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Post by cjm on Oct 24, 2016 14:38:04 GMT
Somehow South Africa is not in AfricaIs the Time Finally Ripe for Bitcoin Remittances in Africa?When the words Bitcoin and Africa appear in a sentence, the word remittance usually follows. When Bitcoin first hit the mainstream in 2013, its low-cost money transfer feature was hailed as the solution to the overly expensive remittance costs charged by the large money transfer operators (MTOs), Western Union and MoneyGram. This is especially true when it comes to transferring funds to Africa. However, in the eight years since Bitcoin was first launched, bitcoin remittances in Africa have not really taken off. ...
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Post by cjm on Aug 30, 2017 10:59:09 GMT
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Post by Trog on Aug 31, 2017 6:53:41 GMT
Hardly seems worth it - you'd have to mine Ethereum for a year to recover the cost of the thing. That's assuming that you have an optimum setup. Furthermore, the technology behind these things move at lightspeed - will it even be competitive in a year's time? If not, you'll have to replace it <=> zero profit.
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Post by cjm on Sept 1, 2017 7:20:18 GMT
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Post by Trog on Sept 1, 2017 9:10:40 GMT
I'm tending towards the conclusion that cryptocurrency mining is similar to a pyramid scheme, in that you have to get into it early to make big profits. As a particular cryptocurrency matures, it becomes less and less profitable to mine it. I suspect that, these days, to profitably mine Bitcoin is way out of the league of ordinary people, and probably only feasible for outfits who have invested many millions of dollars in equipment to do so. I therefore think that, for a normal person (small outfit) to make money from cryptocurrency mining he should focus on the transition phases during the lifetime of a cryptocurrency. These phases are mining on: GPU clusters. Field-programmable gate arrays. Application-specific integrated circuits. Each step is probably a few thousand times faster than the previous one. Once some miners have moved from one stage to the next, whatever remains becomes obsolete. So the art is to be amongst the first at every stage. One should focus on being able to rapidly configure GPU clusters to mine coins at the start of a new cryptocurrency. And then to be able to rapidly set up a field-programmable gate array to take over from the GPU cluster. And to be able to rapidly develop application-specific integrated circuits for that particular currency to replace the field-programmable gate array. (This is complex and you need some very intelligent and highly trained people to do it, but it is still within the realm of the possible. Just.) And then to stop - and move on to a new cryptocurrency. So those are the skills one needs to develop and set up for; to be very good and very early at transitioning. Since there are huge similarities between cryptocurrencies, this is actually a well defined and therefore a fairly narrow field, so these are probably techniques capable of development. Anyway, I see very little scope for profiting from mining in any other way. Integrated Circuit Design: How would one produce own home-brew IC
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Post by cjm on Sept 3, 2017 8:28:34 GMT
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