is here http://bitclub.network/lkcl
the goal basically is to leverage this to become financially independently wealthy, and use it to fund libre hardware and software. there's about maybe 3 to 5 years in which bitcoin - specifically GROUP mining NOT individual mining - is a viable way to do that.
any questions feel free to ask.
l.
2017-12-27 10:59 GMT+01:00 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net: Top note. You're writing like a TellSell ad. I get that you're exited and in need. But it's not boosting confidence.
Also the worlds financial experts have a, perhaps healthy, fear of crypto currency's
Although I think that is also based on lack of insight. It remains currency trading, which in itself is risky business.
i have two separate and distinct questions:
(1) is there anyone who does NOT wish to put their own money into buying bitclub shares who would like ME to sign them up, and, over the next few weeks and months, PAY their membership AND pay for their equipment.
You sign me/us up, I/We pay?
(2) is there anyone who CAN put their own money into bitclub who would be interested to know more. if yes, and you already know about bitcoin mining and about MLM etc. the link is here http://bitclub.network/lkcl
I/We sign up and pay?
the goal basically is to leverage this to become financially independently wealthy, and use it to fund libre hardware and software. there's about maybe 3 to 5 years in which bitcoin - specifically GROUP mining NOT individual mining - is a viable way to do that.
We pay a amount and you enhance that amount via bitcoin group mining, right?
If so, Mine/Our input is one-time or reoccurring?
From what amount can I/We pitch in?
How well guarded is the group? The biggest risk in these "markets" is that if they get hacked the coins vanish at near lightning speed.
Kr, Mike
This sounds like a great opportunity. But I share Mike's questions. Can you clarify what (1) and (2) mean and what's needed for us to pitch in?
On 27/12/17 10:25, mike.valk@gmail.com wrote:
2017-12-27 10:59 GMT+01:00 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net: Top note. You're writing like a TellSell ad. I get that you're exited and in need. But it's not boosting confidence.
Also the worlds financial experts have a, perhaps healthy, fear of crypto currency's
Although I think that is also based on lack of insight. It remains currency trading, which in itself is risky business.
i have two separate and distinct questions:
(1) is there anyone who does NOT wish to put their own money into buying bitclub shares who would like ME to sign them up, and, over the next few weeks and months, PAY their membership AND pay for their equipment.
You sign me/us up, I/We pay?
(2) is there anyone who CAN put their own money into bitclub who would be interested to know more. if yes, and you already know about bitcoin mining and about MLM etc. the link is here http://bitclub.network/lkcl
I/We sign up and pay?
the goal basically is to leverage this to become financially independently wealthy, and use it to fund libre hardware and software. there's about maybe 3 to 5 years in which bitcoin - specifically GROUP mining NOT individual mining - is a viable way to do that.
We pay a amount and you enhance that amount via bitcoin group mining, right?
If so, Mine/Our input is one-time or reoccurring?
From what amount can I/We pitch in?
How well guarded is the group? The biggest risk in these "markets" is that if they get hacked the coins vanish at near lightning speed.
Kr, Mike
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 10:49 AM, Pen-Yuan Hsing penyuanhsing@gmail.com wrote:
This sounds like a great opportunity. But I share Mike's questions. Can you clarify what (1) and (2) mean and what's needed for us to pitch in?
hiya pen-yuan, ha, bit of cross-over, i just replied to mike.
(2) you, as an independent individual, with your own money, sign up, pay the membership yourself, buy equipment yourself, under my "tree". over time if you happen not to put anyone under *your* "tree" i will drop people in it *for* you. you'll end up receiving commission "for free" so to speak (and so will i)
(1) you don't pay anything AT ALL. you sign up, and *I* will pay your membership, *i* will buy your equipment. this can only happen OVER TIME (perhaps in 1, 2 or 3 months time), and i will ONLY do this if you are a software libre or hardware developer who is committed, long-term.
l.
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 10:25 AM, mike.valk@gmail.com mike.valk@gmail.com wrote:
2017-12-27 10:59 GMT+01:00 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net: Top note. You're writing like a TellSell ad.
it happens - it's almost unavoidable at the quotes top level quotes :) the key difference here is that the very "product" if you will of the MLM is *LITERALLY* being actually CREATED and can be put back in to buying more shares in the MLM which then make more bitcoin which then... round the loop for about the next 3-5 years.
Also the worlds financial experts have a, perhaps healthy, fear of crypto currency's
that's because they really, really don't understand it: all their experience is based on fiat currencies. and as crypto-currencies go up in value, fiat currencies correspondingly and naturally *go down*. this is something that everyone is forgetting, that, ultimately, the value of fiat currencies is going to be quite literally worthless.
a good book to read which outlines this in an easy to read fashion is senator ron paul's book, "End the Fed".
Although I think that is also based on lack of insight. It remains currency trading, which in itself is risky business.
ah no. that's one of the crucial mistakes. i am *not* in the *slightest* bit interested in currency *trading*. it's risky, and requires a huge amount of study, time and expertise to get it right. i would in *no way* recommend to people to do *trading* of crypto-currencies.
this is about mining, which is competely different, and i *have* studied that in depth (over the years).
i have two separate and distinct questions:
(1) is there anyone who does NOT wish to put their own money into buying bitclub shares who would like ME to sign them up, and, over the next few weeks and months, PAY their membership AND pay for their equipment.
You sign me/us up, I/We pay?
option (1) i pay. just not straight away, as i need to earn mining and commission to do it. i will prioritise people who have a direct link to some libre software or hardware project, past, present or future, prioritising further anyone who is specifically related to or can help with the immediate goals of EOMA68 and/or the Libre-RISCV64 project.
(2) is there anyone who CAN put their own money into bitclub who would be interested to know more. if yes, and you already know about bitcoin mining and about MLM etc. the link is here http://bitclub.network/lkcl
I/We sign up and pay?
option (2) you pay, yes.
the goal basically is to leverage this to become financially independently wealthy, and use it to fund libre hardware and software. there's about maybe 3 to 5 years in which bitcoin - specifically GROUP mining NOT individual mining - is a viable way to do that.
We pay a amount
from $0 upwards, yes.
and you enhance that amount via bitcoin group mining, right?
if you have some relation to free software or libre hardware and have or can demonstrate some committment to that... yes.
If so, Mine/Our input is one-time or reoccurring?
whatever you want to do, independently. each person is entirely sovereign and responsible for themselves. i would *like* - it would be nice - at some point for people to *also* start signing up *other people* and buying *their* initial equipment. the faster that is done, i.e. the quicker you can get more people under your own network, the higher the commissions.
the numbers here are just insane. the top levels are something like USD $10,000 a *DAY*, actually probably far more than that.
From what amount can I/We pitch in?
anything from $0 to $99 to $600, $1100, $1600 or $3600.
How well guarded is the group?
they're pretty paranoid. they just had a THIRD PARTY service get hacked, just 10 days ago, their infrastructure detected the attack - which was against the developer platform not the main one - within under 15 minutes and they shut down the entire web front-end immediately.
The biggest risk in these "markets" is
please understand: this is NOT a market. it's a mining operation. there is a massive, massive difference.
that if they get hacked the coins vanish at near lightning speed.
this is not an "exchange", it is a *mining* operation. the system "outputs" mined bitcoin to a given address that YOU specify in your web console, every day. you are in complete control of what that is. and are individually responsible for ensuring that you keep the (local) wallet password etc. secure. on YOUR personal device(s).
i'll have to train people on that (i'm recommending electrum as the ONLY way right now because your wallet is recoverable via a distributed peer-to-peer NON corporate controlled network)
l.
that's because they really, really don't understand it: all their experience is based on fiat currencies. and as crypto-currencies go up in value, fiat currencies correspondingly and naturally *go down*. this is something that everyone is forgetting, that, ultimately, the value of fiat currencies is going to be quite literally worthless.
a good book to read which outlines this in an easy to read fashion is senator ron paul's book, "End the Fed".
I am afraid `going up` is problem at the moment.
Currently you cant sell crypto to USD, there is lack of liquidity. Most probably there are some top holders of i.e. Bitocin and try to sell it to fiat as much as they can in this moment. it is classical ponzi scheme where few will get rich and minor investors will pay for it.
You cant purchase things. For example go to shop and buy a car. Price fluctuate 10,20,30% daily, so even if you are benevolent toward idea you cant really hold goods for 6 months and be sure that you will at the end make some margin. Remember, trade (business) is not about speculation but making margins in predictable way. With fiat you can go in restaurant and buy cup of coffee. With cryptos not. There is no economy behind it, just good idea and hype.
I have seen two projects based on cryptos in last two years, they are not coin speculation but real ideas that society could benefit,that are difficult to implement because lack of legislative, government want taxes, stakeholders resist it etc. Unless you see some real business and/or services based on blockchain there will be no real value of crypto-currencies.
Yes, ti is good idea, but what is going on right now is not good at all and if balloon burst it could do more harm then good.
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 12:07 PM, Hrvoje Lasic lasich@gmail.com wrote:
that's because they really, really don't understand it: all their experience is based on fiat currencies. and as crypto-currencies go up in value, fiat currencies correspondingly and naturally *go down*. this is something that everyone is forgetting, that, ultimately, the value of fiat currencies is going to be quite literally worthless.
a good book to read which outlines this in an easy to read fashion is senator ron paul's book, "End the Fed".
I am afraid `going up` is problem at the moment.
if we were talking about *trading* bitcoin i would be concerned. i am not in the slightest bit interested in *trading* of bitcoin. at all. it's an extremely risky thing to do, and it requires an extremely sound knowledge of trading, which you can spend a long, long time studying. i simply don't have time for that.
Currently you cant sell crypto to USD, there is lack of liquidity. Most probably there are some top holders of i.e. Bitocin and try to sell it to fiat as much as they can in this moment. it is classical ponzi scheme where few will get rich and minor investors will pay for it.
You cant purchase things. For example go to shop and buy a car. Price fluctuate 10,20,30% daily, so even if you are benevolent toward idea you cant really hold goods for 6 months and be sure that you will at the end make some margin. Remember, trade (business) is not about speculation but making margins in predictable way. With fiat you can go in restaurant and buy cup of coffee. With cryptos not.
you've not been to Keene, NH, have you? :) or to PorcFest. i bought a tornado potato 2 years ago, my friend paid in BTC for me. zapped the QR code on the window :)
thinkpenguin have been accepting bitcoin as payment for years, now. chris, the CEO, actually now pays all his home utility bills *and* his car insurance... in bitcoin.
it turns out that on average, sometimes he loses 10% on BTC fluctuation, sometimes he gains 10%. to support the *idea* - the freedom of trade - he accepts that fluctuation graciously, as does anyone else who trades in real-world items using bitcoin as the currency it actually is.
the fluctuation is actually down to the fact that not *everyone* is trading in bitcoin. think of it like this: if you were buying a potato from a farmer and paying him in USD, would you go OH MY GOD, THE YUEN HAS FLUCTUATED THIRTY PERCENT, PANIC PANIC PANIC!!! of course not.
so *when* the hypothetical car you mention has all of the sales employees paid in a (steady) bitcoin rate, when the *parts* of the car are bought and paid for in a (steady) amount of bitcoin, the price of the car *can* have a fixed amount (in bitcoin).
but it doesn't work that way, does it? so what do people do? well, they either put up with the fluctuation, or they "pin" the amount that you pay to within 10 minutes. you must make the transfer within 10 minutes or the rate is recalculated.
later on it will be possible - JUST LIKE EXISTING CURRENCIES - to go to a broker who will GUARANTEE you a fixed exchange rate. two futures trading markets have just been set up by large established companies (there were plenty already), which will make that underpinning easier to do.
... but all of this is completely a red herring.
There is no economy behind it,
this is simply not true. it may be the case that you've never *encountered* anyone who has paid or been paid for anything in bitcoin.
l.
On 27 December 2017 at 13:24, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 12:07 PM, Hrvoje Lasic lasich@gmail.com wrote:
that's because they really, really don't understand it: all their experience is based on fiat currencies. and as crypto-currencies go up in value, fiat currencies correspondingly and naturally *go down*. this is something that everyone is forgetting, that, ultimately, the value of fiat currencies is going to be quite literally worthless.
a good book to read which outlines this in an easy to read fashion is senator ron paul's book, "End the Fed".
I am afraid `going up` is problem at the moment.
if we were talking about *trading* bitcoin i would be concerned. i am not in the slightest bit interested in *trading* of bitcoin. at all. it's an extremely risky thing to do, and it requires an extremely sound knowledge of trading, which you can spend a long, long time studying. i simply don't have time for that.
Currently you cant sell crypto to USD, there is lack of liquidity. Most probably there are some top holders of i.e. Bitocin and try to sell it to fiat as much as they can in this moment. it is classical ponzi scheme
where
few will get rich and minor investors will pay for it.
You cant purchase things. For example go to shop and buy a car. Price fluctuate 10,20,30% daily, so even if you are benevolent toward idea you cant really hold goods for 6 months and be sure that you will at the end make some margin. Remember, trade (business) is not about speculation but making margins in predictable way. With fiat you can go in restaurant and buy cup of coffee. With cryptos not.
you've not been to Keene, NH, have you? :) or to PorcFest. i bought a tornado potato 2 years ago, my friend paid in BTC for me. zapped the QR code on the window :)
Great, you bought something two years ago.
And in fact, two years ago the idea in my eyes has been better then it is now as you had some remotely predictable value, it has been used by criminals (that's business too). this is exactly reason why price si inflated right now.
it turns out that on average, sometimes he loses 10% on BTC fluctuation, sometimes he gains 10%. to support the *idea* - the freedom of trade - he accepts that fluctuation graciously, as does anyone else who trades in real-world items using bitcoin as the currency it actually is.
Ok, I do a lot fo trade for living from 2001 and currently have more then 100 suppliers in China. I cant afford 10% fluctuations. And I am pretty sure nobody can unless you trade (usually illegal) stuff with huge margins.
There is no economy behind it,
this is simply not true. it may be the case that you've never *encountered* anyone who has paid or been paid for anything in bitcoin.
l.
Ok, For example we know that German economy GDB is something more then 3 trillion EURO. Do you have any idea what is economy behind i.e. Bitcoin worth. Not this pumping up prices, but economy?
I really like idea of blockchain but what is going on right now is madness, everyone who even dare to point things that do not looks good is labelled.
2017-12-27 12:07 GMT+01:00 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net:
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 10:25 AM, mike.valk@gmail.com mike.valk@gmail.com wrote:
2017-12-27 10:59 GMT+01:00 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net: Although I think that is also based on lack of insight. It remains currency trading, which in itself is risky business.
ah no. that's one of the crucial mistakes. i am *not* in the *slightest* bit interested in currency *trading*. it's risky, and requires a huge amount of study, time and expertise to get it right. i would in *no way* recommend to people to do *trading* of crypto-currencies.
this is about mining, which is competely different, and i *have* studied that in depth (over the years).
Yes your mining currency. Just like gold etc.
But you're putting in dollars/euro's/etc. When your buying stuf you'll either find someone willing to accept your currency, bitcoin, or trade you currency for an acceptable one: dollars.
So dollars->bitcoins->dollars. So currency trading you do. Just not directly. The amounts of bitcoins vs. tradition currency fluctuates on demand, availability and madness.
I consider "raw material" a form of currency as well. Weather you're mining/cultivation minerals, oil, plants or animals.
Currency is just a means to trade with convenience. Usually done with "precious" goods or contracts. Euro's/Dollars/etc are a form of contracts as well.
We agree that a dollar is a notation of worth. When more dollars are made (printed/stamped/booked) it's worth declines. But if the're more stuf to consider worth, the worth of dollar inclines.
hmm I'm derailing from the topic here sorry ;-)
(1) is there anyone who does NOT wish to put their own money into buying bitclub shares who would like ME to sign them up, and, over the next few weeks and months, PAY their membership AND pay for their equipment.
You sign me/us up, I/We pay?
option (1) i pay. just not straight away, as i need to earn mining and commission to do it. i will prioritise people who have a direct link to some libre software or hardware project, past, present or future, prioritising further anyone who is specifically related to or can help with the immediate goals of EOMA68 and/or the Libre-RISCV64 project.
Ah for every signee you earn commission, a slightly bigger share in the mined goods.
I don't understand why you would put in money for someone else for just the commission.
(2) is there anyone who CAN put their own money into bitclub who would be interested to know more. if yes, and you already know about bitcoin mining and about MLM etc. the link is here http://bitclub.network/lkcl
I/We sign up and pay?
option (2) you pay, yes.
And you get a commission. And if I sign someone else up we both get commission. Hmm pyramids. The last one's to join get's the least.
Don't know If I like that approach. But if it helps you.
How well guarded is the group?
they're pretty paranoid. they just had a THIRD PARTY service get hacked, just 10 days ago, their infrastructure detected the attack - which was against the developer platform not the main one - within under 15 minutes and they shut down the entire web front-end immediately.
Sane approach.
The biggest risk in these "markets" is
market/exchange/operation/cooperation/etc.
please understand: this is NOT a market. it's a mining operation. there is a massive, massive difference.
Understood
that if they get hacked the coins vanish at near lightning speed.
this is not an "exchange", it is a *mining* operation. the system "outputs" mined bitcoin to a given address that YOU specify in your web console, every day. you are in complete control of what that is. and are individually responsible for ensuring that you keep the (local) wallet password etc. secure. on YOUR personal device(s).
i'll have to train people on that (i'm recommending electrum as the ONLY way right now because your wallet is recoverable via a distributed peer-to-peer NON corporate controlled network)
Thank you, that's reassuring.
So basically you're buying in processing and infrastructure time, to mine personally. And for every signee, who buys time, you bring you get a bit more time on the operation.
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 12:33 PM, mike.valk@gmail.com mike.valk@gmail.com wrote:
Yes your mining currency. Just like gold etc.
But you're putting in dollars/euro's/etc.
they only accept bitcoin. that bitcoin is used to buy equipment... that mines... bitcoin. they pay out... only in bitcoin. [actually they now have GPU kit which can mine other currencies but i'm personally not interested in that]
When your buying stuf you'll either find someone willing to accept your currency, bitcoin, or trade you currency for an acceptable one: dollars.
yehyeh. thinking further down the line, this is goingt to be... interesting. they did actually have a VISA card for a while, it was so popular it sold out immediately. they're planning to get some more.
We agree that a dollar is a notation of worth. When more dollars are made (printed/stamped/booked) it's worth declines.
*sigh* yes this is the crux of the message in senator ron paul's book, "End the Fed".
hmm I'm derailing from the topic here sorry ;-)
:)
(1) is there anyone who does NOT wish to put their own money into buying bitclub shares who would like ME to sign them up, and, over the next few weeks and months, PAY their membership AND pay for their equipment.
You sign me/us up, I/We pay?
option (1) i pay. just not straight away, as i need to earn mining and commission to do it. i will prioritise people who have a direct link to some libre software or hardware project, past, present or future, prioritising further anyone who is specifically related to or can help with the immediate goals of EOMA68 and/or the Libre-RISCV64 project.
Ah for every signee you earn commission, a slightly bigger share in the mined goods.
yeeees :)
I don't understand why you would put in money for someone else for just the commission.
because it's a hell of a lot, man. jaezuss, i mean, just the one more sign-up for a full share of mining equipment i get six THOUSAND dollars a DAY. that could pay EVERYTHING i need to keep this project going, right there!
beyond that, i can see the potential here, to not just pay for my immediate financial needs and to cover the EOMA68 project, but collectively as a group to fund - independently - things like the mask charges for a libre RISC-V SoC. (if we even had to do that... it might not be necessary to even do _that_). certainly it is within the realm of possibility to fund a team of libre engineers to create the software needed *for* that libre RISC-V SoC.
i would also be able to expand out to start the EOMA50 project (get a smartphone reference design done) and so on.
(2) is there anyone who CAN put their own money into bitclub who would be interested to know more. if yes, and you already know about bitcoin mining and about MLM etc. the link is here http://bitclub.network/lkcl
I/We sign up and pay?
option (2) you pay, yes.
And you get a commission.
yyyup.
And if I sign someone else up we both get commission. Hmm pyramids. The last one's to join get's the least.
the last one(s) have to wait 30 days for their equipment to be bought, installed and commissioned. actually anyone buying a mining share has to wait 30 days for it to be commissioned. 6 months ago it was only 10 days but that was before a MASSIVE demand for equipment went sky-high and the lead time on equipment went... over 30 days.
Don't know If I like that approach.
they have to make some money somehow. the 30 day "lag" allows them to mine sooome BTC which funds the operation.
But if it helps you.
... helps me to help get the goal achieved. if someone else can think of a better way, with as much potential, i'd love to hear it, do a proper analysis, and go 100% at that instead.
i'll have to train people on that (i'm recommending electrum as the ONLY way right now because your wallet is recoverable via a distributed peer-to-peer NON corporate controlled network)
Thank you, that's reassuring.
So basically you're buying in processing and infrastructure time, to mine personally.
yes. they operate most of the equipment - which *you* actually genuinely own (if you want "out" they will do some calculations, make you an offer for NNN's worth of your share of the equipment, and you're out. they also *won't* let you join again except under case-by-case circumstances. it's clearly a bloody nuisance to pull equipment out of the rack).
And for every signee, who buys time, you bring you get a bit more time on the operation.
.... not time, *equipment*. or, more specifically, a *share* of a very very large world-wide pool of equipment.
if you recall, i did actually buy some bitcoin mining equipment, five years ago. i think i mentioned it on here, at the time. it was a f*****g nightmare. i ordered 3 bits of kit. one of them the PSU didn't work, and one of the others went BANG within about 2-3 minutes. so i was down by 2/3s and it was TWO MONTHS to go through the RMA process, all the time watching the difficulty level go up, and up, and up, because EVERYONE ELSE WAS RUNNING THEIR EQUIPMENT NOW.
it was right at the time when the first ASICs came out.
this taught me a hard lesson: under no circumstances buy and operate your own equipment. one piece fails and you're screwed. the noise is intolerable. the heat - basically having an oven operating in your living room. the cost of electricity is insane.
i don't know if you _like_ the idea of a 1200 watt electrical appliance running 24/7 in your house, with the inherent risk of a fire, but i certainly didn't. particularly as *TWO* out of three of the bits of kit that i'd bought DID actually go wrong.
so this is why i'm happy to buy *shares* in equipment that is run off-site (most of it is in Rekyavik, Iceland), where electricity is cheap and cooling is free. and if it goes "bang" it doesn't cause my house to catch fire.
l.
On 2017-12-27 at 11:25, mike.valk@gmail.com wrote:
How well guarded is the group? The biggest risk in these "markets" is that if they get hacked the coins vanish at near lightning speed.
I respectfully disagree. The biggest risk is that those "programs" actually shuffle investors' funds under the false pretense of doing mining, then when the scheme inevitably collapses as recruiting slows down the organizers do a runner or provide excuses such as "we got hacked". This happens all the time.
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 11:31 AM, Luca Saiu positron@gnu.org wrote:
On 2017-12-27 at 11:25, mike.valk@gmail.com wrote:
How well guarded is the group? The biggest risk in these "markets" is that if they get hacked the coins vanish at near lightning speed.
I respectfully disagree. The biggest risk is that those "programs" actually shuffle investors' funds under the false pretense of doing mining, then when the scheme inevitably collapses as recruiting slows down the organizers do a runner or provide excuses such as "we got hacked". This happens all the time.
well, luckily i had 0.65 BTC that wasn't doing anything, and i was prepared to do the risk-benefit analysis and *personally* it came up "can't ignore this opportunity if it turns out to be good".
they *did* actually get hacked... or... a third party service got hacked... and they're back online.
i talked to my brother about this: he was scared witless by both the amounts of money involved and the thought of "losing" (it's a family trait i'm intent on stamping on, very hard). i explained to him that the pool stats, which you can see here: https://bitclubpool.com/index.php?p=stats basically provide an underpinning which is NOT forgeable (if they were forgeable then the entirety of bitcoin is forgeable and we're all in the doo-doo).
look at the pool stats. then back-calculate 3% of total bitcoin mining revenue. i did the maths: you can check it yourself, it comes to twenty four MILLION dollars a month.
TWENTY FOUR million a month!
the organisers - and they're a disparate group, not even a *small* group so it becomes *even harder* to organise a quotes scam quotes - would have to be absolute FOOLS to walk away from that kind of money by trying to do something as stupid as SCAM everybody!!!
remember: the mined bitcoin goes *out* of the network each day (except if people choose to use it to buy more equipment, automatically).
to specifically answer the issue you raise, it might actually be possible to do an analysis, do some estimates based on numbers of people who would have joined, then work out if they had the money *to* actually create a "scam" of the type that you're suggesting. but... honestly, given that it's a large *group* of people, rather than a single person or even a small group, i don't think it's likely - at all - that they will *all* wish to be scammers. it only takes one person to "rat out" the entire group of [potential / hypothetical] conspirators.
l.
On 2017-12-27 at 09:59, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
(1) is there anyone who does NOT wish to put their own money into buying bitclub shares who would like ME to sign them up, and, over the next few weeks and months, PAY their membership AND pay for their equipment.
Me.
You may want to have a look at this: http://behindmlm.com/companies/bitclub-network-review-zeek-ponzi-veterans-at...
I have no doubts about your good faith but to put it bluntly the investment is morally very questionable, almost certainly illegal, and likely to result in financial loss for yourself and the project. It would be a shame to see the initiative crash because the funds got stuck in a Ponzi.
Look at how many similar schemes, offering no proof of actual mining, exist right now. This is not going to end well.
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 11:23 AM, Luca Saiu positron@gnu.org wrote:
On 2017-12-27 at 09:59, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
(1) is there anyone who does NOT wish to put their own money into buying bitclub shares who would like ME to sign them up, and, over the next few weeks and months, PAY their membership AND pay for their equipment.
Me.
cool. gnu.org email address, good enough for me. if you sign up (don't pay membership), then privately email me the username you added i'll keep an eye on it over the next few weeks/months, and when i have available funds from the mining i'll pay your membership and progressively pay for some equipment as well.
You may want to have a look at this: http://behindmlm.com/companies/bitclub-network-review-zeek-ponzi-veterans-at...
yep... seen these, and more. don't - personally - need to see any more :) however for anyone who wishes to convince themselves that they shouldn't participate, they need only look at these types of online sites in order to be "convinced".
I have no doubts about your good faith but to put it bluntly the investment is morally very questionable, almost certainly illegal, and likely to result in financial loss for yourself and the project. It would be a shame to see the initiative crash because the funds got stuck in a Ponzi.
(1) i have (personally) done *my* due diligence, and am (deliberately) *ONLY* investing BTC (not actual cash) which i happened to have (from 5 years ago) plus some donations. i am risking no ACTUAL quotes money quotes. at all.
(2) i have a friend whom i trust who put (actual) money in, i've known him for 10 years. his commissions are... large. and actually exist.
(3) this is quite LITERALLY the opposite of a ponzi scheme. they are LITERALLY making the bitcoin that underpins the entire scheme. this is a completely unique approach which is actually extremely clever.
Look at how many similar schemes, offering no proof of actual mining,
i know. this isn't one of them.
https://bitclubpool.com/index.php?p=stats
i've looked at e.g. gemini mining (whatever the hell they are called). they are DEFINITELY dodgy. no pool stats. no way to verify them. total secrecy..
this is completely different in just about every way possible.
l.
On 2017-12-27 at 11:37, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 11:23 AM, Luca Saiu positron@gnu.org wrote:
On 2017-12-27 at 09:59, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
(1) is there anyone who does NOT wish to put their own money into buying bitclub shares who would like ME to sign them up, and, over the next few weeks and months, PAY their membership AND pay for their equipment.
Me.
cool. gnu.org email address, good enough for me. if you sign up (don't pay membership), then privately email me the username you added i'll keep an eye on it over the next few weeks/months, and when i have available funds from the mining i'll pay your membership and progressively pay for some equipment as well.
I answered "Me" when you asked who would NOT like their funds to be invested in bitclub.
Sorry, I will not sign up, and please do not use my name in anything related to bitclub.
You may want to have a look at this: http://behindmlm.com/companies/bitclub-network-review-zeek-ponzi-veterans-at...
yep... seen these, and more. don't - personally - need to see any more :) however for anyone who wishes to convince themselves that they shouldn't participate, they need only look at these types of online sites in order to be "convinced".
It's always difficult to prove a negative; what behindmlm tends to do is pointing out red flags, and argue that a suspect operation should not be trusted without strong positive evidences of legitimacy, even more in a situation where scams abound. When in doubt we should *not* believe.
(2) i have a friend whom i trust who put (actual) money in, i've known him for 10 years. his commissions are... large. and actually exist.
That is not a good way to tell whether the profit generates comes from a legitimate source or from other investors.
Ponzi and pyramid schemes do pay, particularly to whoever got in at the beginning -- but only until they inevitably collapse. The collapse also results in legal liabilities for the net winners, which may be forced to return what they illegally gained. The details of how clawback works very by country, but if you are in the UK you should definitely be concerned.
(3) this is quite LITERALLY the opposite of a ponzi scheme. they are LITERALLY making the bitcoin that underpins the entire scheme. this is a completely unique approach which is actually extremely clever.
It is not unique, and there is no hard proof that the money being generated actually comes from mining. In order to provide some evidence to be used against us skeptics some scams do perform a token amount of mining, insufficient to keep the scheme afloat but trackable to the pool. I am not informed enough to judge the theoretical sustainability of collective mining, at the current difficulty, with MLM commissions on top; some people say it's impossible. I don't know, but know that many programs with a similar pretense were scams and have already collapsed. In such a situation I would require very strong evidence of legitimacy, and this evidence is just not there.
This last point by itself is not a proof that bitclub is not a honest operation (in actuality, we can't know), but some of the people involved in bitclub also have a history of being involved in Ponzis, as pointed out in the behindmlm article.
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 12:19 PM, Luca Saiu positron@gnu.org wrote:
On 2017-12-27 at 11:37, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 11:23 AM, Luca Saiu positron@gnu.org wrote:
On 2017-12-27 at 09:59, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
(1) is there anyone who does NOT wish to put their own money into buying bitclub shares who would like ME to sign them up, and, over the next few weeks and months, PAY their membership AND pay for their equipment.
Me.
cool. gnu.org email address, good enough for me. if you sign up (don't pay membership), then privately email me the username you added i'll keep an eye on it over the next few weeks/months, and when i have available funds from the mining i'll pay your membership and progressively pay for some equipment as well.
I answered "Me" when you asked who would NOT like their funds to be invested in bitclub.
oh, sorry. ah, i know what happened: you read only the *first* part of the sentence, where it was actually a *compound* sentence.
Sorry, I will not sign up, and please do not use my name in anything related to bitclub.
of course not!
It is not unique, and there is no hard proof that the money being generated actually comes from mining.
it's a legitimate concern, and one that can't really be answered [not without direct access to their database, which would be a massive privacy violation and security violation]. we could theoretically make some guesses and calculations on exactly how much money people in the network will be receiving vs the amount of money that is going "in", and see if the "scam" concept stacks up so to speak. if the amount of BTC going out is GREATER than the BTC coming in, then, clearly and logically, that would be unsustainable, meaning that they would HAVE to get some extra BTC from somewhere....
... and the most likely place that they would be getting that extra BTC would be.... oh.... say... a massive pool of mining equipment distributed world-wide in different geographical locations that is, in total, generating 3% of the world's bitcoin according to globally unforgeable statistics.
the fact that the pool exists is one of the most compelling arguments - even without having access to the [private] statistics. *why* would they be mining 3% of the world's total bitcoin being generated right now... and yet *still operate a ponzi scheme*??? it just does not make any sense... yeah?
l.
2017-12-27 13:35 GMT+01:00 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net:
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 12:19 PM, Luca Saiu positron@gnu.org wrote:
On 2017-12-27 at 11:37, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
It is not unique, and there is no hard proof that the money being generated actually comes from mining.
it's a legitimate concern, and one that can't really be answered [not without direct access to their database, which would be a massive privacy violation and security violation]. we could theoretically make some guesses and calculations on exactly how much money people in the network will be receiving vs the amount of money that is going "in", and see if the "scam" concept stacks up so to speak. if the amount of BTC going out is GREATER than the BTC coming in, then, clearly and logically, that would be unsustainable, meaning that they would HAVE to get some extra BTC from somewhere....
I guess efficiency number are needed here. How much bitcoin is being mined/generated per input (dollar/euro's/joules)
That's the same as for any mining operation. No need to watch how the mining is done just is the cost of the operation lower than the the yield.
That's why a lot of IRL miners work under such poor circumstances.
So where to find such numbers?
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 12:44 PM, mike.valk@gmail.com mike.valk@gmail.com wrote:
I guess efficiency number are needed here. How much bitcoin is being mined/generated per input (dollar/euro's/joules)
they're connected to the national grid in Iceland (they don't run everything there, for security reasons) but it's a good percentage. cooling is free (obviously), and they're actually going to be sinking their own geo-thermal turbines.... on-site. electricity is *already* cheap in iceland... so the cost of electricity can be assumed to be negligeable or zero.
That's the same as for any mining operation. No need to watch how the mining is done just is the cost of the operation lower than the the yield.
That's why a lot of IRL miners work under such poor circumstances.
So where to find such numbers?
the pool stats give you the all-important number.
there are two bits of information that are really needed, to make a proper assessment:
(1) how many people sign up per month (2) how many people are *already* signed up.
i have access to the MLM structure (it's complicated, and very large), it should be possible to make some reasonable estimates / behavioural guesswork.... but it would *need* those two numbers.
i do know that they're starting to go mainstream (as in, a LOT of people are hearing about them).
l.
btw, for those people still thinking this is a "ponzi" scheme... or that it's a MLM that will collapse under its own weight... bitclub *do* actually recognise - and anyone else who knows about bitcoin knows this - that there's only probably about 3-5 years left where bitcoin mining will make any sense.
it's down to the fact that the mining reward halves every 18 months. right now it's a 12.5 BTC reward. in about a years' time it'll be 6.25. 18 months from then it'll be 3.125 and that means that, in one years time, whatever the amount of BTC/USD is earned, that LITERALLY halves LITERALLY overnight. 24 million USD equivalent per month for the whole pool suddenly becomes 12.5 million USD equivalent.
EVERYONE KNOWS this... the people who've done their proper due diligence at least.... IN ADVANCE.
so yes. in about... 3 to 5 years this entire operation is quite likely to shut down.
l.
On 2017-12-27 at 13:15, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
btw, for those people still thinking this is a "ponzi" scheme... or that it's a MLM that will collapse under its own weight... bitclub *do* actually recognise - and anyone else who knows about bitcoin knows this - that there's only probably about 3-5 years left where bitcoin mining will make any sense.
Mining will stop being profitable at some point. True, but unrelated to the possibility of current mining being just pretend.
And I'm shutting up for real now.
On 2017-12-27 at 12:35, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
if the amount of BTC going out is GREATER than the BTC coming in, then, clearly and logically, that would be unsustainable, meaning that they would HAVE to get some extra BTC from somewhere....
Correct, but that's a very big "if". I don't believe the hypothesis.
... and the most likely place that they would be getting that extra BTC would be.... oh.... say... a massive pool of mining equipment distributed world-wide in different geographical locations that is
Again correct, as long as the hypothesis above (the amount coming in being less than the amount going out) holds.
Ockham says that borrowing from Peter to pay Paul is even easier; they can pocket some amount, distribute some more thru MLM commissions, and encourage investors not to cash out for as long as possible, hoping that new funds keep coming. Some comparatively insignificant mining on top of that will give a sense of legitimacy to new investors, keeping the scheme alive longer.
I've given what I believe is fair warning; if it turns out I'm wrong, which I unfortunately consider unlikely, that's better for everybody. You say that the EOMA68 quotes are not at risk; okay, if the project itself in not in jeopardy then I can be less nervous. This will be my last messages on this topic for the time being (if bitclub collapses soon I can't guarantee I won't succumb to the temptation of a "told you so" mail).
However, Luke, I do appreciate the actual technical work you are doing.
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 1:32 PM, Luca Saiu positron@gnu.org wrote:
On 2017-12-27 at 12:35, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
if the amount of BTC going out is GREATER than the BTC coming in, then, clearly and logically, that would be unsustainable, meaning that they would HAVE to get some extra BTC from somewhere....
Correct, but that's a very big "if". I don't believe the hypothesis.
... if there *existed* a way to find out the numbers that would disprove the hypothesis (do a model of their business and see if it can be proved that there's no way they could be financially viable) i would do the model.
ultimately... i did the risk / value proposition a different way: only put in those "funds"... not funds at all they're actually just "numbers".... which were "free". i.e. i did NOT go out and register on a bitcoin exchange, i did NOT register a bank account with them, i did NOT give anyone cash in exchange for bitcoin.
i happened to have 0.4 BTC left over from some mining i did 5 years ago, and someone donated me 0.25 BTC a few months ago.
I've given what I believe is fair warning; if it turns out I'm wrong, which I unfortunately consider unlikely, that's better for everybody.
yehyeh. it's why i didn't take *actual* cash, buy bitcoin, *then* put it into bitclub mining shares. i've never actually registered on any of these exchanges so couldn't get money in or out to USD or any fiat currency even if i wanted to. i only used BTC which i happened to already have.
You say that the EOMA68 quotes are not at risk;
well, if i don't find *some* way to pay for food and the apartment here, that is much more of a risk to the EOMA68 project than anything else possibly could be, particularly as i am in a foreign country on a tourist visa and they don't take too kindly to foreigners not being able to pay for their own flight the hell out of the country.
i have enough cash (from a contract i did 3 months ago) to pay for accommodation for about 2-3 months. if i have to pay the flight to FOSDEM out of that, then that cash reserve drops to around 1-2 months.
that is far more of a quotes risk quotes to the EOMA68 project than me taking 0.65 of a BTC which i happened not to be using, where BTC happened to rise enough to the point where it was worthwhile throwing it at bitclub.
so i have not quotes risked quotes anything. i have not spent actual cash. and - this is REALLY IMPORTANT TO GET ACROSS - i have AT NO TIME UTILISED ANY FUNDS FROM THE CROWDFUNDING.
i am going to emphasise this and say it in capitals only the once
i VERY VERY DELIBERATELY ONLY UTILISED THE BTC THAT I HAD MINED OVER FIVE YEARS AGO (and 0.25 BTC which someone donated me about... 3-4 months ago).
if you recall, right at the beginning of the crowdfunding success, one of my first posts was about getting the money the fuck out of the US due to possible currency destabilisation, given that the U.S. President's total lack of understanding of his new position destablised BOTH the Mexican currency AND the Canadian one. if he'd tried the same thing with the Yuan it could have wiped 10 to 15% off the project right there.
now, luckily that didn't happen but i pointed out that there was NO WAY that i could gamble with the money that had been entrusted to me, and pushed for USD $60,000 to be transferred immediately... right before Chinese New Year. we JUST managed to get the money out the country in time.
okay, if the project itself in not in jeopardy then I can be less nervous.
if i don't find some way to pay for rent and food and the FOSDEM flight then the EOMA68 project basically will be the least of my concerns. i did put the message out on the last couple of updates. i put it in a positive fashion, i received some very welcome suggestions (and need to modify the rhombus-tech website to add a librepay and also a BTC donation link)....
... nothing concrete actually received yet though.
so this, luca, is one primary reason *why* i am telling people about bitclub, because it represents a very big jump in income. six thousand dollars a month, tax free. that's more than i've ever earned at even the highest-paying of any of the companies i've ever worked at.
This will be my last messages on this topic for the time being (if bitclub collapses soon I can't guarantee I won't succumb to the temptation of a "told you so" mail).
:)
However, Luke, I do appreciate the actual technical work you are doing.
thanks luca.
l.
On Wed, 27 Dec 2017, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote: ...
(3) this is quite LITERALLY the opposite of a ponzi scheme. they are LITERALLY making the bitcoin that underpins the entire scheme. this is a completely unique approach which is actually extremely clever.
It seems to me that one way of looking at this is that they are using other people's money to bet that the BTC price will go up on average, and then using the resulting profit to do a spot of mining as cover.
Whether they are paying people back from the speculation profit and/or in the traditional ponzi manner from later investor's funds doesn't seem to make much difference to me.
Most of the people involved in this to date would almost certainly have been better off simply buying BTC at the start, and selling them some time later on.
Likewise, saying that you're only putting BTC in, and hence its only pretend money (or some such) ignores the opportunity cost of no longer being able to sell those BTC for cold hard cash.
So this looks to me like a ponzi built on a speculation bubble, which might be a way of making the ponzi survive longer than it would do otherwise, but if and when the BTC bubble bursts[1] investors are going to discover that the people in charge have done a runner with the remaining assets and that any balance still held within the scheme is just gone.
Luke, given your repeated assertions about the importance of ethics I'm astonished that you'd be willing to be anywhere near such a scheme.
Cheers, Phil.
[1] The actual underlying value of BTC, if it has one, seems to me to be a decentralised medium of exchange. The volatility has recently convinced Storm to stop accepting them:
http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1464096684955433...
which seems like a pretty bad sign for the underlying value. What's left is 90% speculation and 10% criminality.
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 8:47 AM, Philip Hands phil@hands.com wrote:
On Wed, 27 Dec 2017, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote: ...
(3) this is quite LITERALLY the opposite of a ponzi scheme. they are LITERALLY making the bitcoin that underpins the entire scheme. this is a completely unique approach which is actually extremely clever.
It seems to me that one way of looking at this is that they are using other people's money to bet that the BTC price will go up on average, and then using the resulting profit to do a spot of mining as cover.
interestingly they just had to double the commission payouts from $100 to $200. i was watching the pages describing the commissions: one day they were $100, the next it was $200. i believe this is in response to how drastically the exchange rate for BTC went up.
this is one of the indicators, to me, that they're legit. it's also extremely clever of them, to link the commissions directly to a currency that is anticipated to continuously fall. what's hilarious is that the equipment shares is priced in the same currency, so *that* falls in value relative to BTC as well.
basically as BTC goes up, the value of the commissions and the relative cost of the equipment - which are in fixed USD amounts and *converted* to BTC - go *DOWN*.
which is also an interesting salutory lesson to people that as crypto currencies go up, the value of fiat currencies go DOWN. can you imagine if this was BTC/EUR changing 1000%?
Whether they are paying people back from the speculation profit and/or in the traditional ponzi manner from later investor's funds doesn't seem to make much difference to me.
Most of the people involved in this to date would almost certainly have been better off simply buying BTC at the start, and selling them some time later on.
... which i've already determined to be risky and unethical. it's too close to the exploitation i've witnessed - and my friend has recently uncovered clear and blatant evidence of. mining however is *completely* different, not least because it, in no way, *actually* involves actual cash, and it is not directly related to "exchange rates" or the trading of currencies, at all.
Likewise, saying that you're only putting BTC in, and hence its only pretend money (or some such) ignores the opportunity cost of no longer being able to sell those BTC for cold hard cash.
... which i don't feel comfortable doing. as in, i don't feel comfortable interfacing officially with one of the exchange sites. i'm happy basically to keep a very clear division that i will only cross reluctantly and very indirectly between BTC and fiat currencies. there are good reasons for doing so.
also the risk-benefit analysis came up, for me, from *my* experience and ability to assess these things (in the face of unknown and unknowable information such as "how many people, how much have they invested" etc.), as "take the opportunity and throw both oxygen tanks and napalm on it"
So this looks to me like a ponzi built on a speculation bubble, which might be a way of making the ponzi survive longer than it would do otherwise, but if and when the BTC bubble bursts[1] investors are going to discover that the people in charge have done a runner with the remaining assets and that any balance still held within the scheme is just gone.
Luke, given your repeated assertions about the importance of ethics I'm astonished that you'd be willing to be anywhere near such a scheme.
the definition of an ethical act is:
* to increase truth, awareness, love or creativity (those being synonyms for the same underlying principle) for one or more people (including yourself) WITHOUT decreasing ANY of those same four qualities FOR ANYONE.
that's a very very specific and flexible definition of an ethical act that, for example, perfectly well permits people to go to war in defense of their country, and many other things that others might, without such a clear and flexible definition, consider "unethical".
it's also... really quite challenging to "unpack" that definition (it's in effect a "4th normalised form" if you get the SQL database analogy).
i'll be tracking the behaviour of this group closely to ensure that it meets that ethical criteria. any sign of unethical acts on their part - more to the point any sign that by MY actions and decisions *I* am causing harm by leveraging this opportunity - and i'll drop them instantly. i have to. my committment to that definition takes absolute precedence.
l.
Ugh, did it again. Sorry.
On 2017年12月28日 04:13, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
it's too close to the exploitation i've witnessed - and my friend has recently uncovered clear and blatant evidence of. mining however is *completely* different, not least because it, in no way, *actually* involves actual cash, and it is not directly related to "exchange rates" or the trading of currencies, at all.
So, you're somehow ethically opposed to trading Bitcoin for money, and yet not ethically opposed to trading it for goods? That doesn't make a lick of sense, Luke. Money is just a representation of how many goods and services you have produced for others. Economically, there is *no difference* between giving someone Bitcoin for USD and giving someone Bitcoin for food.
You know what's unethical? Mining Bitcoin. Because as has already been mentioned, mining Bitcoin uses a *ton* of energy, and it doesn't actually produce anything in the end. Isn't one of the main features of EOMA68 being environmentally responsible? Well, using Bitcoin mining (through a scheme like this, no less) to fund something that is supposed to be environmentally responsible is the height of hypocrisy. (And yes, it would be funding EOMA68, regardless of whatever kind of weaseling you might do to say it isn't. If you depend on it to work on EOMA68, it's funding EOMA68.)
Just one question: is canceling support for the CrowdSupply campaign an option if you go through with this?
Currently Bitcoin is an insane gold-rush bubble that is frivolous and wasteful but it has the potential to balance out into the secure, distributed, democratized digital currency it was designed to be and I think that is something worth spending energy on.
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 9:58 AM, Julie Marchant onpon4@riseup.net wrote:
Ugh, did it again. Sorry.
On 2017年12月28日 04:13, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
it's too close to the exploitation i've witnessed - and my friend has recently uncovered clear and blatant evidence of. mining however is *completely* different, not least because it, in no way, *actually* involves actual cash, and it is not directly related to "exchange rates" or the trading of currencies, at all.
So, you're somehow ethically opposed to trading Bitcoin for money, and yet not ethically opposed to trading it for goods? That doesn't make a lick of sense, Luke. Money is just a representation of how many goods and services you have produced for others. Economically, there is *no difference* between giving someone Bitcoin for USD and giving someone Bitcoin for food.
You know what's unethical? Mining Bitcoin. Because as has already been mentioned, mining Bitcoin uses a *ton* of energy, and it doesn't actually produce anything in the end. Isn't one of the main features of EOMA68 being environmentally responsible? Well, using Bitcoin mining (through a scheme like this, no less) to fund something that is supposed to be environmentally responsible is the height of hypocrisy. (And yes, it would be funding EOMA68, regardless of whatever kind of weaseling you might do to say it isn't. If you depend on it to work on EOMA68, it's funding EOMA68.)
Just one question: is canceling support for the CrowdSupply campaign an option if you go through with this?
-- Julie Marchant https://onpon4.github.io
Protect your emails with GnuPG: https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 3:07 PM, Sam Huntress samhuntress@gmail.com wrote:
Currently Bitcoin is an insane gold-rush bubble that is frivolous and wasteful but it has the potential to balance out into the secure, distributed, democratized digital currency it was designed to be and I think that is something worth spending energy on.
indeed... would it not be worthwhile, do you think, to leverage *this* opportunity... such that the funds were available to *create* an eco-responsible coin that is *properly* libre, properly peer-to-peer distributed, and so on?
look at what i put out only a few weeks ago, we analysed at least two alt-coins that, whilst the people behind it had their hearts in the right places they *still* did not fundamentally get it.
if we don't do this "properly" then those alt-coins will be all that is available... oh and bitcoin. is that something we really really want?
gone midnight here (julie) i'll write a more complete reply tomorrow.
l.
would it not be worthwhile, do you think, to leverage
*this* opportunity
The problem is that '*this* opportunity' absolutely screams pyramid scheme and should not be trusted without solid verification that the operators of this mining pool are making the investments they claim to be making.
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 11:32 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton < lkcl@lkcl.net> wrote:
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 3:07 PM, Sam Huntress samhuntress@gmail.com wrote:
Currently Bitcoin is an insane gold-rush bubble that is frivolous and wasteful but it has the potential to balance out into the secure, distributed, democratized digital currency it was designed to be and I think that is something worth spending energy on.
indeed... would it not be worthwhile, do you think, to leverage *this* opportunity... such that the funds were available to *create* an eco-responsible coin that is *properly* libre, properly peer-to-peer distributed, and so on?
look at what i put out only a few weeks ago, we analysed at least two alt-coins that, whilst the people behind it had their hearts in the right places they *still* did not fundamentally get it.
if we don't do this "properly" then those alt-coins will be all that is available... oh and bitcoin. is that something we really really want?
gone midnight here (julie) i'll write a more complete reply tomorrow.
l.
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 4:46 PM, Sam Huntress samhuntress@gmail.com wrote:
would it not be worthwhile, do you think, to leverage
*this* opportunity
The problem is that '*this* opportunity' absolutely screams pyramid scheme and should not be trusted without solid verification that the operators of this mining pool are making the investments they claim to be making.
genesi - a competing mining company which people seem to trust - have virtually zero transparency. if someone wants to help tracking down some bitcoin wallet addresses from youtube videos so that the blockchain analysis can be done that would be great.
the pool stats are available (remember bitclub actually started out as a simple mining pool.... that some bright spark went "huh why don't we drop a MLM on top of this?") - there's videos of some of the equipment in various data centres.
briefly, last thing today: the equipment in rekjavik they're sinking their *own* geothermal bore-holes and installing their *own* turbines, keeping it connected to iceland's national grid where geothermal electricity is extremely cheap, and, of course, cooling is literally free.
more on this tomorrow, gotta sleep.
l.
On 28 December 2017 at 17:54, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 4:46 PM, Sam Huntress samhuntress@gmail.com wrote:
would it not be worthwhile, do you think, to leverage
*this* opportunity
The problem is that '*this* opportunity' absolutely screams pyramid
scheme
and should not be trusted without solid verification that the operators
of
this mining pool are making the investments they claim to be making.
genesi - a competing mining company which people seem to trust - have virtually zero transparency. if someone wants to help tracking down some bitcoin wallet addresses from youtube videos so that the blockchain analysis can be done that would be great.
when you google genesis, one of first thing it pops up is scam alert. It is well known fact.
the pool stats are available (remember bitclub actually started out as a simple mining pool.... that some bright spark went "huh why don't we drop a MLM on top of this?") - there's videos of some of the equipment in various data centres.
briefly, last thing today: the equipment in rekjavik they're sinking their *own* geothermal bore-holes and installing their *own* turbines, keeping it connected to iceland's national grid where geothermal electricity is extremely cheap, and, of course, cooling is literally free.
more on this tomorrow, gotta sleep.
l.
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
GNU Taler is a fundamentally different system than Bitcoin. Unless I misunderstand the information on their website.
GNU Taler appears to be a third party; analogous to a credit card company or a bank. GNU Taler could manage and secure your cash (or bitcoin) for you and be trusted to ensure that transactions are carried out smoothly.
In contrast, Bitcoin is analogous to hard currency (Euro coins, US dollar bills, gold, etc), and is something that can be managed for you by a trusted third party.
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 12:35 PM, Hrvoje Lasic lasich@gmail.com wrote:
On 28 December 2017 at 17:54, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 4:46 PM, Sam Huntress samhuntress@gmail.com wrote:
would it not be worthwhile, do you think, to leverage
*this* opportunity
The problem is that '*this* opportunity' absolutely screams pyramid
scheme
and should not be trusted without solid verification that the operators
of
this mining pool are making the investments they claim to be making.
genesi - a competing mining company which people seem to trust - have virtually zero transparency. if someone wants to help tracking down some bitcoin wallet addresses from youtube videos so that the blockchain analysis can be done that would be great.
when you google genesis, one of first thing it pops up is scam alert. It is well known fact.
the pool stats are available (remember bitclub actually started out as a simple mining pool.... that some bright spark went "huh why don't we drop a MLM on top of this?") - there's videos of some of the equipment in various data centres.
briefly, last thing today: the equipment in rekjavik they're sinking their *own* geothermal bore-holes and installing their *own* turbines, keeping it connected to iceland's national grid where geothermal electricity is extremely cheap, and, of course, cooling is literally free.
more on this tomorrow, gotta sleep.
l.
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
Luke,
I know you are a really smart guy. If this group has such a great mining set up, why do they need people to join and give them money? The math of this doesn't make any sense. They could use profits from mining to buy more equipment, they shouldn't need people to give them money, then have those people get more people to sign on. It is a classic MLM scheme where the product is bitcoin instead of some other junk. Jean really knows what they are talking about. I know you are in a desperate situation with lots of pressure, but if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 11:48 AM, Sam Huntress samhuntress@gmail.com wrote:
GNU Taler is a fundamentally different system than Bitcoin. Unless I misunderstand the information on their website.
GNU Taler appears to be a third party; analogous to a credit card company or a bank. GNU Taler could manage and secure your cash (or bitcoin) for you and be trusted to ensure that transactions are carried out smoothly.
In contrast, Bitcoin is analogous to hard currency (Euro coins, US dollar bills, gold, etc), and is something that can be managed for you by a trusted third party.
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 12:35 PM, Hrvoje Lasic lasich@gmail.com wrote:
On 28 December 2017 at 17:54, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 4:46 PM, Sam Huntress samhuntress@gmail.com wrote:
would it not be worthwhile, do you think, to leverage
*this* opportunity
The problem is that '*this* opportunity' absolutely screams pyramid
scheme
and should not be trusted without solid verification that the operators
of
this mining pool are making the investments they claim to be making.
genesi - a competing mining company which people seem to trust - have virtually zero transparency. if someone wants to help tracking down some bitcoin wallet addresses from youtube videos so that the blockchain analysis can be done that would be great.
when you google genesis, one of first thing it pops up is scam alert. It is well known fact.
the pool stats are available (remember bitclub actually started out as a simple mining pool.... that some bright spark went "huh why don't we drop a MLM on top of this?") - there's videos of some of the equipment in various data centres.
briefly, last thing today: the equipment in rekjavik they're sinking their *own* geothermal bore-holes and installing their *own* turbines, keeping it connected to iceland's national grid where geothermal electricity is extremely cheap, and, of course, cooling is literally free.
more on this tomorrow, gotta sleep.
l.
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
On 12/28/17 15:07, Mike Henry wrote:
I know you are in a desperate situation with lots of pressure, but if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.
I mostly just lurk on this mailing list, im a backer on the crowdsupply campaign. I am not an expert on bitcoin or any concurrency. I just wanted to chime in and assert I would be happy to back another crowdfunding campaign for additional funds to see this project succeed, and would feel better about such a thing over this bitcoin mlm based plan.
- Wes
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 5:35 PM, Hrvoje Lasic lasich@gmail.com wrote:
when you google genesis, one of first thing it pops up is scam alert. It is well known fact.
i have a friend who signed up for them a while ago... it's not. remember that there's a hell of a lot of reasons why various vested power interests want to see these new ways of (literally) making money be utterly discredited. however that he's actually receiving mining payouts from genesis mining does *not* make it a worthwhile thing to drop your money^H^H^H^H^Hbitcoin into. they take a fixed percentage, there's *absolutely no way* to verify who they are, there's no public listing of their pool stats... nothing. absolutely nothing by which you can prove OR DISPROVE one way or the other if they are legitimate OR indeed a scam.
l.
rrrright, i've got enough information from the payouts and commissions to be able to reverse-engineer their operation with a reasonable degree of confidence.
key mistake: i initially *misinterpreted* the MLM commissions structure as paying out $200/day *guaranteed*.
what they *actually* do is, for each person who also buys a share, they distribute a percentage of that *upstream* to the previous backers. from the mining generated, and taking e.g. AntMiner S9 as a "baseline" i was able to calculate that the ratio of "equipment purchased that's definitely yours" to "money that's put towards rewarding people who encourage other people to buy equipment but also covering operational costs etc. etc." is around 62:38 give-or-take several percentage points... i'm really fuzzy on this maths stuff, that was last night, i'm now coming up with 25:75.... *sigh* someone please double-check this!!
the figures went like this:
* $3500 is a full share. * daily mining payout is around $13/day @ current exchange rates and difficulty * Antminer S9s cost around $2500 (if you can get them) and @ 13TH/s earns about USD $26/day * scale that up to $3500 and it's $37/day for an antminer-s9-scaled-up's-worth
so 37 + 13 = 50. 13 / 50 = a 26 : 74 ratio.
which seems to be awfully low, i must have made a mistake somewhere.
so this percentage (of what each person puts into equipment) which goes up-tree in commission would explain how they can stay afloat [AND NOT BE A PONZI SCHEME].
if someone can check the maths that would be great.
l.
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 2:58 PM, Julie Marchant onpon4@riseup.net wrote:
Ugh, did it again. Sorry.
On 2017年12月28日 04:13, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
it's too close to the exploitation i've witnessed - and my friend has recently uncovered clear and blatant evidence of. mining however is *completely* different, not least because it, in no way, *actually* involves actual cash, and it is not directly related to "exchange rates" or the trading of currencies, at all.
So, you're somehow ethically opposed to trading Bitcoin for money, and yet not ethically opposed to trading it for goods? That doesn't make a lick of sense, Luke.
:) my understanding of money is different: i take the *intent* of the person into consideration, and i am generous with money - when i have it - to those people whose *intentions* i believe are worthwhile encouraging.
so in the case of trading bitcoin, most of the *intentions* that people are have are for the purposes of explotation. blatant, outright insider trading and pump-and-dump tactics. there's *clubs* you can join where this is carried out.
therefore, if you *trade* bitcoin, it's basically exploitation of somebody else's misfortune. therefore, i cannot and will not do it.
Money is just a representation of how many goods and services you have produced for others.
that's one interpretation, and it's one that serves many people extremely well. however... it misses something very very fundamental.
Economically, there is *no difference* between giving someone Bitcoin for USD and giving someone Bitcoin for food.
ok... would you deal with a warlord or a mass murderer, trading them bitcoin for USD? would you give an embezzler bitcoin if they asked for it saying that they wanted it to pay for food?
You know what's unethical? Mining Bitcoin. Because as has already been mentioned, mining Bitcoin uses a *ton* of energy,
ok there's a few things here:
(1) the reports on which the calculations were based have been shown to be flawed
(2) bitclub run most of their kit out of rekyavijk, iceland, where they are currrently sinking geo-thermal vents to power turbines. also cooling is *LITERALLY* free.
(3) there are instances of people coming up with extremely ingenious plans (one guy is recycling - burning - used car tyres) which otherwise would *never have been financially viable*
so not only are the reports based on the wrong info, but bitclub *is* doing its best to reduce environmental impact,
and it doesn't actually produce anything in the end.
this is equally true of any currency. you can't eat it. the only exception to that was cocoa beans, which the Mayans used as currency. great if there was an economic bust as you could *literally* eat your money.
other than that, to say "it doesn't actually produce anything" is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of money. money is EMPOWERMENT. it is an ENABLER.
Isn't one of the main features of EOMA68 being environmentally responsible? Well, using Bitcoin mining (through a scheme like this, no less) to fund something that is supposed to be environmentally responsible is the height of hypocrisy.
not at all: quite the opposite. what do you imagine that i will be doing this? let's go back to Simon Sinek's Ted Talk, and ask "why how what" rather than "what how why".
so let's ask the question: *why* do you think i am doing this? *why* am i leveraging this abbbsolutely ennormous financial opportunity?
what would it empower me to do? maybe fund a truly ethical peer-to-peer distributed crypto-currency that's truly eco-conscious because it's *not* dependent on proof-of-work, perhaps?
maybe make an ultra-low-power processor that is designed and optimised based around that very same crypto-currency?
maybe fund every software libre project that i've ever promised that i would if i ever had the means to, over the past 20 years?
take the eco-conscious technological plans that i have to the next level that they were *always intended to be*?
... or....
should i... *completely abandon* those plans, forget about them, maybe think of them as a pipe dream, *waiting* for someone to go, "uhhh that's all very well but you're never going to make it a reality, not now, not ever"
should i leave our fate in the hands of google, microsoft, oracle, intel, ARM, facebook, and twitta and that FUCKER elon musk who you can TELL clearly, with all his hype and talk of going to Mars, you KNOW he's given up on Humanity?
should i?
i'm asking you - seriously - should i ignore this opportunity and everything it represents, with everything that you know about me and the promises and committments that i have made, and leave matters in the hands of those.... i don't even want to use any kinds of words to describe how angry and disgusted i am with how irresponsible they truly are, these... "leaders" of technology.
(And yes, it would be funding EOMA68, regardless of whatever kind of weaseling you might do to say it isn't. If you depend on it to work on EOMA68, it's funding EOMA68.)
yup. i have no problem with that.
Just one question: is canceling support for the CrowdSupply campaign an option if you go through with this?
i'm already going through with it - it was already in motion.
ok, the answer's conditional.
(1) if you're part of the 2nd batch you can at any time send crowdsupply your order number, cc me, and i'll authorise a refund. they have all the funds, stored in their bank account(s). also, you don't need to read further, below.
(2) if you're part of the 1st batch, that's much more complex: as i've outlined many many times, the reputation of the factory is harmed if the suppliers do not get the orders that they've been promised; the factory workers are harmed because they don't the get jobs that they've been promised; it also does harm to the project if the funds are below the critical threshold (that they're already at) for buying components and much more. i therefore have to do an analysis to see if there is any harm that you intend to do to the project. it would help in my assessment if you make it absolutely clear if it is your intention to *actively* do harm to the project.
so.
if you are part of the first batch, do you intend to do *active* harm to this project if your request for a refund is not met; please kindly answer yes or no, if yes, please outline the extent of the damage that would be your intent to carry out, if any,, and i will be able to make a fully-informed assessment.
sorry for being blunt, i feel it's best to be absolutely up-front about these things.
l.
On 2017年12月29日 08:53, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
(1) if you're part of the 2nd batch you can at any time send crowdsupply your order number, cc me, and i'll authorise a refund. they have all the funds, stored in their bank account(s). also, you don't need to read further, below.
(2) if you're part of the 1st batch, that's much more complex: as i've outlined many many times, the reputation of the factory is harmed if the suppliers do not get the orders that they've been promised; the factory workers are harmed because they don't the get jobs that they've been promised; it also does harm to the project if the funds are below the critical threshold (that they're already at) for buying components and much more. i therefore have to do an analysis to see if there is any harm that you intend to do to the project. it would help in my assessment if you make it absolutely clear if it is your intention to *actively* do harm to the project.
so.
if you are part of the first batch, do you intend to do *active* harm to this project if your request for a refund is not met; please kindly answer yes or no, if yes, please outline the extent of the damage that would be your intent to carry out, if any,, and i will be able to make a fully-informed assessment.
sorry for being blunt, i feel it's best to be absolutely up-front about these things.
I'm not familiar with the terms "first batch" and "second batch" as it pertains to this project. Which was the first and which was the second?
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 2:43 PM, Julie Marchant onpon4@riseup.net wrote:
I'm not familiar with the terms "first batch" and "second batch" as it pertains to this project. Which was the first and which was the second?
the first batch was the first crowd-funded campaign: august 2016. after that, crowdsupply effectively turned the site into a "pre-order shop". none of the money from this SECOND batch has left crowdsupply's bank account.
for the first batch, $175k, $25k appx is held by crowdsupply because they'll be handling world-wide shipping. $130k of the $175k went to thinkpenguin. $60k of that $130k immediately went to the factory in china. $25k is left in thinkpenguin's bank account, to deal with the laptops when we get to it. $45k of the $60k is left in mike's bank account in china and that is ENTIRELY taken up with components and PCBs for the EOMA68-A20 2.7.5 and Microdesktop 1.7.
so if you're in the first batch there *is* nothing spare to refund *to* anyone. hence the question is absolutely critical because attempting to pull out money which doesn't exist and/or has been allocated for some considerable time does a LOT of damage.
but, the 2nd batch? not a problem at all.
l.
We all seem to be talking past each other and I fear we may have some confusion about what a ponzi scheme actually is.
In a ponzi scheme, money is taken from 'investors' under the false pretense (lie) that it will be used to fund operations with a positive return on investment when actually that money is just stashed and given back out to 'investors' as a fake 'return' on their 'investment'. This doesn't have to just be cash payouts, the con (remember, short for the -confidence- they are trying to steal from you) may include offices or turbines (or just pictures of these things) to make everything seem more legitimate.
In this case, the investments they claim to be making are almost 100% traceable and provable. The Bitcoin ledger can be used to see which wallets all mined bitcoins have gone to and Bitclub can use standard public/private key signatures to verify that they own one or more of those wallets.
If Bitclub cannot provide this verification then they may not be technically competent enough to make good investments.
If Bitclub will not provide this verification then they are most likely lying to their investors.
Given that they already have your money, the best thing to do is hope that whatever they are running (legitimate or not) holds up long enough for you to get back what you put in.
On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 8:53 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net
wrote:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 2:58 PM, Julie Marchant onpon4@riseup.net wrote:
Ugh, did it again. Sorry.
On 2017年12月28日 04:13, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
it's too close to the exploitation i've witnessed - and my friend has recently uncovered clear and blatant evidence of. mining however is *completely* different, not least because it, in no way, *actually* involves actual cash, and it is not directly related to "exchange rates" or the trading of currencies, at all.
So, you're somehow ethically opposed to trading Bitcoin for money, and yet not ethically opposed to trading it for goods? That doesn't make a lick of sense, Luke.
:) my understanding of money is different: i take the *intent* of the person into consideration, and i am generous with money - when i have it - to those people whose *intentions* i believe are worthwhile encouraging.
so in the case of trading bitcoin, most of the *intentions* that people are have are for the purposes of explotation. blatant, outright insider trading and pump-and-dump tactics. there's *clubs* you can join where this is carried out.
therefore, if you *trade* bitcoin, it's basically exploitation of somebody else's misfortune. therefore, i cannot and will not do it.
Money is just a representation of how many goods and services you have produced for others.
that's one interpretation, and it's one that serves many people extremely well. however... it misses something very very fundamental.
Economically, there is *no difference* between giving someone Bitcoin for USD and giving someone Bitcoin for food.
ok... would you deal with a warlord or a mass murderer, trading them bitcoin for USD? would you give an embezzler bitcoin if they asked for it saying that they wanted it to pay for food?
You know what's unethical? Mining Bitcoin. Because as has already been mentioned, mining Bitcoin uses a *ton* of energy,
ok there's a few things here:
(1) the reports on which the calculations were based have been shown to be flawed
(2) bitclub run most of their kit out of rekyavijk, iceland, where they are currrently sinking geo-thermal vents to power turbines. also cooling is *LITERALLY* free.
(3) there are instances of people coming up with extremely ingenious plans (one guy is recycling - burning - used car tyres) which otherwise would *never have been financially viable*
so not only are the reports based on the wrong info, but bitclub *is* doing its best to reduce environmental impact,
and it doesn't actually produce anything in the end.
this is equally true of any currency. you can't eat it. the only exception to that was cocoa beans, which the Mayans used as currency. great if there was an economic bust as you could *literally* eat your money.
other than that, to say "it doesn't actually produce anything" is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of money. money is EMPOWERMENT. it is an ENABLER.
Isn't one of the main features of EOMA68 being environmentally responsible? Well, using Bitcoin mining (through a scheme like this, no less) to fund something that is supposed to be environmentally responsible is the height of hypocrisy.
not at all: quite the opposite. what do you imagine that i will be doing this? let's go back to Simon Sinek's Ted Talk, and ask "why how what" rather than "what how why".
so let's ask the question: *why* do you think i am doing this? *why* am i leveraging this abbbsolutely ennormous financial opportunity?
what would it empower me to do? maybe fund a truly ethical peer-to-peer distributed crypto-currency that's truly eco-conscious because it's *not* dependent on proof-of-work, perhaps?
maybe make an ultra-low-power processor that is designed and optimised based around that very same crypto-currency?
maybe fund every software libre project that i've ever promised that i would if i ever had the means to, over the past 20 years?
take the eco-conscious technological plans that i have to the next level that they were *always intended to be*?
... or....
should i... *completely abandon* those plans, forget about them, maybe think of them as a pipe dream, *waiting* for someone to go, "uhhh that's all very well but you're never going to make it a reality, not now, not ever"
should i leave our fate in the hands of google, microsoft, oracle, intel, ARM, facebook, and twitta and that FUCKER elon musk who you can TELL clearly, with all his hype and talk of going to Mars, you KNOW he's given up on Humanity?
should i?
i'm asking you - seriously - should i ignore this opportunity and everything it represents, with everything that you know about me and the promises and committments that i have made, and leave matters in the hands of those.... i don't even want to use any kinds of words to describe how angry and disgusted i am with how irresponsible they truly are, these... "leaders" of technology.
(And yes, it would be funding EOMA68, regardless of whatever kind of weaseling you might do to say it isn't. If you depend on it to work on EOMA68, it's funding EOMA68.)
yup. i have no problem with that.
Just one question: is canceling support for the CrowdSupply campaign an option if you go through with this?
i'm already going through with it - it was already in motion.
ok, the answer's conditional.
(1) if you're part of the 2nd batch you can at any time send crowdsupply your order number, cc me, and i'll authorise a refund. they have all the funds, stored in their bank account(s). also, you don't need to read further, below.
(2) if you're part of the 1st batch, that's much more complex: as i've outlined many many times, the reputation of the factory is harmed if the suppliers do not get the orders that they've been promised; the factory workers are harmed because they don't the get jobs that they've been promised; it also does harm to the project if the funds are below the critical threshold (that they're already at) for buying components and much more. i therefore have to do an analysis to see if there is any harm that you intend to do to the project. it would help in my assessment if you make it absolutely clear if it is your intention to *actively* do harm to the project.
so.
if you are part of the first batch, do you intend to do *active* harm to this project if your request for a refund is not met; please kindly answer yes or no, if yes, please outline the extent of the damage that would be your intent to carry out, if any,, and i will be able to make a fully-informed assessment.
sorry for being blunt, i feel it's best to be absolutely up-front about these things.
l.
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 3:00 PM, Sam Huntress samhuntress@gmail.com wrote:
We all seem to be talking past each other and I fear we may have some confusion about what a ponzi scheme actually is.
In a ponzi scheme, money is taken from 'investors' under the false pretense (lie) that it will be used to fund operations with a positive return on investment when actually that money is just stashed and given back out to 'investors' as a fake 'return' on their 'investment'.
... down the tree until it collapses, yes.
apart from the US Federal Reserve Ponzi scheme that was cascade-created in 2007 by issuing UNREGULATED bonds a THOUSAND times larger than the entire U.S. Govt regulated market at the time and so consequently it is still in the process of collapsing, what's the largest ponzi scheme that's ever been recorded in human history?
in that historically-recorded ponzi scheme, what order of magnitude of money changed hands? (ignoring the multi multi trillion dollar 2007 US Fed Res ponzi scheme)
In this case, the investments they claim to be making are almost 100% traceable and provable. The Bitcoin ledger can be used to see which wallets all mined bitcoins have gone to and Bitclub can use standard public/private key signatures to verify that they own one or more of those wallets.
you mean, starting e.g. from here: https://bitclubpool.com/index.php?p=stats and here: https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/pool/bitclubnetwork
If Bitclub cannot provide this verification then they may not be technically competent enough to make good investments.
Given that they already have your money, the best thing to do is hope that whatever they are running (legitimate or not) holds up long enough for you to get back what you put in.
sam you underestimate the scope of what i seek to achieve here. i'm looking to leverage this so that the team of engineers can be paid for to design the RISCV-64 SoC, the eco-conscious smartphone can be paid for, and in about a year to 18 months time a foundry line of chips can be paid for - outright.
i'm certainl not "looking to get back $3500" that's for sure! and *i* am not *personally* looking to get back money beyond that which is sufficient to live on: i am looking to leverage this to fund some absolutely amazing...
... AND ECO-CONSCIOUS ....
... projects.
including REPLACING bitcoin.
l.
After recently learning how bitcoin network fees and shot up to £70 min! I asked for alts and was recommended to use dash.
https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/thread/20171227.034339.c3c3053f.en.html
oh! alexander. yeah. you! i'm happy to pay your membership, you've been extraordinarily helpful.... and persistent :)
l. --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 4:07 PM, Alexander Ross maillist_arm-netbook@aross.me wrote:
After recently learning how bitcoin network fees and shot up to £70 min! I asked for alts and was recommended to use dash.
https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/thread/20171227.034339.c3c3053f.en.html
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
you mean, starting e.g. from here: https://bitclubpool.com/index.php?p=stats and here: https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/pool/bitclubnetwork
Yes, exactly.
The blocks they are mining are being awarded to https://blockchain.info/address/155fzsEBHy9Ri2bMQ8uuuR3tv1YzcDywd4 And blockchain.info does record those blocks as being found by Bitclub. So Bitclub does seem to have significant new BTC coming in.
As long as you trust that whoever you sent money to does actually represent Bitclub, further verification does not seem necessary.
I do understand that $3500 isn't exactly backbreaking for this project, it just makes me anxious to see anyone start buying in so fully to things that seem 'too-good-to-be-true'
On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 10:34 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton < lkcl@lkcl.net> wrote:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 3:00 PM, Sam Huntress samhuntress@gmail.com wrote:
We all seem to be talking past each other and I fear we may have some confusion about what a ponzi scheme actually is.
In a ponzi scheme, money is taken from 'investors' under the false
pretense
(lie) that it will be used to fund operations with a positive return on investment when actually that money is just stashed and given back out to 'investors' as a fake 'return' on their 'investment'.
... down the tree until it collapses, yes.
apart from the US Federal Reserve Ponzi scheme that was cascade-created in 2007 by issuing UNREGULATED bonds a THOUSAND times larger than the entire U.S. Govt regulated market at the time and so consequently it is still in the process of collapsing, what's the largest ponzi scheme that's ever been recorded in human history?
in that historically-recorded ponzi scheme, what order of magnitude of money changed hands? (ignoring the multi multi trillion dollar 2007 US Fed Res ponzi scheme)
In this case, the investments they claim to be making are almost 100% traceable and provable. The Bitcoin ledger can be used to see which
wallets
all mined bitcoins have gone to and Bitclub can use standard
public/private
key signatures to verify that they own one or more of those wallets.
you mean, starting e.g. from here: https://bitclubpool.com/index.php?p=stats and here: https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/pool/bitclubnetwork
If Bitclub cannot provide this verification then they may not be technically competent enough to make good investments.
Given that they already have your money, the best thing to do is hope
that
whatever they are running (legitimate or not) holds up long enough for
you
to get back what you put in.
sam you underestimate the scope of what i seek to achieve here. i'm looking to leverage this so that the team of engineers can be paid for to design the RISCV-64 SoC, the eco-conscious smartphone can be paid for, and in about a year to 18 months time a foundry line of chips can be paid for - outright.
i'm certainl not "looking to get back $3500" that's for sure! and *i* am not *personally* looking to get back money beyond that which is sufficient to live on: i am looking to leverage this to fund some absolutely amazing...
... AND ECO-CONSCIOUS ....
... projects.
including REPLACING bitcoin.
l.
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 4:13 PM, Sam Huntress samhuntress@gmail.com wrote:
you mean, starting e.g. from here: https://bitclubpool.com/index.php?p=stats and here: https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/pool/bitclubnetwork
Yes, exactly.
The blocks they are mining are being awarded to https://blockchain.info/address/155fzsEBHy9Ri2bMQ8uuuR3tv1YzcDywd4 And blockchain.info does record those blocks as being found by Bitclub. So Bitclub does seem to have significant new BTC coming in.
cool. can you tell if it matches with the hash rate on the pool?
As long as you trust that whoever you sent money to does actually represent Bitclub, further verification does not seem necessary.
i can now confirm that they're paying out both mining and also commission. the first lot was only USD $14 which is extraordinarily low... but it's the first day and they *might* be taking the time of day when i signed up into account.
I do understand that $3500 isn't exactly backbreaking for this project, it just makes me anxious to see anyone start buying in so fully to things that seem 'too-good-to-be-true'
it actually took me a while - i just didn't mention it until the 30 days on commissioning equipment was nearly up. also i'm unusual in both understanding MLMs (good and bad) *and* bitcoin mining.
l.
2017-12-29 14:53 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68 [...]
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 2:58 PM, Julie Marchant onpon4@riseup.net wrote:
Ugh, did it again. Sorry.
On 2017年12月28日 04:13, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
it's too close to the exploitation i've witnessed - and my friend has recently uncovered clear and blatant evidence of. mining however is *completely* different, not least because it, in no way, *actually* involves actual cash, and it is not directly related to "exchange rates" or the trading of currencies, at all.
So, you're somehow ethically opposed to trading Bitcoin for money, and yet not ethically opposed to trading it for goods? That doesn't make a lick of sense, Luke.
+1 to Julie, and to the other people who expressed doubts about the wisdom to go down this path.
If anything, the whole coin-mining rush and the resources devoted to it (not only computational, also human resources and the amount of press/attention that is given to it) compared to many of the other world problems, look to me anything but sensible, and much less "eco-conscious" or "ethical".
So I am not going to start arguing about this, I hope to not reply to any other email in the thread, but just to express that I also feel that this new adventure is quite far from the general idea of the EOMA (which I backed as part of the campaign and also a few years before that), and the campaign, which I contributed to echo in many places while it ran, which now I kind of regret after the latest developments.
Just one question: is canceling support for the CrowdSupply campaign an option if you go through with this?
[...] i'm already going through with it - it was already in motion.
ok, the answer's conditional.
(1) if you're part of the 2nd batch you can at any time send crowdsupply your order number, cc me, and i'll authorise a refund. they have all the funds, stored in their bank account(s). also, you don't need to read further, below.
(2) if you're part of the 1st batch, that's much more complex: as i've outlined many many times, the reputation of the factory is harmed if the suppliers do not get the orders that they've been promised; the factory workers are harmed because they don't the get jobs that they've been promised; it also does harm to the project if the funds are below the critical threshold (that they're already at) for buying components and much more. i therefore have to do an analysis to see if there is any harm that you intend to do to the project. it would help in my assessment if you make it absolutely clear if it is your intention to *actively* do harm to the project.
I find that the language that you use is completely inappropriate to treat backers of the idea.
Julie and others, including me, *do not actively intend to harm the EOMA project*. They, or we, just don't feel comfortable with the turn of the story that you are going to make, or just made, so they lost confidence that it's a project worth backing. At most we want to *actively* remove us from the equation, not *actively* harm EOMA.
It's you who is *actively* changing the rules and making EOMA conditional on coin-mining operations rather than rethink the project and deliver less than promised, or do it in a different way, or run another campaign.
These suggestions were given by people in this thread, perhaps not the best, perhaps not enough, but that's what many people in the "EOMA community" expressed. If you disregard these opinions, well, it's you who is going to be the only actor *actively* harming or *boosting* the project, whatever end result is going to be.
It's maybe nobody's fault that things went this way, but in any case, it's not Julie's fault in any way what happend so far and that the money is insufficient now, so treating backers in this appalling way is not OK.
if you are part of the first batch, do you intend to do *active* harm to this project if your request for a refund is not met; please kindly answer yes or no, if yes, please outline the extent of the damage that would be your intent to carry out, if any,, and i will be able to make a fully-informed assessment.
If you go down this path, not only linking EOMA to the success of a coin-mining operation, but blaming people who backed and trusted you, I don't think that Julie is the only person who is going to ask for a refund.
sorry for being blunt, i feel it's best to be absolutely up-front about these things.
Ditto.
On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 3:19 AM, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo manuel.montezelo@gmail.com wrote:
2017-12-29 14:53 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton:
+1 to Julie, and to the other people who expressed doubts about the wisdom to go down this path.
the decision was already made. and couldn't really be properly assessed without having the information of someone *who* had made the decision to invest. i've now _got_ that information and it's nowhere near as good an opportunity as i initially thought... but i have enough to know that it is NOT a ponzi scheme.
If anything, the whole coin-mining rush and the resources devoted to it (not only computational, also human resources and the amount of press/attention that is given to it) compared to many of the other world problems, look to me anything but sensible, and much less "eco-conscious" or "ethical".
dude: it's the first time in human history where third parties are neither required for contracts to be ATOMICALLY binding. i'm not sure if you grasp the full significance of that.
prior to blockchain and hashgraph and so on the only way to guarantee that a contract was honoured is to (a) trust each party in the contract and (b) if there is a dispute trust a THIRD PARTY.
entire power structures have built up over millenia based around that and THIS IS THE FIRST TIME THE POWER TO NEGOTIATE CONTRACTS IS TRULY DECENTRALISED.
i... i can't... i can't emphasise enough how mind-bogglingly significant that truly is for the whole of humanity.
So I am not going to start arguing about this, I hope to not reply to any other email in the thread, but just to express that I also feel that this new adventure is quite far from the general idea of the EOMA (which I backed as part of the campaign and also a few years before that), and the campaign, which I contributed to echo in many places while it ran, which now I kind of regret after the latest developments.
there is nothing that i can say here. as in, i am not permitted, under my own ethical operating framework, to say anything that would interfere with your right to make assessments and conclusions for yourself.
(2) if you're part of the 1st batch, that's much more complex: as i've outlined many many times, the reputation of the factory is harmed if the suppliers do not get the orders that they've been promised; the factory workers are harmed because they don't the get jobs that they've been promised; it also does harm to the project if the funds are below the critical threshold (that they're already at) for buying components and much more. i therefore have to do an analysis to see if there is any harm that you intend to do to the project. it would help in my assessment if you make it absolutely clear if it is your intention to *actively* do harm to the project.
I find that the language that you use is completely inappropriate to treat backers of the idea.
ok, let's look first at the facts, then we go over them, then you can let me know how i *should* have presented it, so that i can learn how to make it clear.
but in doing so i am going to ask you one very simple thing: that you accept the facts AS the facts, ok?
the facts are that removing money from the first batch *actively* does harm. i'll go over them again below.
Julie and others, including me, *do not actively intend to harm the EOMA project*. They, or we, just don't feel comfortable with the turn of the story that you are going to make, or just made, so they lost confidence that it's a project worth backing. At most we want to *actively* remove us from the equation, not *actively* harm EOMA.
unfortunately, it does *active* harm if the money from the first batch is removed. i have made this clear a number of times.
* the amount of money available is only sufficient to pay components, shipping etc. (i.e. not living expenses) * therefore if an amount is SUBTRACTED from that total, it must, logically, mean that the total number of units manufactured is REDUCED * in many cases i have ALREADY PURCHASED COMPONENTS. 1500 JAE DC3 connectors. 2000 PCMCIA cases. 2000 PCMCIA sockets * if i talk to the factory and say "i'm sorry, the numbers to be manufactured are now 800 not 1000" their reaction will be as follows:
(1) they will never trust me to place an order with them ever again (2) as a knock-on effect all the contracts that THEY have arranged will also have to be re-negotiated (to LOWER values) (3) the factory's reputation with those suppliers will be IRREPARABLY HARMED as a result (4) the workers on the factory's assembly line will also be harmed.
It's you who is *actively* changing the rules
of course! i'll change anything that's needed - without sacrificing any of the underlying ethical principles - trying and testing out absolutely anything that stands a chance of working towards the goal.
that's *how* you succeed.
again, can i refer to Simon Sinek's talk and invite you to go back, fundamentally, to the WHY.
please answer for me: WHY do you think am i doing what i am doing?
i do mean, actually answer that question as best you can. don't treat it as "rhetorical" in any way.
and making EOMA conditional on coin-mining operations rather than rethink the project and deliver less than promised, or do it in a different way, or run another campaign.
i have been talking in ... have you been *reading* the updates at all over the past year??? fer fuck's sake manuel i've been planning *multiple* avenues here! *including* already delivering less! *including* planning multiple campaigns!
These suggestions were given by people in this thread, perhaps not the best, perhaps not enough, but that's what many people in the "EOMA community" expressed. If you disregard these opinions, well, it's you who is going to be the only actor *actively* harming or *boosting* the project, whatever end result is going to be.
pretty much every single update, i clearly state, "this project succeeds or fails based on your feedback and support". if you come back to the "WHY" as Simon Sinek advises that everyone first and foremost do, and you BELIEVE in that "WHY", then it is ALL our responsibility to keep an eye on the project and to give feedback.
i think you are losing sight of that... and also forgetting that the BTC i mined over 5 years ago - using MY personal money WELL before this Crowdfunding campaign started - was put in 32 days ago.
It's maybe nobody's fault that things went this way, but in any case, it's not Julie's fault in any way what happend so far and that the money is insufficient now, so treating backers in this appalling way is not OK.
tell me: what is "appalling" about describing - truthfully - the direct consequences of removing money from the first batch?
if you are part of the first batch, do you intend to do *active* harm to this project if your request for a refund is not met; please kindly answer yes or no, if yes, please outline the extent of the damage that would be your intent to carry out, if any,, and i will be able to make a fully-informed assessment.
If you go down this path, not only linking EOMA to the success of a coin-mining operation, but blaming people who backed and trusted you, I don't think that Julie is the only person who is going to ask for a refund.
i'm not quotes linking EOMA to the success of a coin mining operation quotes jaezuss, manuel, where did you get the impression that i'm that fucking stupid _come_ on man.
i *don't have* full-time jobs like everyone else in the techie field, i'm too much of a threat to companies for them to employ me. and, not to mention, there's the fact that if i *have* a full-time job i CAN'T FOCUS ON THIS TASK.
wake up for goodness sake, people. i've been trying for EIGHTEEN YEARS to gain full financial independence so that i can focus a hundred percent on ethical business and people KEEP FUCKING TAKING ADVANTAGE OF MY GENEROSITY.
hearing how jeremy allison managed to get his *brother* in on that VA Linux IPO when he'd *ASSUMED* that the founders would have contacted me... the list of times where people have either blatantly exploited my work for significant personal financial gain or blatant outright embezzled it in one case... i won't go into details because it would shock you too much.
so i'm going to ask you a very, very direct question: do you want me to give up? do you want me to quit? go back to the UK and get some fucking stupid job in walmart or tesco's? because i can do that if you prefer.
or do you want me to continue to try to succeed at the goals i've set?
sorry for being blunt, i feel it's best to be absolutely up-front about these things.
Ditto.
_great_! genuinely and absolutely honestly _great_. that way, misunderstandings get cleared up.
l.
if you are part of the first batch, do you intend to do *active* harm to this project if your request for a refund is not met; please kindly answer yes or no, if yes, please outline the extent of the damage that would be your intent to carry out, if any,, and i will be able to make a fully-informed assessment.
If you go down this path, not only linking EOMA to the success of a coin-mining operation, but blaming people who backed and trusted you, I don't think that Julie is the only person who is going to ask for a refund.
i'm not quotes linking EOMA to the success of a coin mining operation quotes jaezuss, manuel, where did you get the impression that i'm that fucking stupid _come_ on man.
i *don't have* full-time jobs like everyone else in the techie field, i'm too much of a threat to companies for them to employ me. and, not to mention, there's the fact that if i *have* a full-time job i CAN'T FOCUS ON THIS TASK.
wake up for goodness sake, people. i've been trying for EIGHTEEN YEARS to gain full financial independence so that i can focus a hundred percent on ethical business and people KEEP FUCKING TAKING ADVANTAGE OF MY GENEROSITY.
Hey Luke, I know this may sound hard for you, but don't let that get you down. You are doing a good service by making the eoma68 standard and even more so putting actions behind your words. Most people don't even try to walk the walk. I am glad you are doing your best to try.
hearing how jeremy allison managed to get his *brother* in on that VA Linux IPO when he'd *ASSUMED* that the founders would have contacted me... the list of times where people have either blatantly exploited my work for significant personal financial gain or blatant outright embezzled it in one case... i won't go into details because it would shock you too much.
so i'm going to ask you a very, very direct question: do you want me to give up? do you want me to quit? go back to the UK and get some fucking stupid job in walmart or tesco's? because i can do that if you prefer.
or do you want me to continue to try to succeed at the goals i've set?
Keep on trying to succeed man, I wish you the best Luke. Truly, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Don't let life get you down. :)
l.
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 9:46 AM, zap calmstorm@posteo.de wrote:
Hey Luke, I know this may sound hard for you, but don't let that get you down.
yehh, i realised a long time ago it would just cause too much distress to do that.
You are doing a good service by making the eoma68 standard and even more so putting actions behind your words. Most people don't even try to walk the walk. I am glad you are doing your best to try.
thx zap.
or do you want me to continue to try to succeed at the goals i've set?
Keep on trying to succeed man, I wish you the best Luke.
i will... as long as it useful to do so. i know not to pursue a goal that's no longer actually relevant, no matter how long you've been at it :)
Truly, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
that's really appreciated.
Don't let life get you down. :)
:)
dude: it's the first time in human history where third parties are neither required for contracts to be ATOMICALLY binding. i'm not sure if you grasp the full significance of that.
prior to blockchain and hashgraph and so on the only way to guarantee that a contract was honoured is to (a) trust each party in the contract and (b) if there is a dispute trust a THIRD PARTY.
entire power structures have built up over millenia based around that and THIS IS THE FIRST TIME THE POWER TO NEGOTIATE CONTRACTS IS TRULY DECENTRALISED.
Well, sort of. The actual exchange of currency doesn't involve a third party, and in the case of e.g. Ethereum there's a lot of interesting stuff you can do within the network. But for most real-world contracts you need information from outside the network about whether one party actually fulfilled its obligations, and then you're back to the messy realities of human trust.
On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 5:07 AM, Jonathan Frederickson silverskullpsu@gmail.com wrote:
entire power structures have built up over millenia based around that and THIS IS THE FIRST TIME THE POWER TO NEGOTIATE CONTRACTS IS TRULY DECENTRALISED.
Well, sort of. The actual exchange of currency doesn't involve a third party, and in the case of e.g. Ethereum there's a lot of interesting stuff you can do within the network. But for most real-world contracts you need information from outside the network about whether one party actually fulfilled its obligations, and then you're back to the messy realities of human trust.
eeexactly.
whereas with blockchain and hashgraph that trust is a mathematical inviolate (cryptographical level of) certainty.
i may have assumed above that you would realise the significance of what an an "atomic transaction" means in relation to contracts. it means that a public declaration of a contract becomes atomic - indivisible - i.e. absolute and inviolate.... WITH NO THIRD PARTY AND REQUIRING NO THIRD PARTY DISPUTE ARBITRATION.
to a mathematically cryptographical level the contract IS absolute and inviolate.
for LITERALLY the first time in human history.
is that clear? it means we - humanity - can be free to make our own contracts with other people, at our *own* responsibility, not that of a government or a judge or a lawyer or *anyone* else but the person with whom we are dealing. directly.
the number of people who truly grasp the significance of that is... honestly... really quite small.
l.
whereas with blockchain and hashgraph that trust is a mathematical inviolate (cryptographical level of) certainty.
Sure, assuming every aspect of that contract can be expressed on the blockchain. Financial transactions with cryptocurrencies can be (I'll sell you this ERC20 token for this much ETH, if and only if enough people pledge), but I'm still skeptical that such contracts will be very useful outside of a few narrowly defined niches.
A smart contract for preordering a new device, for example, has no idea whether the devices have been shipped, whether they were lost in transit, etc. The moment you involve humans (which is almost always necessary), you're back to needing dispute arbitration. A mathematically inviolable contract does you little good when a key part of the contract as seen by one of the parties (i.e. actually receiving the thing) can't be expressed as part of it.
On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 6:18 AM, Jonathan Frederickson silverskullpsu@gmail.com wrote:
whereas with blockchain and hashgraph that trust is a mathematical inviolate (cryptographical level of) certainty.
Sure, assuming every aspect of that contract can be expressed on the blockchain. Financial transactions with cryptocurrencies can be (I'll sell you this ERC20 token for this much ETH, if and only if enough people pledge), but I'm still skeptical that such contracts will be very useful outside of a few narrowly defined niches.
it's early days yet. cryptokitties is an actual first real-world effort to create something that isn't "trading or mining or speculation". this video is both extremely funny, informative and insightful at the same time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu8X0aZhDpA
A smart contract for preordering a new device, for example, has no idea whether the devices have been shipped, whether they were lost in transit, etc. The moment you involve humans (which is almost always necessary), you're back to needing dispute arbitration. A mathematically inviolable contract does you little good when a key part of the contract as seen by one of the parties (i.e. actually receiving the thing) can't be expressed as part of it.
yehyeh. but... let's think it through. there's a couple of scenarios
(1) one of the uses is: insurance. insurance companies are now investigating blockchain for declaring and underwriting insurance. what do you think would happen if an *insurance* company decided, affer making a publicly declared inviolate contract with someone, "oh we don't want to actually pay out, it's just a mathematical note, we didn't really actually truly mean it"?
the consequences of disregarding a [physical] violation / dishonouring of a publicly-notarised atomic contract is actually much more serious than it first seems.
(2) numerically-expressible contracts such as "subtract this number and add it to this other number"
this is basically the whole basis of crypto-currencies (except ethereum). the transaction is done and inviolate and there *is* no backing out. the "number" is transferred (added) to your "balance sheet", and that "balance sheet" propagates forward within the network.
the number [the "value" of the crypto-currency] *has forward continuity*. further atomic transactions empower further atomic transactions empower further atomic transactions.... you never *actually* escape from the inviolate nature of the atomic-contract-public-ledger-system.
thus, for *this* scenario, the objection that "human dispute arbitration" is needed simply does not apply.
(3) computationally-expressible contracts such as ethereum
this is where it gets *really* interesting as e.g. cryptokitties demonstrates (which, btw, has caused a major meltdown of ethereum as it's sucking up THIRTY PERCENT of the ENTIRE ethereum network resources).
whilst you _can_ actually replicate the contract system (cryptokitties unfortunately have not published the FULL genetic algorithm / contract) it is clear that the cryptokitties site is - as things stand - entirely set up to be the "enabler". it is NOT however the "arbitrator". the ETHEREUM NETWORK is the "arbitrator and prover that you bought, sold or birthed a kittie".
it is just unfortunate that the relevant algorithms have not been made public so it is not possible to create your own kitties... you *can* i believe however independently *buy and sell* them using a replica of the buy and sell algorithms... i'd like to see someone do that.
regardless: this is just another specialisation and extension of the extreme degenerate case, "subtract this number and add it to this other number", such that *as long as* you remain *within* the cryptokitties "system", All Is Well.
(4) static contract / document storage including describing arbitration procedures (potentially in computational form)
this is a proposed "hybrid" system which would be REALLY interesting, and is a general form of (1) and (3) that i've been thinking about for some time.
so where there is an actual cross-over into the real world, it's the ethereum-style (computation style) contracts that get particularly interesting, and even more so when you have machine-readable documents (think "Microsoft Access Forms"). in effect, this moves our dependence on individual computers over to DISTRIBUTED networks, exactly as the microsoft millenium research group envisaged about 20 years ago and used DCOM as the basis to do it.
so overall i believe you're missing the fact that it's only because *right now* we still use "individual" computers (or MIS-place our trust in other PEOPLE's computers), but imagine what would happen if ethereum's computation system BECAME THE DEFAULT FOR ALL COMPUTING ALGORITHM EXECUTION WORLD-WIDE OVERNIGHT.
that we *haven't* moved to that model - world-wide - is the reason why i believe that what you say, "we need to fall back on human-powered dispute arbitration" is true... *at the moment*.
l.
Hi Luke,
Julie Marchant onpon4@riseup.net writes:
You know what's unethical? Mining Bitcoin. Because as has already been mentioned, mining Bitcoin uses a *ton* of energy, and it doesn't actually produce anything in the end. Isn't one of the main features of EOMA68 being environmentally responsible? Well, using Bitcoin mining (through a scheme like this, no less) to fund something that is supposed to be environmentally responsible is the height of hypocrisy. (And yes, it would be funding EOMA68, regardless of whatever kind of weaseling you might do to say it isn't. If you depend on it to work on EOMA68, it's funding EOMA68.)
Just one question: is canceling support for the CrowdSupply campaign an option if you go through with this?
I’m quoting this, because I very much agree with Julie and others who oppose Bitcoin.
Whatever perceived advantages Bitcoin may seem to provide, I oppose it for a number of reasons, and I’d be very unhappy and disappointed if you went along with this plan.
(There’s no need to insult us by insisting that we simply don’t get the advantages of Bitcoin.)
-- Ricardo
GPG: BCA6 89B6 3655 3801 C3C6 2150 197A 5888 235F ACAC https://elephly.net
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 10:06 AM, Ricardo Wurmus rekado@elephly.net wrote:
Hi Luke,
Just one question: is canceling support for the CrowdSupply campaign an option if you go through with this?
I’m quoting this, because I very much agree with Julie and others who oppose Bitcoin.
ricardo: it's a little late... and also no longer relevant. it's too late because i had *already* - 34 days ago - used personal bitcoin mined over five years ago that has absolutely no connection WHATSOEVER to the EOMA68 project's (cash, USD/RMB) funds, and second it's no longer relevant because it's been established that it's a long-term investment not an "immediate financing of this and all possible projects we ever wanted to be funded" opportunity.
so your opposition is noted, respected... and at the same time can be disregarded.
l.
On 12/31/2017 05:17 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 10:06 AM, Ricardo Wurmus rekado@elephly.net wrote:
Hi Luke,
Just one question: is canceling support for the CrowdSupply campaign an option if you go through with this?
I’m quoting this, because I very much agree with Julie and others who oppose Bitcoin.
ricardo: it's a little late... and also no longer relevant. it's too late because i had *already* - 34 days ago - used personal bitcoin mined over five years ago that has absolutely no connection WHATSOEVER to the EOMA68 project's (cash, USD/RMB) funds, and second it's no longer relevant because it's been established that it's a long-term investment not an "immediate financing of this and all possible projects we ever wanted to be funded" opportunity.
so your opposition is noted, respected... and at the same time can be disregarded.
I must admit, I would not trust bitcoin either, but if you think its a good idea to use, that's your prerogative. I just think you should use liberapay for the majority of your donations. and avoid bitcoin when possible.
But since you have already have an account, I just ask you to be careful. It may not be very stable.
l.
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 8:31 PM, zap calmstorm@posteo.de wrote:
On 12/31/2017 05:17 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 10:06 AM, Ricardo Wurmus rekado@elephly.net wrote:
Hi Luke,
Just one question: is canceling support for the CrowdSupply campaign an option if you go through with this?
I’m quoting this, because I very much agree with Julie and others who oppose Bitcoin.
ricardo: it's a little late... and also no longer relevant. it's too late because i had *already* - 34 days ago - used personal bitcoin mined over five years ago that has absolutely no connection WHATSOEVER to the EOMA68 project's (cash, USD/RMB) funds, and second it's no longer relevant because it's been established that it's a long-term investment not an "immediate financing of this and all possible projects we ever wanted to be funded" opportunity.
so your opposition is noted, respected... and at the same time can be disregarded.
I must admit, I would not trust bitcoin either, but if you think its a good idea to use, that's your prerogative. I just think you should use liberapay for the majority of your donations. and avoid bitcoin when possible.
the other difference here is - was (before i had enough information to be able to ascertain that it was not feasible to do so):
* when i believed that bitclub was a high-exponential curve payout *I* intended *TO FUND* software libre projects with it
* now that i *KNOW* that bitclub is a LONG TERM investment, i am back - once again - to being DEPENDENT on donations and sponsorship and, once a fucking gain getting money from contract work and/or having to consider enslavement i mean employment which i know that people will say "you're wasting your time, you're a threat to our jobs".
door number one: financially independent and able to fund all projects i ever wanted to fund
door number two: not financially independent and back to having to listen to people telling me i'm being a fucking idiot and incapable of making decisions.
l.
...i am back
- once again - to being DEPENDENT on donations and sponsorship and,
once a fucking gain getting money from contract work and/or having to consider enslavement i mean employment which i know that people will say "you're wasting your time, you're a threat to our jobs".
Hi Luke, I backed this project because I feel what you are doing is extraordinary.I want to provide some additional funding, but I rather not open another account. Will paypal work for you?
As Lee Camp would say "Keep fighting"
On Sunday, December 31, 2017 6:39 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 8:31 PM, zap calmstorm@posteo.de wrote:
On 12/31/2017 05:17 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 10:06 AM, Ricardo Wurmus rekado@elephly.net wrote:
Hi Luke,
Just one question: is canceling support for the CrowdSupply campaign an option if you go through with this?
I’m quoting this, because I very much agree with Julie and others who oppose Bitcoin.
ricardo: it's a little late... and also no longer relevant. it's too late because i had *already* - 34 days ago - used personal bitcoin mined over five years ago that has absolutely no connection WHATSOEVER to the EOMA68 project's (cash, USD/RMB) funds, and second it's no longer relevant because it's been established that it's a long-term investment not an "immediate financing of this and all possible projects we ever wanted to be funded" opportunity.
so your opposition is noted, respected... and at the same time can be disregarded.
I must admit, I would not trust bitcoin either, but if you think its a good idea to use, that's your prerogative. I just think you should use liberapay for the majority of your donations. and avoid bitcoin when possible.
the other difference here is - was (before i had enough information to be able to ascertain that it was not feasible to do so):
* when i believed that bitclub was a high-exponential curve payout *I* intended *TO FUND* software libre projects with it
* now that i *KNOW* that bitclub is a LONG TERM investment, i am back - once again - to being DEPENDENT on donations and sponsorship and, once a fucking gain getting money from contract work and/or having to consider enslavement i mean employment which i know that people will say "you're wasting your time, you're a threat to our jobs".
door number one: financially independent and able to fund all projects i ever wanted to fund
door number two: not financially independent and back to having to listen to people telling me i'm being a fucking idiot and incapable of making decisions.
l.
_______________________________________________ arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
On Mon, Jan 1, 2018 at 7:58 AM, Chuck Card via arm-netbook arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk wrote:
Hi Luke, I backed this project because I feel what you are doing is extraordinary.
thanks chuck.
I want to provide some additional funding, but I rather not open another account. Will paypal work for you?
that would be perfect - it'll need to be to my partner marie's paypal account? here's a convenient link:
marie says:
"The account is registered in the UK. Pounds are preferred. When they click on the link, They should see my name...Marie Raymond and a picture of yarn balls and a crochet hook. And Newton Stewart as the location."
As Lee Camp would say "Keep fighting"
:)
i received from someone a really inspiring and thoughtful message, i've received permission to anonymously put it into an update. mostly as a reminder to myself.
thx chuck.
l.
On Mon, Jan 01, 2018 at 09:08:14AM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
On Mon, Jan 1, 2018 at 7:58 AM, Chuck Card via arm-netbook arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk wrote:
I want to provide some additional funding, but I rather not open another account. Will paypal work for you?
that would be perfect - it'll need to be to my partner marie's paypal account? here's a convenient link:
I understand everyone who does not want to open another account. I did a quick check and it appears that paypals fees can be substantially higher than those of liberapay. Paypals fees seems to depend if you pay right out of your paypal balance or from credit card via paypal and if it is U.S. domestic (which it is not as the paypal account of lukes partner marie is from the UK) or international.
Liberapays fees seem especially reasonable if you have a bank account in the European Union
kind regards Pablo
Sent this from the wrong email address. Please excuse the duplicate email. Luke: if the other email is in the moderation queue, feel free to just reject it, since it doesn't add anything beyond this version.
On 2017年12月27日 06:23, Luca Saiu wrote:
You may want to have a look at this: http://behindmlm.com/companies/bitclub-network-review-zeek-ponzi-veterans-at...
I have no doubts about your good faith but to put it bluntly the investment is morally very questionable, almost certainly illegal, and likely to result in financial loss for yourself and the project. It would be a shame to see the initiative crash because the funds got stuck in a Ponzi.
Look at how many similar schemes, offering no proof of actual mining, exist right now. This is not going to end well.
I have to second this opinion. Luke, doing *nothing* and losing the funds honorably would easily be preferable over trying to do *any* kind of "multi-level marketing", which is almost certainly going to be a financial loss to you.
The idea of "multi-level marketing" can be explained in a chart. The "0"s represent people buying into it, with the one at the top being the one who started it. Tell me, what does this look like?
0 000 00000 0000000 000000000 00000000000 0000000000000 000000000000000 00000000000000000 0000000000000000000 000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000
If you need money to survive, and you can't find any contracts for well-paying work that you could do alongside EOMA68, then the best thing to do is either:
1. Do whatever you can with the remaining funds to do the closest you can to fulfilling your promises. This may force you to make cuts. For example, perhaps you might have to scrap the laptop design entirely and only deliver cards and micro-desktops, then fund the laptop design separately later. Or, perhaps you will have to just abandon delivering on the printed-for-you laptops, and everyone would have to print the laptops on their own. This is the solution I would prefer; it would be a bummer to not have everything you sought out for, but at least we would have *something*. A starting point. It's better than nothing.
2. Put the project on hold to get a well-paying, actual job and build up enough savings to continue as originally planned at a later date.
3. First do (1), then do (2) when you run out of funds.
Note: You said in a later email that it's just Bitcoin you already had you're "investing" into this, but that's rather splitting hairs. You said you have 0.65 BTC; that's currently worth almost $10,000. That's a *massive* financial loss you're looking at there. If you have no use for the BTC and haven't been touching it, convert it to real currency and put it in your bank. Don't go throwing it at one of these schemes.
Look at how many similar schemes, offering no proof of actual mining, exist right now. This is not going to end well.
I have to second this opinion. Luke, doing *nothing* and losing the funds honorably would easily be preferable over trying to do *any* kind
My understanding of bitcoin is that you can 'check the ledger' to see the entire history of every bitcoin including the block it was mined from and the key it was awarded to.
Is it not possible for this mining operation to prove they own these keys and show that all BTC they distribute to the pool came from blocks the pool mined?
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 5:43 PM, Sam Huntress samhuntress@gmail.com wrote:
My understanding of bitcoin is that you can 'check the ledger' to see the entire history of every bitcoin including the block it was mined from and the key it was awarded to.
Is it not possible for this mining operation to prove they own these keys and show that all BTC they distribute to the pool came from blocks the pool mined?
if people published their private wallet addresses then yes. it turns out that there are a number of people online who do videos showing their MLM web front-ends. if some of those people *accidentally* or perhaps even on purpose show their private wallet address then yes you could link through to them.
it would be a *lot* of laborious work, going through.... hundreds of hours of youtube video footage.
l.
Bitcoin is hyper-deflated due to over speculation.
With 16.7 million bitcoin across 21 million wallets lets say averaging 1.2 wallets per person meaning very roughly ~17.5 million wallets within a deviation of that statistic probably close to +/- 2.5 million, leaves between 1.114 btc and 0.835 btc per person. For comparison: 1.55 trillion usd across 326 million citizens ( generously disregarding the petro-dollar attribute ), leaves about 4.7 thousand usd per citizen. If every bitcoin wallet owner considered spent bitcoin exclusively and with the same purchasing power as the average us citizen and with the same habits, the tangible value of between 1.114 and 0.835 btc would be approximately 4.7 thousand usd. None of this is the current economic reality though, as a very miniscule percentage of wallet owners actually survive by spending bitcoin. Additionally the petro-dollar trait increases the population which owns primarily usd significantly about the us population, which would increase its value and thereby decrease bitcoin's relative tangible value. So this valuation is very generous in favor of bitcoin, to say the least.
Many of the transactions done in bitcoin are black market, which is showing increasing demand for switching to Monero ( a currency which launders as a part of the mining operation at a high risk of losing portions to malicious attackers ). This switch may help bitcoin with legitimacy issues, but also may not if both currencies share popularity. Either way so long as some interest in Monero exists, that is a cut in value.
Many of the detractors uninterested in bitcoin's effect on crime, will argue the ecological effect of crypto-currency mining procedures through massive electrical requirement. Most of these detractors may be satisfied once Ethereum implements the first large scale proof-of-stake algorithm which requires only execution of the transaction and staking one's own currency on the accuracy thereof. The appeal of creating entire organizations with contracts on the platform, Ethereum has a non-trivial possibility of becoming independent of trade outside its marketplace ( a thing countries strive for ). This depends on the security of auditing contract code as well as fulfilling the promise to actually release a proof of stake protocol. If those two conditions are met, there would then be an argument for bitcoin becoming considered obsolete. However it is also possible many will remain unconfortable with the principle of weighing one's influence on consensus as proportional to how much currency they are willing to gamble on that influence, and will prefer bitcoin's most efficient hardware approach as supporting cryptographic research indirectly.
All in all, if you purchase bitcoin at today's market price in usd, you are making the bet that bitcoin's base will fully convert there finances to bitcoin and the number of those people will increase by a magnitude of 3 before selling or that the consensus among speculators will change to make bets that it will increase above a magnitude of 3 before you sell.
All in all, this type of speculation rewards gambling and malicious mass misinformation campaigns and I would not support it by participating.
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 8:54 AM, Jean Flamelle eaterjolly@gmail.com wrote:
All in all, this type of speculation rewards gambling and malicious mass misinformation campaigns and I would not support it by participating.
thank you, jean, for a really informative and insightful discourse. your arguments are precisely why i will not participate in crypto-currency trading.
l.
if people published their private wallet addresses then yes.
No. The entire point of public/private key pairs is that you can prove you own the pair without revealing the private key. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/58792/proof-of-address-ownership
We can use the bitcoin ledger (blockchain) to see what address every mining reward went to. This mining pool needs to prove they own one or more of those addresses in order to be trusted. They do this by privately signing some arbitrary challenge using the private key associated with the public key to which the mining reward was assigned. That public key (that we know from looking at the blockchain owns the BTC awarded through mining) is then used to confirm the signature thus confirming that the mining pool does indeed own that key pair and therefor did actually receive the BTC for mining that block.
We can then look at the BTC<->USD exchange rates and see if the payouts from this mining pool are within reason.
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 4:16 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net
wrote:
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 8:54 AM, Jean Flamelle eaterjolly@gmail.com wrote:
All in all, this type of speculation rewards gambling and malicious mass misinformation campaigns and I would not support it by participating.
thank you, jean, for a really informative and insightful discourse. your arguments are precisely why i will not participate in crypto-currency trading.
l.
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 2:44 PM, Sam Huntress samhuntress@gmail.com wrote:
if people published their private wallet addresses then yes.
No. The entire point of public/private key pairs is that you can prove you own the pair without revealing the private key. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/58792/proof-of-address-ownership
sorry: i meant, everyone has a private wallet into which they're receiving bitcoin. the public key of that wallet is put into their management console web front-end.
We can use the bitcoin ledger (blockchain) to see what address every mining reward went to. This mining pool needs to prove they own one or more of those addresses in order to be trusted. They do this by privately signing some arbitrary challenge using the private key associated with the public key to which the mining reward was assigned. That public key (that we know from looking at the blockchain owns the BTC awarded through mining) is then used to confirm the signature thus confirming that the mining pool does indeed own that key pair and therefor did actually receive the BTC for mining that block.
ok so... does this assume that we can find out what the public key of people's "receive" wallets actually are? here's one (mine):
19trK4AVnCC1YHdJfgWWfpZ9c2uLociNjQ
so it should be possible to do a proof-of-concept... ahh... except i'm not planning to actually take any BTC out in the immediate future... ok i could transfer *something* out, like $10 or something.
getting hold of anyone else's public-key for their wallets means doing a *lot* of trawling of youtube and/or looking online for screenshots that people might have accidentally published via the various "hey this is real sign up under me" jobbie videos.
We can then look at the BTC<->USD exchange rates and see if the payouts from this mining pool are within reason.
i also found a page that shows how many "Founders" there are. a "Founder" is defined as "anyone who has at least a $3500 share in the three mining pools". there were around 14,000 such people as of arouuund.... november 1st.
it should be possible to make a guestimate of the total number of people in the network based on that, if we make some conservative guesses about the ratio of the number of people who did *not* by full shares vs those who bought partial shares.
it's quite a lot of assumptions.... it'd do for a start. y'know what... we could... um... just... ask them :)
l.
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 4:26 PM, Julie Marchant onpon4@riseup.net wrote:
Sent this from the wrong email address. Please excuse the duplicate email. Luke: if the other email is in the moderation queue, feel free to just reject it, since it doesn't add anything beyond this version.
On 2017年12月27日 06:23, Luca Saiu wrote:
You may want to have a look at this: http://behindmlm.com/companies/bitclub-network-review-zeek-ponzi-veterans-at...
I have no doubts about your good faith but to put it bluntly the investment is morally very questionable, almost certainly illegal, and likely to result in financial loss for yourself and the project. It would be a shame to see the initiative crash because the funds got stuck in a Ponzi.
Look at how many similar schemes, offering no proof of actual mining, exist right now. This is not going to end well.
I have to second this opinion. Luke, doing *nothing* and losing the funds honorably would easily be preferable over trying to do *any* kind of "multi-level marketing", which is almost certainly going to be a financial loss to you.
nope, it won't. it's already a gain - someone kindly signed up and took me over the threshold into $200/day commissions. time for celebration, there :)
The idea of "multi-level marketing" can be explained in a chart. The "0"s represent people buying into it, with the one at the top being the one who started it. Tell me, what does this look like?
i'm not ready yet to tell you the story, publicly, about the pyramid scam perpetrated by the U.S. Federal Reserve back in 2007. the scope and scale is... breathtaking in its brazen-ness. Senator Ron Paul's book "End The Fed" and that film on the AAA+ mortgage scam is just the tip of the iceberg that can be traced DIRECTLY back to, correlating DIRECTLY with, that blatantly unethical and BEYOND criminal decision.
please... it makes me see red to hear people compare MLMs to pyramid scams when, if you know where to look, you can see evidence of governments basically doing exactly that and pretending it's not. i'm taking it down a few mental defcon levels now... getting over the feeling of outrage... callm, caaalm...
i've actually joined an MLM before (Moxxor - didn't make anything because my partner ran it, we set up 3 accounts.... and she put everything in "left leg"... sigh) and i know people who have (my partner joined Usana 10 years ago and encouraged her family to join). she earned a good salary at the time so it wasn't "risk", and actually ended up buying then giving away quite a lot of pharmaceutical-grade products to friends who really needed it. the problem was not so much that it was damn hard work but that it "fizzled out". people gave up, disillusioned, and, DESPITE the warnings, tried suing Usana. idiots, the lot of them.
most MLMs have a peak period where the exponential effect, like any evolutionarily constrained growth, out-strips "supply" and tails off. i even did the implementation of "fox and chickens" population algorithm growth, many years ago.
bitclbub will be absolutely no different from that, and everybody KNOWS that IN ADVANCE. there's even warnings about it actually *on* the informational pages and articles in the site. everyone KNOWS that unless something drastically changes, there's a window of opportunity of 3 to 5 years where mining is profitable. 12.5 BTC reward this year, 6.25 18 months after that, 3.125 18 months after that...
... and that's probably the point where they might actually consider shutting the entire operation down. or adapting to different currencies. they do also offer GPU mining of about 7 or 8 altcoins.
If you need money to survive, and you can't find any contracts for well-paying work that you could do alongside EOMA68, then the best thing to do is either:
well... someone very kindly joined and put in enough so that i've crossed the first threshold for commissions :)
- Do whatever you can with the remaining funds to do the closest you
can to fulfilling your promises. This may force you to make cuts.
i'd already been doing that. the NAND is gone, and the next thing that would have to go would be HDMI. this would be a bitch as anyone with stand-alone Cards wouldn't be able to use them. i'd have to give those people a Micro-Desktop PCB.
For example, perhaps you might have to scrap the laptop design entirely
i really *really* don't want to do that :) and, luckily, it looks like i now won't have to. yay!
and only deliver cards and micro-desktops, then fund the laptop design separately later.
yehyeh that's what the current plan is.
Or, perhaps you will have to just abandon delivering on the printed-for-you laptops, and everyone would have to print the laptops on their own. This is the solution I would prefer; it would be a bummer to not have everything you sought out for, but at least we would have *something*. A starting point. It's better than nothing.
yyyeahh
- Put the project on hold to get a well-paying, actual job and build up
enough savings to continue as originally planned at a later date.
there are enough people already contacting me (1 every update, usually) that further delays would be... bad. if i am explaining privately to people that i am *actively* getting on with things, they're fine with that. if i don't *have* an answer, it all goes to hell in a handbasket very very quickly.
also, the fact that i am a software libre developer with such significant copyright material, and that i had to stop adding to my CV about 4 years ago when it got to i think 15 pages in length actually means that i'm not really "employable" by traditional companies. the insecure CTOs usually freak out and believe i'm after their job, and the secure and sensible people state quite openly, "you will get bored here, it would be IRRESPONSIBLE of us to employ you".
as a result my "employment" - actual paid work vs time not being paid - has been consistently somewhere around FIFTEEN percent for the past 20 years. average income over a 20 year period: around USD $15,000.
bottom line is: anyone else this idea would be fine. for me - aged 47 and at the point where i should be a CTO of my own company.... not going to work, is it?
- First do (1), then do (2) when you run out of funds.
yes - you basically described my default fall-back plan, in a nutshell.
some time about 5 weeks ago, i was pretty depressed and f****g fed up, basically, and i went, "right, that's it, i've HAD it with this consistent decade-long scraping around". i recovered the BTC i got from the (almost failed, f*****g dangerous) butterfly labs equipment purchased 4-5 years ago, and on hearing about bitclub from a friend, immediately recognised the benefits *thanks* to my former experience with MLMs and with mining, and it was an easy decision.
Note: You said in a later email that it's just Bitcoin you already had you're "investing" into this, but that's rather splitting hairs.
yes it is - i run on some... interesting ethically-based heuristics. i didn't mention this before but last year i GAVE AWAY 1.3 of the bitcoins mined by that incredibly dangerous butterflylabs equipment to my sponsor, chris, from thinkpenguin. he'd sponsored me by that point to the tune of USD $60,000, so it felt "right" to just... give it to him.
You said you have 0.65 BTC; that's currently worth almost $10,000.
it wasn't: 0.4 BTC was about... $3500 at the time i bought the equipment. and it's already bought. the decision's been made.
0.25 i gave to someone in order to invest in their 3D printing products, as a joint venture / investor in him, he's an extremely reclusive and exceptionally competent engineer, and he'll be able to pay for converting one of his products to injection-molded and we'll be able to market it and make quite a lot of money. i've never actually invested in anyone else's business before, it's a first for me.
and i could *only* consider doing it because that BTC came from a source that has absolutely nothing to do with the crowdfunding. obviously though i chose to invest in something that will, indirectly, benefit EOMA68 (in this case the 3D printing part).
the nature of who i am and what i am is not changing: over the past 20 years i've been through absolute HELL and the worst kinds of exploitation by corporations spongeing off of my expertise, i've witnessed key strategic people in the free software community also end up being targetted by people wishing to exploit them, and i'm not putting up with it any longer.
That's a *massive* financial loss you're looking at there. If you have no use for the BTC and haven't been touching it, convert it to real currency and put it in your bank.
nnope. the bang-per-buck ratio of doing so vs the potential to fulfil the plans that i've been working on, everything i've read over the past 20 years tells me that's "failure" talk. i've been looking for something like this for some time, with the potential and also sufficiently ethically justifiable to consider leveraging.
... one person i'm in touch with, they've been investigating altcoin trading. they have asperger's so have the attention span and the intelligence to VERY quickly do the research and experimentation. what they've uncovered... holy f*** the insider trading and "pump-and-dump" tactics being deployed world-wide right now are OUTRIGHT BRAZEN. i did try talking him out of it but he seems to be doing ok: he's up $1800 in 10 days and has encountered and fallen foul of both John Macaffee's twitter "pump-and-dump" "AltCoin Of The Day!!!" scam *and* the fraudulent guy who
my next target's USD $400 / day, which is where, every 9-10 days, i'll be able to buy people from the free software and libre hardware community a share of equipment that will earn them $30-$50 a day.
all of that funded not through putting CASH in but using MINED BITCOIN and *commission* to do it.
l.
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 11:59 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
ok so the past couple of updates i sent out i mentioned that there's no longer sufficient funds in the current campaign to further pay accommodation or any other living expenses. thus it is *really important* that i find sources of funds, immediately. beyond that, i may have found something that's worth exploring that has the potential to fund pretty much absolutely everything that we want to achieve, if it is leveraged correctly.
one of the options that i am exploring is bltclub.
I got to be honest here, running out of funds in a crowdfunding campaign and looking to make it up via bitcoin does not make me feel very confident. I don't mean to rub it in your face and I'm sure you've explored this thoroughly, but you also did that with the campaign and yet you did run out of money because shit happens and crypto is too messed up right now. Besides the problem with bitcoin is that as of right now there are 200k pending transactions. So unless you can confirm from beforehand that you can pay a significant amount of the remaining expenses directly via bitcoin I don't think this idea even computes as turning it into fiat is slow and expensive in transaction fees.
An idea of mine: this project is exactly what the government funding shakti hope for. Maybe ask madhu about potential government/uni funds. Pitch the crowdfunding campaign as the proving ground of the standard and hope for the best. Education is a good example. If it goes through you will probably get more money that you'd know what to do with in the context of the campaign, plus a nice trip to India.
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 11:03 PM, Bill Kontos vkontogpls@gmail.com wrote:
I got to be honest here, running out of funds in a crowdfunding campaign and looking to make it up via bitcoin does not make me feel very confident.
luckily, aside from cashflow (which someone's offered to help with), as of yesterday that's gone, $200/day. first commission came in at 3am this morning, TW time.
nit-picking: it's not bitcoin, it's bitcoin mining *commissions* that make up the vaaaast bulk here, and those are issued in USD not BTC.
I don't mean to rub it in your face and I'm sure you've explored this thoroughly, but you also did that with the campaign and yet you did run out of money because shit happens
that, and because i knew that there was quite a lot of technical issues to be resolved (linux kernel stuff etc) the absolute last thing needed is to go "mainstream user", hence why i am very happy that the numbers are *only* 2500 backers, *only* 900 cards, *only* 450 microdesktop housings and *only* 120 PFY/PIY laptop housings.
and crypto is too messed up right now. Besides the problem with bitcoin is that as of right now there are 200k pending transactions.
that's valuable information that i will need to know so as to be able to plan ahead, thank you. if you hear anything like that please do tell me straight away ok?
An idea of mine: this project is exactly what the government funding shakti hope for. Maybe ask madhu about potential government/uni funds.
yes... i will get a chance to talk to him about that in about a month's time when the team isn't focussing 100% on tape-out.
Pitch the crowdfunding campaign as the proving ground of the standard and hope for the best. Education is a good example. If it goes through you will probably get more money that you'd know what to do with in the context of the campaign, plus a nice trip to India.
:)
madhu did explain that getting money out of india's bureaucratic government system is.... sloooooow in the extreme. their reaction time should, basically, not be relied on in any meaningful way.
one of the things that i will need to do is think through with madhu *exactly* what kind of SoC the indian education sector would actually need. there's a professor who did a report (18 months ago?) he recommended 2gb RAM Intel Celeron laptops as being perfectly capable of running LibreOffice, Firefox etc. etc.
so the EOMA68 laptop Housing with an EOMA68-RISCV64 processor with say 4GB of dual 32-bit LPDDR3 RAM ICs would be *perfect*.
but... getting the indian *government* to pay that funding? yes..... but 18 months late.
hence the focus on getting - FAST - the funds IN PLACE so that we don't HAVE to wait around.
l.
arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk
-
Alexander Ross -
Bill Kontos -
Chuck Card -
Hrvoje Lasic -
Jean Flamelle -
Jonathan Frederickson -
Julie Marchant -
Luca Saiu -
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton -
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo -
Mike Henry -
mike.valk＠gmail.com -
Pablo Rath -
Pen-Yuan Hsing -
Philip Hands -
Ricardo Wurmus -
Sam Huntress -
Wes Frazier -
zap