Who uses the Bitcoin?

[Sombeech]

I heard about this today and was surprised to learn it's been around for several years.

It's a digital currency, probably most notoriously used for purchases on The Silk Road, the "Amazon.com for Drugs".

Does anybody here use this currency to buy anything? How has your experience been? Benefits? Downfalls?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um63OQz3bjo

[DiscGo]

You just heard about BitCoin?

[DiscGo]

$750,000 pizza:
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/this-pizza-is-worth-750000

[Deathcricket]

Yeah, I made some money off em. Got out too early though. Some dude got hacked a couple years back, made me nervous, bailed. I still doubled my money though. So it worked out ok.

[JONBOYLEMON]

I buy all my illegal stuff online with it!:lol8:

[Iceaxe]

Tell me more about this "silk road"... a friend wants to know....


Tap'n on my Galaxy G3

[hike2kolob]

http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/08/news/silk-road-crime-uk/ Last I heard, after shutting down Silk Road, the FBI seized the Silk Road founder's bitcoin "wallet" (an encrypted file with his bitcoin keys) and the FBI could not "open" the wallet to extract the monetary value of the illgotten bitcoins. If I remember, those seized bitcoins represented a substantial share (like 5-20% or something) of all bitcoins in circulation. I understand there are copycat sites to Silk Road, but Silk Road is currently "run" by the FBI. Probably not a good idea to do business with them if still operating.
Tell me more about this "silk road"... a friend wants to know....


Tap'n on my Galaxy G3

[Sombeech]

You just heard about BitCoin?

You know what, i think i heard about it a few years ago but didn't really think of it as a serious currency. I've been fascinated by the concept lately though. I think I'm going to but 1 bitcoin, currently worth $144, just to say I've got one lol.

And yea I've been reading about the silk road too. Wow, i had no idea. I guess there are a few more drug market places like that still in operation too. Interesting stuff.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk

[Rob L]

The original "silk road" was the 16th & 17th century African routes of the slave traders.

[Iceaxe]

How to lose $7.5M Bitcoin fortune


IT worker throws out hard drive, loses $7.5 million Bitcoin fortune

LONDON -- An IT worker threw out a computer hard drive without realizing it contained $7.5 million worth of the digital currency Bitcoin.

The device is now buried somewhere in a vast landfill site near the home of owner James Howells -- who only realized his mistake when it was too late.

"It is soul destroying to be honest,” Howells told NBC News on Thursday. "I haven’t had much sleep over the past few days. Every second of the day I am thinking about what could have been."

Howells, whose ordeal was first reported by the Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site), worked out the hard drive would have been taken to a local landfill site and visited the dump to speak to the manager.

But the hopelessness of his task became clear when he was was told that finding he disk would take weeks even with a team of a dozen people and backhoes."I had originally thought about raising money to hunt for the drive, but it was more an off-the-cuff idea. I know it’s gone," he said.

The hard drive is so valuable because it contains the key to 7,500 bitcoins, a currency which exists only in the digital world.

The currency was created in 2009 and has recently skyrocketed in value -- hitting $1,000 per unit on Wednesday (http://www.nbcnews.com/business/virtual-currency-bitcoin-bursts-through-real-1-000-barrier-2D11663468) -- having enjoyed a surge in interest by the media and financial sector.

Howells, from Newport, in South Wales, created his 7,500 bitcoins in 2009, when the new currency was only known in niche circles and of little value.

"It was just after the financial crash and when I found out about Bitcoin it seemed to me to be the perfect alternative," he said. "I knew it was going to be huge."

The 28-year-old "mined" the currency by running a computer program on his Dell laptop for almost a week, eventually having to turn it off because his girlfriend complained the fans in the machine were getting too hot and noisy at night.

Howells said he was forced to take the hard drive out of the laptop in 2010 when he poured a soft drink over the keyboard, and over the next three years it remained forgotten in his desk drawer.

He does not know exactly when he threw it away, but said it was at some point this summer.

In the meantime. Bitcoin's popularity had exploded into the mainstream.

Norwegian investor Kristoffer Koch made about $800,000 when he bought $27 worth of bitcoins and forgot about them. And before it was closed by the FBI in October the illegal online marketplace Silk Road used Bitcoin to trade goods including drugs and weapons.

It was further pushed into the mainstream when Richard Branson announced this week that people would be able to pay for Virgin Galactic space flights using the currency. The first Bitcoin ATM machine opened in Vancouver, Canada, last month.

Howells only realized what he had done last Friday.

"I started hearing all these stories about people making money from Bitcoin, and basically the penny just dropped and I remembered the bitcoins on the hard drive I had thrown away,” he said. “I have turned my house upside down looking for it, but I know deep down I threw it away."

However, he refused to be too downbeat about the episode, and is now concentrating on the next opportunity the internet might bring.

"I am not about to jump off a bridge or anything," he said. "There's always going to be another opportunity."

[Deathcricket]

the 28-year-old "mined" the currency by running a computer program on his Dell laptop for almost a week, eventually having to turn it off because his girlfriend complained the fans in the machine were getting too hot and noisy at night.




The funniest part of the story right there. He made 7.5M in a week, but his girlfriend complained about some noisy fans on his workstation, so he turned it off and stopped making money.

[Sombeech]

The funniest part of the story right there. He made 7.5M in a week, but his girlfriend complained about some noisy fans on his workstation, so he turned it off and stopped making money.

Yes dear

http://www.my-favorite-coloring.net/Images/Large/Famous-characters-Troll-face-Okay-meme-face-139908.png

[Iceaxe]

Google "Dutch Tulip bubble 1637" and you will have a good understanding of what is happening with bitcoin.

Tap'n on my Galaxy G3

[rockgremlin]

http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/08/news/silk-road-crime-uk/ Last I heard, after shutting down Silk Road, the FBI seized the Silk Road founder's bitcoin "wallet" (an encrypted file with his bitcoin keys) and the FBI could not "open" the wallet to extract the monetary value of the illgotten bitcoins. If I remember, those seized bitcoins represented a substantial share (like 5-20% or something) of all bitcoins in circulation. I understand there are copycat sites to Silk Road, but Silk Road is currently "run" by the FBI. Probably not a good idea to do business with them if still operating.


Silk Road Reloaded is up and running. You have to download a .TOR file in order to access and transact with the silk road. The old Silk Road isn't operated by the FBI, it was just seized and shut down. Four weeks later the Reloaded version pops up. Kinda like Medusa. Chop off one head and at least 2 spring up in it's place.

[Iceaxe]

Seizing the domain never works, at least with currnt laws and tool available to law enforcement . It has been tried with the torrent sites for years and now they are geared for the seizures they are usually back up and running within hours.

Tap'n on my Galaxy G3

[rockgremlin]

Long live the Pirate Bay, haha!

[Iceaxe]

Bitcoin sounds like a safe, solid investment to me....


The forces behind last week’s collapse in value — which took the price of an individual digital coin to below $600 from a high of more than $1,100– hail mostly from China, where recent investor interest has been hottest.

Concerned about the impact the unregulated currency could have on the country’s financial system, the People’s Republic banned Chinese financial institutions from accepting Bitcoin transactions last Wednesday. Later in the week, Baidu, China’s primary search engine, said it would no longer accept payments in Bitcoin as well.

Speculative investors were back at it on Monday, bidding up the price to close to $900, according to Mt. Gox, a main online trading platform (see chart). But as governments and banks – including here in Canada (http://globalnews.ca/news/996853/as-bitcoin-surges-canadian-banks-make-converting-to-cash-difficult/) – apply greater scrutiny, the sudden surge could end just as spectacularly, experts warn.

http://globalnews.ca/news/1018890/bitcoin-loses-value-as-china-clamps-down/

[dmMatrix]

How taxing is the "mining" with bitcoin? I thought about just letting it run on one of my extra computers.... Is it worth the power used?

[jman]

How taxing is the "mining" with bitcoin? I thought about just letting it run on one of my extra computers.... Is it worth the power used?

Depends on your system. If just a junky PC don't expect a lot of dough.

I tried it just to see how it all worked about 6 months ago and was able to mine .03 bitcoins a day. I was using a dual core i5 @ 3.02GHz with a dual ATI 4850.

The trick isn't in your CPU but GPU (graphics card). And if you want to be profitable you will need at least 4 graphics cards which will require a 600-watt Power supply, working all day. It would be like leaving 2 vacuums on all day, power wise.


-Brett

[Deathcricket]

How taxing is the "mining" with bitcoin? I thought about just letting it run on one of my extra computers.... Is it worth the power used?

Not now. The difficulty is set impossibly high. I bet you could mine for 2 or 3 months and probably not get one. Sorry bro.

[Sombeech]

It sounds like they used to be easier to mine, but as time goes on and more bitcoins are created, the mathematical equations become more complex that your computer has to work through, costing more time and power.

This is why it will max out at 21 million, it's just the way the code was written and it's mathematically impossible to pass that number. But when it reaches that high it will be so difficult to mine for that it will not be worth it for the average user.

Then there are mining pools, groups of people using their collection of computers and graphics cards to mine for bitcoins and the results are shared across the pool.

Check out the "bitcoin mining rigs" that people are coming up with now. Making dedicated rooms in their homes, running extra power and A/C for cooling. Crazy stuff.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nDTBN_cPs0


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxn0ZJqYoGk

[DiscGo]

http://qz.com/154877/by-reading-this-page-you-are-mining-bitcoins/

[dmMatrix]

Its crazy that it takes so much work. And for reference by "old" I meant quite powerful system that is now not the main system LOL.

Some of the videos that I have seen make me feel scared to even install the miner (like the videos above ha ha). Maybe I ought to just throw it on my new system and see what happens.