(06-08-2015, 03:54 AM)SCN-3_NULL Wrote: [ -> ] (06-08-2015, 03:51 AM)Surge Wrote: [ -> ]I hope you brought a sentinel module for those SHIVs
or a whole SHIV/drone team, sending humans in are too wasteful, machines can do a better job
well SHIVs have the weakness of not scaling as well, they are constants, so you can't get 100% shots with them due to ridiculous aim, they also can't take cover, use explosives, run & gun, volley fire, they can't get gene mods....basically they're great for augmenting a team of humans, especially if you can't stock yourself with 6 colonels, and a 6 SHIV team technically works but there are better options, especially on classic.
(06-08-2015, 12:32 AM)Battle Bee Wrote: [ -> ]Not Bitcoin.
A credit card/bank account in general.
Right, but I mentioned bitcoin because bitcoin allows you to send money to anyone in real life or online without requiring a bank account or credit card or any of that.
You just run an app on your PC or phone that serves as a bitcoin wallet, allowing you to send and recieve them as easily as you would pay someone using cash.
The only tricky part for people without the ability to buy things online is getting some bitcoin. It is possible to buy them in person if you know somebody who has them for sale, or can buy them online using their account for you.
Once you have them though, you send a payment by copypasting the address to send the payment to and it will get there all by itself for perhaps $0.02 in fees, compared to the several dollars in fees you pay using paypal or a major credit card.
Its a really incredible technology that sadly is taking a long time to catch on. But already you can buy things online from a growing number of stores like Newegg using them, and there's resturaunts and the like where you can buy coffee or lunch for yourself using it as well.
For instance here's one of my bitcoin addresses. You can make as many of these as you want, and most wallets let you label them to make it easy to keep track of who you have sent money to or gotten money from. 16Bgxkcam8WnoWvwkRZUcnn4HfCjg5n2He
And one of the neatest things is that you can see how much money an address has in it, but you can't take that money out of it unless it belongs to you. No more of that stealing people's account numbers nonsense that goes on with the banks.
For those not using sufficient amounts of dakka, this is what it looks like.
(06-08-2015, 04:08 AM)OdinYggd Wrote: [ -> ] (06-08-2015, 12:32 AM)Battle Bee Wrote: [ -> ]Not Bitcoin.
A credit card/bank account in general.
Right, but I mentioned bitcoin because bitcoin allows you to send money to anyone in real life or online without requiring a bank account or credit card or any of that.
You just run an app on your PC or phone that serves as a bitcoin wallet, allowing you to send and recieve them as easily as you would pay someone using cash.
The only tricky part for people without the ability to buy things online is getting some bitcoin. It is possible to buy them in person if you know somebody who has them for sale, or can buy them online using their account for you.
Once you have them though, you send a payment by copypasting the address to send the payment to and it will get there all by itself for perhaps $0.02 in fees, compared to the several dollars in fees you pay using paypal or a major credit card.
Its a really incredible technology that sadly is taking a long time to catch on. But already you can buy things online from a growing number of stores like Newegg using them, and there's resturaunts and the like where you can buy coffee or lunch for yourself using it as well.
For instance here's one of my bitcoin addresses. You can make as many of these as you want, and most wallets let you label them to make it easy to keep track of who you have sent money to or gotten money from. 16Bgxkcam8WnoWvwkRZUcnn4HfCjg5n2He
And one of the neatest things is that you can see how much money an address has in it, but you can't take that money out of it unless it belongs to you. No more of that stealing people's account numbers nonsense that goes on with the banks.
The problem with bitcoin is that it's a tremendous pain in the arse for anyone who isn't using bitcoin. It's not a preferred currency because the value with respect to real money fluctuates wildly (though it is stabilising) and converting from bitcoin to real money only happens through third party services, some of which can be pretty shady. I think there's also a somewhat lengthy turnaround on bitcoin to real money or vice versa.
It is catching on slowly but I think at present it's hardly worth the effort.
(06-08-2015, 04:51 AM)Segolia Wrote: [ -> ] (06-08-2015, 04:08 AM)OdinYggd Wrote: [ -> ]Right, but I mentioned bitcoin because bitcoin allows you to send money to anyone in real life or online without requiring a bank account or credit card or any of that.
You just run an app on your PC or phone that serves as a bitcoin wallet, allowing you to send and recieve them as easily as you would pay someone using cash.
The only tricky part for people without the ability to buy things online is getting some bitcoin. It is possible to buy them in person if you know somebody who has them for sale, or can buy them online using their account for you.
Once you have them though, you send a payment by copypasting the address to send the payment to and it will get there all by itself for perhaps $0.02 in fees, compared to the several dollars in fees you pay using paypal or a major credit card.
Its a really incredible technology that sadly is taking a long time to catch on. But already you can buy things online from a growing number of stores like Newegg using them, and there's resturaunts and the like where you can buy coffee or lunch for yourself using it as well.
For instance here's one of my bitcoin addresses. You can make as many of these as you want, and most wallets let you label them to make it easy to keep track of who you have sent money to or gotten money from. 16Bgxkcam8WnoWvwkRZUcnn4HfCjg5n2He
And one of the neatest things is that you can see how much money an address has in it, but you can't take that money out of it unless it belongs to you. No more of that stealing people's account numbers nonsense that goes on with the banks.
The problem with bitcoin is that it's a tremendous pain in the arse for anyone who isn't using bitcoin. It's not a preferred currency because the value with respect to real money fluctuates wildly (though it is stabilising) and converting from bitcoin to real money only happens through third party services, some of which can be pretty shady. I think there's also a somewhat lengthy turnaround on bitcoin to real money or vice versa.
It is catching on slowly but I think at present it's hardly worth the effort.
The delay getting in and out is inflicted by the banks at either end because they aren't happy about interacting with a non-bank system. It could be done a lot faster and more reliably, but why would they want to cooperate with a system that could put them out of business if it became widespread enough. Though your value can be locked in during that period on most of the platforms to experience it, for instance if I submit a buy order now for $500 worth I won't actually recieve that bitcoin for 3 days due to bank delays, but the purchase will be locked in to today's prices. Same in reverse to sell it back to cash. Of course if I had bitcoin for sale and you had a way to get the money to me to buy it, I could have it visible in your wallet a few minutes after getting payment and usable to you within 2 hours on a typical day.
As for the stability of its value, normal 'fiat' currencies are not perfectly stable either. They fluctuate considerably over a pretty significant range, the effects of which people oftentimes don't even notice as the prices on the things they use vary a small amount up or down in response to the changes.
Bitcoin just shows the changes more drastically than other currencies because it is a much younger market and doesn't have that enormous marketplace volume of normal money to provide resistance to rapid changes in value.
Recently, trading USD for Euro fell to record lows and a rate of only 1:1.05 USD:Euro. For a currency that was supposed to go mainstream and be stable, it has lost a lot of its value lately. And other currencies especially those from Europe are taking similar hits due to financial concerns in their parent countries, while the US dollar has varied from being on shaky ground to being quite solid in value.
As for actually using it, its as easy as copy-pasting a code on a computer or scanning a barcode using a phone app. More people using it would make it more widely accepted, stabilizing its value and making it more useful to have.
(06-08-2015, 05:04 AM)OdinYggd Wrote: [ -> ] (06-08-2015, 04:51 AM)Segolia Wrote: [ -> ]The problem with bitcoin is that it's a tremendous pain in the arse for anyone who isn't using bitcoin. It's not a preferred currency because the value with respect to real money fluctuates wildly (though it is stabilising) and converting from bitcoin to real money only happens through third party services, some of which can be pretty shady. I think there's also a somewhat lengthy turnaround on bitcoin to real money or vice versa.
It is catching on slowly but I think at present it's hardly worth the effort.
The delay getting in and out is inflicted by the banks at either end because they aren't happy about interacting with a non-bank system. It could be done a lot faster and more reliably, but why would they want to cooperate with a system that could put them out of business if it became widespread enough. Though your value can be locked in during that period on most of the platforms to experience it, for instance if I submit a buy order now for $500 worth I won't actually recieve that bitcoin for 3 days due to bank delays, but the purchase will be locked in to today's prices. Same in reverse to sell it back to cash. Of course if I had bitcoin for sale and you had a way to get the money to me to buy it, I could have it visible in your wallet a few minutes after getting payment and usable to you within 2 hours on a typical day.
As for the stability of its value, normal 'fiat' currencies are not perfectly stable either. They fluctuate considerably over a pretty significant range, the effects of which people oftentimes don't even notice as the prices on the things they use vary a small amount up or down in response to the changes.
Bitcoin just shows the changes more drastically than other currencies because it is a much younger market and doesn't have that enormous marketplace volume of normal money to provide resistance to rapid changes in value.
Recently, trading USD for Euro fell to record lows and a rate of only 1:1.05 USD:Euro. For a currency that was supposed to go mainstream and be stable, it has lost a lot of its value lately. And other currencies especially those from Europe are taking similar hits due to financial concerns in their parent countries, while the US dollar has varied from being on shaky ground to being quite solid in value.
As for actually using it, its as easy as copy-pasting a code on a computer or scanning a barcode using a phone app. More people using it would make it more widely accepted, stabilizing its value and making it more useful to have.
I mean though, hasn't a full bitcoin been historically worth anything from $400-$1000 USD?
In terms of ease of use, I get that setting up a bitcoin wallet and stuff is easy (at least for you or I, maybe a little less so for not as tech-savvy people). What I meant was more like, if somebody pays you a small sum in bitcoin, it is difficult to convert that into a more usable form. If somebody paid me $10 worth of bitcoin for something that I did, I can't just go out and buy lunch with that, or a game on steam, or use that to pay my bills or anything of the sort. If I want to go get that as cash, there's a several day turnaround (and, I'm not certain but aren't those services only really practical when dealing with larger sums of money?).
Somebody pays me $10 via paypal and I can use it instantly to do any of those things. There's a convenience factor that's just not there until it becomes more widely adopted as a currency. I'm not saying bitcoin is a bad thing or anything, I think it's a great technology, but it's just not there yet IMO. Maybe I'm just not really the early adopter type *shrug*
*to Null's image reaction dump*
Someone sends you $10 on paypal, you only actually get about $8 of that. Paypal keeps the rest. If you were sent $10 worth of bitcoin, you'd only lose about $0.02 of that to fees unless you had to convert it back to USD before using it.
Now if you needed to convert that bitcoin back to dollars before using it, then yes that can take some time if a bank is involved. On the other hand selling it back to a person, you can have your cash in hand and be on your way within a few minutes. They just have to see the transaction in their wallet pending confirmation.
Far as I know there really aren't limits on how much you can convert at once until you get into the thousands of dollars range at which point the banks will get jumpy about anti-fraud protocols. I've converted amounts as little as a few cents in either direction, while my largest purchases were in the $400 at a time range.
It is true though that bitcoin was over $1100 in 2014, but now is only worth about $225 for 1 full bitcoin. What happened there is a phenomena called a market bubble, which can happen to USD and has happened recently to energy prices and housing prices. People bought it and bought it and drove the price up to far higher than it should have been before suddenly leaving it to collapse back down.
Right now we're looking at prices still nearly double what they were before the 2014 bubble, and it has stayed right around $250 for the past few months with only a few dollars movement each day for the most part. The huge price swings we saw are hopefully gone, resulting in a relatively stable value that makes it possible to actually use bitcoin as money without concern of it suddenly losing half its value overnight.
There's actually plans in the works for paypal to accept bitcoin as a valid payment- which if it does go through will be huge as far as driving acceptance goes. I'm fairly sure Amazon is considering it if not already doing it, and there are plans in the works from Microsoft and Sony as well for accepting bitcoin payment. For a good long while now Newegg has accepted bitcoin too, and a constantly growing list of stores and resturaunts that take it. Reddit regularly talks about buying pizza using bitcoin, and quite a few places accept this. Depending on what you want, you might not have to convert it back to USD anymore to use it.
And I take bitcoin too for my web hosting services when hosting sites that need more capacity than the free accounts I offer can provide. For me bitcoin translates to better profit because I'm not losing such a high percentage to fees.
guess the refrigerator is operational......
(06-08-2015, 04:16 AM)Surge Wrote: [ -> ]
For those not using sufficient amounts of dakka, this is what it looks like.
DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka.
(06-08-2015, 02:52 AM)kawaiiChiimera Wrote: [ -> ]oh my god
fuck 'Lil Hunter
I like how Lil' Hunter is more stressful to fight than the Throne.
It's already 8pm and there's already 2 buses passed by that did not go to my destination,what's next? A ferry that doesn't take personnel?
Great, it already started raining and I didnt bring my umbrella..........also I've been carrying a laptop........
3Rd bus not to ferry terminals
Anyone notice Segolia's avatar slowly gets more awesome and adorable as it evolves?
(06-08-2015, 12:15 PM)Marxon Wrote: [ -> ]Anyone notice Segolia's avatar slowly gets more awesome and adorable as it evolves?
<3
I've been using this one for a while now though, probably the better part of a month.