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Don't get hung up on the "1 BTC" requirement, if that's what you are worried about. If you are only interested in speculating by buying and holding, you can put any amount of USD in that you want. .001BTC is going to jump/drop just as much as 100.0 BTC will, in terms of percentage. Lots of places are switching their units to mBTC (.001BTC) now because so many people have this weird mental block. You can currently buy 1mBTC for 90cents!Originally Posted by icecream
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Yeah, I wasn't aware until I opened an account on coinbase only to find out I can't link my Canadian bank account to my wallet :/ I was going to throw in 50$ and see what it would doDon't get hung up on the "1 BTC" requirement, if that's what you are worried about. If you are only interested in speculating by buying and holding, you can put any amount of USD in that you want. .001BTC is going to jump/drop just as much as 100.0 BTC will, in terms of percentage. Lots of places are switching their units to mBTC (.001BTC) now because so many people have this weird mental block. You can currently buy 1mBTC for 90cents!
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Oh... Canadian! I'm not sure what the best option is for you in that case.
https://bitcoinaverage.com/#CAD says there are 3 active exchanges. I have no idea what the reputation is for each of them within Canada. Localbitcoin should pretty much be the same no matter where you are, I'd assume.
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So, what's the best spot to get into it? If I was to do it, I would be a complete newly to it.Don't get hung up on the "1 BTC" requirement, if that's what you are worried about. If you are only interested in speculating by buying and holding, you can put any amount of USD in that you want. .001BTC is going to jump/drop just as much as 100.0 BTC will, in terms of percentage. Lots of places are switching their units to mBTC (.001BTC) now because so many people have this weird mental block. You can currently buy 1mBTC for 90cents!
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If you are asking about the right time to buy in from a speculation angle and trying to make USD... it's impossible to say. Your best bet at timing a market is to pay really close attention to the news. Otherwise, buy some and plan on sitting on it for at least a year. Also, should should be able to afford a 100% loss. I saw people dumping their entire life savings into it back in April when it was hitting the $250USD+ range... a few days later it collapsed down to well under $100USD. They cashed out and lost their houses, etc. Too bad they didn't just wait because 7 months later it climbed to $1200.
For bitcoin to have any real value, someone needs to have at least one killer use. Right now, everyone is working on doing just that. This is like the early days of the internet. It's entirely possible that killer use will never happen and bitcoin will vanish. It's entirely possible that the Internet would have never taken off because the right conditions didn't unfold. There were a lot of nonbelievers back in those days too. I personally think bitcoin has huge potential and feel like the chances of someone delivering something great is likely. See the 45min video I posted earlier, many great examples there. I don't see centralize currency systems magically fixing all the problems that bitcoin fixes. Bitcoin also has plenty of development capacity just on it's own. It can evolve and will evolve, just as the markets built on bitcoin are growing and evolving. Something simple like the colored coins that is actively in development goes way beyond currency... that one little addition opens bitcoin up to disrupt the industries that center around certificates, record keeping, loans, etc. That one little tweak has a huge number of possible uses, many of which have not been thought of. With every tweak, the potential goes way beyond currency.
In terms of the speculators, I still think it has plenty of room to grow due to popularity growth. Lots of countries are still learning about it. China got interested just a month ago. It looks like India is starting to take notice.
Last edited by DigitalChaos; 12-10-2013 at 12:36 AM.
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to give a slightly different answer on the speculation topic and timing... I tried doing daytrading just for fun. I payed very close attention to the bitcoin news. After a few weeks, I made some money. The money I ended up making would have been 10x as much if I had simply bought and held. So, it really is hard to know when the time is good or bad. Historically, it has only gone up in a year over year perspective. It's possible that it could go down to... so #1 rule is to never put in what you cannot afford to lose.
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Ok, thanks for the help!! I'm kinda kicking myself for not getting them when they were 700 or so (CAD) just a few days ago. I have a few sites but I'm still not sure how to buy/sell. Do I need to find someone selling and then buy them from them?? And then if I want to sell them I need to find a buyer?
Last edited by icecream; 12-10-2013 at 03:57 PM.
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That's my understanding of the localbitcoins system, yea. Never used it though. The exchanges like mtgox don't do that. I'd recommend just putting $10 in and testing a buy and withdrawal with whoever you use. Read up on it. It's easy to get screwed right now because it's still the Wild West.
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A lot of money in the wild westthanks for the help again. I'll throw 10 or so in and see what happens.
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I agree I did not explain the whole article
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Awesome intro to bitcoin the technology (that few people know) and why it is different than bitcoin the currency (that everyone knows).
Hierba Gatera
And another Tor site gets hit by the FBI.
FBI seized entire TorMail database in Freedom Hosting investigation.
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MtGox say's they were hacked files for bankruptcy in Japan, Silk Road 2.0 says they were hacked. A good article in Forbes http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronk...ur-tax-losses/.
The "hack" was using txid manipulations to make transactions faster which involved a "hot wallet" which sits on a live server as apposed to a "cold wallet" which is not on the net. With super high flexing value levels, transactions must be quick. I don't yet buy either site could be that compromised by this attack, but why would either company take the money and run if you knew the value would drop with news of an such an attack. More questions than answers.
-Louie
Last edited by Louie_Cypher; 03-01-2014 at 06:03 PM.
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There are a lot of possibilities with mtgox. From govt gag orders to plain old incompetence.
The great thing is there is nobody getting bailed out here. The currency is doing just fine. Hell, there were huge lines on physical ATMs that only let you buy BTC on the day mtgox announced bankruptcy. This is a great demonstration of how free markets will handle bad times. Even The Daily Show covered mtgox this week in a positive light compared to the US banking sector.
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I saw that and it didn't hit bottom, again maybe the attack was from the industry (banking) Canada is adding bitcoins to their ATM's. We will see how this plays out (oops sorry I just repeated what you said about ATM's)
-Louie
Last edited by Louie_Cypher; 03-02-2014 at 01:36 AM. Reason: Me no read so well
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The lines I saw forming to buy BTC were from ATMs in Japan... i think.
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Couldn't we create an ETS mining pool?
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We could, but it doesn't really do anything for us. I don't think many/any of us have enough computing power for it to make a difference over individual mining. Even if everyone on this forum had their own ASIC miners it would be a sysiphean task with how the difficulty is growing exponentially.
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Didn't realize it was that big of task.
I thought it was something like SETI, which simply runs in the background until it finds a "key".
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It's very similar. Basically, every 10min a new block is released. If you are producing 50% of the current processing power, you have a 50% chance of getting that block. Over the course of 24hrs, you'll get roughly 50% of the 144 blocks that get mined. The number of bitcoins you receive for every block you get started at 50BTC and it gets cut in half every ~4 years. I think blocks are currently 25BTC in size. At $700USD per BTC, that's worth over $17,000US!
So, if you are only providing like .01%, it's going to take you a decent amount of time to score a block unless you happen to get lucky. Providing .01% translates to a 1 in 10,000 chance every 10min. A pool lets everyone throw their computing power together as if they were a single person. The pool will then cut each found block up into fractional pieces corresponding to the total computing power that each member is providing. So, instead of having to wait for your 1 in 10,000 chance, you simply score 1/10,000 of every block.
In the very beginning, you could provide a significant portion of the total computing with CPU's. Then someone figured out how to use GPUs (graphics cards) to dramatically increase the computing power and it made using CPU's cost more in electricity than you could ever make in bitcoin. About a year ago people started building ASIC's. Application Specific Integrated Circuit. Basically, you are etching silicon to create a processor for a very specific process. It's how places like Intel make their chips and it easily costs $1mil in R&D to develop. ASIC's are much more efficient and way more powerful than the GPUs. In less than a year the available ASICs went from 65nm architecture to 28nm architecture.
The computing power for bitcoin is measured in hashes per second. I'll compare everything in megahashes per second (MH/s) to put it all in perspective. These are all rough averages, but it gives you an idea:
CPU = 10 MH/s
GPU = 500 MH/s
ASIC 65nm = 50,000 MH/s
ASIC 28nm = 1,000,000 MH/s
Currently, the total processing power that you would have to compete with is 30,000,000,000MH/s. So, running 1 CPU miner will give you a 1 in 3 billion chance of ever getting a block. The total computing power is also climbing exponentially due to all the rapidly evolving tech and with the potential to basically print money. http://bitcoindifficulty.com/
Last edited by DigitalChaos; 03-05-2014 at 08:03 PM.
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Thanks so much for this explanation. Really interesting.
Looking at that graph on bitcoindifficulty.com pretty much tells me we're about 1 year late to the party?
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Yea, 2011 and 2012 were the prime years for mining with your GPU. Before the ASIC days it got nuts. People were buying actual truckloads of super expensive graphics cards and dedicating entire rooms of their house and even warehouses to a mining operation. The power draw and heat output was so bad that some of the "smaller" operations running out of people's houses were getting raided by the police for suspected marijuana grow ops.
In 2011, I was pulling in like half a bitcoin per day with a few laptops I had laying around at work. That was when 1BTC was worth ~$10USD. I got distracted by other stuff and didn't keep up. I ended up buying a $1500 ASIC miner early last year. It finally delivered in October and was pulling in maybe .05BTC per day. It was WAY more profitable to sell it after a few weeks than try to keep it running.
hindsight is a bitch...
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Speaking of bitcoin history... Looks like they finally found the bitcoin founder!
http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/b...-nakamoto.html
There is so much awesome in that article.
some of my favorites:
"He is the only person I have ever known to show up for a job interview and tell the interviewer he's an idiot - and then prove it."
"Descended from Samurai and the son of a Buddhist priest, Nakamoto was born in July 1949 in the city of Beppu, Japan, where he was brought up poor in the Buddhist tradition by his mother, Akiko."
"We were doing defensive electronics and communications for the military, government aircraft and warships, but it was classified and I can't really talk about it,"
Nakamoto encouraged his daughter to be independent, start her own business and "not be under the government's thumb," she says. "He was very wary of the government, taxes and people in charge."
"He was always expounding on politics and current events. He loved new and old technology. He built his own computers and was very proud of them."
Nakamoto, who was laid off twice in the 1990s, according to Mitchell, fell behind on mortgage payments and taxes and their home was foreclosed. That experience, says Nakamoto's oldest daughter, Ilene Mitchell, 26, may have informed her father's attitude toward banks and the government.
He doesn't like the system we have today and wanted a different one that would be more equal. He did not like the notion of banks and bankers getting wealthy just because they hold the keys," says Andresen.
Mitchell suspects Nakamoto's initial interest in creating a digital currency that could be used anywhere in the world may have stemmed from his frustration with bank fees and high exchange rates when he was sending international wires to England to buy model trains.
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Apparently, one of my LA friends is having lunch with him tomorrow. I'm a little bit jealous.
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I don't know if I'm exactly sold on this although it is is an interesting read. The people who are commenting seem to be up in arms over this article.
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Inside DarkMarket: a Silk Road the FBI can't touch
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/...rket-prototype
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The provocative nature of this teaser video is just perfect.
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"“This is a way of using bitcoin that mocks every attempt to sprinkle it with regulation”
“It’s a way to say to the government ‘You’ve set yourself up to regulate bitcoin. Regulate this.’”"
“Liberty is a dangerous thing.”
I love that guy so much.
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