Can someone explain me how those work? I allow others to use the calculation power of my cpu and gpu to resolve problems and i get a virtual money back? or i completely missed the point? Also where do you spend or get those?
I toyed with that for a while, but I could never figure out how to accumulate bitcoins. I left it running all night and it never did anything. Whatever. I had read that the Radeon HD 5850 was good for bitcoin mining, that was why I started playing around with it. But I've since sold that GPU and gotten a GeForce 560 Ti.
You end up spending more on power than the coins are worth - especially since the market value dropped like crazy. Waste of time
Yup waste of time now, would have been worth joining when it initally started. Not worth anything now.
It takes around a day to mine them on say the higher radeon cards like 6xxx. Fantastic when they were worth $11+/coin in may last year or so. August came and the value tanked and isn't worth it any more. Worth like $4/coin now.
Bitcoins are set up kinda like a pyramid scheme anyway: there's a decreasing amount of coins to mine making them harder to get over time, meaning the people who got on early get paid, while the rest lose.
yeah, at prime time it was definitely profitable, particularly if you got in the game early, as the time needed to mine a bitcoin goes up as the supply dwindles, so some people managed to hoard them up bigtime from the get go quickly and just wait for the price to rise. But yeah, their market crashed bigtime and I doubt it will recover to pre-crash levels
The concept of an independent currency itself is a good idea. The implementation is highly interesting from a mathematical point of view, but fails to meet the demands of the market.
I made enough to pay for the video card I purchased for it, back when the value was closer to 18 a coin. Nowadays, its not worth it at all.
I was on the forefront mostly because a guy I know whos a financial analyst was really obsessed with this, saying it was going to change the world because bitcoins are untraceable and thus untaxable The whole "mining" thing is just to get the bitcoins, you dont contribute to anything is just one bigass number crunch so they can limit the number of bitcoins flowing into the market without the need for a centralized system Still, dont bother: bitcoins have gone down from like $35 to less than $5 last time I checked, and all the virtual wallet and exchange sites have closed down or gone bankrupt Lots did, I know a guy who lost over $500,000 with bitcoins And thats the problem: because there is no "source", organization or government behind this if you get hacked you're SOL, and while afaik you cant make fake bitcoins stealing them isnt that hard: even MtGox which is the biggest bitcoin exchange got hacked That day prices plummeted to $0.01, wouldnt be surprised if someone committed suicide after that.
Speaking of bitcoins https://ogrr.com/viewtopic.php?t=1139 100k worth of gear here for sale for 75k. There is no way he made 25k off mining and is just looking to breakeven.
Check out Tor, you'll find plenty of places to buy black/grey market goods with bitcoins. Natural progression of something considered as shady to world governments as untraceable currency they don't have their taxing hands in.
Some of these comments make me laugh now. MTGOX BTC = $1227 BTC-E BTC = $1076 BTC-E LTC = $41.47 BTC-E PPC = $6.23 BTC-E FTC = $0.78 Of course since this thread as been inactive we've had another crash and rise of prices several grey/black markets closed or forcibly shutdown. Some fun stories. http://arstechnica.com/business/201...in-a-month-to-all-time-high-of-more-than-100/ http://arstechnica.com/business/201...losing-nearly-half-of-its-value-in-six-hours/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ad-arrest-alleged-admin-dread-pirate-roberts/ http://www.coindesk.com/robocoin-launches-bitcoin-atm-vancouver/ http://www.coindesk.com/dark-wallet-crowdfunding-campaign/ http://www.coindesk.com/btc-china-beats-mt-gox-bitstamp-become-worlds-1-bitcoin-exchange/ http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-iranian-shoe-store-trade-sanctions/ http://www.coindesk.com/peercoin-vault-of-satoshi-deal/ http://www.coindesk.com/senate-bitcoin-hearing-legitimacy-challenges-virtual-currencies/ http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-payment-processor-bips-attacked-1m-stolen/ http://www.coindesk.com/litecoin-price-surges/ http://www.coindesk.com/one-bitcoin-worth-ounce-gold-today/ Guess I'm interested to know what peoples current thoughts are. I usually offer crypto coin as a payment method but have yet to have any one take me up on it. Mostly because I don't think most people have any.
I went to the bitcoin ATM in Vancouver a few days ago, but I didn't get one - a $1000 coin isn't worth it for me The growth is insane though. Certainly it's a bubble and it will collapse, but there's no way it goes back as low as it used to be in the beginning. There was this story about the one guy who bought $25 worth of bitcoins for a research project in 2010 or so and now his coins were worth $900,000. That was in October though, right now they may even be worth twice as much (but he had sold already anyways). I'm excited for when it crashes. Such growth is not sustainable and with the downfall of the silkroad they lost one of their most important hubs.
The silk road rebuilt and is now running again. Along with a lot of other markets that are not as well know. Mining is trivial at this point because you would need thousands upon thousand of dollars of ASIC hardware. I expect it to climax, then when ASIC's get too slow to make them profitable i think we will see a lot of miners to to LTC.
The ASICs won't get slower. Instead, as long as BTC is being talked about, more people will start mining, reducing the hash power of each ASIC relative to the rest of the (growing) network, reducing the probability of your device mining he next block. The raw has throughput of your device remains constant though. Eventually - without going too much into the details if the network - the network will also lower the amount of coins you get for each block mined, and if the value of average no. coins mined during a given timespan drops below the energy costs for said span, that's when it becomes unprofitable. Btw, have you noticed how the ASIC shops limit the quantities they sell? That's as not to overwhelm the market. ASIC development is expensive as f*ck - it has a very high development cost (i.e. upfront investment), but once the design is finalized, each individual device produced is pretty cheap - so they keep to maximize their ROI by cautiously, slooowly trickling their devices into the network, trying to reduce mining profitable as slowly as possible. They have no interest in a market collapse, quite the contrary. (Also they're usually mining themselves.) About Litecoin: If LTC ever really gets off the ground, it will go through a similiar cycle to BTC, just (hopefully) with less hype. They're already in the GPU mining stage (though the different algorithm means that this time, NVidia GPUs are competitive), next would be the FPGA stage (unless I missed it and people have already started doing that in a big way), and then come the ASICs which, again due to the different algo, would necessitate the development of a whole new set of ICs - you can't just reuse the ones you still have from BTC mining. Anyways... IMHO the big point is that at the moment, Cryptocurrencies are first and foremost seen as a speculative investment. This is something that needs to be worked against, by moving it out of the "virtual" realm into the physical one - i.e. you need to be able to buy real, tangible goods with it. (If at all possible, things besides drugs.) BTC are being accepted already in quite a few online shops, and even a decent number of real-world ones (example). This should help the BTC to keep a good deal of its value. LTC still has a long way to go.
I had a bitcoin miner virus on my PC a while back, I guess bitcoins were nearly just as good as real money
Now this is just my personal opinion, but because bitcoins hold no intrinsic value outside of what people "feel", I consider the currency worthless. Just a bunch of meaningless data you happen to have control over. Don't get me wrong, if I had 100 bitcoins I have no problems passing them off to someone and cashing out. But that's not because I think the coins are valuable, just that I think there are people who will pay something for valueless data. I figure the only reason this currency is still around is because there are enough early adopters with coins, who have a vested interest in convincing other people that the 'coins' they have are valuable. Which is also why the price can swing essentially on a whim.
