What's your involvement, in order of decreasing BTC support?
I find it hard to believe, at the moment, that bitcoins are generally acquired for non-speculative legal reasons.
Illegal usage seems unlikely to bootstrap the bitcoin economy, speculative usage seems certain to crash unless legitimate usage arrives in tandem to bolster it.
In principle I can see a crypto-currency economy emerging but I can't see how to get there from here without a crash on the way. So I'm not going to take the gamble.
Made the decision at $100, I see it's now at $200, my guess is it will rise considerably further before the crash so good luck to those going into this with their eyes open.
The idea is that there can only be 21 million Bitcoins, or something like that, but in the end there could be a lot less because they are lost.
* may not be precisely true, but it's something along those lines.
1BTC = 10M satoshi.
2012 US Penny Production = ~6B
6bn/10M = 600
Total number of us pennies made in the last 10 years tops 43B which pushes the difference from 600x to 4300x
The important part of that is "currently possible". The protocol allows for us to divide down as far as we want. All we need is a software update.
Even if there were an upper limit of 21 trillion bitcoins, people would still be worring about them being lost, even though it makes no difference.
Shish2k's point stands, only with "430 BTC is as many satoshis as there are US pennies".
But this is irrelevant anyway. If 1 satoshi ever becomes too coarse-grained, the whole Bitcoin community would obviously agree to revise the protocol to further subdivide satoshis...
Bitcoin is gambling to me, it is pure speculation. Don't drop a tear for that. In general society would be better without such schemes.
This is still Hacker news right?
crypto currency could be one of the most exciting things to come out of this decade.
The really important thing right now is widespread bitcoin acceptance. Until that comes around.. sigh we're in the wild west of bubble territory.
The easier ways to get bitcoins are to sell something on bitmit or something like that. Or, you could try localbitcoins and try to buy from someone in your city.
In the US it's fairly easy..
Or post to your local craigslist and ask to pay cash for bitcoins. If you are in a big city, anywhere in the world, chances are you will find a Bitcoin seller.
You pay the equivalent of $74 in BTC according to the live exchange rate. So you pay USD 1 less.
It's not a ripoff, it's a discount. example: Right now, you'd pay 0.3333 BTC.
Again, I see that the UI isn't 100% obvious, I will make sure that it is updated shortly.
Further, the announcement you linked to (by Butterfly Labs) isn't really all that accurate. They originally promised a ship date of early October. No products have shipped to date, and they've changed the specs and pricing on what they're going to offer a number of times. Some people think they'll never ship anything.
There are, however, other companies who have shipped ASIC mining chips recently, hence the skyrocketing difficulty. At this rate within 6 months it will no longer be profitable to mine bitcoin on GPUs.
I actually wonder if it's better to mine BTC, or buy some solar panels or wind turbines and sell electricity back into the grid instead.
Note that the initial values (60,000MHash/sec, and a very tidy profit in 3 months) are appropriate only for one of the specialised hardware options. If you start filling it in with realistic values for a PC with a graphics card (see, e.g., https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison) you'll likely find the calculations running rather less in your favour.
Profiting is also much easier when bitcoins are $188 each than it is when they are $10 each.
Also you need to correct for HVAC.
If its winter a KWh of BTC is the same heat as a KWh equiv of natgas, although the natgas is a little cheaper than electrical, by about a factor of 2. So spend $10 on a absolutely roaring system (About a KW continuously 24x7 which you're not going to be doing on non-dedicated hardware) and save about $4 on my gas bill so the NET is an expense of $6.
In the summer you have to correct for the overall system coefficient of performance, and people who have no idea what a COP is usually assume its "1" (legally mandated by local building code to be a minimum of 10 where I live, your experience may vary). So spend $10 on electricity and add an extra buck or so for HVAC cooling capacity.
> Electricity is pretty cheap. The kind of gear required to make the electric bill a significant problem would be a bankrupting level of capital expense.
The problem is that often Bitcoins are cheaper.
I checked a few days ago and it seemed that my 2011 MBP would earn me a few cents per day...
DO NOT buy into the ASIC market right now though. The preorder waits are too long to accurately make ROI calculations, regardless of price. As more ASICs come online the difficulty will rise significantly making it hard to make back the money you spent on your ASIC.
If you're interested in it as a transfer technology (A very wise idea, especially for small-ish international xfers) then just buy/transfer/sell, mining is ridiculous.
For a long time coins were being mined and sold at about the cost of electricity for the most efficient miner. It would be interesting today to see what the premium looks like, probably a pretty scary number. Back when the difficulty factor was a large two digit number I mined a hundred or so BTC in software (not GPU). It's a bit harder now.
If you want to get by with the hardware you already own, look into Litecoin mining, then sell those Litecoins for cash or Bitcoin. Mt.Gox will support Litecoin transactions (indeterminate ETA).
Honestly I think the easiest path is to just buy coins and hope they continue to appreciate. I remember not too long ago buying a few when they were in their ~$90s USD, and then regretting buying them at that "high" price. Now it's more than doubled.
600e6 (hash/sec) * 3600 (sec/hour) * 24 (hour/day) * 50 (days) / (2^32 * 7.7e6 (number of hashes to solve a block)) * 25 (bitcoins/block) * 200 (usd/btc) = $392
So it is very profitable to GPU mine right now. In fact, it has never been so profitable since June 2011 (previous Bitcoin bubble). However keep in mind a few caveats: (a) this assumes an exchange rate of 1 BTC = 200 USD which may or may not crash in the near future, and (b) this assumes a difficulty factor of 7.7e6 which is rising quite quickly (see the charts at http://bitcoin.sipa.be/, it rises by about 10-50% every 2 weeks or so, mostly due to ASICs).
In retrospect that makes a lot of sense with bitcoins going for ~200 USD each.
Also, you can own a fraction of a coin so 0-1 does not overlap completely with 1-9.
I just happened to have multiple high-end GPUs and discovered bitcoin about the time GPU miners were coming to the fore.
I expect the stream of stories, particularly those which are little more than price reports have more to do with those who have "bought in" seeking to spread and re-affirm their bullishness than any technical merit or interest.
The type of story and the nature of comments within are virtually identical to what you'll find on traditional trader forums during any strong trend.
It's only after the last cynics have been suckered in, most believe that "you just can't lose" is when it is going to crash.
If the price is being driven by new speculative investment (ie, a bubble), the price should stagnate as fewer speculators join the pool. If the price stagnates, there will be little incentive for purely speculative investors to keep their money in BTC.
The last cynic buying in is just an indicator of late-adopters hitting the market, signaling little gains left to be had.
And I also lost 50 bitcoins after a pc cleanup. A block mined solo, with my CPU. A long time ago.
A. Flip a coin. Head you win $50k, tail you win $50k.
B. Flip a coin. Head you win $5k, tail you win $95k.
That exactly what I would have said back in January 2013 when it was at around $34.
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/130327160138-chart...
That doesn't mean the crash will kill Bitcoin though. In the longer term, government regulation may do that. A lot of fiscal policy, e.g. high taxes when withdrawing investment from china, or more significantly this [1] are very hard to pull off with something like bitcoin around. Thus it must die.