How to Buy Bitcoin
markmaunder.com
markmaunder.com
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360zigDailyztgSzm...
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg730zigDailyztgSzm...
by the time mainstream publications like the BBC are reporting on spectacular gains in an asset, it's far too late to invest speculatively in the hope of finding a greater fool and cashing out before the inevitable crash, even if you believe in the long-term future of this currency.
China has implemented capital controls to prevent individuals from moving large amounts of wealth out of China. See http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific... for some background (or just do a Google search for china capital controls).
A Chinese citizen could conceivably bypass those controls by (1) depositing renminbi (i.e. CNY) into a BitChina account, (2) buying bitcoins, (3) transfering them to a non-Chinese exchange (e.g. MtGox, BTC-e, BitStamp), where they (4) sell them for USD.
The only downside is that it's not a real time trading platform / you wouldn't want to do day trading of BTC on it.
This link will give us both $5 in BTC if you buy 1 BTC.
https://coinbase.com/?r=4fedfb2d6cbd3b0003000845&utm_campaig...
I'm absolutely fine with that, just wondering what the rules are re: referral URLs since other comments seem to be posting them without issues...
Too much hassle to be greeted with "your bank doesnt support some lettercombination"
I have had no issues with them, was about 48 hours after signing up to get my first Bitcoins. Supports 24 hour bank transfers or 1 hour cash deposits if you need them fast.
It's not too late to buy bitcoins, though: you don't need to buy a whole one. For example, if you think bitcoin will double in price over the next month, you can easily buy 0.1 bitcoins for about $100 and sell it next month for $200.
One of the benefits of bitcoin is that it's highly divisible- the idea of "1" bitcoin doesn't really matter for most purposes. If Bitcoin becomes commonly used as an actual currency, people will almost never deal in whole bitcoins (any more than they would deal with $10k bills if they existed). You'd buy a loaf of bread with 0.0001 bitcoins, for example.
So, if you think the trend/fad/craze will continue, you might as well buy fractions of a bitcoin. I can't speak to the alternate crypto currencies, though.
This is outdated advice from the GPU mining days. ASIC miners use very little electricity compared the BTC that they generate.
If it weren't for the huge price increases, all the people who bought ASIC miners would be underwater right now.
I have a 60GH/s BFL miner. It uses about 350W or so. The fans are LOUD. When I get home the room it's been running in is noticeably warmer.
They don't generate as much BTC as one might think - just 0.04 / day at current difficulty and this is decreasing at a rapid clip (1 month ago or so it was 0.11 / day).
As an aside, I've always wondered if one day all heating will be computational waste heat. You could almost give away ASICs (whether for mining or other purposes) to people in cold countries and subsidise their electricity when they run their heater...
In San Francisco this is already a reality: http://www.icebreaker-sf.com/3/post/2013/11/heat-the-icebrea...
Imagine prices in shop given as 0.000132 BTC, 0.000123 BTC, 0.0000132 BTC or even worst 0.0009999, 0.000999, 0.009999 - looks similar and it is easy to be mislead and pay for something much more then expected. People would need to get use to count zeros after decimal point. This hardly matters with any real currency.
Far more important limitations:
Built in deflation - that it is seen as a one-way bet with ever-increasing value and an ever more limited supply would cause problems if used as a currency (though not obviously as a store of value). The problem for it as a store of value is that the value is entirely predicated on it being a successful currency.
Volatility - if prices change rapidly, that would make use in retail almost impossible, and as a store of value dangerous. Many of the places which say they take Bitcoin right now simply move the money immediately to another currency to avoid this issue - that's not going to work if it is actually used as a currency and to store value long-term. Imagine it replacing the USD for example and remaining volatile...
Time to process transactions - takings minutes to verify a transaction is not going to work -it'd need to be on the order of seconds, and for a digital currency it really should be as fast as the network.
Lack of regulation - again retailers/consumers should be nervous if their financial institutions have no regulations or guarantees that the money they say they hold actually exists at all. Some exchanges have reported a massive theft and walked away with no liability, others impose arbitrary limits on withdrawals etc - this really is wild-west finance and in a crash or bubble you can expect extreme fraud to go on undetected because there are no independent auditors, regulations or laws which govern these activities.
Lack of ties to identity - without verified accounts it's far too easy to commit fraud or theft - very like paper money which everyone is moving away from.
Lack of reversibility - it doesn't let you roll back transactions, though one could work around this by keeping a ledger and rolling the ledger positions back by transferring coins back and forth. If you're going to do that though and trust the bank/exchange to regulate transactions, why bother with the cryptocurrency bit at all?
Lack of transparency in the management process - who decides on the rules of the game here? If the official clients suddenly change rules in concert - existing bitcoin holders would have to just go along with this if the majority voted with it - when large amounts of money are involved, this sort of thing becomes very important. e.g. we hit the existing 21m limit, and those controlling the software decide to up the limit to 30m - suddenly lots of assumptions about value would be questioned. I'd be very nervous about the lack of regulated control.
Lack of backing by a government, corporation or trading bloc - when the market attacks government currencies, governments are able to expend extreme resources to mitigate outright panic and collapse. When the market sharks get interested in Bitcoin and attack it in the same way as they attack say the Euro, there will be no such backup, just a freely floating rate which is open to manipulation and depends entirely on public confidence.
I do think it has some interesting properties and is a useful experiment, but have extreme reservations about this being the actual digital currency which makes it into use as a global exchange mechanism.
"Lack of transparency in the management process" the official client is open source, any changes would have to be agreed by the development team but they would only come into effect if all miners (or at least 51%) agreed to the change.
It seems your points show you dont really understand what bitcoin is. Requiring it to be backed by a corportation or a government is exactly the oppositte of what bitcoin set out to be.
You should read more on it before making suggestions such as these.
What does relatively safely mean? I'd prefer transactions to be guaranteed and accounts to have a verifiable amount of funds in them - the currencies/banks we have now do this in seconds for small transactions.
the official client is open source, any changes would have to be agreed by the development team but they would only come into effect if all miners (or at least 51%) agreed to the change.
There's definitely space for conflict there. If the official client and/or lots of the miners decide something, it's going to be hard to get momentum in another direction, and as a small holder you will have no say at all. Given the huge vested interest of developers and miners, that seems ripe for abuse.
It seems your points show you dont really understand what bitcoin is.
If that's the case, it should be easy to rebut them. That you have replied with non-rebuttal rebuttals on two points and snide remarks for the rest doesn't give me much confidence.
I also find the deflation built into Bitcoin worrying, esp. accompanied by the unquestioning cheerleading from many proponents of it.
I had a look at your website, and it looked really interesting - http://evr.gr/.
Aren't those two just a layer on top of bitcoin?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=14438.msg195287#msg1...
1 mBTC = 0.001 BTC
1 mBTC = 100,000 Satoshis
1 uBTC = 0.000001 BTC
1 μBTC = 100 Satoshis
1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC
100 Satoshis = 0.000001 BTC
1,000 Satoshis = 0.00001 BTC
10,000 Satoshis = 0.0001 BTC
1 BTC = 100,000,000 Satoshis
1 BTC = 100,000 μBTC
1 BTC = 1000 mBTC
So 0.000132 BTC would be labelled in a shop as 0.132 mBTC
Too many people dont realize that while it might be hard to invest 50$ in Apple, investing 50$ in Bitcoin is always possible - no matter the current price.
Hardware manufacturers are likely well aware they're dumping more hardware on the market than Bitcoin can profitably absorb. They're enabled by customers willing to preorder hardware months in advance who are essentially gambling that the mining difficulty won't rise too quickly to make their brand new hardware unprofitable.
Why would anyone ever sell any means of production? Why sell solar panels, or farm tractors, or metal lathes?
The answer is obviously to raise capital to so they can make more money faster.
However that is starting to change (see ASICminer's facility)
I think another factor to consider is that for the companies to use the ASICs themselves -- even if they felt they could eke out a slightly bigger profit (though I bet they know they can't), it would require faith in Bitcoin. By selling them its cash upfront, which is how real-ass businesses (hardware manufacturers being a major type) operate. The business model is reliable and 1000x simpler.
GPU mining on Litecoin is still profitable since it uses scrypt, making the processing power of an ASIC or FPGA not that significant. Some people mine Litecoins just to sell them for Bitcoins, you may do it as well :)
I would only advise you to buy an ASIC if you live an area with extraordinarily cheap power. In the US this means probably somewhere between $0.05 and $0.10 per kWh.
Even then, its impossible to know how much the difficulty will increase.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
These are benchmarks of Bitcoin mining hardware. GPU's outperform CPU's by a large margin, then FPGA's outperformed GPU's and now ASICs (programs on a chip) absolutely kill everything else. Look at Xtreme Miner's "The Lion" specifically. It's only going to (alegedly) be available in Jan/Feb time, but the benchmarks they're claiming are scary.
Also there are some very very large ASIC data center deployments being worked on in China with some fairly innovative stuff like teflon shelves to avoid rack/rails and innovative cooling systems all designed to provide higher ROI per watt and capital invested. China really seems to be leading the field in mining.
Also keep in mind that as coins dry up they will be replaced by you collecting transaction fees. So it's not all about getting coins.
If I were to start mining today, and I believed Feathercoin and other smaller variants have promise (which I do) I would buy a dedicated ASIC box that can do SCrypt hashing (keep in mind you'll need more memory than dedicated ASICs for BTC) and give that a shot. With Bitcoin you're up against some very serious players at this point and the fact that ASIC boxes have a bigger advantage with Bitcoin than they do with Litecoin or Feathercoin makes it less attractive.
tl;dr: it is fun for dorks like us, but at this point, don't expect to build your retirement nest egg mining -- just buying coins on an exchange is going to have a much better chance at ROI.
If you plug the numbers in you'll see that to all intent and purposes, private mining for BTC is now useless unless you invest in a USD$5K+ ASIC mining rig and even then the rewards are not guaranteed as the overall network difficulty (how hard it is to find a block) keeps jumping every few days (see http://bitcoindifficulty.com). Basically, you'll end up underwater if the value of BTC drops from its current high.
I also missed the BTC mining boat and instead have decided to mine Litecoin (working on the assumption that a rising speculative tide floats all ships).
Litecoins use a different hashing algorithm (scrypt) which is designed to prevent a mining arms race and keep it feasible for CPU miners to continue finding blocks.
I joined the liteguardian.com pool 5 days ago and have three servers mining (each has an Intel Xeon CPU E31245) and I will have made 1LTC tomorrow. At the moment 1LTC is trading at just over $40. It was $6 a week ago.
Another option which I discovered yesterday is http://www.kraken.com - they appear to be a fully fledged FX platform that allows margin/leverage trading on BTC. Risky though unless you know what you're doing (I don't).
Edit: have just sent you an invite to the liteguardian pool in case LTC mining interests you.
If you have USD in cash, you can sell them for close to 10 ARS and then buy BTC at about 7.34 exchange rate.
If you ask for non-US based services, it's probably worth specifying where you are. BTC exchange services are very jurisdiction-specific at the moment.
Edit: Well, currently they seem 50% overpriced, so maybe this is not such a good idea, unless you really just want "some" BTC to use instead as an investment.
Polish version of this market was rock solid for last few years (still is): https://pln.bitcurex.com/
For buying, I use to just buy through blockchain.info, once you created a wallet, you could just put an amount you wanted to add in and run down to the nearest moneygram / western union. The process was fairly painless, took me 20 minutes. You type in the number of bitcoins you want, print out a piece of paper with instructions. Head down to moneygram or western union, follow the instructions of hand it to the person there, they do everything for you, you pay in cash. Refresh your bitcoin wallet and you should see your coins there shortly.
I think in the UK debit card payments are meant/are to be non-reversible. Couldn't find a clear answer on this though.
http://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/problem/how-do-i-use-...
Google anti fraud api, it is quite interesting.
I'd imagine that would be a shitty algorithm.