Yes, ETH continuing to push upwards, looks like the new playground for the next week will be in the 700-800k range. I had thought, and still do a little, that it would come crashing back down by now, but it looks like it has different ideas.

It amazes me how many people jump on a thread such as this, clearly don't read the OP or first page at all, and make a post. For all you latecomers trying to up your post counts, the OP bought his 1 BTC back on the first page and clearly he doesn't need your johnny come lately advice anymore.

BTW bjbear123, congrats on your decision. Even though BTC is down a bit from when you bought it, I have confidence as we get near the halving and beyond your investment will pay off.

I don't know what the big deal is either, even if this is the address of Poloniex, so what? Does it make you more comfortable for an exchange to rent out a $30,000+ a month suite in some expensive office building? Didn't Mt Gox do this and look what that got them.

Spending a ton of money as a startup on fancy offices and other expenses you don't need is a sure way to bankruptcy, not the other way around. You can rent out servers from many reputable hosting providers for the infrastructure, and I am sure most of the support staff can be located remotely, especially moderator type staff, probably in their homes.

Starting out small and growing slowly while preserving capital is the way to succeed, but I guess that idea doesn't hold sway in today's get rich quick mentality.

As has been pointed out, if you buy new hardware you will most likely not make ROI anytime soon, if ever. Most of the people you see on here that are mining have left over rigs or components from their previous days of mining scrypt or other alt coins. Thus since they already had the equipment in place, and assuming it was already paid for from previous mining efforts, they can now currently make a bit extra off mining ETH as it is returning roughly 4x its power cost.

While this sounds great consider that a single 7970 is currently hashing at about 22 MHS, producing maybe 0.8 ETH per day. In an average mining rig, this card will also draw about 200 watts of power if optimized properly. (This figure is based upon draw from the wall from an average rig with 4 GPUS and the motherboard/CPU power overhead evenly dived amongst each card.)

So to summarize, each 0.8 ETH will cost you 4.8 KWh of power daily. So as long as the 0.8 Eth is worth more than your KWh draw per day you are in profit. At today's exchange rate and a power cost 0f 0.10 per KWh you would be making roughly $1.50 per day after costs per card. Considering even a used card will set you back around $150, it would take nearly 100 days to ROI. This of course does not include the other components needed to build a rig and the countless other parts people often overlook, riser cables, racks, fans for cooling, adequate power, etc.

This also assumes everything stays constant. Recent history has shown mining revenue drop from about 1.2 ETH per card a day to 0.8 ETH a day. So even with the recent rise in price, the revenue is slowly declining over time, thus casting doubt on even the optimistic 100 day ROI above.

Long story short, if you already have the equipment or can buy it as fire sale prices, you will probably not make back your investment. If you just want to buy a few parts and play around with it a bit as a hobby, you might get most of your money back, but again look at it more as a hobby that a profit stream. Of course GPUs are still finding some usefulness nearly 2 years after mining scrypt with them became unprofitable, so who knows, maybe new GPU mine-able coins that turn a profit will continue to appear.

TLDR: Mine with a GPU as a hobby not to get rich.

It looks like it is connecting to the pool just fine, do you have anymore output? The next lines should indicate your local proxy settings, something like:


So the LISTENING FOR MINERS ON http://192.168.100.12:8546 should be your proxy local address and port you setup in the proxy config file here:



and which further you should be pointing your miners to using:



Let me know if any of that helped, it is hard to troubleshoot with the limited information given.

The best way to encourage mainstream adoption is not necessarily with skills or elaborate schemes, but simply introducing people to bitcoin. Give BTC as gifts/presents and show the recipient how to use a wallet, or exchange it to cash if needed. Ask small local stores if they accept bitcoin, if they seem interested volunteer to show them how to setup a wallet or to visit Bitpay or other processor to accept BTC and convert it into Fiat. Until people are actually exposed to it, most will seem put-off and not trust it. Once they are exposed, they may embrace it and spread the word further, so if you expose 10 people to BTC and even if only 2 of them go on to expose others to BTC, its adoption will grow.

The problem is most people simply want it to magically succeed with no time or financial investments of their own. By investments, I am not talking about buying 100 BTC and hope it grows, but the investment of giving BTC away to introduce others to it, or donating your time to help people get to know and use it better. That's the kind of investments we are in most need of right now.

Since your argument revolves around the dust, which is worth less than the transaction fee, currently around 0.0001 BTC or about 4 cents, let me ask you if you would pick up 4 cents laying on the ground in a parking lot.

You know the pennies laying under a empty beer bottle in a corner covered in soot, dirt, vomit, possibly urine or feces.

If so, than you would be better off picking up the 4 cents, investing them into bitcoin, than worrying about the dust left on exchanges. If BTC is ever worth $10,000/btc, your 4 cent investment you are fretting over would only be worth about $1.

I bolded your main problem above. As others have already pointed out, you first need to rethink what you are doing and why. I think the better question would be "how to justify using your college's resources alongside Bitcoin to help your college."

As suggested by others, your best course of action would be to get the assistance of either a computer science professor, or perhaps an economics professor, to help justify why your college should begin investigating bitcoin. I think pursuing it from an educational angle would make the most sense, however I suppose you could also try to convince them that they could use it to accept donations, or even perhaps tuition payments, although the later suggestions probably wouldn't fly as well as the first.

There are already several colleges teaching about bitcoin, and more specifically the block-chain technology. You may want to emphasis the block-chain in any presentations, and simply refer to Bitcoin as an example of this technology rather than be the main focus.

Hear, hear! I was thinking the same thing about ordering pizza in celebration of the halving. Hopefully it doesn't cost us 10,000 BTC each.

That's exactly what I thought when reading the title, yet another proclamation of LTC's death because the other 100 posts over the past 2 years saying the same thing weren't enough. I believe LTC has enough life for a few pumps before it goes away.

There appears to be renewed interest in a lot of alt coins for 2016 as we have already seen several pumps. I agree that a rising BTC floats all boats, as most alts are directly coupled to the price of BTC, but I also think we will start to see a bit more independence as the year progresses, including LTC. We had the pump last year where LTC broke above $8 and above the .01 LTC/BTC ratio so it is not always directly coupled to BTC, and I have a feeling we might see a few more pumps. While most alts are only good for pump/dump, I believe over time the more useful alts will begin to take on a life of their own.

Right on man, I get sick of hearing about the pizza guy example as well. Back then each BTC was worth maybe a few cents. It was a $30 pizza if I remember and it wasn't even the pizza guy but a friend who he transferred the BTC to and his friend called the pizza place and paid for it with his CC. But the point is, any one of us had the chance to buy $30 worth of BTC back then with the same expectations of it increasing 1000% as we do now.  A $350 BTC could be $35,000 in five years. Sound crazy? I bet the $1,200 BTC did to the pizza people back then as well.

The bolded part of your quote above is what most people on this forum, or in the larger bitcoin community in general, fail to appreciate. Those with deep pockets and long term timelines do realize this and that is why the next time BTC goes past $1000 it's not coming back. The problem is this doesn't fit within the get rich quick mentalities of most of the people reading this, so there will be plenty more time for gloom and doom before they realize the opportunity they were given but chose to ignore.

It still has a long way to go to become real money. For the most part is is only as real as the amount of fiat it can be exchanged into. Even the merchants accepting it are pretty much an illusion, as most of them are using a services such as bitpay, where the transaction is immediately converted into fiat. Until we get to the point that a majority of merchants are happy to keep the BTC and not instantly get it converted, and further when they can use that BTC to purchase their supplies from the upstream supply chain, who again further purchase resources and labor with BTC, it is simply a token representation of fiat.

With all else being equal the halving will put pressure on the miners to hold out for more return on their earnings. With the block reward going from 25 down to 12.5 and using current prices ~$375 BTC, their income would drop from $9,375/block (25*$375) down to $4697.50 (12.5*$375) if the price did not rise. Mining revenue is already running on razor thin margins, so a prolonged period of  lower prices would force many miners to shut down. This coupled with the fact that the incoming dilution of fresh BTC is also going to decrease from approximately 6000 new BTC/day down to 3000 BTC/day, should combine to strengthen prices over the long term.

This is it exactly, there is no one right answer as there are way too many variables. To answer for you specifically you just figure what you need to live on in your local currency for 1 month, then divide that amount by price (in your currency)/1 btc and you will have the number for BTCs a month you need to live. Of course this will probably vary month by month as the price of btc fluctuates a lot.

BTC is still too new and volatile in price right now to be a reliable means of living off. Even if you managed to secure a steady 2 BTC a month income, and further assuming that was enough in your region to live off of, what happens if the price of BTC drops in half? Sadly, BTC is still very much tied to its value it fiat, so at the end of the day even if you are buying things in btc, it is still priced based upon its relative value in fiat. A 0.01 BTC Starbucks today might sell for 0.02 BTC tomorrow and 0.05 BTC next month.

Well that's the thing, I didn't mind the strict KTC/AML things Coinbase asked for, in fact I thought dealing with them versus some of the looser non-regulated exchanges would prevent this type of thing. I am not one of these guys trying to hide everything I do and thought dealing with the most legitimate exchange would be fine.

The forms BoA sent are asking for a ton of questions on if I am a Money Services Business (MSB), which 99% of the form isn't even remotely connected to my situation. There is one spot asking if my business engages in virtual/digital cryptocurrency, which I assume is what they are targeting.

I will call them again to see what all this entails, but I really don't feel like filling out a lengthy form asking for a lot of non-relevant information just to buy a few bitcoins a year. So right now I am torn between just letting them close the account, or filling out the paperwork on principle, because the other effect this is having on me is it is like they are making me feel like I am doing something wrong. The only thing I am hesitant of filling out the form, is at the end is explicitly states that submitting the form in no way guarantees that they will re-open the account, so it may all be a waste of time in any event.

Yeah, this has me a bit bummed really, I thought this type of stuff was behind us. Now I am hesitant to link up another bank account, as they are a hassle to setup and get going and I need at least one open to pay my regular bills, lol.

Well this seems to be back. I just received a letter from BOA asking about a single Coinbase transaction, sending $300 to them from my bank account. My account is frozen until I fill out the form. Reading these threads it seems they have 0 tolerance for BTC transactions.

Yes, I am buying and the lower it gets the more I will buy. I think all the recent controversy has spooked people too much and BTC is undervalued right now. Once some of the FUD surrounding transaction capacity is cleared up along with the approaching block reward halving, I think a sizable rebound will occur making today's prices seem like they were giving BTC away.