Bitcoins - anyone else mining? (2 Viewers)

[GregR]

Popcorn.

Also can someone explain the dark internet or deep internet or underground Internet for me? These are all just hyperlinks from one place to the next, what makes those places so special and secret?

Can you post links to some of those places?

TIA

Check out this wikipedia link on how communications with such sites are made anonymous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28anonymity_network%29

 

[GoFishTN]

That's a decent ROI, I suppose.

An offhand $26 investment in bitcoins has turned into an $850,000 windfall for one very lucky Norwegian man.

According to Norwegian news outlet NRK, Kristoffer Koch decided -- on a whim -- to invest 150 kroner (about $26) in 5,000 bitcoins in 2009, soon after the Bitcoin network first came into existence. Koch is said to have discovered the virtual currency while writing a thesis on encryption and decided to put down a small investment out of sheer curiosity.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/29/bitcoin-investment_n_4175421.html

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

OK so $266 dollars in bitcoins in early April (the start of this thread) is only worth $200 dollars today.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

OK so $266 dollars in bitcoins in early April (the start of this thread) is only worth $200 dollars today.

Thanks Debbie Downer, how about a month ago?

 

[Guster]

I want to have all the sechs with the girl in this video about Bitcoins. All of it. All.

 

[Das Boot]

I want to have all the sechs with the girl in this video about Bitcoins. All of it. All.

Well her face is certainly expressive.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

$300

 

[mquinnjr]

$300

Mis-read this one completely.

 

[shader]

Bit coin up to 400 bucks........

Is it too late to get into mining?

 

[Maelstrom]

Bit coin up to 400 bucks........

Is it too late to get into mining?

Just be careful where you store them (i.e. don't store them in the "cloud")

http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5082350/over-1-million-stolen-from-bitcoin-digital-wallet-service-claims-site

 

[Whitetail Hunter]

$500

\/\/o\/\/

 

[Whitetail Hunter]

Traded up to $900

Back to $600

 

[QuizGuy66]

Bitcoins in the news: http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2013/11/online_gaming_firm_to_pay_nj_1.html#incart_river_default

-QG

 

[flysack]

A student of mine just sold one of these for $700.

Looks like I missed out on easy money yet again.

 

[Fennis]

Bit coin up to 400 bucks........

Is it too late to get into mining?

Just be careful where you store them (i.e. don't store them in the "cloud")

http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5082350/over-1-million-stolen-from-bitcoin-digital-wallet-service-claims-site

I keep mine in a safety deposit box.

 

[shader]

I'm strongly considering buying some bitcoin. However, I think it's going to have very explosive highs and lows. I think there will be an upcoming bigtime crash that I will be able to take advantage of.

 

[Whitetail Hunter]

I'm strongly considering buying some bitcoin. However, I think it's going to have very explosive highs and lows. I think there will be an upcoming bigtime crash that I will be able to take advantage of.

Maybe, but if you're right, you want to have an account funded. It takes some time to get USD into a trading account.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

$840

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

What is the ratio of bitcoins to Schrute Bucks?

A lot less these days.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.

She had so many children, she didn't know what to do;

She gave them some broth without any bread;

Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.

 

[CBusAlex]

It'll be interesting to see how close the bitcoin threads track to this one.

Looks like we're somewhere around page 5 so far.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

It'll be interesting to see how close the bitcoin threads track to this one.

Looks like we're somewhere around page 5 so far.

So you still think Bitcoin is a fad (that thread you posted didn't even last 2 months)?

Some people will never admit they are wrong

.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

There's other talk that the real boom in bitcoins has not happened yet and that once the technology and use of bitcoins becomes widespread in China there could be some serious upside with little recourse by the Chinese government since the network is so decentralized. DYODD.

Bitcoin adoption by country by quarter - 2013-Q2 China looks to be at about 3/4 the pace of the U.S.

Sourceforge has the top client

Their stats:

YTD - China is at 63% U.S. download rate

This quarter - China is at 93% U.S. download rate

the past week - China is more than 2.5x the U.S. download rate

 

[GoFishTN]

If the convertor I found is accurate, the 144K Bitcoins the Silk Road guy lost are now worth $115M.

 

[Whitetail Hunter]

If the convertor I found is accurate, the 144K Bitcoins the Silk Road guy lost are now worth $115M.

converter?

 

[Whitetail Hunter]

There's a bitcoin conference in London on November 30th.

Elektra Kute will be there singing her song.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

$1,000.00*

________________

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[GoFishTN]

If the convertor I found is accurate, the 144K Bitcoins the Silk Road guy lost are now worth $115M.

converter?

Exchange rater?

 

[Maelstrom]

An alternate view:

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/27/a-prediction-bitcoin-is-doomed-to-fail/

For me, I hope BitCoins succeed. But I still think they haven't faced a serious challenge yet and are still way to volatile (as seen during their rapid climb, could just as easily plunge again).

 

[Das Boot]

So how difficult is it to actually exchange bitcoins for cash?... if someone had 50 bitcoins, how long would it take to cash them out?

(I don't have 50 bitcoins )

 

[Whitetail Hunter]

So how difficult is it to actually exchange bitcoins for cash?... if someone had 50 bitcoins, how long would it take to cash them out?

(I don't have 50 bitcoins )

Wouldn't take long to sell--~1hour or less if you were flexible on price-- but it'd take some time for the wire to reach you.

BTC-E has traded 25k bitcoins today.

eta: mt gox has traded 37k BC today

 

[Fennis]

$1,000.00*

________________

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Good thing that's not how a bubble looks.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

$1,000.00*

________________

* "Otis Font" All Rights Reserved

Good thing that's not how a bubble looks.

So are you going to keep making this post every time it grows 10x without making any predictions and then when it crashes from 10,000 to 2,000 are you going to bump your post and say I told you so?

Another question, if you define a bubble purely by looking at a chart, when does the gold bubble crash, how many years can a bubble last?

Gold "Bubble" Chart

A longer term view, looks like a "bubble" in the first ~5 years of this chart, and then what happens?

Haven't other currencies exhibited similar charts as they grew in "popularity"? I admit bitcoin is becoming more popular, it's trending on Google in a number of countries, sometimes as the #1 trend, there is a speculative nature to bitcoin trending, but at the same token with its popularity more companies are accepting bitcoin as payment. More charities are accepting bitcoin as a valid form of donation.

 

[Whitetail Hunter]

Here's a breakdown of prices on various exchanges. Yes, there are huge arbitrage opportunities.

https://bitcoinaverage.com/#USD

 

[bagger]

$1,000.00*

________________

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Good thing that's not how a bubble looks.

So are you going to keep making this post every time it grows 10x without making any predictions and then when it crashes from 10,000 to 2,000 are you going to bump your post and say I told you so?Another question, if you define a bubble purely by looking at a chart, when does the gold bubble crash, how many years can a bubble last?

Gold "Bubble" Chart

A longer term view, looks like a "bubble" in the first ~5 years of this chart, and then what happens?

Haven't other currencies exhibited similar charts as they grew in "popularity"? I admit bitcoin is becoming more popular, it's trending on Google in a number of countries, sometimes as the #1 trend, there is a speculative nature to bitcoin trending, but at the same token with its popularity more companies are accepting bitcoin as payment. More charities are accepting bitcoin as a valid form of donation.

charities by their nature take pretty much anything. If you are comparing bitcoin to a poop stained bed then I guess we are in agreement.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

$1,000.00*

________________

* "Otis Font" All Rights Reserved

Good thing that's not how a bubble looks.

So are you going to keep making this post every time it grows 10x without making any predictions and then when it crashes from 10,000 to 2,000 are you going to bump your post and say I told you so?Another question, if you define a bubble purely by looking at a chart, when does the gold bubble crash, how many years can a bubble last?

Gold "Bubble" Chart

A longer term view, looks like a "bubble" in the first ~5 years of this chart, and then what happens?

Haven't other currencies exhibited similar charts as they grew in "popularity"? I admit bitcoin is becoming more popular, it's trending on Google in a number of countries, sometimes as the #1 trend, there is a speculative nature to bitcoin trending, but at the same token with its popularity more companies are accepting bitcoin as payment. More charities are accepting bitcoin as a valid form of donation.

charities by their nature take pretty much anything. If you are comparing bitcoin to a poop stained bed then I guess we are in agreement.

Yeah poop stained bed's, now there's an investment for you, why don't you start your own "old shoes" and "poop stained beds" thread.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

Kutcher*

________________

*I don't think this charity accepts "poop stained beds"

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

Interesting post I came across:

People looking at Bitcoin tend to fall into one of two camps:

1. Bitcoin is a bubble that will inevitably pop and become valueless.

2. Bitcoin is a disruptive technology following the S-curve most disruptive technologies do.

I fall into the second group (and hold a small quantity of Bitcoin). The current instance may be a bubble or may be an approach of its true valuation (that I believe is likely to increase due to Metcalfe's Law), but even if it pops, it has substantial long-term utility not met by existing technologies, so its ultimate value likely exceeds its current value.

First, I'd like to counter Gonzalo Lira's premise, that there is no market where you can exclusively use Bitcoin; I disagree, and in my disagreement, I will use this web site as an example, that contains a bot for tipping with Bitcoin. There does not exist another good way to see another Internet user, go "I want to give that guy some money," and give them money without one of you providing personally identifiable data. It could similarly be used for gaming tournaments or any other instance where all you have is an Internet pseudonym. Given that people experienced with the Internet are wisely reluctant to provide personally identifiable information to people they have only met on the Internet, Bitcoin addresses a real need: The ability to send money to people you cannot identify by their legal names. It has similar advantages for sending money "back home" for immigrants (and its rising price may increase its utility for this, particularly due to the arbitrage situation; Korea, for instance, hit $1500/XBT the other day).

Even if his premise were accurate, Lira would still be wrong. For instance, Bitcoin has additional advantages as a reserve currency not shared by contemporary currencies. While the dollar is the reserve currency of the world, the US government has an advantage: If they need to pay off debts, they can issue more dollars, devaluing it. You end up with the same problem if you transition to another nation's currency, and a comparable, but smaller, problem if you use a basket of currencies. Even gold has a similar problem: At some point it becomes economical to send mining space probes and extract gold from asteroids (see, for example, the Spanish conquest of Latin America). Bitcoin has an advantage here because of the known, fixed, limited supply (admittedly, it would have been better if it had been designed to scale with the size of the network for, say, 10 years, and then increase by 1%, giving you a stable exchange rate during its initial growth (now) and then a slightly inflationary currency afterwards; PeerCoin does something like this). This limited supply cannot be changed without agreement of the other members of the network. People have to have an actual economic exchange to acquire Bitcoin (which includes mining it, which is essentially an economic exchange in return for helping the network run smoothly), no one can just decide "Oh, yes, I have enough money to pay you now." That's far better as a reserve currency than any of the existing ones, because it does not require trusting a third party (an extreme weakness of most current currencies). This is likely to be attractive to world governments other than the US since it reduces the US's influence over them.

Bitcoin also has the advantage of storage; it costs no more to secure 100,000 Bitcoins than it does to secure 0.001 Bitcoins. Contrast this with physical assets, such as gold or oil, which require significant infrastructure just to put them somewhere, to say nothing of securing them. To have access to a given Bitcoin address requires the storage of 32 bytes, costing approximately $0.00000000149011611938 to store (for comparison, the value of the smallest Bitcoin unit is orders of magnitude larger than this cost). To store the entire Blockchain costs about $0.60, comparable to the transaction fee on a single $20 credit card purchase. The security can be via password, with all the standard password disclaimers, or physical, by storing a record of the private key somewhere and securing it the same way any piece of paper might be secured (store it in a safe, hide it in a book, have a really good memory, etc.). This is a tremendous advantage; the disadvantage being that since it has no industrial utility, its value is strictly in what other people are willing to pay for it--it's solely a matter of perception. This is a disadvantage over physical goods, but it's a disadvantage shared by any currency in a country where that currency is not required for paying taxes (staying out of jail being generally advantageous), and the dollar's doing all right for this, so that's not necessarily a deal-breaker.

Bitcoin is affected by Metcalfe's Law: As the size of the network grows, its utility grows as a square of the number of users (this is also why non-Bitcoin cryptocurrencies should be looked at with skepticism: unless their technology is so much better than Bitcoin as to trump the network effects, they aren't actually providing any value). This means while users grow linearly, utility grows exponentially. Combine this with something that grows in a linear supply and you'd expect to see an exponential curve in its value. This feels intuitively wrong, because most assets do not grow exponentially; my claim is this is a black swan event that is an asset that follows the S-curve and right now we're still on the rising exponential portion of it. Eventually it will hit saturation: Everyone who wants to use Bitcoin will be using it, and its exchange rate will stabilize, but right now there are, at most 22 million users, assuming that each address ever used belongs to a unique user (this has approximately a 0% probability). More realistic is that there are at least 2,161,563 users, which is probably still extremely low. In either case, very little of the population has ever used Bitcoin, but you could have said the same of the Internet in 1993 or Facebook in 2004. A stable Bitcoin would make it more useful for its general application, but it's impossible to both grow rapidly and be stable, so these are necessary growing pains.

Since Bitcoin is able to solve real problems not addressed by preceding technologies, it has value. As long as the rate of people joining the network exceeds the rate of Bitcoins being added to the network, the value of a given Bitcoin will rise. How much that value is is hard to say, but approximating its endgame market cap as comparable to gold (a reasonable guess, and I emphasize guess, based on its ease of storage) gives it an ultimate value of $185 billion, or another 15x increase. We are currently in the phase of nascent adoption, where people know what it is but haven't used it. Over the next few years, adoption's likely to rise just because it's cheaper to accept than the existing technologies. Its irreversibility is also likely to be attractive to merchants, particularly digital merchants.

The above post was in response to this article.

 

[Otis]

$1,000.00*

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Our trademark and branding lawyers appreciate you working with care here.

 

[Fennis]

$1,000.00*

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Good thing that's not how a bubble looks.

So are you going to keep making this post every time it grows 10x without making any predictions and then when it crashes from 10,000 to 2,000 are you going to bump your post and say I told you so?

Another question, if you define a bubble purely by looking at a chart, when does the gold bubble crash, how many years can a bubble last?

Gold "Bubble" Chart

A longer term view, looks like a "bubble" in the first ~5 years of this chart, and then what happens?

Haven't other currencies exhibited similar charts as they grew in "popularity"? I admit bitcoin is becoming more popular, it's trending on Google in a number of countries, sometimes as the #1 trend, there is a speculative nature to bitcoin trending, but at the same token with its popularity more companies are accepting bitcoin as payment. More charities are accepting bitcoin as a valid form of donation.

No I will bump it when it is (near) worthless.

This is not how a currency behaves. This is how pricing of a fad behaves.

 

[Rohn Jambo]

Thanks but no thanks. I will stick with real money for now.

 

[SacramentoBob]

$1,000.00*

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How much money have you made with bitcoins?

 

[AYBABTUS]

Is it to difficult to get started now anyway? Just looking at expected hash rates for my video card and it's so low it seems impractical to even start unless you buy specific mining hardware.

 

[cstu]

This is not how a currency behaves. This is how pricing of a fad behaves.

If they get too popular the government will make bitcoins illegal (and convince other countries to do the same) under the explanation that it can be used for money laundering. Bitcoins will still have value for the underground economy but not at $1000.

 

[Das Boot]

Is it to difficult to get started now anyway? Just looking at expected hash rates for my video card and it's so low it seems impractical to even start unless you buy specific mining hardware.

I think the shark move is to go to that landfill and look for the 7.5M hard drive.

 

[cstu]

Is it to difficult to get started now anyway? Just looking at expected hash rates for my video card and it's so low it seems impractical to even start unless you buy specific mining hardware.

I believe electricity costs more than what you would make mining.

http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

$1,000.00*

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How much money have you made with bitcoins?

$0 what's your point?

 

[Das Boot]

$1,000.00*

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How much money have you made with bitcoins?

$0 what's your point?

I don't know if he intended any kind of point, but after your strong defense of bitcoins, I was hoping you had profited from them.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

$1,000.00*

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How much money have you made with bitcoins?

$0 what's your point?

I don't know if he intended any kind of point, but after your strong defense of bitcoins, I was hoping you had profited from them.

Can't fix stupid. People will continue to be ignorant towards bitcoins calling it a tulip and a fad because they don't understand the technology and the value it provides.

They said it was a bubble when it went up to $120. Now what are they saying at $1200? The same thing, what will they say at $2500 and $5000? They'll never admit they were wrong. Then when it crashes down to a fraction of the high they will come and bump this thread and "call me out" all the while refusing to make any predictions on timeframe or price because they don't want to admit that they misjudged the value bitcoins provide.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

$1,217.00*

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Updated