Posted on 12/03/2013 10:19:00 AM PST by Star Traveler
On Sunday, Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal admitted he was rethinking his former view that Bitcoin was a "currency for clowns." But Matt Yglesias still isn't convinced that Bitcoin is anything special:
Bitcoins are more portable than either suitcases full of $100 bills or diamonds. So there's some use there. And even though I think inflation paranoia is dumb, it's certainly a real phenomenon. And anything gold can do Bitcoin can do better. In essence you've combined the smuggling utility of pieces of paper with pictures of Ben Franklin on them with the inflation hedging properties of gold. That's a decent achievement. But it's not going to set the world on fire.
I don't know if Bitcoin is going to set the world on fire, but I think this analysis overlooks the characteristics that give the financial network the potential to do so. To see what Matt is missing, it's helpful to go back to an analogy I made a couple of weeks ago: the early Internet. The Internet of the 1980s was a small, strange and inhospitable place. Reading Bart Gellman's dispatch from the Internet circa 1988, it's easy to imagine sober-minded people wondering why millions of dollars of taxpayer money are being spent so a few thousand nerds can argue about their favorite science fiction franchises and send each other glorified telegrams.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Silicon Valley catches Bitcoin fever
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3097361/posts
A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3097365/posts
Bits and Bob [analysis of Bitcoin]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3097370/posts
Bitcoin Under Pressure
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3097394/posts
Huge bitcoin heist: Black market drug shop Sheep Marketplace poofs with $40 million
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3097504/posts
Meet ‘Bitcoin Jesus,’ A Virtual Currency Millionaire
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3097691/posts
The secret Hong Kong facility that uses boiling goo to mine Bitcoins
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3097708/posts
The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/all/
Watch the Bitcoin transactions LIVE - as they are occurring ...
http://blockchain.info
How would you cash in the profit?
Or would you just spend it at places that take Bit Coin.
You can sell bitcoins for US dollars, Euros, or any of a number of currency at bitcoin exchanges. Coinbase is my favorite.
Thanks
Anyone try mining?
That all depends on whether or not one has access to a computer.
Yes, although not to any significant capacity. I’ve got an inexpensive VPS running my personal Web site and mail server, and I use about half of its processing power to mine Litecoin.
Thus far, I’ve earned about 2 LTC. It isn’t a lot, but when you consider that it’s essentially free money because I’m not paying for my VPS’s electricity use, it’s a no-brainer.
Bitcoin mining has become so difficult that I can’t imagine recommending it to anyone. Stick to Litecoin or Peercoin - they’re up-and-coming altcoins that still have room for everyday miners.
You cash it in at an exchange.
Interesting.
I’m not familiar with Litecoin or Peercoin, so thanks for making them known to me.
Why does Enron keep popping up in the back of my mind?
I remain cynical that one can just make something out of nothing and decide that it's money. PT Barnum would be impressed
How would you cash in the profit?Or would you just spend it at places that take Bit Coin.
Sell it on an exchange, or locally.
I'm having to deal with these for an estate. I sold one Saturday, as a test, on Mt. Gox. US$1224. Now I just have to get it to the estate bank account.
Anyone try mining?
As part of dealing with the above mentioned estate, I intercepted the shipment of a Butterfly Labs miner. Their smallest, the 40W cube thing. I turned it on Oct. 11. So far it's generated (OK, "mined") about .3 bitcoins.
Isn’t step 2 “Ship to Japan”?
“Well ... I thought about it and then just set it aside and did nothing.”
If I had the money from every time I did this, I’d be retired on a beach earning 20% :-P.
“Anyone try mining?”
Not yet.
I have FPGA development skills (programmable logic ... think of it as an integrated circuit where you can implement virtually any digital circuit depending on resource restrictions). I knew nothing about Bitcoin a few months ago. I started looking into it and discovered that logic to perform what’s needed to mine isn’t all that difficult to implement (you simply need rather large devices to get a high number of “mining operations” (technical term is “hashes”) per second ... in fact, some free designs exist out there.
Anyway, it turns out that even if I were to run my “feeble” setup that might nab me about 700M “mining operations” per second on an unused development kit I have lying around, I might be lucky to make a few dollars. And I mean few. There are literally hundreds of trillions of mining operations per second occurring right now. The odds of mining a reward of 25BTC is extremely low anymore. Your best bet is to join a guild and pool your resources.
I might try to get it up and running over Christmas just to say I did it :-). I get a kick out of this stuff.
You can also run programs on your PC that use your GPU to accelerate mining, but typically you’ll pay more to power your PC than you’ll earn. Still, who knows ... you might luck out enough to make it worthwhile.
I really wish I paid more attention to this back in 2009-2010 ... :-).
buy a bitcoin. buy a gold coin. see which is worth more a year from now.
I’ve been around long enough to remember when gold dropped like a rock and people I knew (who bought into it) “lost their shirts”!
It all depends on when gold is going up and when it’s going down. It’s the same for Bitcoin - as it will go up and down, too.
With both it’s just a matter of catching it at the right time.
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