Bitcoin Forum

Whats the point in gathering bit coins if they are being both harder to get and lowered in value with time?
2 weeks running almost non stop and I got 0 coins yet with a speed of 2700khash/s. :(

Whats the point in gathering dollars if they are being both harder to get and lowered in value with time?

Generating coins is not the purpose of bitcoin.  Trading is.  The strength of bitcoins are their ease of storage/movement, almost no transaction costs, good security, pseudonymity, their limited inflation, etc.  In fact, their difficulty to generate is one of bitcoin's strengths.

If you are frustrated trying to generate bitcoins, you should try selling some goods or services for bitcoin to help the economy.

Yeah, it would suck if bitcoins could just be created on demand... like dollars are. Do stuff people want done or make stuff people want to have to get bitcoins. Thanks to the markets (mtgox and bitcoinmarket) you can trade to get USD then BTC if you need.

So I can start a webshop and sell stuff for bitcoins that takes a year to gather bitcoins equal to $50. I still don't see why people would perfer it over paying real cash unless your 10 years old and cant really earn any real money.

Or I want to buy things from you without telling you my name? Or I want to accept payment from strangers and know it cannot be charged back? And I don't have to Pay fees to a CC company? Lots of reasons.

edit: I am not BSing either. I would never and have never sold PS money for PayPal, it would be stupid and I would have to worry about charge backs for 60 days, and I would probably have zero recourse because I was selling poker money. I have sold $500 worth for bitcoin. I saved some, spent some on silver, and got some legit PayPal from MtGox. And some people who could not or would not give payment info to poker sites have been able to play.

If you are trading Federal Reserve Notes over the internet, it can be very easily traced and taxed by the government.  Plus you have to pay high transaction fees to paypal or credit card companies.  Plus, you have to trust centralized entities such as banks to hold your money safely, but banks have a tendency to lend out your money and become illiquid when they have lent out much more money than they have or have only poor assets backing up loans.  This causes bank runs such as what just happened at this Afghanistan bank (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38976292/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia) or during the financial crisis of 2007-10 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007–2010) and most other bank runs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run) in history.

And I don't know what you mean by "real cash", I'm assuming you are referring to the fact that Federal Reserve Notes are Legal Tender.  But that just means you have to pay your taxes and debts in FRN if requested.  Great!  But if you promote the use of FRNs, then you are stuck using money that can be arbitrarily inflated by the whims of the Fed chairman when he engages in interest rate settings and quantitative easing, and can by arbitrarily devalued by politicians when they issuing lots of treasuries to finance their deficit spending.

Yeah, it isn't like we have a good currency to use and we're just mucking about with another for kicks. I want to use a good money.

Ok so there are low tranfer fees, but I think the time it takes to get the coins are too long to be worth it, it will take so many months to get what you can earn in less then a day by working and then paying with credit card. You cant really compare bitcoin to banks, its not like your gonna have 10mil BTC on your computer and also a bank is alot more safe then your own computer. From what I understand if you delete the bitcoin folder you lose your coins.

Anonymous payments, good for what? Porn and illegal drugs online?

Generate coins for a year and you can afford a porn dvd or a joint. There is no point in buying BTC for real cash like USD, SEK, EUR, BHT and so on only to buy something for them.

If there is any shop or site offering services for BTC that makes any profit please show it to me.

Why are you stuck on the generating time? How long does it take you to generate $$ with your computer? At least compare apples to apples man.

My site is on google blogger which costs nothing and a domain name is only 7 bucks a year. Amazon affilliate commissions more than cover this even the paypal fees. So now Ive proven that at least one site makes a profit what is your next argument?
Your fear and loathing about bitcoin is quite obvious - why all the negativity?

The point is to find your niche not do the same thing everyone else is doing. People might not actually care if they make a profit from bitcoin because it is a hobby and an experiment worth pursuing.

I take my time and use it to earn USD on PS, then I trade it for BTC. Is this a BTC business? Did I profit?

I earn $10 usd daily on my website...


But where does bitcoin play any role in this site?

If its not for profit and just trading coins is a hobby then I have nothing more to say. If sending coins to people is what you like then I see why you guys spend time doing this.

When I find my niche I will not use it with bitcoin but with moneybookers so that I can earn soemthing on it ;)

Thanks for all replies but I will stop asking stuff now since aparently im too negative :S
cya

I make money with my site as well.

Instead of being negative, you should contribute. Help us! :)

It is as simple as accepting Bitcoin as a payment option on your site. Educate others! Spread the word! :D

Forget about generating, you'd better buy them. Generate them if you want to help the system by increasing the difficulty factor.


That's controversial. Banks will use your money what pushes the inflation rate. Your money then loses value, not to mention the economic cycles that such practice creates... USA and Europe are living the consequences of such system right now, many other countries were economically destroyed by it.

Bitcoin inflation rate is hardcoded in the algorithm, and in a couple years it will slow down considerably. In the mid term, it will be slower than any fiat currency in this world.
Bitcoin emission is not controlled by any authority. That's the biggest point you're probably missing.

Regarding your safety concern, there are already services that backup your bitcoins online. And, well, you can do it yourself, it's not that hard. It's much harder and more dangerous to protect physical money on your own.


The possibility to be anonymous as well as the low transaction fees are interesting, particularly the latter.

Also, the low inflation rate will be particularly interesting for those who keep bitcoin reserves.

So, with using bitcoin you aren't able to earn something?
why not?
tell me what exactly the big difference is between moneybookers and bitcoin?
can you generate moneybookers-cash anyway faster than bitcoins? doubt that, cuz you can't generate it at all,
you have to "buy" it first to buy something else for it, it's exactly the same as with bitcoins, although it's still called "USD", or "EUR" instead of MBcoins.

where's your point?

I can not open my bitcoin client and transfer bitcoins to my bank account.

1. taking payments with moneybookers = one click or so and the cash is on my account
2. taking payments with bitcoin = users have to register here, download the software, learn basics of how it works (most people already know how sites like moneybookers or paypal works), send me the bitcoins, I have to sell the bitcoins and when I sell them whats the chanse that the buyer uses moneybookers?

This shows how I feel that bitcoin is a detour.


I am supporting it by using it right now to generate coins, I will get 100 and then I will send them to someone ^^

This is, I believe, the biggest separator between bitcoin backers and mildly curious people; those who believe that bitcoins do infact have intrinsic value, if only for philosophical reasons, or even privacy concerns, don't use BCs to get EUR or USD. It's the other way around. You think in terms of country currency because that's what you use to buy bread and gas, but my personal take is that bitcoins are their own value. Sure, you can't do much with them right now, but think about a month ago... there was no lottery ;)

Bitcoins ARE a detour if you want to go from USD to USD (or whatever currency you use). But that is NOT what bitcoins are about at all.

You keep wanting to covert everything to 'cash', because this is what you know as money, what buys things. Bitcoins are challenging that thought process. US currency in its current form has only been around for decades, not forever as many people believe.

Example:
Assume English is your only language and you wanted to learn Spanish. You learn that 'los manos' are 'hands'. But to people who speak Spanish, 'los manos' are the things at the end of your arm with 5 fingers sticking out of them, they don't know what the spoken word 'hands' are.

Likewise, If I want to sell you a cheeseburger for 30 bitcoins, you probably think 'hmmm. bitcoins are about 6 cents each, that means a cheeseburger is $1.80'. But to those who don't know US dollars, they just equate 30 bitcoins with a cheeseburger.

1. on your account? what account? bank account? you dont even need a bank-account to use (or buy) bitcoins.
2. thats not true, users don't have to register anywhere to use bitcoin, they don't even need to download and install any software themselfes, they can also use webservices like MyBitcoin.
and i doubt they'll get a moneybookers-account without registering one.
sure, if they ALREADY HAVE one, it'd be easier to just use that, but why do u expect that?

This is the same problem I've encountered with a couple of friends I've talked to about bitcoin. A lot of people don't have the economic insight to understand why bitcoins have certain intrinsic advantages over other currencies. To them it's just play money you can generate with some obscure algorithm on a computer and then convert into "real" money. At best they see it as some form of speculation or pyramid scheme (which currently is a deflating factor imho) and in the worst case they see it as some unworldly hippie thing.

Some serious thought should be put into making people understand the intrinsic benefits of bitcoins, but I'm not sure how to do that either. Most people simply don't care and just use whatever money their government wants them to use.

What kind of a nut would want a computer in their home in 1985?
What did people think of a network of computers communicating with each other in 1995?

I don't know what will catch-on and what will fail. Bitcoins seem to solve current problems, and are worth investigation.

So I need to give all my information to a bank or financial site to buy something online? lol

That, and I have 500 dollars on the line. I plan on making it succeed so I can collect my 500 dollars bet.

You make a good point there.
That's not easy, as we can see by this topic.

Maybe we should start with libertarian communities.
I wrote a text for a Brazilian libertarian site, talking about bitcoins. Here's the automatic translation of it: http://tinyurl.com/38llgfq
I could make a "human translation" if the some English (or French) libertarian site wants to publish it.

It would be really nice if we could get a libertarian institute like the Mises or Catto Institute to write something about bitcoins, or even better, to accept them on their online shops. If an institute of this importance start accepting bitcoins, other libertarian institutes might do as well.

Once several renamed institute are accepting btcs, maybe it would be easier to convince "geek" sites like ThinkGeek to accept them. And once many geek and libertarian sites are doing it, it gets easier to convince general purposes sites to do so, since bitcoins do have short term advantages like low transaction fees and anonymous transfers...

i wonder how many users are simply trying to generate some bitcoins just because they can be exchanged for money... it seems to me there are a lot of that kind of users

They are probably wasting money if doing so.... I think that the electricity costs of generation highly exceed what you can get for it.
But, well, let's not complain... they are helping the network by donating processing power to the block building process, as well as allowing us to buy cheaper bitcoins  ;)

I think residents of Zimbabwe would have a special, natural insight into the advantages of Bitcoin.

+1

I was really into both, at those mentioned points, and I didn't have electricity in my home in 1985 or a computer there in 1995.  I think you are setting adoption points a bit late.

Nice thread. I also thought that bitcoin is a money from thin air first. Everybody talked that it's not the point of them but anyway I generated to become rich. Now I see it's pretty useless for creating wealth, too slow and profitless. Generating is needed of course but not for getting rich.

Now I see the great possibilities of bitcoin. Recently a market (https://btcex.com) was opened so I can exchange roubles to BTC and then BTC to PayPal via any other exchanger. For now I didn't calc savings but expect some. Also I can invest some funds in BTC because their cost is growing and then exchange them back to roubles. It's like gold while we can convert it to any country currency. I see here a great future where we'll trade goods worldwide for bitcoins and use regular currency only for bills or buying food. Sadly enough big players like paypal will raise difficulties against bitcoin if they'll see its potential.

As Gandhi said: «First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.» Waiting for laughing...