Bitcoin Forum

Hey guys, So I discovered bit coin today from freetalklive.com. I love the idea of the currency. I run my own business and would love to accept bitcoin as payment at some point starting very soon. I have some questions un-realted to that. Just basic user questions.

I run windows. I downloaded the bit coin program from bitcoin.org. I opened it, is that all I have to do to 'create' a bit coin 'account'?

I dont see any option for a wallet in the program. No save, open, backup, nothing. I dont have any bit coins yet. Where is my wallet saved? Do I need to have coins to have a wallet?

I went to bitcoin faucet and entered my bitcoin address. It said I was sent bit coins but nothing ever sowed up. This was about an hour ago. I have almost 108,000 blocks downloaded right now. Shouldn't the bitcoin have showed up? What are the blocks Im downloading?

Is it realistic to use the bitcoin program to generate coins? I have an intel i5 machine running windows 7.

thanks!

Ok I JUST got my transaction from bit faucet and the program stopped downloading blocks at 107896. Can someone explain this to me?

when the bitcoin faucet made the transaction sending you 0.05 bitcoins, it got inserted into the block chain. Once your bitcoin client downloaded all of the available blocks, your client saw that transaction in the chain and so you have the money available to spend now.

It stopped because you got all the blocks. They will trickle in now as new blocks are found roughly every 10 minutes.

Only when the program is mining/generating?

Don't bother with the generate coins option in the bitcoin program. It's too slow and you'll burn more energy than is worth it.

As long as the client is open and has connections it should download new blocks.

No, you hear about new blocks whenever you are connected. Mining means you are doing hard computational work to find a block yourself, that is very hard to do now with only a cpu.

Ok I get it. So is it pretty pointless to mine with my pc?

I like the idea of bitcoin. I like it a lot. Im considering making a couple dedicated mining units to link up with pool mining. It would have to be easy for me to do. I can build a pc but I'm not really familiar with linux. Im sure I can figure something out.

It's less pointless than buying a lottery ticket :)

You might want to look into the various mining pools that have been set up. A bunch of people share results reducing variance. It's set up pretty well, cheating is not possible afaik.

This will get you like .02/day or something instead of a very random result.

.02 BCT? Thats cool considering BCT looks to outpace the dollar.

Does anyone know where I can purchase bitcoins via paypal without heavy fees?

Also how do I keep track of my bitcoins, how do I move/store my wallet, bank it ect?

Is it possible to make a backup and have two wallets?

If I make a copy of my wallet what prevents me from useing both copies? for example if I have 2bct and make a copy then load it onto another computer what happens?

Bitcoin-otc is good for buying coins with paypal, as is coinpal.

coinpal is out of coins.

Amongst the numerous questions you have, one is worth answering right now:

Yes, it is possible to backup your wallet, and you really should do it once you got a significative amount of bitcoins.  Check out the FAQ and the wiki.

You won't be able to spend the coins twice. The network will prevent it. However, Bitcoin is not meant to be run like this, and you might lose coins by accidentally making invalid transactions.

Nice try, anyway.  Not especially smart, but quite an amusingly naïve attempt.

Use separate wallets on separate computers and as different ones acquire btc, use transactions to send them to the one wallet you want to hold most of your btc (and back that one up and encrypt the backups)...and make sure your computer where you run you main btc client is secure.  Sending btc between your different wallets is a great way to get a feel for how it works.  Basically, when you spend btc, you are creating a transaction and broadcasting it...that transaction rapidly spreads through the P2P network (which is why you don't have to send ip addresses or anything when exchanging money with anyone else on the btc network)...the transaction gets confirmed when it is rolled into a block in the chain...multiple confirmations just mean that more nodes in the network have accepted it as part of a valid block of transactions.  It really is a beautiful system on many different levels.

bitjet, I sent you some coins.  Have fun.

and he is usually offline on Sundays.
try today again and or search for his forum here. he usually posts a brief "hello I've stocked up coins" msg there after he reopens with fresh stock of btc.

and for your question from two copies of wallet spending ... one of the transactions would be rejected by the network. depending on the peers connected to your client while spending it's hard to tell which one would make it to the block chain but you would not succeed.

btw to generate coins on your pc just go to menu and check "generate coins" option.
you might not be able to compute a single block in your pc's lifetime but there's also a pool for miners that does rewards per partial computation task. you would contribute to the computing power of bitcoin network and gain some bit pennies

Hey thanks so much man!! I was wondering where those came from.

Im currently doing 14 mh/s on slush's pool. Im picking up a monster graphics card locally tonight!

If you're purchasing a video card for the sole purpose of mining Bitcoin, two things.

1) You might be better off straight up purchasing Bitcoin through an exchange
2) I'd recommend an ATI Radeon 5850 or higher

wow. that's 30x more that i squeeze out of my pc's cpu. enjoy the hard work!

The bitcoin software only allows you to hold, send and receive bitcoins. Just like a real money wallet or bank account.