Poll: How many Bitcoin do you own? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: How many Bitcoin do you own?

184 pointssuperamit162 comments

Please upvote if you think this is interesting so that more people respond.

The last time someone did this, they mistakenly used "0-5 BTC" as the lowest cutoff. You've made the same mistake. There should be "0-0.25", "0.25-0.5", "0.5-0.75", "0.75-1", "1-2", "2-3", "3-4", and "4-5". Extra poll options are better because now we've lost valuable information at the low end. In 20 minutes, 65 people say they own 0-5 BTC. That's anywhere from $0 to $1385. That's a massive range. We now have no idea how many "casual" bitcoiners there are, because casuals will only have like $200 max.

EDIT: Here's what your poll looks like as of t=35min:

▆▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂

Leftmost bar is 0-5BTC. Rightmost bar is 100+BTC. Oh look, now we know basically nothing about the two most interesting ranges.

EDIT2: As of t=44min: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=bar+chart+154+21+26+15+... ... Pretty hilarious.

If we had a list of all the bitcoin wallet values (even estimated) we could use this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenks_natural_breaks_optimizati...

It should be relativly simple to generate such a list. Unfourtuantly, the best I could find (in 5 minutes of googleing) is [1], which shows the ballance of a single account as a function of time.

[1] http://blockchain.info/charts/balance?address=1DkyBEKt5S2GDt...

http://btc.ondn.net/search

Last I checked, I owned $0.25 worth of bitcoin.

Where's my "just here to say I bought bitcoin before it was cool" option?

If you bought $0.25 before it was cool, you probably have over $1000 in bitcoin (like me) by now.

Or use a logarithmic scale: 0 < x <= 0.1, 0.1 < x <= 0.3, 0.3 < x <= 1, 1 < x <= 3, 3 < x <= 10, 10 < x <= 30, ...

0 but I don't fit in any of the given 0 categories.

Yup. Not gonna mine or buy, not worth my time as I can't confirm or deny its bubble-ness.

Don't care about Bitcoin and absolutely sure I cannot predict what it will do in the future. It's outside of my focus.

+1 to this guy.

I answered both "0-4.999" and "0 - But I am thinking of buying" thinking that they were not mutually exclusive.

But perhaps I just screwed up the poll.

0: Little interest in real currency, zero interest in new ones.

Didn't notice it as a phenomenon early enough to start mining with desktop and laptop CPUs and GPUs. Can't afford mining ASICs. Would not buy as, not only can I not afford it, I also don't speculate on foreign currency (though I realize that virtual currencies are a special case). So until Bitcoin gains ubiquity I ain’t likely to come into ownership of any. So 0 now and into the foreseeable future.

It's not a foreign currency. Think of it like gold. I rather think of myself as a human than as a <insert nationality from country I happened to be born in>. Gold is mine, and so is Bitcoin.

So, given that article about a guy that bought $17 in BTC in 2009 and found out recently that it was worth 5 figures, should I feel like an idiot for not getting in on this while BTC were cheap a few years ago? My logic at the time was "I don't really know that much about Bitcoin, so buying some would basically be speculating, which seems like a bad idea."

If you didn't bet on a roulette table and it came up black, would you say "God damnit I feel like an idiot, I should have bet on black"?

I think you mean: If you didn't bet on the roulette ball balancing on the divider between numbers, would you say "God damnit I feel like an idiot, I should have bet on that!"

The odds of a cryptocurrency catching on the way Bitcoin has are very low. Buying BTCs (or other cryptocurrencies) back in the day would be like investing in penny stocks.

EDIT: For the record I agree with you - there's no point in looking back and saying "I should have done that!"

I don't feel bad about not having invested in it at the time. The only way I would feel bad now is if I had invested, and then sold it before it reached the height of today.

You never know how it's going to develop. I once sold Apple stock after getting 40% profit in a few months. Should I have known that it would continue to climb for a few more years? Usually, getting out while you're ahead is a good idea. It's often better to sell to early than too late.

I guess what I'm really wondering is: just know that Bitcoin existed already put me in the minority. Was there something I should have caught on to that would have told me that it was going to succeed? From this and other answers, it looks like that is not the case. Thanks.

Such is life with most investing - I'm sure you could have said the same thing about all tech shares.

It wasn't so easy back then. I tried to buy bitcoin for a couple weeks as it went up in price from a buck fifty to around four dollars. I ended up having to meet a miner in person with cash.

This whole poll just serves to illustrate the problems with bitcoin. Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency, but people are treating it like an investment. The more relevant statistic to bitcoin's popularity as a currency would be how many bitcoin transactions people have participated in over the past year.

It's also useful as a store of value. If you live in a country with an un-sound currency, Bitcoin is a compelling product.

Right now there's a good chance we're in a bubble. But that doesn't remove the fundamental value behind Bitcoin.

It's supposed to be a decentralized, unseizable, un-inflatable value transfer mechanism. Looks like it is succeeding. Also, you have to bootstrap a stateless currency somehow. Day to day transaction volume will always trail speculation/exchange trading volume. Analogously, forex trade volumes for traditional currencies dwarf global GDP.

I bought $1k worth at $36/coin. I sold it when it dropped to $6. I'll have to go long on the next cryptocurrency.

Why even bother selling when it dropped to 6? Were you really that hard up for a few dollars?

He was probably thinking to better sell it at 6 than 0. That's quite a few cups of coffee anyways.

Buy high, sell low. Right?

Buy high, sell low, and make up for it with volume.

Welcome to Knight Capital -> http://www.zerohedge.com/news/what-happens-when-hft-algo-goe...

This is impossible. It never dropped to $6 after hitting $36. In fact, it never dropped below $30 after that point (March 2013). Did you mean $32 (June 2011)? That would be possible, but also extremely poor timing, as it was only at such a price for about 24 hours. With something as volatile as bitcoin, dollar cost averaging is your friend.

Didn't it hit $36 in 2011 before the drop? Was 30+ then.

Bitcoincharts.com says the high was 31.91, for a few short hours. Either the parent comment has ridiculously bad timing and less than 20 months of patience, or is trolling us.

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60zigHourlyzczsg2...

13 people with 100+ bitcoin? Unfortunately I think this is another example of HN polls becoming completely unreliable.

If my understanding is correct, that's about $30,000 worth.

I bought about 350 coins with a week's paycheck not very long ago. They didn't use to be so expensive.

Why do you think 13 with 100+ is wrong? They weren't worth much a few months ago, and this is a website for hackers. I wouldn't be surprised if 10 of those 13 have thousands of coins.

At the time when I posted the comment that was almost 2x the next highest category

100 - 21,000,000 is a much, much larger range than 90-99.999.

Not necessarily, there's plenty of people on HN who could have gotten in early when mining reaped greater rewards and/or the cost of BTC was very low.

Unfortunately I can't count myself in that bracket.

bitcoins at the beginning were like worth nothing, and 18 months ago they were only at 3 dollars/BTC as far as I recall.

At one point I owned about 150 bitcoins, but I sold the majority off at the $30-something peak a few years back. I also paid for my bitcoin miner back when bitcoins were $11, and my cost was 58 bitcoins. The miner that I finally received, has made me 5 bitcoins.

Sad times.

Yep I had about the same amount, when they were worth around 7-8$ a coin. Bummer, 40,000$ would be nice right about now.

Of course, if everybody knew BTC would skyrocket in value, and hoarded coins- hello deflationary spiral, hello BTC crashing in value.

I also bought at around $30. Back when the only way I could realistically get BTC was on IRC on #btc-otc using PayPal. I still have the original Excel spreadsheet I used to track the purchases and marking the ones where I got ripped off. Then it all went to shit in a few hours. Forgot about the coins until now.

It's equally probable that people are going to laugh their heads off in a few years that people were selling their coins at $300. I mean it was ridiculous to us that the $30 coins were selling at $250 in April.

That is not that much if you are dedicated to the idea of Bitcoin and make a point of investing a lot into them. I would not be surprised if a lot of Bitcoin die hards are also into StartUp culture and programming/building stuff.

I am actually surprised there are so few people who posted on the poll with 100+ Bitcoin.

I sometimes invest on Just-Dice and plenty of people have thousands of Bitcoin to throw around, a lot of these people are developers with a passion.

There are a lot of bitcoin billionaires on HN.

Millionaires, sure, but definitely not billionaires.

I threw away 30 coins during the first year of mining when you could get a coin a day on a half decent box... It's always made me annoyed at myself because I could buy a lot of pizza with those coins.

Aw... Man. $8310.

I sold 5 coins at the first peak of $31/BTC. Thought I was pretty damn sly for getting out ahead of the following crash ($8/BTC). Joke's on me! I've now lost out on $1230 and counting.

There's no joke on you at all.

I was going to buy $300 worth when they were 30 cents each. I didn't, though, as it involved travel to a nearby town and I was working on a book and thought I should be practical and spend the weekend on that. Ah well, one less house.

I hope your book sold well.

It did, although not that well haha.

Dude, you made the right choice. Just because things have been heading up for many Bitcoin users doesn't mean it's not speculation. Bitcoin will always have large value fluctuations since it is, unlike "real world" currencies, decoupled from the rest of the economy.

And if I was you, I'd do myself the favor of not torturing myself about what could have been.

Yes, there's definitely an element of speculation about it, but also of platform-building. I was depressed about it for awhile, but take it with a grain of salt now for the most part. It would nice to be financially independent, as some other friends of mine who were early adapters are, but hindsight is 20/20.

I own half of a Bitcoin. I purchased about two weeks ago. In the intervening time, the value of Bitcoin has gone up 40%. I can't complain, and I'll probably buy more in the near future. It is somewhat disappointing that they can't be used for anything, though. Without practical applications, Bitcoin is subject to massive volatility and doesn't have any sort of foundation to prevent against collapse of the market.

Incidentally, I also developed a Bitcoin Twitter ticker. If anyone would like to keep up with hourly prices via Twitter, I suggest that you check it out.

http://twitter.com/bitcoin_ticker

Buy some gold or silver if the price of btc gets up to where you want it:

amagimetals.com

goldsilverbitcoin.com

I fixed up my house with a Lowe's giftcard bought with btc:

gyft.com

It is at least useful as savings. Isn't it a "practical application"? It's being very useful for me to store value in long term.

I'd say it's horrible for savings. Savings is something you actually want to "save", meaning its likelihood of retaining value is as close to 100% as possible. With low risk comes low return, which is okay for savings. Bitcoin is an investment at best, a speculation at worst. It definitely isn't a guaranteed store of value. It's easy to confuse the fact that it's going up with the idea of storing value. Not very long ago your "savings" would have been about 1/2 its peak value in April, and in a year it might be worth 10X or 1/10th.

I trust more Bitcoin than dollar, oranges or woods to save my money.

At this point it is way too volatile for use as as long-term wealth storage. The current state of Bitcoing only makes it suitable for high-risk, high-reward investing, which is not conducive to saving.

No. It's only useful as savings if it can be reasonably expected to hold long-term value. But with a valuation based almost entirely on speculation there isn't really a rational reason to assume that (unlike, say, gold or silver which still have commercial use providing a price floor).

Needs an option for 0. Not everybody owns bitcoin.

Sorry, it has one now. For some reason it was lost when i created the poll.

In 2010 I chose an amount of money that I wouldn't feel too stupid about spending on a silly web lark. That was $30, and the price was $1. It took me a week to get them, during which the price hit $4, so I got 7. It's quite possible (/likely?) it goes to 0 at some point but I still think of it as a $30 option with an uncapped upside.

And that's the point - the exchange rate has no underlying fundamental except supply is limited and demand is unpredictable. If you're unsure whether you should get some, choose a figure you don't care about and just buy some tiny amount. You might get 0.01 btc but you won't care if it goes down and you will if it goes up.

Admittedly I'm not sure I'd follow my own advice because the price always seems insane. $280? Madness. But much easier than getting emotionally invested in the whole mining route, which for the majority is destined to fail since you have to be on the leading edge of performance to make anything.

If I were to do it now I'd probably buy a tiny amount now and a bit more if it drops a lot. No amount I'd care about.

I've tucked mine away, took it off mtgox ages ago and no wallet on my computer. Don't care if it hits 0, it was only $30 anyway. It's either a new thing or a bubble, but this feels less stupid than a lottery ticket.

I bought 50$ of bitcoins a year ago. I have sold them this week for 100$. I'll buy back when it's low.

At first I thought a deflationary currency was the future. The more I think about it, the more I think bitcoin is just the first step on a bumpy road. I don't see the point anymore in buying bitcoins to then buy goods/services. What always ends up happening is that someone somewhere hogs them and waits for the price to go up. I'm then stuck to buy at a premium, every time, unless I had a stash of coins to begin with, something which most potential adopters don't have. I'm also not convinced that the early adopters should get a bonus from having mined so many coins when it was easy. I don't have a silver bullet, but I think this problem could be fixed by a new cryptocurrency. Either dampen the bonus to early adopters or remove it entirely. This should be a goal of crypto-anarchists, I think...

Or maybe I'm wrong and we'll be seeing a lot of trade going on with different denominations of one BTC in the near future. Maybe people don't care to give a premium to early adopters.

You might be interested in Freicoin: http://freico.in/

Or if there was a system that gave all users 1 free cryptocurrency unit every day. Effectively basic income within a cryptocurrency system. But then you get inflation.

Yup. The magic word here is "liquidity trap".

Interesting read. Related, with babies: http://www.pkarchive.org/theory/baby.html

I bought 10 BTC in April @ $220 each. The next day, it crashed to $150.

I sold 5 BTC this week @ $220 each. The next day, it reached $280.

I suck at this.

Figure out your opinion of bitcoin's long term potential value, the percentage of savings/portfolio you are comfortable risking, and then come up with a dollar cost averaging plan. Something like $X a week for 6-12 months would be decent. More months = you believe more strongly in its potential. Altho I wouldn't do less than 3 regardless, as bare minimum volatility mitigation.

I'm gonna be ultra simplistic:

539 said they own bitcoins

205 want to

404 said no way, bubble

1-2. I got a mobo and graphics card for free and mined lightcoin sometime last year. bought some usb asic's and sold all but one for break even, then bought 10 more at the final ASICminer wholesale price. I've mined those to breakeven.

now I have a coin, some anachronistic blinking doo-dads, and a slightly firmer grasp on my own ubuntu box and btc as a whole. had fun to boot. I did buy a usb hub for 50... but now it holds my blinking doodads!

0 now. I made some money from buying low selling high from the first bubble. I sold out all of them when the price was at $144 a couple weeks ago under the belief that mtgox was becoming too unstable. I still haven't received any money from them after cashing out so I'm not feeling to bad about losing out on the current bubble. The market is just too sketchy to stay in any longer, I have no faith in the exchanges.

0.000001

I withdrew my funds from Mt Gox over a month ago. Still waiting for it to arrive back in my account. The price of bitcoins has risen significantly since :(

I had been waiting 4 months for my withdraw -- just email their support and ask them to cancel the transaction. They were able to do so for me today, and I can now trade them again (and transfer them out as BTC anywhere).

I own 1, but I lost it amidst some hard drive reformatting earlier in the year :-|

A couple of years ago, I was trying to get others to invest in my mining operation. Then it tanked, I shut down and sold the rigs, and eventually cashed out - I let the 15 or so coins I had climb back up to $7 or so before I sold. If only ....

What if I got 4.9999 bitcoins? It doesn't fit in any of the slots. I think this case statement is huge fail.

Stupid that there is no "0 - but I have none of the simplistic opinions the poll writer provided"

0-4.999 includes zero so I figure that's the 'Zero. Just zero. No comment. Just plain old nothing'

0. I had one at some point a few years aback but I deleted the miner and the wallet along with it.

What happens to the coin in your deleted wallet?

It is considered "lost forever" unless an enterprising hacker comes along and can create a private key which matches the wallet.

You'll know if that happens, though, since the technique will obviously be used on the largest wallets first.

Side note: interestingly, right now, the largest wallet appears to be Dread Pirate Roberts' seized bitcoins held by the FBI.

This is considered one of the most unbreakable aspects of bitcoin. It would take all the hashing power in the world something like 10^50 years to brute force the private key (a.k.a. ain't gonna happen). One cool thing, if the address has never been spent out of it (only received coins), it is theoretically still safe from quantum computers.

Second time I read this. How so? The address has been used to receive coins, surely a private key must exist?

A private key is not strictly necessary to receive coins, only to spend them. So while there is still probably a private key with that address (since he intended to actually be able to use those bitcoins), the public key is not revealed unless coins are spent from that address.

But the public key must be linked to the address, or else you could not confirm the public key belongs to that address. Right?

Yes, but this information is not published to the blockchain until you spend it.

The address is literally RIPEMD-160(SHA-256(public key)), plus a 4 byte checksum. To receive coins to that address, the sender publishes the amount they are sending and that address, they never see the public key.

When the owner of the address wants to send bitcoins from it, only then do they publish the public key, along with a transaction signed by their private key.

Ok, so I'm not a cryptography specialist, but I don't see how "address = RIPEMD-160(SHA-256(public key))" makes it impossible to derive the public key from the address if you have a quantum computer. Or is SHA-256 not vulnerable to quantum computing the way public/private keypairs are?

Yes that is correct. SHA256 is not known to be vulnerable to quantum computers[^], ECDSA (Bitcoin's public/private key algorithm) is.

[^] There is a known quantum attack against SHA256 that reduces the brute force search space from 2^256 to 2^128, but that wouldn't really break the Bitcoin protocol. The ECDSA quantum vulnerability, however, would make ECDSA essentially useless.

If you didn't shred the hard drive and haven't defragged it or anything, there's a good chance that the private keys are able to be recovered. There are scripts that will scan a drive for fragments that look like bitcoin-qt wallet files and dump the keys.

Interesting. I'm not sure which disk its on and it might well be corrupt but I had various components that I was going to make into a secondary desktop or donation machine so I suppose I should check while I test, it might pay for itself!

Here's what I've used: http://www.makomk.com/~aidan/wallet-recover-0.3-linux.tar.gz

Put this on a bootable usb with ubuntu or something and run it against the drive in question. Let it run overnight, and in the morning, you may find yourself with a windfall.

Here's the thread with more info: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0

After it runs, it will create a wallet.dat file that you will load with bitcoin-qt. If it works and you have the private keys, I would recommend exporting them into a better format, like an electrum or armory wallet.

Thanks!

What about negative amounts? It's possible... Sometimes.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/14260/negative-ba...

Just a display bug. The actual balance is not negative.

It's not a display bug, it's a feature. It also has nothing to do with block chain accounting structures (which are never negative). It's the internal accounting system used by bitcoind/Bitcoin-Qt, exposed by a command line and JSON-RPC interface.

On Hacker News for at least a year, and have yet to research ANYTHING about bitcoin *runs.

0, because I just sold (doubled up on a single bitcoin). Will buy in at the next trough.

well clearly I would have called this a mistake (but I actually did need the money)

Just started mining this week. It took 6 months for the dedicated machine to arrive.

Oh man. Bitcoin mining just broke 4 Petahashes/sec, 9 days after 3 Ph/s, 10 days after 2 Ph/s. Check out the 6 month difficulty increase: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/

Sorry to hear that.

I had 0.5 and just cashed out. It's really too volatile to do any business on it right now. Its great that there is a current upside, but it has to be predicted that there will be a downside just as big at some time.

Zero.. I recently owned 10 but sold them all when the price jumped to $200. I guess I was too quick on the trigger, but what can you do. Will be buying again in about a month when this hype cycle dies off.

Are you trying to day trade? Are you a long term bull? You gotta come up with an investing plan :)

One potential solution to your problem is to do something like: sell Y% of my coins everytime the price increases by X%. An example would be sell 20% after each 50% rise (semi bullish plan. I also made those numbers up, don't consider them as specific advice).

Definitely a long term bull but I agree that my execution could use some refining :) I like your strategy suggestion.

Glad to be helpful! Small clarification, just in case: sell Y% of the remaining coins. That way you will always have some, even if the price goes ballistic.

I have an increible hard time to get started with bitcoin. Which website? How? Can someone pull through the right path for me? I want to start investing in mining and buying.

Blockchain.info is a good start. Also go to bitcoin.org and learn about how much you should trust 3rd parties vs. your local wallet. I'm just starting too, hope this helps a bit! Ps. Don't bother mining, it's a lost cause for most.

Thanks. I will look into this.

Mining is a lost cause for the average Joe. The simplest way to buy for U.S. citizens is coinbase.com. Local bitcoins is pretty good too, and has somewhat of a global presence. Look up creating an offline paper wallet to securely store your invested coins (short version: disconnect internet, print out a few copies of paper wallet using offline version of bitaddress.org, and then reset computer before reconnecting the net). Practice a few times with small amounts first. For everyday use, security is not as important and you can keep small amounts in a smartphone wallet or desktop client.

How quickly can you buy/sell your coin. Say you buy in at $100 and then sell $110 the end of the day, possible? And really, only USC? What about with SS? And doesn't it defeat purpose if you need to prove you are a USC?

You can do short term trading (as well as long term, of course) if you get an account at an exchange (bitstamp is good from what I hear, it's in the EU). I just mentioned Coinbase as it is easier than getting a trading account. Local bitcoins allows for anonymous trading, as it is peer to peer. All the large exchanges have to follow anti-money laundering laws and other regulations.

A more exponential graph probably would have been better.

Mine are all stuck in MtGox's clutch, I've just about tripled my current investment. I hope it doesn't crash before they give it up.

I'd transfer them over to another exchange and sell them, if I were you. The USD price on Mt. Gox can be considered fake because nobody can get their money out.

Is there a problem with USD withdrawls? It looks like I can transfer to my US bank account right now...and I have never had an issue.

Have you performed a transfer recently? How long did it take?

The prevailing experience is that yes, you can transfer, but you may have a 4-6 week wait.

I have not tried in a bit...last time was 2 days. I have heard they had a backlog due to the withdrawl shutdown but of course that is speculation unless I try to transfer today and see how long it takes.

Back in the day, yeah, it was a few days. Typical wire times.

It's a much different story these days. You can transfer $100K out of a brokerage faster than you can get $100 out of Mt. Gox.

Well, you don't necessarily need to cash out to USD to withdraw from MtGox. Instead, you can transfer to an offline wallet with a few physical and/or cloud+encrypted backups.

My point is that the USD price on Mt. Gox isn't accurate because it isn't liquid. If money comes in, but never comes out, how can you know that money is worth x amount? If I give someone x money and they give me something in return that they say is worth the same amount of money that I gave them, but I can't actually get that amount for it, is it really worth that much?

btc is easy to withdraw from mtgox...

I had one when it was $10 but spent it, now at zero.

Is anyone day trading bitcoin? i.e., buying and selling multiple times a day based on small-ish fluctuations of the market?

Yep. Some of my co-workers do algorithmic trading as a hobby.

I've read that only works to a certain degree, not much more than 50%. Is that right?

If you average everyone, then yes but that's a tautology, isn't it? In reality there are winners and there are suckers.

No idea how well they do.

I used to do this and eventually gave up because of the swings. Being a student (and from a very poor background) it was surreal, I would make or lose in 1 day more than I make in 3 months working at a cafe.

I am slightly ahead day trading but the gain was not worth the risk I took.

Yes, and I've had decent-enough luck with it.

There is an entire secondary market based on bonds and pseudo-stocks.

0 - My wife said, "No way, it's a bubble."

Just because it's rocking at this moment doesn't mean it isn't a bubble.

Yeah, but she said "no" when they were priced at $20-30.

I fully understand the risks involved. Heck, my Economics degree makes me 1% more qualified than most people here to talk about how bubbles work.

If I'd bought BTC, I'd have been more worried about technical problems. I don't claim to understand the system in depth, but I know that crypto-fails happen all the time.

If an exploit is ever discovered, I wonder what we'd do with all that surplus bitcoin mining hardware?

Your wife sounds smart, reasonable and down to earth. Congrats!

That, she is. And also stubborn, and short-tempered.

Waiting for a relatively large drop.. I have about $0.25 in my wallet at the moment! :)

I have 0.006 from when I tried out mining a while back, but gave up pretty quickly.

There should be a "0 - Just not interested" option

Not enough.

You need one more category "0 - carries a stigma (used by drug dealers, pornographers, etc.)"

Really?! $300 billion worth of drugs is moved each year using "traditional currency". Oh and also, silk road was shut down, and the price doubled. Judge the tech on its features and potential, not who uses it.

Really. Given that Gross World Product was 72 trillion dollars[1] last year, only 0.4% (by price) of all global trade for goods and services was illegal drugs.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product

Nowadays, that'd be a pretty decent characterization of many physical currencies as well.

Case in point: Most US $100 bills circulate in the black market. Most paper currency circulating in the USA has traces of cocaine on it.

True. Trading in a physical currency also carries a stigma.

But don't confuse physical currency with fiat currency.

Electronic transactions, direct deposit, wire transfers, credit card payments, etc., denoted in fiat currencies are the norm.

The reason Bitcoin and physical currency carry a stigma is both can be spent or received anonymously: which is perfect for illegal transactions.

Funniest comment ever. If there's a stigma it's because it's used by nerds.

0- but thinking of mining

Mining is sort of a lost cause at this point. It is ultra competive with specialized chips, most don't regain their investment. Better off just buying coins.

200!

big interest, no money.

All 'yall need to be ashamed of yourselves if you don't own even a US penny's worth of Bitcoin. I'm not even kidding. If you've never witnessed a bitcoin transaction or held a bitcoin on an electronic device this far into the game, just hang your heads in shame.

Elitism is counterproductive. We need people to like Bitcoin.

This attitude is counterproductive as it paints our culture in a bad light. We should be on our way without pushing our ideals on others.

Bitcoin can feel like a cult sometimes, something I am ashamed of.

Also telling everyone to buy just a little reeks of pump and dump.

Spend some time on /r/bitcoin. There's some good discussion, but also some talk on there that would cause you to run away for fear of association. Sometimes I'll go there and want to go somewhere with more intellectualism and open-mindedness, like say a Tea Party forum.

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