>>1981

>>1862

>>3223
I've never bought any, but I mined and sold some. Calling it a scam doesn't really make sense.

I've bought some and no one ran off with my money.
What sort of giant scam?

>>3223
>>1981

Some say that it resembles a Ponzi scheme. I don't think it is though.

Sage for valueless post.

It's absolutely ridiculous, you magic this 'currency' out of thin air and then use it to buy real goods and services. Can you imagine a financial system that could possibly succeed on that principle? Oh...wait...never mind.

>>3241
Sigh.

All currencies had to be magic'd up at somepoint.

>>3242
That being his point.

I have £600 invested in bitcoin. The exchange rate appears to have hit exponential growth. I intend to sell when its value hits £1200, which will hopefully be before the crash which is likely to happen eventually, say if SR gets killed off.

>>3245
It's increased in value by 60% in the last 11 days btw.

>>3246
And nearly a further 50% today alone. Bitcoin is now bigger than the M1 of around 30 countries.

>>3246
>>3342
What exchange are you looking at? Looks pretty flat to me.

>>3344
MtGox. Your graph isn't flat at all and shows the growth mentioned in >>3246. Today's increase is not yet reflected on that graph, for the price is close to $60.

>>3347
My mistake, I thought the volume plot was the price. I was just browsing /*/, serves me right for coming into topics I know nothing about.

>>3245 >>3246 >>3343

Oh, christ, those bitcoins I bought in January have close to quadrupled in value now.

And all I ever wanted to do was procure a few druggywugs. I think at this stage I may need to sell half of them off before the bottom crashes out.

My mind boggles.

My investment has gone up in value £120 today.

Remember the bloke who spent 10k bitcoins on a pizza a couple of years ago?

Hahahahahahaha.

>>3366
I saw a comment from him where he was putting on a brave face. "It was a really nice pizza, I regret nothing" or something.

Poor bastard. I'm still kicking myself for not picking up a bunch when I noticed it going back up after the big crash, when I was dipping my toe in mining. I did think seriously of investing £50-£100 which would've paid off tidily if I cashed out now.

>Drugs are bought with ‘Bitcoins’, an untraceable digital currency. It is not regulated by any government or company but just by mathematical equations.

>The value is worked out by how many Bitcoins are in existence and how many are being traded. Another knock-on effect of sites such as Silk Road is that the value of a 'Bitcoin' have gone from being virtually worthless to trading at $70 - around £46 - each.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2297958/Drug-dealers-ebay-selling-ecstasy-HEROIN-doubles-sales-1MILLION-month--police-powerless-ban-it.html

I still find it surreal when mainstream media comment on internet things.

I haven't bought any bitcoins before, but given that it now seems to be gaining traction on mainstream sites, it seems like I couldn't really go wrong buying a few hundred quid's worth as an investment.
Am I mistaken in thinking this? It doesn't look like it's going to disappear any time soon and since the total number of bitcoins is close to the max now, the price will rise in proportion to the number of users, right?

>>3376
That depends on how much money a few hundred quid is, to you.

Personally I think it's inflating too fast right now and buying is bad, selling should be done as soon as possible, before it bursts. I'm no expert at economics, but I've not seen anyone with more knowledge than myself advocate investing at this point in time.

That said, they are fluctuating a great deal these days, so even if they decrease in value soon; they'll not take too long to approximate the same value in time.

>>3376
Almost ฿11M of the total ฿21M have been mined. Bitcoin was getting a lot of attention when it surged to $30+ in 2011 but it subsequently slid steadily to $5. Investing in Bitcoin could certainly pay off handsomely, but no investment where you can double your money in such a short time can be considered safe.

>>3378
Oh my mistake, I thought we were a lot closer to 21M than that. I suppose I'll wait for another slide then before venturing in.

Some silly buggers have been trying to destabalise mt gox in order to affect panic selling so they can profit. The price continues to rise.

My £650 investment now stands at over £1800. Not sure when to sell.
I'll probably sell £650 so that I've got my original money back out and can rest easy knowing I haven't lost anything, then sit pretty a bit longer until the price increases some more.

>>3401
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22026961
https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130404.html

In these heady times it's easy to forget that the entire Bitcoin ecosystem still whiffs of amateur hour.

>>3402
I've never had more than £20 at a time in instawallet. I was evidently right to be skeptical wrt their security.

I just bought £500 on bitcoins.


Not that I want bitcoins, I'm buying litecoins.


Also it's fuckign hard to get hold of these currencies in GBP

>>3405
Who accepts litecoin and what is the point of it?

>>3406
Who accepts Bitcoin and what is the point of it?

>>3408
Silkroad accepts bitcoin.
Wordpress accepts bitcoin.
Many non profit organisations accept bitcoin donations.

I have yet to find a single service accepting litecoin. And I've been googling for ten minutes.

>>3409
I don't want to use them for shit. Most of the people involved in Bitcoins don't use them for shit.

>>3410
So you spent £500 on something you don't want to 'use for shit'?

>>3410
Also, I have never bought bitcoins without a specific purchase in mind.

>>3411
Yes, I want to trade them.

>>3413
For what? Pogs? Footie cards? Monster in my pocket?

>>3414
You know what I'm doing so I don't know why you bother with this

Personally I use them to buy drugs. I don't know what all this evasive bullshit is about.

But yeah. No point in litecoins until someone will except them for trade, and I can't find much evidence of that yet.

Volume seems to have grown a lot. Multibit takes longer to synch each day.

>>3223
I don't like the look of that.

>>3476
There's been a ton of media articles about the rise of bitcoin, I wonder if we'll get even more about the crash.

>>3477
>the crash
You mean 'the scam'.

>>3477
Weirdly someone I was talking to weeks ago said it would crash at $250.
I don't think this is the final crash tough.

>>3487
Does the fact that I've made money out of this mean that other people have lost money?

>>3489
Er, yes?

>>3488
What do you mean by 'final crash'?

I'd put money (in fact I have put money) on it rising beyond $300 within a month.

>>3499

Me too, it's backed by good solid old fashioned narcotics.

>>3489
You can't just magic up currency lad, so yes.

Even if you printed your own currency, everyone else would be losing money by their money not being worth as much (hence why counterfeiting is bad). But because it's spread over such a large amount of people, they aren;t going to notice unless it's done to a ridiculous amount. As opposed to say mugging someone of an equal amount.

>>3505
>You can't just magic up currency

you obviously don't know about fractional reserve banking.

>>3503
Ah yes. I forgot that the growth is driven mainly by the growth of silkroad in the USA.

My big hope is that the LTC equivalent will take off soon, I've got most of my play money in that.

>>3506
I'm no economist so no. Could you explain?

The way I understand is probably very simple, but I see 'currency' as meaning 'commodities and power' which are both limited. As opposed to simple paper money or numbers on a screen, which have no intrinsic value.

>>3477

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22105322

>>3514
I told myself I would sell at $200 but I left it, thinking it would head higher.
If I cashed out now I'd still make a healthy profit, but I'm inclined to 'wait and see'.

>>3508

A currency is just a unit of exchange, used as an intermediary in trading. Currency emerged as a more efficient alternative to barter. Without currency, if I'm a sheep farmer and want some new shoes, I've got to find a cobbler who wants a shitload of mutton. With currency, I just need to find someone who wants mutton and the cobbler just needs to find someone who need shoes.

Precious metals have been used as currency for a long time, because they have intrinsic traits that make them a useful unit of exchange for primitive peoples. They're inherently scarce, durable and portable and can be proved to be authentic fairly easily. Coinage was a good way of providing a consistent and trusted weight of metal, in a quantity that was convenient to exchange. The ridges on the edge of a ten pence piece are a throwback to this - coins were originally ridged to prevent people from shaving off the edges of gold and silver coins for profit.

If there's no functioning currency, people will simply use whatever is suitable. When the German economy collapsed between the wars, people took to trading in cigarettes. Rolling tobacco used to be the currency of British prisons, but they switched over to phone cards when smoking became less popular. In many US prisons, they use pre-packaged snack cakes.

The first paper money were gold and silver certificates, written out by pawnbrokers. People found it convenient to store their metal with a pawnbroker and give someone the pawnbroker's slip. Eventually, government took over that role, guaranteeing bank notes against a store of silver. The pound sterling was once literally that - a pound weight of sterling silver.

Many governments realised that they could print more banknotes than they had metal to back it, which was of course highly profitable for the government. The problem with that is that as you print more money, the money in circulation falls in value due to simple supply and demand. If there's more money in circulation but the same amount of stuff to buy with it, the value of money will fall. We call this process "inflation" and it's why things always get more expensive over time.

Inflation is very useful to a government for several reasons. Governments are heavily indebted, but if the value of a pound falls, it's effectively cheaper to pay off your debts. Inflation also encourages people to spend money rather than hoard it, which is good for the economy. Too much inflation can be risky and discourage investment, so most governments aim for inflation of a few percent per year.

Eventually, governments abandoned their store of precious metals entirely, creating what we call a "fiat currency" - a currency with no direct material value that is backed purely by confidence in the government that prints it. Fiat currency is a win-win for all sorts of dismally nerdy reasons, but it comes with a big risk attached. A government has complete reign in manipulating that currency and a collapse in confidence in the government can lead to a collapse in the value of that currency. A common vicious cycle is that a government with severe debts prints more money to pay their debts, which reduces the value of their money, which means they need to print more of it. This is hyperinflation, which happened in Germany in 1923, Hungary in 1946, Zimbabwe in 2008 and many other places and times. This is extremely destructive, because people lose confidence in the value of money and spend it as soon as possible.

Bitcoin is currently experiencing the opposite, hyperdeflation. The value of bitcoin is increasing at an exponential rate, because supply is very limited but demand is increasing rapidly. The more Bitcoin increases in value, the more people who want to buy it, on the expectation that they'll make a big profit. The key problem is the opposite to that of hyperinflation - nobody with Bitcoins wants to spend them, because they expect them to increase in value.

The problem for Bitcoin is that a currency is only worth what people will exchange it for. Nearly all of the current value of a Bitcoin is the expectation that, in the future, lots of people will want to exchange things for them. As it stands, transactions where Bitcoins are exchanged for goods or services represent only a tiny fraction of all Bitcoin transactions. The sum value of all the goods in the Bitcoin economy and all of the non-Bitcoin currency held by Bitcoin bureaux de change is vastly less than the nominal value of all Bitcoin in circulation. The entire value of a Bitcoin is the expectation that Bitcoins will be valuable in future, which is an extremely fragile state of affairs.

>>3518
Good post.

Since you seem to know what you're talking about, I have a follow up question relating to your last point about its value being based on expectation. AFAIK, governments haven't yet decided how to deal with cryptocurrencies if they actually became widely used - is there a particular legislative move they could take that we should keep an eye out for that would render bitcoin effectively worthless?

>>3522
>AFAIK, governments haven't yet decided how to deal with cryptocurrencies

The septics are trying to regulate transactions involving Bitcoins and dollars.

http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130325/03034522451/feds-take-step-closer-to-trying-to-regulate-bitcoin.shtml

>>3518
Not who you were responding to, but that was an excellent post. You get a gold star for /squiggles/'s Post Of The Week.

>>3524

What's to stop people changing their money to Euro or Pounds or Shekels instead and avoiding these regulations?

>>3522

They could easily outlaw various trading activities that make cryptocurrencies practical, which would severely undermine the value of any cryptocurrency. The clear example would be the UIGEA, which stopped internet poker companies from doing business with US customers by banning US banks from doing business with foreign gambling companies.

Bitcoin only has any real value today because it is freely convertible back into "real" currency. The drug dealers on Silk Road are reliant on being able to convert BTC to cash to buy more stock; Their customers are reliant upon being able to convert their cash into BTC. The speculators buying BTC as an investment have no real intention of spending them, but invariably expect to cash them out for their own national currency. Bitcoin therefore doesn't currently function as a fully-fledged currency, but a sort of financial derivative. For the moment at least, Bitcoins are essentially useless without a means of converting them to proper currency.

It would be very easy for a government to make the argument that due to the risk of fraud or money-laundering, banks will be banned from doing business with Bitcoin bureaux de change. It would only take a Daily Mail headline about "SECRET ECONOMY FOR JUNKIES AND PAEDOPHILES" for that policy to become a major vote-winner. Bitcoin advocates argue that that's not a problem because Bitcoin will develop a fully-fledged economy, but that's a total sham. A vicious cycle would rapidly develop, because Bitcoin is and will continue to be an inferior currency - you can't pay your gas bill or your council tax in Bitcoins if you can't convert them to Sterling. Given the choice, nearly everyone would prefer to be paid USD or GBP than in BTC, because BTC is obviously an inferior currency under such conditions. The only current non-convertible currencies are the Cuban Peso and the North Korean Won, which should give you an idea.

It's a really interesting project and I think there are some fantastic ideas at the heart of it, but I think it has been over-egged by people who don't understand economics and lack a clear sense of what a currency is and what gives it value. I think that BTC is vastly overvalued due to a speculative bubble and should be somewhere around $15, based on the level of real spending. I think the market-makers know this to be the case, because I've tried to bet against the value of Bitcoin and nobody will take my money. None of the "exchanges" will let me naked short or take a put option, which to me speaks volumes.

>>3528
Which "real currency" you exchange virtual currency for doesn't matter.

Many 'real' currencies only have value because they can be exchanged for USD, this isn't something special to cryptocurrencies.

>>3538

Yes, but they also have the advantage that they can be used for all goods and services within a local area, which is something BTC does not have. To the average man on the street, it doesn't matter that the Egyptian Pound only really has value on the macro level because of its potential exchange with the USD, because he's using it to pay his bills and buy his groceries etc.

>>3518

I''ve only got to paragaph four, but this is nonsence. No offense meant, don't take this as a flame. Thi is textbook Economic Science. Unforyunatley, as with the vast majority of ES, it has no basis in fact, history, of the development of currencies.

I'll keep this brief, and offer a good primer afterwards.

1st para: I need to find a cobbler who wants a sheep. No. You need a cobbler who *at some point* will need a sheep. For the vast majority of the time cobblers have existed, you would know that cobbler personally, as you would live in the same tribe, village, or street. You drink in the same pub, if they existed. You get a pair of shoes, then when he needs mutton he pops over to pick it up. This fallacy is the perfect example of how ES fails to understand social and societal roles in the exchange of value.

2nd para: Not wuite. While silver was used as a means of local currency in the Roman times, this was because it was easily hammered into flat strips that could be torn up. Coinage only existed for governments and traders. No normal person would ever have seen a coin for thouands of years - they had other means of exchanging value.

I don't want to fully engage with this, as I've only just woken up. Anyone who is interested in this subject would to well begging, borrowing, stealing or torrenting "Life Inc." by Douglas Rushkoff. It's neither left wing (Marxist) or right wing (ES). Easy to read, well researched and written book,
by one of the smartest people I have ever come accross. The first third of this book is all about the emergence of national currency, and the history of exchange/currency itself. Possibly the best non-fiction read I can recommend anyone.

Right, now, if anyone needs a hangover this year get in touch, and I will happily give you mine in exchange for a full English...

>>3540

>>3529
That post was really interesting, thanks. >>3518 was also interesting (and I'd assume yours), despite >>3540's still-drunk and mostly incoherent critique.

I remember reading at the depth of the big Bitcoin crash of 2011 that the estimated cost of each bitcoin for the miner was about $2 in terms of hardware + electricity over the lifetime of said hardware, which was approximately equivalent to its market value at the time. Might have been $5 or something, I'm not sure and it's not that important. Anyway, if that's the case then surely as long as the trading value of each Bitcoin is above that value then the smarter move would be to engage in mining? Why would anyone who is interested in speculating in Bitcoin pay directly for them (at $200 a pop) when they could invest in hardware with the same money? Obviously it'll take longer to see ROI but if you're investing then you should have an eye for the longer game, no?

How long does it take a reasonably high-end GPU to mine a bitcoin now, anyone know?

(My spellchecker suggested "bitchiness" instead of "bitcoin". I have no joke but it seemed funny anyway.)

>>3542

If I was inchorent, I apologise, please let me know where, and I´ll elaborate.

>>3543
Genuine question: When do you anticipate you'll begin using a fully functioning keyboard?

>>3544

Monday I hope. But good to know that someone remmebers me.

>>3543

Bring along the book in a couple of weeks mate. I'd quite like to have a look at it, especially what with the course I'm doing.

>>3547

>
Bring along the book in a couple of weeks mate.

What? Evidently I have missed something.

>>3548

If you're who I think you are with your dodgy keyboard, we should be going for a drink in a couple of weeks.

NYE, remember.

>>3549

Ah. Need to drop you an email. Thanks for the reminder.

My annotated copy is with a mate, I do not know if I will get it before we drink.

Dig it out from the library though, if your library does not have it I would be having a serious word with one of the librarians.

>>3542

GPU mining is nearly dead and the serious miners have already sold off their GPU rigs. By design, the difficulty of bitcoin mining increases exponentially over time. The new game in town is using FPGA and ASIC chips, which are custom-designed processors that do nothing but bitcoin hashing. By dint of specialisation, these chips are vastly quicker than GPUs and much more power-efficient, but they're also expensive and are useless for anything but hashing. The risk in buying one of these machines is that mining will only be profitable for a relatively short period - it won't take long for the difficulty to exceed the cost of electricity. Once that happens, you're left with a useless lump of hardware. The biggest issue is the incredible volatility in pricing, which makes it very difficult to predict your ROI. We're now down from $266/BTC to $92/BTC in under a week, so future pricing is really just guesswork.

>>3551

No, lad, the difficulty of mining does not increase over time. The level of difficulty is dynamic. This is how they are able to keep the output of bitcoins at a constant predictable rate.

When the ASIC miners all come online (if they EVER do lol) the difficulty will shoot up a great deal.

Conversely, if a whole load of people decided to drop out of the network, difficulty would drop significantly also.

Think of it like this:

>More processing power = Higher difficulty
>Less processing power = Lower difficulty

Does that help?

>>3550

It's got 3, but they're all in the deep stack so they don't lend them out. I'll order one of them up when I've actually got some time to kill.

>>3552
>More processing power = Higher difficulty
>Less processing power = Lower difficulty
Hence, difficulty increases over time.

>>3554
No. It can and probably will, but you are wrong and he is right.

>>3555
If by "no" you mean "yes" and "probably" you mean "almost certainly", then yes, you're right. Otherwise I'm just going to point and laugh at you.

>>3558
I can't speak to your experience of time, but I've never encountered it passing backwards.

>>3561
Well what do you know? The difficulty has indeed increased with time.

>>3564
You might as well say the price increases over time (the two are of course loosely related). I doubt that'll be much comfort to the people who just lost half their investment.

>>3566
>You might as well say the price increases over time
You might as well say that. However, unlike claiming that the difficulty rises over time, you're likely to be wrong.

Nothing further to add, stubbornlad.

>>3552

The ASIC miners are already online and hashing. BFL miners may be vapourware, but Avalon have already shipped their first batch of 65Gh/s miners and are due to ship another 600 tomorrow. A top of the range GPU does somewhere around 0.8Gh/s.

>>3572
Congratulations, you've superimposed two unrelated lines on a chart, and demonstrated that they're unrelated. Would you like a gold star in your exercise book?

>>3574
Right, because if Bitcoins were worth $5 tomorrow, nobody would stop mining, everyone would happily continue at a loss and there'd be no cause for difficulty to fall as consequence. This certainly didn't happen between Sep-Dec '11 when many felt the price would never recover.

It feels like you're telling me the sky is green.

>>3575
Red isn't a good colour on a herring, lad.

>>3575>>3576

Who are you two and why are you so mardy?

>>3575>>3576

This to me looks like a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

>>3578

Agreed. Stop being so yellow-bellied and address eachother directly.

I'm scared.

>>3554

Maybe, but that would be by coincidence and not by design. Difficulty will only increase if more processing power is added to the mining effort. It could quite possible happen that a lot of people leave if bitcoin collapses or some other catastrophe.

So therefore, difficulty does increase, but not by design.

What is in the design is for difficulty to increase with processing power so that the output of coins remains a constant.

Difficulty COULD DECREASE with time too, it's not a one way only thing...

There that sums it up better...

>>3588
Right hang on. In 2017 the number of Bitocoins generated per block chain will halve and then keep halving over the following years until 21mil is reached. With the caveat that I don't know what I'm talking about, doesn't that mean that by design it will get harder to mine coins as time goes on?

>>3589
Yes.
Though really it's taking into account that computer processing power (the ability to form coins) gets considerably better.

>>3589

Well not quite. Difficulty only goes up in relation to the processing power being used in the network. It does not relate to the amount of coins being produced.

By the way that you say coins will be harder to mine, because the amount in a block will be halved, you COULD say that, yes, it will get harder to mine coins in that sense, but not NECESSARILY difficulty wise.

And >>3590

Even though processing power may indeed get better with time due to Moore's law etc, this does not relate to the amount of processing power that MAY be available in the Bitcoin network.

I'm trying to think of a simple way of putting it.

Say you are in a maths class and the teacher gives out 10 gold stars every day, and you have 10 students working on the problem, this will be fine at the difficulty level of the problem the teacher has set.

Now, once the students get the hang of performing the teachers sums, he will increase the difficulty of the sums so that they are still only solving 10 a day. Conversely, if they are finding it too hard and not able to answer the 10 a day he would decrease the level of difficulty of the sums to such a level that the students are still getting 10 a day correct.

I hope that analogy helps...

>>3591

That is 1 of the best explanations Ive read.

$76 and falling...

>>3595
I'm itching to buy but I keep thinking if I do they will just drop even further.

>>3597

It's still falling - the last trade on MtGox was at $72.4 and the order book is suggesting $69. There are a couple of big bid orders at $60 and $50, so I expect the price to go no lower than that in the short-term, but to be honest anything could happen.

>>3598

The people who bought at $200+ must be feeling pretty sore today.

What's the best way to buy?

>>3603

Mtgox.

Or just throw all your money in a big bin.

>>3604

>Or just throw all your money in a big bin.

This has been my preferred method of investing disposable income for years. Good to see I'm not the only one. I choose the bin outsde my local Tesco's. What about you?

It's up to $126 again.

Finally decided to cash out.
Made a profit of $1625, but would have made twice as much if I had sold at the peak.

>>3608

How did you sell them?

>>3609
Mt Gox
The money is sitting in my account atm, will get it out via euro bank transfer.

www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/18/bitfloor-closes

got greedy and lost a bit on a supposed NVC pump. Never mind. I'm down about 10% overall which I don't think is too bad considering I started trading a few days before btc price dropped 66%.

In the last month the price of bit coins has vaired from $180 to $40. Quite frankly I don't know how that kind of boom bust can possibly support an economy black market or otherwise (I certainly wouldn't want to price a product in a currency that unstable one day your ounce of weed sells for $60 5 days later it sells for $12), if you are using bitcoins for anything other then short term speculation (i.e gambling) I am convinced you are an idiot.

>>3613

How much did it cost to grow that ounce? Less than 12 bucks, I wager. For a secure transaction with little risk of arrest? I'd be bang on it mate.

>>3613
Drug prices are pegged to the USD to precisely reduce that kind of problem.
As long as the sellers are cashing out regularly they don't have a problem.

Lads, I don't have the hardware to do mining but I want some litecoins. How do I go about buying some? Ideally without having to convert my beautiful British pounds into Euros or dollars.

>>3615

thanks for clearing that up for me.

>>3616
>Lads, I don't have the hardware to do mining but I want some litecoins
I thought the whole point of Litecoins was that they could be mined with regular consumer hardware.

>>3618
Yeah all you need is a decent ATI graphics card. I don't play games so I don't have a decent graphics card and I may as well buy coins directly rather than buying an expensive graphics card (and new PSU).

>>3616
btc-e sells them, it says the best method somewhere in the litecoin thread

The Department of Homeland Security just froze Mt. Gox's Dwolla account. It'll be interesting to see how far they take this.

http://mashable.com/2013/05/14/dwolla-homeland-security/

>>3621
SELL SELL SELL

Have I missed my window to buy a fuckload of amphetamines with cybermoney?

>>3624
No, they'll just work out a lot more expensive now though.

>>3621
I bet the fucker behind that decision first sold all his coins, and is planning on buying more for cheap after he crashes the market a little.

Mt. Gox apparently failed to register as a money transmitting business. That this exchange is still the market leader after all the mistakes it has made is something to behold.

>>3627

It does show how huge the demand must be that as rough around the edges as it is, it is still going. The time for an alternative and electronic currency is here.

>>3630

Well yeah, of course there's going to be huge demand for mail-order drugs.

>>3633

Perhaps. Even an illegal demand is still a real demand. As many have found to their misfortune and discomfort in a prohibition era.

>>3637

The demand is for an anonymous means of sending payments online, not an alternative currency. There are myriad ways of achieving the former, without the obvious risks of the latter.

>>3638
Since other currencies are subject to strict control, one follows the other - but I would like to hear more about these many alternative ways if I am missing something obvious.

>>3643

Have you heard of Google?

What's actually wrong with using alternate currency? If I made a self sufficient settlement and everyone in it bought and sold within the settlement with a currency seperate from the pound, would they stop us and make us use the pound?

>>3647
And how would "they" do that?

>>3648

By "they", I mean the police under orders from Parliament, and quite easily. They could just confiscate the funds like the Americans did with Bitcoin.

>>3649

A quick google reveals that the US government seized the bank account holding central bank money that was being used as an exchange between bitcoins and dollars. The bitcoins were not seized; as I understand it, that's impossible.

I doubt the British police would storm in and steal, for example, everyone's Brixton pounds. Or ban gift certificates. What the government will do is demand taxes; taxes will be demanded in pounds, and if payment is not paid in pounds, the government may seize assets instead, or imprison the person expected to pay.

>>3651
>The bitcoins were not seized; as I understand it, that's impossible.
Certainly not impossible.

>>3223
>buttcoins
bugger that

There was a post on .gs a while ago explaining to newcomers the best method for getting bitcoins but I can't find it now. Anyone care to write a quick guide?

>>3903
I think the Barclays Ping method is the least traceable, after a fashion. I hear Blockchain can do the bulk of the buying and wallet sorting for you. Never leave it hanging around one place too long (move it instantly, really), or get a local wallet.

In the news recently there was a Scandinavian chap who bought a 400,000 odd pound flat with bitcoins that cost him less than a twenty note years ago. Not bad.

>>3905
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/29/bitcoin-forgotten-currency-norway-oslo-home

>>3904
Thanks but I was hoping for rather more detail than that. I've been searching for a couple of hours now and can't find a solid how-to guide. How do I get a local wallet, and how do I get money into it?

>>3904
I've had about.five hundred.quid sitting on btce for about a year now. Not safe at all, but it's still there.

Best method is described here >>3436

>>3911
That's the post I was looking for, cheers.

> one bitcoin is now $293

So when's the crash?

>>3938
I sold at. 195, perfectly happy with it even though I could be $800 richer now, it could've gone to $0.10 for all I knew. Satisfied.

Waiting for it to all come tumbling down before I get back in. It's a relief to have it in nice stable USD for a while though, rather than btc for a while, which I've had since April.

>>3938
Within the next week I would guess, the gradient resembles the ridiculousness the preceded the last crash.

I just hope it's not this weekend, I won't be around to cash in.

>>3938
I remember looking seriously into buying bitcoins back when the first big crash occurred and they were down to $2 a pop. It was late 2011, and I had £100 ready to go, just as a flutter. I may even have literally tossed a coin, that's what I usually do when I'm in really two minds about something. That wallet would now be worth £15k.

Hmph.

>>3941

Please read >>3939.

You didn't buy because you didn't think anything would come of it. You made a sensible decision, no point in being disappointed about it.

>>3942
The point at which I thought "ok, I'd sell them now" was earlier this year when the first spike to $200 hit, so yeah. C'est la vie.

>>3941
>had £100 ready to go, just as a flutter
That's exactly the view I'm taking, but I couldn't figure out how I'm actually supposed to buy and store them. I'm going to give it another shot this weekend.

Up to $450 now. This is getting silly.

>>4004

I sold at 420, but I still have half a coin left, that is about £150 though so I might sell it before the impending crash to 200, then buy back in for the inevitable correction to around 300-350.

I day-traded the currency for 18 months and I have made tens of thousands it is the most predictable bubble currency ever, be aware once the price drops below a certain level the miners won't be making a profit and they will move onto Litecoin initially (and others to follow).

Litecoin has been struggling to remain around 1% of bitcoins value (per coin, not total market share).

But has been floating over 0.01 recently, my prediction is that litecoin will each 0.015 - 0.02 once bitcoin has crashed and corrected, and steadily increasing.

Mtgox is rumored to to be adding litecoin 'very' soon, but be aware that when bitcoin hits $200, a litecoin if it remains at 1% of bitcoins value will hit $2.

This can change though, and all markets are heavily manipulated by whales, bears and neck-beards.

>>4005

>I sold at 420

n1m8

>>4005

>Litecoin has been struggling to remain around 1% of bitcoins value
Heh, quite amusing when increasing your value by 50% or so is considered struggling.

>Mtgox is rumored to to be adding litecoin 'very' soon
This was a rumour when I first bought into LTC about 8 months ago. More interestingly I've heard that BTChina may be picking it up too.

I've got 300 LTC ready and waiting.

>>4007
How hard is it to mine, can I do it with an Nvidia card on Linux etc, and how long did it take you to get 300?

>>4008
I didn't mine them, I bought them. I did mine them for a while, back when I lived with seven other people, so didn't have to pay most of the bill...

Anyway, I don't remember how long I mined for, it wasn't very long but it was a slow process overall so I gave up, it was more hassle than it was worth to be honest, especially considering I could've killed my GPU.

If memory serves, Nvidia cards aren't that good for mining anyway, I had a Radeon 6870.

Here's something you might want to consider.

Because arbitrage is so hard between MTgox and the rest of the bitcoin world, you can make 11% return in a month with no worries about hte price of bitcoin. The only thing you'll have to worry about is whether or not you get anythign back at all...

1. Deposit money on BTC-E
2. Buy Bitcoins (current price $427)
3. Transfer bitcoins to MTgox
4. Sell bitcoins instantly (Current price $470)
5. Withdraw USD

Now, because it takes so long to get money out of BTC, you'll be waiting a month plus, but considering interest rates are so low, that's 11% in a month with no concerns about variance in the price of Bitcoins, since it's more or less instant in-out from USD to BTC to USD again. The risk here comes from whether or not you actually get that USD out of GOX or not...

>>4009
Damn, I was hoping you were still mining. I've been trying to set up litecoin mining for fucking hours, on either Linux or Windows, and nothing is bloody working.

>>4011
Curiously enough I also tried setting up Litecoin mining earlier but gave up pretty quickly after I couldn't find a mining program that didn't trip my AV suite. I am out of depth on this stuff so it's probably for the best, and anyway I did a quick calculation based on someone else's Litecoin mining which indicated that I'd make fuck all money even if my (halfway decent) GPU ran for months.

>>4012
They said that about bitcoin a couple of years ago, then the value shot up.

>>4011
It's a bitch, took me hours. Once I got it started it was fine.

>>4014
How much have you made, and with what hardware? How long have you been mining?

http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/18/as-bitcoin-prices-surge-past-600-a-new-high-u-s-agencies-set-to-argue-in-favor/
A high of $649 on MtGox. Fucking nuts.

Reminds me of this guy:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.0
They'd be worth $6m or so today.

Is it too late for me to get in the game? I had a teary last night for not taking advantage.

The intrinsic worth of a bitcoin is around a few dollars; this is very roughly what they cost to produce. The current situation is that lots of people are buying and hoarding them, driving up demand. The danger is that someone out there who's holding a large number of bitcoins is going to try and cash out at some point, thus triggering a massive crash.

If you have not done so, read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

>>4019
It's almost as if it were a fledgling currency.

>>4022

Almost.

>>4034
If you press the Anonymous button then you can delete posts.

well now.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24986264

I am facepalming so hard I didn't buy them at $30 a go 2 years back :|

>>4038
I'm not sure if it's your pointless, mass-swill hindsight, the irregular punctuation in your post or the emoticon at the end, but today you have jumped right to the top of my "I fucking hate you" list.

I am so glad I came off my meds because now I can feel burning disdain for people like you again. Today is going to be good.

>>4038

Even more gutting for me is the fact that I mined almost 1600 coins back when bitcoin wasn't even heard of and simply deleted them from my computer.

>>4040

You'd be a dollar millionaire by now. I've got a lovely bit of rope in the shed, if you want it.

>>4041

Yes I feel like a right cunt, but at the time I never thought it would even end up being worth a quid a coin let alone the mental price it has reached now.

One consolation though is I did mine some more afterwards, so I have got 12 and a bit left of those that I did not spend on SR. I will be keeping these until the bitter end as I really do think that we will see BTC reach heights that we cannot imagine, even to the point of them being worth $1,000,000 each or maybe even more.

>>4042
12 right now is still a fucking good nest egg. Well done, sir.

>>4043

I am hoping that it will be with the value rising fast. Even if there is a correction in the price there is going to be a good few more rises in price as the long term trend is definitely upward.

Oh my fucking god...

>>4045

Hubble bubble, toil and trouble...

>>4045
A high of 900 fucking dollars.

>I really do think that we will see BTC reach heights that we cannot imagine, even to the point of them being worth $1,000,000 each or maybe even more.
If you multiply 1,000,000 by the number of bitcoins in existence (12,000,000) you get a pretty big number. I don't see that kind of value.

More to the point, I don't know why people are spending $900 on a bitcoin when for that kind of money you can probably buy some pretty substantial mining hardware and make them yourself. It is very weird and makes me wonder if I just don't understand something.

>>4047

You could either get mining hardware or invest in something else, maybe gold or other stable or staples that are sure to be in demand. With something like this it's okay to take a long shot gamble but pull the money out and use it elsewhere if you get lucky...

>>4048
Obviously you could buy a bitcoin at $900 as a long shot but anyone doing that isn't going to be thinking about gold as an alternative. Similarly, anyone thinking about mining equipment is looking at the longer term and not about "getting lucky". And yes, I am an insufferable pedant.

>>4047
Any mining hardware you buy now will be out of date in a matter of weeks.

>>4047
If bitcoin goes mainstream mainstream then there's a long way left to go...

>>4054
What's happening over the next few weeks?

>>4055
http://www.butterflylabs.com/

Trying to jump on this now is a waste of time. It's like the people who ignored me and others when we were buying gold when it was down at $300. If you miss a boat then don't try to leap on after it has raised anchor. You'll most likely only drown with the other losers. When you see something going mainstream and joe nobodys are talking about it at lunch, it's time to look for the next thing.

>>4057
Joe Nobodys aren't talking about it at lunch though. I doubt most people have ever heard of it yet.

>>4058

So, you don't read newspapers then?

>>4059
Joe Nobody certainly doesn't.

>>4057
That's only true if you assume its only value is as a speculative investment. It's not currently being used for a whole lot of real transactions. If/when it is more widely used, there's every reason to believe its value will be much higher than it is now.

I don't think we realised just what a boon an untraceable currency would be to the criminal underworld. CryptoLocker is terrifying.

>>4059>>4060
Silk Road was mentioned in a sub-heading on the front page of the Metro just the other day.

>>4063

And if someone is so low on the scale they can't manage to read the Metro they don't even get considered.

>>4062

That is nasty stuff. Course, the simple solution would be to carve up the people behind it like a Christmas turkey. Let that happen a few times and people start to think twice about imitating it. As it is they get free reign to cause misery.

>>4064
"Oi mate, 'ave you 'eard? These kids are buying drugs off the internet. All the more reason they should ban porn. These filthy paedo twats."

>>4062

Forget about the criminal underworld, the real problem is tax avoidance/evasion. Implemented properly (and multinational corporations certainly have the expertise to do so), Bitcoin is a near-perfect tool for transferring wealth in a manner that is invisible to the tax authorities. With appropriate use of mixers, bitcoin transactions are as anonymous as cash in hand. A bit of dodgy dealing is nothing compared to the potential loss of trillions of pounds in tax revenue to governments all over the world.

>>4064

Good luck trying. Ross Ulbricht was busted only because he was cocky, careless and utterly inexperienced in running either a major web service or a criminal conspiracy. The next wave of imitators will learn from his experience and then some. The Snowden papers clearly show that the NSA/GCHQ have no practical means of attacking Tor, confirming the cryptographic theory. The core security model of Tor is mathematically unbreakable, just as certainly as 2+2=4. The next Silk Road won't go down easily - in all likelihood it will be run by the Russian mafia, who can operate without fear of extradition. Like it or not, anonymous marketplaces are here to stay. All we can do as a society is work out how to live with them, because we have no means of stopping them.

>>4066
Do you not think 'quantum computing' and so forth pose a threat to those who rely on present computing techniques to guarantee their anonymity?

I basically know nothing, I just learned about these terms from Horizon and Click.

>>4061
Bitcoin transactions are fundamentally one-way. Why would anyone use bitcoin for regular purchases, when there are plenty of established alternatives which are much safer and much less hassle for the regular consumer? It seems like a solution looking for a problem.

I'm surprised that the spike we're seeing now came after Silk Road got shut down, as that was one of the few applications for bitcoin that actually gave it purpose, albeit minor in the scheme of things. I appreciate that I'm being short-sighted, but until a purpose is found for which bitcoin is easier to use and for which there exists a meaningful reason to use it over cash or the many alternatives, I can't see the whole thing as anything other than a speculative bubble.

The guy who said earlier that he thinks they'll some day be worth £1,000,000 each, wouldn't that point to an economy that is worth £21 trillion (since there will eventually be 21 million bitcoins)? There are people here who understand economics far better than I do, am I missing something? Because that seems pretty obviously outside of the realms of possibility. I'm completely open to being educated if I'm wrong or just being unimaginative.

>>4068
Its only reason for existence is for its value to be speculated upon, and traded. Nothing else.

>>4068
Silk Road is up, trade is being conducted in bitcoin.

THe big growths are all down to speculators though.

>>4067

Unless there's an earth-shattering sort of breakthrough, then not for many decades. Quantum computers are still largely theoretical and there is a very long list of hard problems in mathematics and theoretical physics that need to be solved before we would expect to see practical quantum computers, if they are in fact possible.

There's a more general problem, in that nearly all modern cryptography relies on the same set of maths - RSA and related algorithms based on factorisation. If you break Tor, then all secure communication on the internet comes tumbling down with it and we're thrown straight back to the 1970s. There's no fundamental difference between the cryptographic methods used to secure a shady black market deal and a credit card purchase on Amazon, they're both equally vulnerable to attacks using quantum computers.

Either way, there are no maps for these territories. If factorisation-based asymmetric cryptography remains secure, then we've just got to get used to a world in which criminals can communicate and do business with impunity. If those methods are broken, then we've got to get used to a world in which secure communication is the preserve of governmental organisations who have the resources to do secure key exchange.

>>4069

That's just not true. Bitcoin does something uniquely useful, by facilitating secure exchanges of value without a central authority. There has never been a practical means of doing this due to the difficulty of the double-spending problem, but Nakamoto has solved this in triumphant style. Bitcoin is the direct monetary equivalent of Bittorrent; Decentralisation is a difficult but extremely powerful attribute of any system, and the fundamental idea behind the success of the internet. The mathematics behind Bitcoin are utterly brilliant and could prove as revolutionary as RSA, by facilitating ways of doing business that were previously considered impossible or even undreamed of.

Most of the current value of Bitcoin is speculative, but that speculation isn't totally unfounded. Bitcoin has real value in the here and now, albeit a very small fraction of the current market price. If Bitcoin does indeed fulfil its potential then it could be worth vastly more than the current price, but there is currently a great deal of risk and uncertainty, partly from regulatory issues and partly the simple threat of a better, cleverer technology usurping Bitcoin. I don't own any Bitcoin and think that we are in the middle of a speculative bubble, but I think it's foolish to dismiss cryptocurrencies out of hand as nothing more than a ponzi scheme or a tulip mania. Beneath the sensationalist headlines, there is a very clever and useful technology that almost certainly has a real future, albeit not necessarily in its current incarnation. I think Bitcoin is essentially in the dot-com bubble stage - the hype has arrived well ahead of the reality, but the reality is tremendously important.

I'm going to make it my sole aim in life to be the guy who handles a big dodgy companies bitcoin transfers. A slip of the finger one day and I can disappear to Thailand.

>>4073

Look up a guy called The Grugq, he's living the dream - he's a broker who deals in security exploits, spending his days ferrying giant bags of cash around Bangkok.

>>4072
Post of the thread.

>>4072

A challenger appears:

http://www.dwavesys.com/en/dw_homepage.html

>>4076

There's a huge amount of well-founded scepticism about what D-Wave are doing. The D-Wave Two is genuinely very quick at solving certain classes of problem, although there's no good evidence that it's very much faster than a similarly specialised computer built using conventional technology. It only usefully performs a small handful of computational tasks and factorisation (the key problem in modern cryptography) isn't one of them. The D-Wave computer also stretches the definition of "practical" to the limit - the processor needs to run very close to absolute zero, so the system has to be installed in a room-sized cryogenic chamber cooled by liquid helium. I'm not dismissing their technology out of hand, but it is a very long way from fulfilling the hype that has surrounded it.

>>4077

"4076" here. I agree with you - for the same investment (or likely for a substantially smaller investment) you could put together a HPC cluster of some type that would likely out-perform a D-Wave. Also, having liquid nitrogen in a conventional datacentre setting would be absurd as you rightly raise. But it's starting to be "out there" and I think in the next 3-5 years we'll see it become more commercially viable. Especially since the likes of Google and Amazon are interested in it. The increase in funding for research will increase and I think we'll see these sooner than you think.

It hasn't even begun.

>>4079

But what use will bitcoins be in a SHTF scenario?

>>4080
Ask rich Greeks.

>>4080
As much use as dollars. Or gold, to be honest.

>>4080

That's why i've got a garage full of tins of baked beans.

>>4083

I fucking hate baked beans.

>>4084

PACK_YOUR_RICE

>>4083

A wise move. They are an excellent source of nutrition and will be worth their weight in gold, so to speak, in TEOTWAWKI.

>>4084

MARKED FOR MASS BURIAL

>>4083

GARAGE FULL OF TIN OPENERS CALLS DETENTE.

What service do you all use to buy? I was initially thinking of just buying in-person with cash to avoid having to give up any bank account details, but I've decided against that now.

If I buy on a site that offers an online wallet, is it easy to then transfer the coins to an offline one? I'm still trying to get a grasp of all the different methods one can use; any advice would be appreciated.

>>4094

bitbargain to buy using bank transfer, then if you want to hide the origin convert through different exchanges i.e. gambling sites, cryptocurrency exchanges like btc-e, cryptsy and so on.

>>4102
If I'm not looking to buy anything shady, is there any other reason I would want to hide the origin?