Bitcoin nearing $800/BTC | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin nearing $800/BTC

bitcoincharts.com

16 pointsIgorPartola21 comments

This is a good time to start the rumor that when Bitcoin reaches $1000 the NSA will explain why they wrote it.

If USD/BTC goes slightly above $1,000, it will be profitable to mine on EC2 GPU instances.

edit: Forgot to mention, only profitable with Spot instances which are significantly cheaper than the on-demand rate.

Could Amazon disallow that if they wanted?

No they could not, it's just OpenCL. Also: Why would they? They still get paid and the GPU is dedicated on those instances.

Why wouldn't Amazon just then dedicated "all" of their free resources towards mining them, and keep whatever profits other are making?..

> Could Amazon disallow that if they wanted?

It would make sense for Amazon to raise the price rather than disallowing it (specifically, because enforcing a prohibition on activity would cost Amazon money, but setting the price to be at least marginally more expensive than Amazon's expected minimal-effort realizable gain from using the GPU instances themselves would make Amazon money.)

For the time being that is.

BTC just crossed $1032 in China

http://i.imgur.com/etPRM0q.png

This is both the worst and best thing to happen to Bitcoin.

It's good because more and more people are learning about Bitcoin. It's never going to stand a chance without mindshare (ignoring any other problems it has).

It's bad because when this bubble bursts, the resulting backlash from people "investing" in it (instead of using it as a currency) is going to put people off.

That's just on Gox. On BTC China it's touched over $1000 USD in Yuan and on Bitstamp it's only $675. The global average is over $800 already. The USD only average is quite a bit below that.

https://bitcoinaverage.com/#USD

funnily enough, the average increases if you ignore gox. presumably because of the volume of BTC China.

Is there a way to arbitrage this difference?

Is it actually possible to sell BTC held in a random wallet and withdraw the proceeds as USD? I'm not familiar with the intricacies of the various exchanges, and am wondering if it is truly a convertible currency. (Assume that selling ~500 BTC would not move the market.)

Yeah, you just register on an exchange, deposit your BTC, trade them into USD and withdraw USD.

I just did this with BTC-E.com today.

How long did it take from the time you deposited the BTC to when you got the USD into your bank account?

Trades at the market price are instant.

Withdrawal to a bank - depends on the method you use (SEPA, wire, etc) and the country you're in. From a few hours to a few days.

Is this site no longer working? http://realtimebitcoin.info/

What's the best site to bookmark for a simple real time price quote?

http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/

Yikes that totally is not working on the iphone.

Bitcoinity's site is probably one of the better ones.

http://bitcoinity.com/markets

You need to watch the other US exchanges as well, not just MtGox. It's basically impossible to get USD from MtGox right now, making it a very poor benchmark for the actual exchange rate.

I think an HN person made this one recently http://pricebtc.com/

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