I will exchange for gold. 1 btc = 1 troy ounce of gold. Not cheaper. )
It wasn't that long ago that such a day arriving seemed so far off. With gold dropping the chances of Bitcoin hitting that in the next year or two (or less even) would not be surprising. |
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What's the best way to make a deposit from Canada to BTC - e?
You can make an international wire transfer (using USDs) but it probably won't be cheap. - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BTC-E#Deposit_optionsAnother method is to open an OKPay account and wire money to them that way. |
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he's too old to understand Bitcoin.
His age has nothing to do with it, but his target market that reads his words certainly does. He's simply using a tired argument that exchange rate volatility is bad for a currency. He's not incorrect, but that doesn't mean bitcoin won't succeed as a currency. There's a difference. He probably knows that but is describing to his audience what they want to hear. Now what is surprising is that Steve Forbes isn't making the connection between Bitcoin catching on and that helping his cause of moving to a flat tax. If bitcoin essentially makes income tax something voluntary (since the state will have a much harder time with enforcement of the tax laws) then a flat tax is about the only solution. For some reason, either he hasn't made this connection or doesn't want to share it. |
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But still I think a fundamental equation holds that the market will balance when:
rate of mining income = rate of capital repayment + rate of profit + electrical power cost
Can we agree on that? Over the long run, yes. the rate of electricity consumed will remain broadly proportional to USD/BTC. i.e. even if ASICS turn out to be 3 times more efficient over their lifetime, that won't compensate for the price of BTC increasing 1000 times.
Absolutely, if there is a doubling in the exchange rate, there will be a proportional increase in the amount of electricity consumed, unless further efficiency from hardware design can (and likely will) come. I had expected the cost of hardware to drop as higher quantities are produced but with demand far outstripping supply we're not there yet. But regardless of the proportion, you are correct. A higher exchange rate will cause a greater amount of electricity to be consumed. There was handwaving about this in the media as early as 2010 when most mining was on CPUs, ... with projections that if bitcoin caught on it would consumer a quarter of all the world's electricity demand (or some whack number like that). Even using the power draw if all mining were done on GPUs today, daily power consumption is a fraction of the daily energy consumed at even one gold mine (my assertion, without actually having calculated it but I've literally stood under the trucks that mine ore and can say with confidence that moving dirt around consumes one hell of a lot of energy.) |
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Alright alright, I didn't know that there was an eating in restaurant option!
Is that really offered? Then why do they only show takeout / delivery on the site? |
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it will just rise up to fast so no one will use it to buy products because 1 day you can be paying $100 and the next you just paid $200 due to the bull market.
Care to answer why FedEx and UPS have dropped off packages today then? (ordered a week ago today, as the exchange rate was rising). Incidentally, I've not made a single purchase using bitcoins since the selloff began. This would seem to be counter to the hoarding argument. I make more purchases with bitcoins when I think the exchange rate is too high. |
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There will be a tendency for the same electrical power to be used whatever the technology. ASICS just go faster for the same power.
I doubt that. It might cost $400 for a GPU that burns over $400 per year in electricity. So given a 2 year useful life of the GPU, about a third of the mining costs are incurred for the hardware cost and two-thirds are attributed to the electricity. With a $5K Avalon ASIC, that chews $780 per year in electricity. So given the same 2 year useful life, about three-quarters of the mining costs are incurred for the hardware cost and just one quarter is attributed to the electricity. So over time the tendency will be for mining to reach break-even, then at that point two to three times more electricity will be consumed when mining is on GPUs versus when on ASICs [Edit: at the same BTC/USD revenue level]. |
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Can my coins somehow be retrieved?
If you made a backup, try that first. (Well, make a backup of the possibly bad wallet.dat before restoring anything). Or try importing it here and then if that works, start over with a new, empty wallet.dat and send the funds back. - http://blockchain.info/wallet/import-wallet |
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I have a bunch of old BTC transactions between 4/10 and 4/12 that were confirmed long ago. But somehow today, they all suddenly appeared as not confirmed. Newer transactions are not affected.
Any ideas what's going on?
A confirmed transaction can drop to unconfirmed if was double spent when a block reorg had a different transaction. That doesn't happen a whole lot, and the transactions affected during the March 11th hard fork were the only ones since 2010 that a transaction with six confirmations on the longest chain reverted to being unconfirmed. So if you had a confirmed transaction revert, it would have had just one confirmation most likely, Check to see if the payments show on Blockchain.info. |
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cool, I just rsvpd for the meetup on monday.
Any report on how that went? Also, heads-up: Next week in Southern California (Los Angeles and/or San Diego, I couldn't make it out), the first Bitcoin ATM will be deployed [Edit: demonstrated]. - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=177397.0 |
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I'ld like to know more about where this ATM (s) will be in Southern California.
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Very, very nice! How about a secure (SSL) site? - http://m.sarafu.net [Edit: the mobile site itself is secured with SSL.] Also, the domain is registered with privacy protection. Who is the operator (i.e., you personally, or a company/LLC)? And security of E-Wallet, ... are coins kept in cold storage with a hot wallet? |
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Members of the bitcoin community are starting to wonder if anarchy is the best policy,
We don't have anarchy. Competing exchanges have been regulated out of existance. BitMe.com shut down hours after FinCEN guidance was released saying they would be classified as a money transmitter. If we had anarchy, BitMe would still be taking cash and selling bitcoins. If he had anarchy, then the operators of ICBIT exchange would be willing to share info like who they are and where they are located. Because trading of futures contracts is a regulated activity in most areas they operate anonymously. When the exchange rate was skyrocketing, over the past weeks there was lots of interest in buying contracts but there wasn't much liquidity. Part of the reason is counterparty risk - who feels comfortable sending larger amounts of bitcoins to sites operated anonymously? If we had anarchy, or just free markets even, we wouldn't have had such a spike to $266 because hedging and shorting would have absorbed the upward pressure and then on the way down short covering would have provided support rather than seeing a drop to mid-double digits. We need LESS regulation, not more. We need MORE freedom to transact among ourselves without intervention. |
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...I may have wasted my time, unless people find the services like automatic FX rate conversion and the ability to pull the prevailing exchange rate via SMS useful. I also intend to add services like FX rate and GoxLag notifications, should interest present itself.
No, you most definitely did not waste your time. There is one risk though. What if an evil network engineer for the mobile carrier is sniffing and/or intercepting the SMS traffic. What risk of loss occurs? |
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I commented in the article: Litecoin is a proof-of-work based currency just as Bitcoin is. That means it is also vulnerable to a 51% attack, just like bitcoin is.
However, to reach 51% of hashing capacity with Bitcoin you need tens of millions of dollars worth of GPUs and FPGAs (ASICs would work too and cost less even but every one produced is already allocated to buyers and thus delivery is not available).
For Litecoin, that number necessary is much less, a fraction of a million dollars, or much less even due to Litecoin pools not being mature and able to remain up during a DDoS attack.
The steel door of a bank vault needs to be just as thick whether it stores inside just one million dollars of funds or two billion dollars. The same scenario is at play here.
So Litecoin simply is not simply a less costly sibling that using a different hashing method, it is a completely different animal when you consider the risk profile.
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