Interested fo sho. Wish I had bought $27 worth of it back when I heard about it in '09 like this guy.
ah, yes, the good ole days when you could buy with a credit card http://s.drollette.com/image/352s2G370d2d
I have some bitcoin, don't remember how much. I briefly thought about using it when I donated today, but you only take paypal and regular credit card. :-/
hey now.. i've had a bitcoin donate button on here for years https://forum.woodenaxe.com/pages/donate/
I looked at it a year ago. I understand the concept, but not the whole mining thing. I think I have an account, not completely sure.
I still have 50 bitcoins I've been holding onto since I sold them at the same time I sold my mining gear right around the $130 mark. They had just dropped from over $200 so I figured with the new ASIC chips it was time to get out. I miss the good ol' days when CPU mining could actually net you some bitcoins without even being in a pool.... Oh how times have changed.
I've never fully grasped this whole concept. I can't get my head around what happens when they get close to their cap and there is no incentive to process them anymore, seems like a hot potato kind of deal to me. Perhaps I am misunderstanding something. It sounds interesting though.
At that point I suspect it becomes like any form of tangible barter with a fixed supply. Like trading diamonds if the map stopped generating them and Matt didn't inject any into the economy. I think that would tend to drive prices up because of the poor liquidity, since vendors would tend to accumulate a lot of them and they don't have much incentive to move them back out into the economy unless there's a high price or their suppliers use bitcoin. If there's an upward trend in value, as this suggests, then a lot of it will just be banked, further drying up the supply. I'm not sure what would devalue bitcoins except for probably three things: lack of demand if the system gets too inefficient (if a bitcoin is $300 now, can you pay in fractions of bitcoins? if not, that's bad if its value increases), vastly better computational power for mining comes along, or some sort of vulnerability is found. I'm actually thinking about buying a couple of hundred dollars worth and sitting on it for a few years. If anyone knows a good place to buy them from, I'd be glad to hear about it.
The easiest place to purchase is from coinbase.com. They are reputable (venture-backed from Silicon Valley) and much quicker to verify your account. The exchanges (MtGox, Bitstamp) can take days or weeks to verify your account and transfer money.
Bitcoins are divisible down to 8 decimal places. So, the 21 million max is really more like 21 quadrillion. As far as transferrable units.
in 50 years, my 1 bitcoin will be enough of a trust fund for all my 25 grandchildren. also a great animation that can help those who (like me) were completely mystified by it:
I think I've still got about 10 left out of some that I mined back in '10. Mined with a laptop no doubt, not some crazy ass rig.
No wonder I never noticed the bitcoin option. I've never been to that page before. I've always gone to portal first (cuz people say go to portal to donate) then from there I can only choose credit or paypal.
What all do I really need to know and have to invest in this or "mine"? The video was interesting but vague.
Mining bitcoin is equivalent to mining for gold. You wouldn't just randomly go out and purchase land, hire employees, buy machinery to mine and process the ore. Unless you have huge capital to invest, mining is not something for beginners. But, you can purchase bitcoins from other people that own some (using an exchange like MtGox), or sell things/services and get paid in bitcoins (using a merchant processor like BitPay). You can also exchange dollars for bitcoins (using a "bank" like Coinbase).