From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux
On Mon, 1/5/2026 8:56 AM, bad sector wrote:
Watching this vid made my blood boil!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fshsk8MCAf4
I have never used bitcoin yet but if I ever do, and I might just try it exclusively to get my feet wet in this respect, is it available for linux desktop or only for android (my smartphone familiarity ain't up to scratch yet, and I wouln't wanna do any financial transactions with a phone anyway)?
Are you planning on mining Bitcoins, or buying and selling Bitcoins ?
There is a tax consideration for Bitcoins. If you "make" them, you
have to keep track of the materials (vid card price, electricity consumption) while mining. Sell price minus commission minus input costs, is your
capital gain.
If you use a video card and are a solo miner, your odds
are 900 billion to 1 of instantly earning $100,000. The odds are still ridiculous if you buy a used ASIC miner box (~1KW), but the hash rate
could be 6000x greater. You might buy a used miner from China (from
some of the shut-down sheds there), for a portion of the original $3000-$4000 price. It might require a new power supply, just in case the old one is
getting tired, or the miner doesn't come with a PSU.
if you join a mining pool, you will be swamped out by people with shedfulls
of ASIC miners. When one of the pool members earns a coin, the proceeds are split among members according to the pool contribution on hash rate. You might earn $1.52 every day (with random fluctuation when the pool does not mint
any coins at all), while you could be using a steady $3.00 in electricity
every day. If you do it in summer, you either need a big air conditioner,
or, the room gets really hot (one apartment dweller measured 50C in the
kitchen from the miner heat! Imagine the beads of sweat). ASIC miners are
more of a winter activity. Like, in Finland, you would "open a window".
If speculating on Bitcoins, there would be a slip for
your buy and for your sell, and the difference between those is
your capital gain or capital loss. There is a processing fee for
conversion back and forth. The processing fees are generally
inconsequential if your investment went up 1600x, but for normal
levels of market fluctuation, the fee might take a big bite
out of your winnings. The sales slip would have the sell price
and the fee charged, which would go into your tax spreadsheet.
It's a hobby where you have to like spreadsheets, and you have to be
good at bookkeeping in cases of significant amounts of transactions
going on. Does BTC "attract audits" ? Dunno.
*******
Note that ASIC miners only mine one coin. The SHA256 chips can mine
Bitcoins. The Ethereum miner boxes, each chip had a stash of RAM on it
(a different hardware design than the other box).
Whereas a video card, is programmable, and faster than your CPU.
It can handle brand new or arcane coins. If a "proof of work" existed
for a DOGEcoin, then you could mine it with the video card. This is why
video cards aren't entirely dead. But then, an obscure coin can be
worthless (right now), with little reason for the value to rise.
Monero are valued for their anonymity, which is why for a while,
vid card people pissed off about Bitcoin, would mint Monero. I do not
know if the privacy of Monero has been compromised since then, and whether
it's just as easy to trace as Bitcoin is.
And wallets, of course they're dangerous. You read enough stories about compromises, it's hard to say what the risk level is on a daily basis.
The wallets have their own terminology -- ask an LLM-AI for details
about hot and cold wallets.
Paul
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