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Next difficultly estimate: 700000 | via Gribble on bitcoin-otc, just thought I'd share that with you fellow miners. | noob question: what is the current difficulty? | Bitcoin |
US senitors seek crackdown of Bitcoin and could possibly try to target Mt. Gox (fortunately most markets for Bitcoin are out of the US control) | null | The funny thing is bitcoins are the exact opposite of untraceable in most cases. Sure you can "launder" using the blockchain, but you literally leave traces at every step of the way! | Bitcoin |
Miners: Join the reddit mining team!! | null | mtred.com is in dire need of a redesign imho. deepbit is ugly but at least it's functionally ugly.
Looks are everything. In life and on the net. | Bitcoin |
Bitcoin’s Four Hurdles: Part Three – by the founder of the Pirate Party | null | And he is exactly right. | Bitcoin |
If Bitcoin can generate 1/4 of the interest that people have in Gold, expect $1000/BTC | It's speculation... but just think about it. There are about 50 million ounces of gold and it's price is over $1500/ounce. The most Bitcoins there will be is 21 million... so if it had get the price of Bitcoin if it had equal interest (at the max amount of Bitcoins), multiply the current price of gold by 2.38. Then to assume Bitcoin would generate a quarter of the interest people have in gold, multiply that by 0.25.
Also consider that this is a conservative estimate considering we won't reach the max of bitcoins (21 million) for quite a while.
Your thoughts?
--
1DgjdmzDSHto6gNsu6eTgySUAwU1NF2aMq | Gold's been used as currency for thousands of years and can be used in manufacturing. Don't get ahead of yourself. | Bitcoin |
Hypothetical Question | Say I know someone who was capable of mining around 150 - 200 Gh/s. Would that kind of mining power be able to singlehandedly crash the Bitcoin market? | No. The pools run well over 5 times that much. | Bitcoin |
Video Card prices being driven by bitcoins? | I've noticed that the price of video cards on eBay have been drifting upwards for the past three weeks. I speculate this is a result of the spike in the value of bitcoin. Thoughts? | Yes.
I bought a used 5970 off ebay 2 months ago for $500.
Just sold it for $785. Look me up in "completed listings", I used "bitcoin" in my title.
Viva la Bitcoin! | Bitcoin |
Stay calm people. | null | I have to stop watching these damned numbers!!! | Bitcoin |
Do you backup your wallet for every transaction? | I was wondering if this was necessary, or do we backup the wallet just once? | I think you should back it up every time you get more bitcoins, or a large enough amount of bitcoins to care if you lost them for some reason. | Bitcoin |
This is how much I believe in Bitcoin... | Here is a short timeline of my bitcoin activities:
- discover bitcoin through "anonymous" blog post asking for donations in bitcoin that hits front page of reddit back in march.
- begin eagerly reading everything I can about bitcoins for the next week.
- researched what cards would bring in the biggest bang for buck in my own personally created spreadsheet listing local prices, mhash/watts, total mhashes, $/mhash, etc etc...
- maxed out my credit card and spent a few grand I had in the bank on 5870s, 5970s, a few motherboards and powersupplies.
- spent almost every second since that time mining/tweaking cards/mining/tweaking/reading about bitcoins/etc...
Am I crazy? Probably a little.
Am I worried? Not at all.
Going into this... I was expecting bitcoins to become worthless in the near future... and even if that happened, I was prepared to sell all of my recently purchased computer equipment on ebay for an approximate 30% loss. So out of the probably $10k I spent on mining equipment... I can only ever stand to lose about $3k of it so long as I sell within a few months. (As it stands however with cards becoming more and more scarce... I just sold one of the 5970s I purchased for a few hundred more than I paid for it 2 months ago! So I might actually make money on selling my hardware!!!)
Within 3 months of finding bitcoins; it has completely consumed my entire life, all of my "money", and I am loving every minute of it. I have convinced 3 friends to buy some mining rigs, although I warned them not to go as "crazy" as I did, they each have about 2Ghps of mining equipment humming along at their places and all of us have paid off our initial investment.
How much do you believe in bitcoins?
P.S. AMA! | are you the guy that made the youtube videos of his basement setup? and the laptop presentation? | Bitcoin |
Mt. Gox is based out of Japan | ...Satoshi? | It does seem likely, doesn't it. | Bitcoin |
The early adopters of bitcoin own a significant portion of the total number of all available bitcoin wealth; allegedly as much as 19%(!). I consider this to be the BitCoin "Elephant In the Room". Does the project have an answer to this late-comers-get-screwed aspect of it? | [Here's *a* link to someone who alleges some actual figures.](http://baum.com.au/~jiri/ae/blog/01298716157)
Feel free to find your own to confirm or deny.
I personally believe that a good currency system will not unfairly favor any participant over another. In today's world, the banks are clearly the favored sons of the system. It would appear that the bitcoin universe, the early adopters are the favored sons.
To elaborate, early adopters have already gained a rather seizable portion of the wealth, and at this point there is little to no way to change that provided they hold onto it. The entire system is of little value to anyone without a large number of participants, yet as of two months ago 71% of those participants are already out of luck. And over time, that proportion is going to get *greater* as more people buy into the system, and the portion of available, possible wealth (bitcoins) *decreases*. I am not sure I am prepared to sign onto a system wherein 19% of the wealth is already spoken for before most people have even heard of it.
So I guess the real question is:
Is this a good thing for *the system and all participants in the end* that they hold such a large portion so early on? I consider it to be a dangerous situation for everyone but the early adopters. Now, in all fairness, they are taking the greatest risks. But does their risk justify owning 19% of the entire system's wealth, potentially forever?
If the community agrees that this is a flaw, what could we possibly do to fix it that would not be incredibly unjust to those that put their stake in it early? They did get the ball rolling. But 19% of the total, ever-to-be-printed wealth? It reads like Yet Another Pyramid Scheme. With the early adopters at the top and everyone else farther down.
I for one, have had enough of pyramid schemes. In software engineering an old adage is, "Build one to throw away." So if there is no equitable solution for this ownership imbalance, my vote is 'trashcan' and try again. | 1. I don't see how this is anything other than rank jealously, you had just as much an opportunity to get involved any any stage as anyone else did. Why shouldn't the early adopters, the one who took the *big* risks early on with a completely obscure and unproven idea, receive a return on their risks? (Disclamer: I got involved about a month ago)
2. If you really feel strongly about this, feel free to take the technology and create a new block chain. I'll even join in and help mine some blo... oh wait then I'd be an early adopter. How exactly do you propose to distribute the first coins anyway?
3. We're all still early adopters (assuming Bitcoin is even succesful), 99.9% of the population of the world hasn't even heard of one. One year from now, should we all lose the potential rewards (when the next generation of adopters gets jealous) for the risk we're taking now?
tl;dr u jelly? | Bitcoin |
EVERYONE SWITCH OFF DEEPBIT RIGHT NOW. | We are facing a very SERIOUS potential network issue if Deepbit moves over the 50% threshold.
In no uncertain terms, he can and might fork the block chain. I'm not saying that I don't trust the operator, but Bitcoin in general is about a system that works while mitigating the role of Trust in a central authority, and if deepbit controls more than 50% of the network mining capacity trust is all we have. | 6% stale shares. | Bitcoin |
VirtEx: A BTC-CAD exchange that accepts e-Interac! | null | So... like mtgox... but with interac money transfers? Can I cash out this way? If so... I love it!
Edit: WTF..?!? Somebody sold 1 BTC for $60 CAD in today's high?
Edit2: I like the encryption, but why no .ca domain? :(
Edit3: OP, are you the owner of this site?
Edit4: Any other canadians used this site yet? Looks clean, legit, and am excited to sell some of my first BTC through it as I need the cash ASAP for more video cards :P | Bitcoin |
Don't buy unless you can stomach the ride. There are going to be some super wild swings for the next few years until things settle down. | null | Seriously, that's why I'm in it for the long haul! Yet I'm called a "hoarder." :/ | Bitcoin |
The Coming Attack On Bitcoin And How To Survive It | null | I think he is spot on. There is nothing immoral or unethical about BitCoin, but the powers that be will make every attempt to make BitCoin look like Satan incarnate. They will invent or interpret laws to protect the state sponsored currencies. What they don't understand, however, is that other governments see the way the U.S. bullies everyone into using the Dollar and will be happy to support (although passively) any alternative as a big "fuck you" to the Fed. | Bitcoin |
Default Bitcoin Generator Rate? | I have this program (http://www.bitcoin.org/) generating bitcoins but I have no idea how efficient it is. Does anyone know where I can find this info?
I have it also on another machine but it does not have the option to "Generate coins". | The standard bitcoin program is not very efficient because it uses CPU power to calculate the hashes needed to mine bitcoins. There's a lot of bitcoin GPU (graphics card) miners out there (poclbm, phoenix miner are the most popular) that use the processing power of your graphics card instead of the CPU. This is a hundred times more powerful than your cpu (citation needed) and you should definitely opt for that.
Also, with the current difficulty in the calculating of bitcoin hashes, since a lot of bitcoins have already been mined, it is now common to join a mining pool instead of mining on your own, known as solo-mining. May I suggest the [reddit mining pool](https://mtred.com)? There's some others out there, but the reddit one could use your support. Also, do it because I helped you ;) And there's a post here about how we need to even the distribution of miners because one pool has nearly 50% of all mining power, which could seriously disturb the bitcoin blocks or something (don't get the fine details, but not important atm, just don't join deepbit, join the reddit pool).
Ok, so summarized:
1. get a GPU miner like poclbm or phoenix miner
2. join a mining pool (NOT deepbit, but preferably [MtRed](https://mtred.com))
3. ???? (a lot of calculating and overclocking cards)
4. PROFIT | Bitcoin |
Why I'm buying Bitcoins | I first saw Bitcoin in December of last year, downloaded and ran the client, saw an exchange at $0.24, and was like, "meh" - another attempt at a currency. Good luck with that. I spent about half an hour, and moved on.
Last week, they came back on my radar, and after about a day of reading, and I decided to buy some (they were at $9.5USD/BTC then). I've seen a whole lot of people argue about a whole lot of different reasons and theories, but frankly, my reasons are simple.
* I would use them.
* The system is transparent. I've read the code, I've seen and (mostly) understand the algorithms. While complicated in implementation, Bitcoins have orders of magnitude more transparency than existing financial systems.
* Bitcoins do not depend on trust, they depend on algorithms. They are not backed by guns, they are backed by computation. There will be no bailouts, no federal funds rates. Frankly, I'd rather live in a world where resources and trade came from smarts and computation than in a world where resources are backed by force and fear.
* The peer-to-peer nature of the technology, combined with the incentive structure for keeping it going will make stopping bitcoins extremely difficult nigh impossible. Stopping bitcoin at this point would require making computers legal only with a license, and having explicit permission to use the Internet for approved applications. Not going to happen.
* I have very low confidence in the dollar. Given that, I have very low confidence in the stability of existing financial systems. I no longer think that it is a matter of "if", but rather a question of "when" and "how" we will see another serious recession/depression/crisis. The same people who caused the last crisis are still running all the banks and investment houses. Their greed will overcome their caution again, and there will be larger crisis points. When that happens, at least now there are alternative currencies the world will take seriously.
* I feel a bit late to the party, missing out on $0.24 bitcoins. See a price chart I made from raw trade data on MtGox http://i.imgur.com/ut2Fl.jpg Getting Bitcoins now is not easy, at all. After 7 days, Dwolla still has not processed my transfer, and I have yet to participate in any market.
**However, the price of a Bitcoin is determined only by demand and utility**. If no one wants them, the price goes down, if people do want them the price goes up. Given that that Bitcoins can be accepted **by anyone using a computer** - I think lots of people all over the world will want to use them, and their price could be extremely high, breaking through 100,1000, or many 10s of thousands or even higher in the months to come.
* I find no structural flaws in the system that will bring it down. Have I bet my house on it? No. Have I translated all my savings into bitcoin? No. That would be foolish. But I am buying some.
| I personally think there's only two options: either these will be worth a fortune, or they'll be worth nothing. They can't exist for long in the middle. | Bitcoin |
Bitcoin Worldwide Exclusive: New Competitor to MtGox | http://TradeHill.com
Discount code: TH-R1184 for a 10% lifetime discount.
It has instantaneous buy/sell transactions, which I think is going to be extremely important for the long term growth of BTC. | No sir, Bruce Wagner is the owner and the creator. | Bitcoin |
What happens when the Government tries to shut down MtGox.com? USE NAMECOIN | What happens when the government gets wise to Bitcoin (happening already with the Silk Road press) and unavoidably tries to subpoena the DNS record of MtGox.com to be dropped just like they did for WikiLeaks? ...We need to take action before it ever gets that far. We need to look into our decentralized DNS solution that was built on the same system that Bitcoin's open source allowed.
We need MtGox.bit support and increased support for the .bit DNS extensions. The bullying will come and despite it not being able to "stop" the Bitcoin, it WILL affect us all. | Would you be concerned if there was a rising power that took away your ability to tax people, control prices & throw their weight around? That goes beyond just the USA...that becomes a global issue. Think big scale - this isn't going to be just American government. | Bitcoin |
Looking to buy $100 worth of Bitcoins. Anyone got BTC, need benjamin? | I can pay with a verified PayPal account. Looking to dip my toe in the waters. | bitmarket.eu has a nice way of handling paypal. Bought my 10 BTC a couple of days ago over there without a problem. | Bitcoin |
New Canadian Alternative to MtGox , live Market --> CaVirtex | null | doing a test now, but its worked for some friends and is legit from what I understand. Finally no more OTC for canadians. | Bitcoin |
Will the price of 1 BTC stabilise with the cost of the electricity to generate it? | null | No, but the rewards of mining will stabilize at the cost of electricity to generate it. | Bitcoin |
New Bitcoin Exchange: TradeHill | Seems like a viable alternative for those who have problems with the Mt. Gox monopoly: [TradeHill](https://www.tradehill.com)
Use my referral code TH-R1348 for a 10% discount on commissions. | If you sign up with the referral code, your commission should be 0.54%, which is cheaper. | Bitcoin |
Reading and re-reading the Bitcoin wiki didn't help - Can anyone please try to explain in layman terms the process of mining from start to finish? | I'm particularly interested in the following questions:
1. What is it that actually being calculated?
2. What's the calculating function?
3. How long would a *single* calculation take for a *normal computer* (not a mining rig, and using the GPU when possible and CPU as default) - I'm not meaning a "successful" calculation (where you win the block), but rather a "try" to see if you're right (that's how it works, right?)
4. Can I control how much processing power to use?
Regarding the last question (#4): If I understand correctly the way it works is that I need to calculate some sort of hash, this takes some amount of time but less than 24 hours, and I can't "progress" in the calculation, I either hit it or miss it every time. So what I want to know is whether I can make the calculation to work, but not take all of my resources.
> ********
## Edit
After some more reading and some of the replies here, I figured this is how a pseudo code for the mining function would look like:
var target = TARGET_FROM_BITCOIN_NETWORK;
var nonce = NONCE_FROM_BITCOIN_NETWORK;
function mine (target, nonce) {
var calc = target / nonce;
if (calc == 0) return "Success! This is the answer you were looking for";
else {
nonce++
}
}
while (true) {
mine(target, nonce);
}
Is that anywhere near what's actually going on? | * Transactions that haven't been put into a block are grouped together (plus a fudge factor) and a hash is generated. This hash has certain requirements. The number of leading zeroes in the hash sets the difficulty. The more zeroes required means the longer it takes to find a suitable fudge factor (some random data) in order to have those zeroes. This is where all the computing goes. It's called Proof of Work. It takes a lot of CPU/GPU power to find that fudge factor that produces a hash that meets the leading zero requirement.
* It's a SHA-256 hash function.
* All hashes take the same time on the same CPU whether it's the winning one or not. It's not super hard to compute, but you need to do this millions of times. Calculating one hash would take mere microseconds. That's the cool part of Proof of Work systems. Hard to generate, easy to verify.
* Depends entirely on your hardware / software. If you've got multiple video cards, you could use the ones that you aren't using for your primary display. Doing CPU mining is useless. GPU's completely outperform them by at least a factor of 10, usually more. If you are using your primary video card, there are mining programs, like poclbm that let you set certain settings that will lower the stress on the video card.
Best is to just run it over night while you're not using your computer. And join a pool (higher chance of actually being part of the group that finds the winning hash.) There's a reddit pool too, if you'd want to join that one. | Bitcoin |
why bitcoin failed as a currency and is on its way to become an asset.
| (apology : english is not my native language )
**Are we in a bubble?**
Ask yourself this question:
Are you, or people around you who are buying bitcoins because they want to use it to purchase/trade for something else, or they are buying them with the expectation that they will go up value later?
If your answer is the latter, you are speculating or investing, depending on your own definition. Either way, you are expect a higher return IN TERMS OF DOLLARS(or whatever currency your local economy is using).
**This is where bitcoin failed as a currency **
The distributed software itself was brilliant, but what it lacks was the ORGANIC ADOPTION AND ACCEPTANCE from the society, by that I mean bitcoin failed to build a large enough society or community where people buy and sell ALL necessities through bitcoins exclusively, where we use it because we like its unique characteristic over other currencies: finite, digital, and "untraceable"
**wait, you will ask, aren't we already seeing more and more merchants who accepts bitcoins now, aren't bitcoins on the right track of getting more adoption and acceptance from the society?**
Answer is : No. Bitcoin is not on the right track becoming a currency. Yes, more merchants are accepting bitcoins and yes, bitcoins are getting more adoptions. But merchants are accepting bitcoins because they can convert it back to dollars, not because they can buy other necessities with bitcoins.
**so what's the big deal you ask? end of day it is the same thing, more people accepting bitcoins. **
The big deal is this:
** now, dollar has direct influence in bitcoins. **
This direct link to dollar is bad for many reasons(and they all related):
* enabled speculation,
* increased the perception of risk involved in accepting bitcoins.
* the bitcoin market cap is still very small, any major players can manipulate the market with the dollars they have. When they do, we are going to experience parabolic growth and spectacular crashes.
* the volatiles in price made it very difficult for merchants to price their goods in terms of BTCs.
All above are bad for the long term bitcoin eco system.
**So what went wrong? **
** Prematurely enable exchange between currencies is the best way destroy a new currency. **
The part that went wrong was that we enabled the exchange between bitcoin and other major currencies BEFORE we build a bitcoin only eco system. Had we build such eco system/community first then enable the exchange, inside the system/community, people will measure everything in terms of bitcoins, including other major currencies.
**wait, you ask, If all other major currencies can be exchanged against each other, why cant bitcoins do the same now?**
Answer: All other major currencies have achieved adoption and acceptance in their particular local economy BEFORE they can be traded against other currencies. Whereas bitcoin has not.
For example, people in U.S. measure everything in terms of dollar, including Euros. People in Europe measure everything in Euro, including dollars. Bitcoin failed to build such community.
Everywhere in the world, online or offline, people always measuring bitcoins against their local currency.
This is a new problem for a distributed currency, since acceptance and adoption are forced or strongly recommended by governments for all major centralized currencies. Without government force, 'organic adoption and acceptance' will take a long time to achieve. It will be slow. This is the way it suppose to be. Instead, Bitcoin tries to 'cheat' this by making itself more liquid against major currencies(maybe 'cheat' is a strong word, 'shortcut' maybe more appropriate ). This pushed bitoin into the asset category, rather than a currency. Currency is always the measuring unit, and asset always get measured in terms of the currency.
I have no fix for this. The purpose of is merely point things out.
> Shameless advertising(my boss made me do this):
http://carwoo.com
| I'm actively spending bitcoins. I'm not spending everything I mine, but I AM spending. Sure, there are a lot of people holding onto it expecting to make some money when the value skyrockets. But people do that already, called foreign currency exchange. I think it's too early to be making calls like this. We just have to wait and see what happens.
When more retailers start accepting bitcoins, I think things will get better. | Bitcoin |
Is anyone else mining more value than a minimum wage job? | and loving it? | Hell yes! | Bitcoin |
How do I get bitcoins out of Mt. Gox? | I just read about the chance of action against Mt. Gox. I will continue using them, but want to download and backup my bitcoins in case of a raid or something. I can't find a link to do that on the site, however. Is there a standard process for doing this? Thanks! | Thank you! How do I do that, exactly? "Withdraw funds" only deals with dollars... | Bitcoin |
Keep an eye on Mt. Gox exchange rates with a Safari browser extension. Now I can get work done without having to refresh the page every 30 seconds. | null | You can also use [this](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/hv39i/mac_app_for_last_bitcoin_price_and_bitcoincz/)
Shows mtgox info as well as mining.bitcoin.cz mining stats (which I just added earlier today). | Bitcoin |
How a Wired article sent the price of Bitcoins skyrocketing | null | If this was posted today, why does it have an outdated price? It is at $30 on MtGox right now. | Bitcoin |
NEED HELP | I submitted my account to Mt. Gox and I did not get my BTC what do I do??? I went to http://www.bitcoin.org/ downloaded the program for windows and had the coins sent to 1FA4UFPEKfwYW1MLeNanoAxLvppKWhPWqG and NOTHING HAPPENED except my coins are gone from Mt Gox?! | Did the client download all the blocks? It should show you a number of blocks downloaded at the bottom. If that number is lower than 129482, it hasn't seen your transaction yet. | Bitcoin |
I doubt anyone really missed the (temporary) market wipe-out, but here's for you who did: See market depth to the left. | null | mt. gox | Bitcoin |
hashbounty : crack real hashes for bitcoins | null | Just went online today. It's still a bit flaky in places, but it works.
code is here https://github.com/pierce403/hashbounty
Just looking to get some real usage data on the site right now. Only hex encoded md5 and sha1 are available at the moment, but we are looking to add more soon. If you want to add anything like new hash verifiers, rss feeds, xmpp alerts, cleaner APIs or anything fancy like that, let me know. I will pay out for cool features like that, or any others you can think of.
edit : how it works
1. submit your hash, server responds with email containing activation address
2. send an initial bounty to the activation address so it shows up on the site
3. someone cracks the hash, and submits the solution
4. the server verifies the solution, emails you the solution, sends bitcoins to solver | Bitcoin |
"The U.N. Declares Internet Access a Human Right" - Bitcoins are saved? | null | Sure, if governments crack down, we can be sure of a strongly worded letter. | Bitcoin |
Finally, the ridiculous movie scenes where a drug dealer transfers money on a laptop watching a progress bar going left to right will become terrible reality ;-) | null | I was thinking exactly the same thing this morning. Only it was Snake stealing from the internet cafe in that episode of the Simpsons. | Bitcoin |
Is a deflationary currency like Bitcoin the perfect fit for a "full" world? | null | Awww, you made me think nytimes was talking about bitcoins :( | Bitcoin |
It's official... there is not a single 5800 series video card for sale on NewEgg.com and NewEgg.ca!?! There are tons of nvidia cards though. I think I am going to buy stock in AMD... | null | Its my bitcoin hedge, picked up 200 shares @ 8 a while ago, snap em up before they report for the quarter. | Bitcoin |
Mac app for last bitcoin price and bitcoin.cz mining stats (link in comments) | null | Sweet!
I installed it, and it's only showing me the current trading price and the volume. Everything else under the ticker heading is empty. I haven't entered a mt gox account or pool. | Bitcoin |
As a vendor, how should I accept Bitcoins? | I have a small electronics kit/ crafts selling online store and I'd like to take Bitcoins, because I think it'd be neat.
How would it be best to accept them? I wouldn't want to accept them for larger orders- so maybe just a percentage of the total can be payed with BTC?
How can I accept them without a *massive* headache of figuring out BTC addresses to orders?
For reference, right now my store On Etsy and I get maybe [5-10](http://www.etsy.com/shop/ladycartoonist?ref=si_shop) orders a day. I'd also like some sort of purchase with/ donate with BTC button on [my site, ](www.ladycartoonist.com) .
| Have a look at the bitcoin server side API's that are available. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Api#See_Also
Also, right now I'd suggest tying into Mt.Gox to get the current excange, so you're getting your money's worth (and also not over charging).
Basically what you could do is create a new receive address for every transaction (what you should be doing anyway) and presenting that to the customer. "Please transfer the total amount of XX.XXXX BTC ($YY.YY at the current exchange rate) to the following account: [account address] and upon verification of your payment we will ship your order."
Once the transaction (with correct amount) is sufficiently verified by the bitcoin network, you can send out your "Your payment has been received" email and continue normal operations from there.
It's not something thats' easy to set up yourself though, unless you're not afraid to spend time writing code.
Also, please realize that the value of bitcoin is in flux at the moment so there's no guarantee that 5 minutes after you've verified the payment, your bitcoins are worth $10 less than what you agreed upon with the customer. | Bitcoin |
My Glorious Mining Rig | The entire frame is made ONLY of kinex and is strong enough to be picked up. Sadly I'm still waiting on the motherboards to arrive (I built 2 identical rigs)
http://i.imgur.com/e7G0k.jpg | As long as the plastic doesn't just melt. | Bitcoin |
Noob Question: Is this acceptable? How long would it take? (New to this who BTC THING) | Im using diablo on a box with a Radeon 4850, getting about 34 MH/sec using BTCguild
Is this good? How long would it take to get 1 BTC? Im a little dense so someone hold my hand to give me an idea where this is going? | It would take a little over 2 weeks.
http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php | Bitcoin |
I am Satoshi Nakamoto t-shirt | null | Buying that T-shirt for dollars would be such a fail. | Bitcoin |
So we all know about mining, but what about the IRC nodes? | People are setting up mining boxes thanks to the clear incentive, but do we need more people helping out with IRC nodes to form a more resilient front end for submitting transactions? | The IRC nodes have nothing to do with transactions.
IRC was just the first method used for a new install to find other network nodes. If your client uses IRC bootstrapping it logs in to #bitcoin with an encoded nick. The nick consists of your ip address, port, and checksum.
By listing the users in the channel your client can decode these names to find other users.
Unfortunately the IRC channel got overloaded so now the client uses #bitcoin00-#bitcoin99. The client is moving away from IRC and toward DNS peer discovery at the moment.
After you bootstrap to the network transactions are just passed from node to node; they were never sent over IRC.
| Bitcoin |
Jeff Garzik (Bitcoin developer) responds to Adam Coen's "No. Bitcoin is a ludicrously bad idea. It is a scam. A Scam." | null | Early participants who took *what* risks, exactly? Running experimental software while AFK?
Just call it what it is: extreme good fortune or foresightedness to be in on the ground floor.
Edit: don't anyone think I'm calling Bitcoin's currency distribution method *unfair*. They made the rules, made them universal, and played by them. I just think their riches are the result of luck or brains, which are two sides of a coin that depends on how events turned out. | Bitcoin |
Senators seek crackdown on "Bitcoin" currency | null | There it begins...
They also want to target Tor. Good luck with that. My sentiment is that they do not understand what they are going after... | Bitcoin |
Bitcoins stolen from mt. gox account | I think someone hacked my mtgox account. I just logged in and all my bitcoins where withdrawn from my account and stolen. | LOL WUT
| Bitcoin |
The market cap is over 200 million. Honestly, how do you guys NOT see this as a terrible bubble about to burst? | null | If you wanna get out now Ill buy your BTC... thats why | Bitcoin |
Daytrading platform for MtGox | null | Meh, yesterday I started writing basically the same thing in Python. | Bitcoin |
Bitcoin questions not in FAQ | I’ve been quietly following bitcoins for a while now, more out of interest in cryptocurrency then actually acquiring. I didn’t see these answered in the faqs, so if someone could confirm/deny/help, I’d appreciate it.
1. First, it seems the sudden popularity of bitcoins can be attributed to reddit. As I mapped it: a few threads mislabeling the deep web made it to the front page, which in turn brought more people to the hidden wiki (which is not deep web), which lead them to TOR (mostly the silkroad for the media), which gets picked up by the ‘oh we’re soo on top of things’ gawker network, which leads to a wired article, which leads to… well, where we are now. Anyone else see this?
2. Bitcoin lacks a central bank or monetary authority to manipulate the liquid market. From the people I’ve asked, this lack of central regulation is a boon to currency stability, as central authorities can sometimes foster instability in the form of inflation through unnecessary regulation. The more I look at this though, the more it looks like the bat could swing both ways. How volatile is this market in its sudden popularity?
3. Anonymity- since bitcoin works as a P2P I understand there is no need to work through banks; thus, one can avoid setting off the SAR alarms in the transfer process. Moreover, being that they are a form of cryptocurrency, their intrinsic value is consistent across borders. One needs not register usernames and personal information to acquire and transfer bitcoins… but as I understand it the legitimacy of payment processing/transaction hinges on a complete record of transactions kept as blocks in an overall block chain. Each block is comprised of a series of transactions that is sent by the block before it. This process is one of confirmation, in that each new block confirms the integrity of the block before it, back to the genesis block so as to maintain block integrity. …So, in this manner, could the ownership of bitcoins, as they proverbially ‘change hands,’ be charted? Or am I way off the mark in how it works?
4. I’m not an economist, but it seems like bitcoins are awkward to trade for USD. What currency works best security-wise as an intermediary?
5. I’ve heard rumors of a bitcoin installing piece of malware. Anyone else heard or think it’s even possible? | 1. Bitcoin has been getting slashdotted almost weekly for about a month or so now. :( But Reddit might have played a small part in the current boom.
2. No one has any way of knowing what the "true" market value of the BTC is - it's purely speculation. It's entirely possible we're way over what they're really worth, which would mean a correction downwards at some point. It's also possible (there's calculations somewhere on the Bitcoin forum) that if Bitcoin reaches even say 5% of what Visa or Paypal process, that the buying Bitcoins now is buying them at pennies-on-the-dollar for what they'll be worth in a decade.
3. Bitcoin is not anonymous - it's pseudonymous. If no one can pin the addresses on you, then you're effectively anonymous, but that's really no different to posting throwaways on Reddit. If someone can pin a username on you with evidence, then there's a detailed history of everything you've done. But yes, Bitcoin depends on tracing the history of a coin from it's generation (it's basically a giant distributed ledger) - it's the only way to confirm that a coin that's coming to you has not been spent already. I don't think it's in the current implementation, but there's talk about when transactions explode and nodes have difficulty keeping up, it will be possible to prune out the middle transactions and only keep the first and last - I don't fully understand how that's supposed to work though.
4. Check out the Bitcoin OTC group - they're a group on IRC and websites where you can do exchanges in person after negotiating them on IRC. If you're in any kind of built-up area, you'll likely find someone around you who will trade them for whatever currency or goods you desire.
5. The code is open source, check it for yourself. Or build it yourself. My guess is it's either a) idiotic rumor; or b) false positive because the Bitcoin client by default connects to an IRC server in order to gain a list of peers (and so looks like it's part of a botnet). You can disable this behavior once you have a decent list of peers if you don't want it stuck on an IRC network someplace. | Bitcoin |
Now this is a motherboard. | null | Oh, and throw in a few of [these](http://www.logicsupply.com/products/pelx16_c11)
(I have no idea if this would actually work, although I'd be curious if someone would try it.) | Bitcoin |
Australia's national broadcaster interviews Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen | null | "plutonic ideal". | Bitcoin |
can someone explain this behavior? | Hi, saw this just a moment ago on mtgox
Time & Sales
Time Price Volume
12:53:18 31.00000 3.0300
12:53:14 31.00000 1.0000
12:53:11 31.00000 1.0000
12:53:11 30.99990 0.5000
12:53:01 30.50000 21.0820
12:53:01 30.50000 3.1500
12:53:01 30.50010 3.0480
12:53:01 30.96990 0.2700
12:53:01 30.99000 2.4500
is there any explanation for a drop and a rise like this in such a short time? | Yes. There are 4 types of participations:
- SELL positions
- BUY positions
- SELL orders (ASK)
- BUY orders (BID)
If everyone posts positions and suddenly two people post a buy and a sell order that fetch passive orders, then those will eat up and down in the market depth, and move the median price around. What you see in the price chart is only the river, you do not see how steep or lean the river banks are. | Bitcoin |
Is bitcoin the first of many? | A lot of people are enjoying the rapid increase of the value of bitcoins more or less as an investment rather than a currency. The future is hard to predict but one day will probably level out, probably. Maybe at 1 BTC = 1 million USD or 1 BTC=0.01 USD seeing as its not really tied to anything its hard to say. But the final value isnt what my post about.
What i'm wondering is will people try to make more online currencies in an attempt to recreate the profits that were made from investing in BTC when they were less than 1USD in hopes they will also reach 30USD and higher? | Wallet files will inevitably be lost and deleted accidentally. Each bitcoin will be worth more than that in the end. | Bitcoin |
Where in NYC can I have a few beers and pay in Bitcoins? | I'm meeting a friend for beers in NYC this evening, and I'd like to pay in Bitcoins. Is this possible?
Update: This article: http://www.observer.com/2011/06/bit-omoney-whos-behind-the-bitcoin-bubble/ claims "Meze Grill on 55th Street and Eighth Avenue ... accepts Bitcoin". | no. | Bitcoin |
I am a musician/producer, how should I sell my music in bitcoins? | I was thinking of releasing my music so people can buy it with bitcoins, or maybe even making some bitcoin-exclusive releases to sort of promote the adoption of bitcoins.
So what would be the best way of selling them? Automated would be great, but I don't have a while lot of time to program a web store. I imagine I could do a trust based "send me the money, and then I'll email you the tracks" kinda thing. I imagine the volume of sales probably wouldn't be too overwhelming anyway.
At simplest there could be a payment and an auto-email to a link, but I' be worried about people leaking the link (I suppose they could just upload it anyway even it it was somehow a private download?)
Anywho, I wanted to see what your thoughts were. | There is a site like http://ubitio.us but it does have some bugs when we discussed it before. Still, it may be a good way to investigate sharing digital content and charging people for it. | Bitcoin |
0.0 Trades mtgox | Hey, i use the feed from mt gox linked to sierra charts.
Sometimes there's trades moving the price with no amount attached; what's going on here?
http://imgur.com/ZB4QH
Thanks | Dark pool orders are another possibility since the volume is hidden. | Bitcoin |
Senators target Bitcoin currency, citing drug sales | null | They should go after cash too, since cash has traditionally been used in nearly 100% of drug sales. | Bitcoin |
Bitcoin, the Darknet Economy, and the Low Overhead Revolution by Kevin Carson | null | That article makes me want to reread Neuromancer and Snowcrash. | Bitcoin |
Neil Stephenson's (1995) predictive tale about the growth of decentralized cryptocurrencies. | null | Also the single-page print version: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,982610,00.html | Bitcoin |
Is there a way to find out how many Bitcoin users are out there? | At least a rough estimate? | Not really. There's a hard upper limit set by the number of private keys: ~1.40904789 × 10^59. You could achieve a theoretical current upper limit by reading the block chain and seeing the number of addresses that currently possess Bitcoins, but some of those are held by more than one person, so the number is lower. You could try to match those addresses with individual users, by matching published identities to net or realworld identities, but the number of such connection you would be able to successfully make is small. | Bitcoin |
Tradehill - new and strong mtgox competitor. Free bitcoin for signing up | null | 0.01 BTC is hardly a "free bitcoin" and more of a referral scam.
So if you want to save 10% off you commission at trade hill, AND knowingly help me earn commission you can click here https://www.tradehill.com/?r=TH-R1249 | Bitcoin |
The bitcoin revolution needs more programmers. | Let's make a list of programs that are needed to drive the bitcoin economy. Then prioritize which are most important, and then start building open source solutions. The bitcoin currency exists, now we need to build the infrastructure around it to let the coins flow. The hard work has just begun!
We need to make:
* Online encrypted wallet
* Reputation system
* Exchange for buying/selling
* Secondary market
* Mining Pool
If we could get more ideas that would be splendid. We should get a group on github so interested people can start contributing. | i'm pretty sure those things exist. for example, silk road has a reputation system and is an exchange. deepbit is a mining pool | Bitcoin |
Does overall confirmation time decrease as the bitcoin network increases in size? | The way I see it is that more popularity in bitcoin equates to more miners, but also more trade volume. Is there any indication that the hash rate is increasing more quickly than the trade volume, or will transactions always take this long to confirm? | Ten minutes is a lot if you're, say, buying something from a local shop. | Bitcoin |
Is bitcoin "theft" illegal? | Let's say I had some way of "stealing" bitcoins. Like maybe I had a little trojan-like utility program that you downloaded, and it read your bitcoin data and posted transactions sending all your bitcoins to myself. Or even if I was sitting at your computer one day with your permission, and I saw the bitcoin client open and used it that way. It doesn't matter how I do it, I just end up with your bitcoins without your permission. Since bitcoins are not "recognized" currency by any government, and even the "theft" itself is not really stealing anything physical, would it be considered theft? It's not even "stealing" data like when someone pirates a dvd, it's making completely new data with a cryptographic signature that isn't even 100% guaranteed to be uniquely yours (it's theoretically possible for two computers to accidentally generate the same private key). Would this be illegal? Are there any laws on the books yet, or has it still been yet to be tested? | I never said it was right, I was just curious about the law concerning digital cash. | Bitcoin |
What developments exist for providing "easy" Bitcoin access? You know, mobile apps, P.O.S. systems... who's working to make Bitcoin accessible to all? | Just because Bitcoin is cryptography-tastic shouldn't mean that hoops are required to take advantage of it. I wanna be able to "bump" phones with someone and pay them, or have a method to use them at the 7-11. Paying with bitcoins over the internet seems like it's growing at a nice pace (not a surprise); but these things need to make a move in some form to meat space to help in general adoption.
What exists to use bitcoins effectively in that regard? | if nobody is working on this, I just want to put it out there that I also think its needed, and that I think I could develop something for this if I could justify spending the time on it. Right now I have to earn money for rent and food every month and I do it by freelancing. If someone wants to give me a flow of BTC (equivealent to $2000CAD per month is all I need to live comfortably) I will work on these kinds of things exclusively. I would love to pay my rent with BTC! (which I understand I'd have to convert BTC to $CAD first but I have to do the exact same thing already with the $USD my client pays me through paypal anyway).
So someone hire me with BTC as a pocket coder. cmon. | Bitcoin |
Is anyone here willing to sell a few bitcoins over paypal at current market rates? | I'll eat the paypal fees if there are any. I want to get in on this, and it's pretty much the only way I can right now.
Obviously not a throwaway account, I can even mail you something neat of mine if you want. (I have puzzles, I could draw you a picture, whatever).
I want in on bitcoins, and buying is the best way for me (going to start mining at night soon, in the reddit pool.) | No. And go back to Nigeria.
/sarcasm.
Seriously though. Nobody should ever sell bitcoins through paypal, credit card, or any other "reversible transaction" type medium.
I can send you $1,000 through paypal/visa... you can send me the coins... I call to complain and get my money back - what do you get? | Bitcoin |
Bitcoiners in LA want beer? | See username. Also, this is for Los Angeles, not Louisiana. Sorry. | I have beer and want BTC! Wish I could ship you some, but there's all these "laws" and "fees" involved. If only we could make a decentralized P2P beer... | Bitcoin |
Could BitCoin have solved Sony's woes? | Would it be possible for a service like PSN to offer payment via BitCoin and achieve ultimate security? Surely a company like Sony, who loves their own, different, proprietary media, could see value in something like BitCoin being their special form of accepting payment for online gaming.
Thoughts? Or is this a dumb idea? | They would have probably lost their wallet. | Bitcoin |
Beware of a new type of scam | null | Wow, that's a pretty clever trick. I guess the flaw is not verifying that the person making the deal is actually the owner of the paypal account.
| Bitcoin |
It's Not in the Box, It's in the Band | I have a proposal to make wallet files less prone to corruption and enable their use on multiple machines. This is by no means perfect, and I'd like to get input from people smarter than I.
Right now, I'm running my wallet on two different machines (though I only send from one right now). This is dangerous as the addresses can get out of sync. Imagine the situation where, if you went to another branch of the same bank, they might not know about some of your transactions. Silly, right? People could create multiple wallet files, but then they have to figure out how much money they want to transfer from their PC to their mobile phone before leaving the house. Also dumb. My proposal to (mostly) solve this is as follows.
1. The wallet file contains a random hash which is a seed for your private keys.
2. This seed, through a strong one-way RNG yields ECC PKPs/addresses (however it works underneath - shooting from the hip here). This could emit things into different categories. I see a need for 3:
a. Sending addresses
b. Receiving addresses
c. Sideband description info (discussed later)
3. Initially, there is only one address in each bucket. This is the address that will be used next.
4. If the client sees the address used in the blockchain, it emits the next address and sets that as the head address.
This would allow wallets to sync up once the blockchain was downloaded. It seems to me that this could cause problems if spends occurred before resyncing, and that's what I'd like to explore here.
...
C. sideband info: Ideally the blockchain would've been set up to include small amounts of encrypted data with a transaction (say 80 bytes) for ledger entries. I think that a *purpose*-based entry system rather than *address*-based entry system (from the users' perspective) makes more sense. However, that's not the case, so how does one keep wallets in sync without having to modify the protocol?
I'd expect such information would have to be transmitted to an individually defined location. For instance, I could send encrypted transaction *purpose* information to gmail. This information could even contain the index of the address used, so other clients would be able to jump right to the correct head address without having to download the entire blockchain.
This would only involve making a different client, which is good. RNGs can open up holes though if they're not done well.
Thoughts? | That was my understanding, except that change can get sent to a new address that you don't know about. I'm starting to speculate that the "private key" is just a hash that when hashed generates the public key, which would explain why addresses are one-use.
There was a post (somewhere, can't find it) where someone lost a bunch of bitcoins by doing the following.
ADDRESS A: 10000BTC
Send 1 to MtGox at ADDRESS B,
Client generates ADDRESS C for change
* ADDRESS A: 0
* ADDRESS B: 1
* ADDRESS C: 9999
Now, his old wallet file (on the other computer or partition or whatever) knew about A, but not C since C was new and not generated deterministically (as I was mentioning could be done with a seed).
He overwrote the newer version with the older version somehow and lost 9999BTC.
This sort of thing would happen ALL the time using the same wallet on multiple machines (I already got a double spend rejected doing that). The solutions as I can see them are:
1. Have a central location to sync your wallet with.
2. Have a wallet file be able to deterministically create all future addresses from a seed. The seed is effectively your private key.
| Bitcoin |
Bitcoin is set to EXPLODE in 3, 2, 1.... | I am making a prediction, and I am making it public.
**Prediction 1)** Most buyers on mtgox are buying an investment, not a currency. You typically "sit on" investments for some time rather than sell them immediately. So "most" coins sold through mtgox will be "sat on"/"hoarded"/"held" for at least a short period of time.
**Prediction 2)** Bitcoin prices will explode to never before imagined heights within the next 3 months. By september 9th, 2011 I expect 1 bitcoin to trade in upwards of $500.
Why do I think that? It's elementary, Watson.
There are only ~6.5 million bitcoins in existance right now.
There is roughly 1.25 million bitcoins being traded (hoarded) per month according to [bitcoincharts.com](http://bitcoincharts.com) and this number is quickly increasing. This month, 1.25 million... next month 1.75 million... after that 2.5 million at which point there are only 1 million coins left for the following month, and demand should be 3 times that.
[And the next month...?](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania)
Mark my words. | Except most people aren't going to feel like buying in when the price is anywhere close to $100 per coin. IMO. | Bitcoin |
WikiLeaks endorses Bitcoin! (And Namecoin) | null | I would have agreed with you a few weeks ago, but with the Silk Road story and two US senators specifically targeting Bitcoins I think the cat is out of the bag already.
But yeah, it will draw both positive and negative attention. | Bitcoin |
BitCoin, RipplePay, and Decentralized Exchanges | I really want BitCoin to succeed and, until we have enough merchants accepting it, the exchanges are really helping. Unfortunately, they are a huge point of failure. There is always some law to bring out and I'm sure many of the current exchanges could be brought down on a technicality. That will be a huge blow to the usefulness of BitCoins for a while. It might not even be able to recover. On another note, it seems silly to me to create a decentralized currency and then put the future of it in MtGox no matter how trustworthy they are. (And yes, I know, no one person *made* MtGox the official BitCoins exchange, it's just may be a stable state for there to only be a few large players).
There has been mention of using [the cutout](http://bitcoinweekly.com/articles/anonymous-money-needs-an-anonymous-exchange) and that will work, but few will create new bank accounts and mail their debit cards out to an exchange. We could go one step further and have some small group of people do "the cutout" and act as a local exchange, but that risks shutdown again (though there'd be safety in numbers) and it still has something central backing it.
I don't have a solution per se, but I think we can learn a lot from Ryan Fugger's [RipplePay](http://ripplepay.com/). If we could extend our friends credit that they could, in turn pass on, then no one would really screw anyone over unless one had bad friends. The neat thing about Ripple is that it's, I feel, a purer (or at least more honest) form of money than BitCoin, but it's probably too difficult to bootstrap. However, if we let BitCoin be the currency and ripple be the trust and routing, maybe something could work. In the meantime, I know a miner I can buy BTC off of. | I think Ripple is a neato idea but based on a chain of trust is only useful if you have people you trust around you that can link you with the things you need. I think Ripple will eventually take off, but not until more people find a way to use it.
Whats most interesting about bitcoin to me is that people are actually using it. Since seeing the exchanges crop up, I have personally decided I will accept BTC as payment (among other things, my list is at chws.ca) and I take comfort in knowing that if 65BTC magically appeared in 14KE9rQTYEvL8RinYhTYgPq3atoU7493aA (HINT, HINT) that I could pay my rent and expenses this month with it (after converting to national fiat).
An interesting idea that just occurred to me would be a precious metals/BTC exchange running on TOR and using anonymous snail-mail remailer for inbound (and perhaps outbound) metals. This service should be impervious to attack using current technology. | Bitcoin |
What happens if my HD crashes? Are Bitcoins stored on it permanently destroyed from the system? | null | Yes.
Back them up.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet | Bitcoin |
Between what hashrates (per second) would you consider or not using a mining pool? | When is a rig powerful enough to not require a mining pool? | I think it all depends on how long you want to wait for your first 50 bitcoins - with a 1.4 Ghash/s rig (dual 6990s) it will take an average of 20 days, with a 50% chance of getting them in 33 days. If you are cool with waiting then you are saving yourself whatever fee the pool charges. If its a 0% fee pool like mt.red, I don't think there is much difference. I like having my miners hooked up to a pool because I get to look at the overall stats my machine is putting out. | Bitcoin |
Miners: What is your mh/s rate, and what hardware are you using? | Just curious what everyone's pulling. I've been mining, though only when I'm using my computer for other things, at 20 mh/s just with the CPUs, but I've got a card coming in the mail sometime tomorrow. | my 9600GT is old and crappy and doing 16MH/s. You beat it with CPUs. I lol at myself. | Bitcoin |
Are there any early adopters that have already made a $500+ profit through trading? | I wish I had invested when my friend first told me about bitcoin. I could have made at least a $150 by now. Then again, at that time, I didn't think it would last that long. | An $800 investment in computer hardware a month ago has netted me 100 Bitcoins, so about $2200 'profit' so far. But bear in mind, if I'd bought outright at $1.30 I would have 600 Bitcoins instead.
Of course if Bitcoin fails next week I won't have made any profit at all (but at least I can sell the hardware). | Bitcoin |
Canadians, there is a new exchange for us. I've used it and it works. | [Link](http://cavirtex.com). I've bought and sold using this website, it works well. | I bought $300 worth of Bitcoins from it last night. The eInteract payment had to be handled manually on their end (so 30 min transfer + 60 min to deposit), but other than that everything went very smoothly. | Bitcoin |
MtGox's Dark Pool- how is it justified? | Trades that are large enough have the option of not being listed on the market. However, when the trades are completed do they actually move the market? Is there any way to verify that they really do?
Dark pools in other exchanges just provide anonymity. The trades still move the market (and with today's technology in real-time).
What is to stop people from buying from the public market, then selling on the dark pool, and repeat? They end up manufacturing liquidity and manipulating trends that aren't real, in order to drive the price up. | don't leave us hanging! | Bitcoin |
One pixel of this image is Mtgox's daily turnover rate compared to the world's | null | Data used for this:
Daily world turnover (source: Wikipedia): $3.98 trillion
Daily turnover rate on Mt. Gox (30 day average BTC, * 28.5): $1.15 million
Pretty cool imo. | Bitcoin |
Is there anyone offering food-stuffs (home garden produce etc.) via BTC exchange? | I see great potential here, shipping is a bit touchy, but myself I can dehydrate foods/meats, and canning is wonderful for shipping too. Any opinions? Information? | I'm working on an organic greenhouse of fruit and veg (I might get some chickens eventually for eggs too) mainly because I find I feel better when I eat mostly raw (with some protein). If I get this up and running soon, I'd be happy to sell for BTC. | Bitcoin |
If bitcoin is revolutionary, then why is bitcoin mimicking the current economic paradigm in so many ways? | Futures trading, a stock market, currency exchanges, etc. All the same old capitalist bullshit, just with a new, "revolutionary" branding. Hoarding and greed and market analysts and buy!buy!sell!sell! and technological elites mining far more wealth than the average little guy.
Then, where is the environment in all of this? You know, nature, that thing capitalism has been so efficiently dismantling, consuming, and shitting out in massive dumps and landfills.
What does bitcoin do to change this? Is it simply trying to provide an alternative to the current system so that people can opt out of the standard capitalist bullshit? If so, why keep so many of the standards of capitalism? Otherwise, it just becomes more like an upgrade of the way things are than a reboot or revolution.
Don't get me wrong, I see hope in using bitcoin as a stepping stone away from the current system. It just seems really, really, really similar to the current system. Just sayin. | Maybe because the corrupt system we have today started out right, or at least better. It's broken, but fixable. It's not going to be an easy fix.
Incremental improvements can be revolutionary. | Bitcoin |
Napkin Math: When 1% of today's Internet business is conducted using Bitcoins then the worth of 1 BTC will be 402€ | OK this is very sketchy and some numbers are pulled from random sources, but i challenge you to give a better estimation what the price will be once 1% of the business in the Tubes is done in Bitcoins:
assuming the total number of a currency compared to the GDP is roughly the same in every currency.
for €:
[total GDP in countries using €: 1.236 × 10^13](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=GDP+of+europe+in+%E2%82%AC)
[total number of € (M3 of 2007): 9.58 × 10^12](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#European_Union)
[worldwide GDP: 3.577 × 10^13 €](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=worldwide+GDP+in+%E2%82%AC)
[part of GDP conducted in in the Tubes: 3.4%](http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/internet_matters/index.asp)
total number of BTC: 21*10^6
therefore:
(1.236 × 10^13)/(9x10^12) = (0.01*(3.577 × 10^13)*0.034)/(X*22*10^6)
X=402.531
so 1 BTC will be worth 402€ once it gained some more traction.
--------
hey, i'm a software engineer not an economist. if this is nonsense please explain.
| I think you mean if, not when. | Bitcoin |
Bitcoin popularity/stock comparison | Was trying to estimate the price of Bitcoin if investors got behind it compared to various stocks... here's how I did it:
First, pick a stock, I picked LinkedIn because it's new to the stock market and not extremely well-known. Get it's market cap and recent close price to figure out how many shares there are.
LNKD: 6.8B / 75.91 = 90M Shares
Figure ratio to Bitcoins: 90M / 6.5M = 13.85
If Bitcoins were equally as popular, their price would be:
13.85 x 75.91 = **$1051/BTC**
However, [according to Google trends](http://www.google.com/trends?q=bitcoin%2C+LNKD&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=1), Bitcoins are more popular than LinkedIn's stock ticker. Now, I understand traders don't have near the same access to Bitcoins as they do stocks... and it's almost like comparing apples to oranges. Just a little fun experiment I thought I'd share. | Here's another similar calculuation. My educated guess is that, so far, no one has spent more than a few hundred thousand USD buying bitcoins. It's easy to imagine people spending tens of millions of USD on bitcoins, in which case the price could conceivably rise accordingly and be worth on the order of $1000/BTC.
I actually think it will be worth more than that because I think it will occupy a very significant fraction of the world's economy. | Bitcoin |
Did I accidentally pay a fee? | I sent 0.01 to an address, and when I look at the transaction in the JSON API, I see a "fee" has been paid:
Array
(
[amount] => -0.01
[fee] => -0.01
[confirmations] => 1
[txid] => 3e1e967193ba943b88e859e5db279a2770c0b55e9b2423deb5a65cd70128ee5b
[time] => 1307671339
[details] => Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[account] =>
[address] => 192AEYMgerPjhxxJ5SMAqfAvZ9ASbvT4fU
[category] => send
[amount] => -0.01
[fee] => -0.01
)
)
)
Did I do something wrong? | Transactions 0.01 and smaller require a fee, to make DoS of the network by flooding tiny transactions more expensive. The next version of the client will support a TX fee of 0.005 (I believe that's the right figure), but there will still be a fee for any transactions below a certain amount (I think it's still staying at 0.01BTC), or I believe any transactions where you're sending immature coins. | Bitcoin |
Question about BitCoins | Okay, so I tried out Bitcoins a year or two ago and had something in my account.
Thing is I've formatted my drive since then.
Is it possible to get those BTC's back? =T | If you have no other copy of your wallet.dat (the file where your private keys are stored), then you can not restore your Coins :-/
If the amount you had was high enough, you could bring your hard drive to a specialist, who can possibly still restore the file. There are also programs to undelete files (which were not overwritten when deleted). I am not sure, if you can still restore after you format, maybe you can if you only "quick-format"ed it. | Bitcoin |
U.S. government going after Bitcoin | null | ok let's look at this logically.
By going after bitcoin in the state it is in, you are effectively attacking a group of about 20k people around the world, a much higher than usual percentage of who are professional Programmers, System Admins, Penetration testers, Security Analysts etc.
These highly skilled people have home built super computers that are designed for hash cracking and have the skills to compromise systems (and some do professionally).
The whole system is decentralized and supported by many internet freedom societies.
The world economy is in the shitter, the USA is fighting at least 4 wars and now you decide to fuck with some of the people who help keep the internet running by screwing with their new monetary system they invented.
So it is a good idea to piss off the bitcoin network........ because...... why?
| Bitcoin |
Told my friend about Bitcoins. He made some ads. I'll pay him 1 Bitcoin for his work. [NSFW] | null | You give her the wallet.dat with the amount desired. | Bitcoin |
Browser screenshot | null | [Room temperature](http://i.imgur.com/EZXJa.jpg)
It was above 42.C two days ago, before AMDOverdriveCtrl was used to lower the memory clocks. | Bitcoin |
Nothing is stopping anyone from forking the bitcoin code, starting a new block chain, and creating a new cryptocurrency. Given the popularity of BTC and the allure of 'getting in early', will cryptocurrencies suffer from (hyper?)inflation because new ones are so easily created? (ie, Namecoin) | null | It will suffer the same problems as trying to break into the "social networking website" business: in order to succeed, what's important isn't the product, it's the community. Bitcoin now has by far the most established community, so unless everyone suddenly decides they don't like bitcoin anymore (which, to be fair, is possible if something *really* cool comes along, like Facebook vs Myspace), it's gonna be a steep uphill battle for any new challengers. | Bitcoin |
I noticed this today. It makes sense, but is still an interesting correlation. | null | That would be a terrible mistake, I think. Don't artificially inflate something that indicates people's interest. | Bitcoin |
Is it already too late to get into BitCoin? | I usually pride myself for being on the edge of rising trends, but it looks like I'm joining the flock with the rest of the sheeple this time around.
With the BTC exchange rate skyrocketing, I'm feeling a little sick that I didn't plunk some change down back when things were ultra cheap, but I know that I could be kicking myself even harder in six months if things _really_ take off.
I already set my mobile GPU chugging away at an adorable 53mhash/sec, I joined the Mt.Red pool, and I'm starting the slow climb, but the question nags: did the early adopters already win this? Is there still any chance of making it big with BTC?
Thanks to anyone who can offer any perspective. I'm not treating it like a get-rich-quick thing, but... okay, maybe I am a little bit, but only because I'm seeing people who invested just a few months ago looking at double-digit returns on investments. Think there's a second wave this new generation can ride? | No, man. It's still early days. You'd do well to get a decent video card and keep mining. The real trick though, is to find ways to create services and products to sell. Everyone that can do that now will be on par with early miners.
But yeah, it's going to get harder and harder to sit around on your ass and keep pulling in BTC unless you can come up with something that competes with the likes of MtGox or Deepbit. | Bitcoin |
so how much are you sitting on? and when are you going to sell... if at all? | i bought at 8.50 ish and have a mere 4.8 coins. I dont know when im going to sell... I figure if it goes up to 100+ a coin then I might as well use them as coins since by that time there will be some sort of market for them.
If everything crumbles I wont be worried. I just put in 30 euro. | I decided to buy at 15, and bought at about 30. That's one day to transfer all the funds. So, I've 2.19 coins, and I'm holding onto them against the bitcoin apocalypse. | Bitcoin |
Rented servers with decent GPUs for mining? | Seems like a viable alternative to building your own ghash machine: renting out someone else's for a similar fee. I know you can order private server access from colo services, but I don't know of any that outfit their boxes with nice GPUs.
Anyone know of some place that does that, maybe something for contributing to Folding@Home-type projects but that can be repurposed for mining?
(I realize that this kind of thing would probably be spoken widely about if it existed, but it can't hurt to ask.) | nvidia... | Bitcoin |
Am I doing it right? | null | bitcoinplus is a cpu miner, so very inefficient. I recommend using a gpu based miner like http://kradminer.com/ | Bitcoin |
What would be a vital part of your ideal BitCoin Android app? | What features would you need to see implemented before you'd consider using an Android app to work with, send, receive and manage your BitCoins?
What monetization system would work best? In-app BTC transaction fees, a cheap $0.99 app on the Market, or a free app that was ad-supported? | I have a question about ad-supported apps, because my phone blocks ads within apps in the hosts file. Do the programmers still get the incremental funding or am I a dirty freeloader?
As far as required features, It needs to:
Send & recieve payments.
Configure processing fees.
Show balance (option for 8 decimal places)
Show and generate addresses
Share the same wallet.dat as your home computer, maybe an option to quickly transfer between the two if separate for security reasons.
long term: A QR picture generator/reader for showing addresses to people, since it is rather unwieldy to say the codes to each other. This might be the same request as point one.
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Could the Dwolla API issues on Mt Gox be the cause of this drop? | The price is slowly going [down](http://i.imgur.com/Ayb3g.png) right now. It seems like the bid pool is [drying up](http://i.imgur.com/qcHbC.png), which is driving the price down.
Hopefully, when those issues have been resolved, demand will go up again? | There seems to be a whole bunch of buy orders around $22, so it looks more like the anticipated correction if you ask me. | Bitcoin |
Bitcoin noob question | Hi,
I recently learned about bitcoins and gathering as much information about it as I can, out of interest. One thing which is not clear to me about mining is
1) I read that mining can be pooled
2) A transaction fee is applied to a bitcoin transaction which goes to the block discoverer
I would like to understand is the original block discoverer is preserved when mining in a pool and how? | >I would like to understand is the original block discoverer is preserved when mining in a pool and how?
From what i understand no, some places like DeepBit will tell you that you found the block (because it was your hashes that did it), but according to the network DeepBits server found the block and it gets the payment, which is then distributed among users. | Bitcoin |
MtGox is 14% of the current transaction volume | At 11:33 GMT, I took the last hour volume of transactions there :
http://blockexplorer.com/ and the volume of transaction in MtGox there : http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html
It turns out that MtGox accounts for 14% of the transactions made in the BTC network. Other currency markets account for less than 2%. Is that a lot ? You judge. I personally thought it would be bigger but apprently BTCs are used and not just hoarded. Sure it could be people just swapping BTCs around to increase the volume, but that is still interesting to see. If someone has an idea to better analyze what happens, I'd be glad to hear.
EDIT: URL corrected | What about the mining pool transactions? | Bitcoin |
BitEgg. Buy Newegg Giftcards (US or Canada) with Bitcoins! | null | The site's creator advertised this in #bitcoin-otc. Thought I'd pass it on. | Bitcoin |