It does not happen exactly every 10 minutes, as was said above if you look at the actual block times they vary by quite a bit. Sometimes you get two blocks within a minute, and sometimes it takes over an hour to get a block, but the average is 10 minutes.

Think of it like if you roll dice, if you roll a 6 sided die once a second you would expect to get a 1 about every 6 seconds. But sometimes you would roll a 1 two times in a row, and sometimes you would roll a bunch of other numbers, but on average the 1 would come up about every 6 seconds.

If more people start mining bitcoins then the blocks will start coming faster. Like in my die rolling example, if you start rolling two dice then you will get a 1 twice as often. But what happens is the bitcoin protocol adjusts the difficulty every so often (about every two weeks, but actually there is a set number of blocks which it recalculates at). So in our dice example, after rolling two dice for a while you get changed to 12 sided dice, so then the rate of finding 1's goes back to where it was before.

The difference between this and brute forcing a password is that there are more possible answers for this (any number less than difficulty, as opposed to just one right answer). You could make an estimation of the time it takes to do a brute force, but since you are just looking for one answer the probable time is less meaningful, people usually state the time needed to try all possible passwords. So if your brute force can run through all possible passwords in 10 days, the average time to find the password would be 5 days, but you might find it in the fist day or you might find it in the last day.

I have 3 (yes, just 3) shares of bakewell, so I guess I'll register too.

We don't really have gypsys around here, is calling somebody a gypsy trader supposed to be insulting/racist?

Or, if I want to use the money as savings, I can just convert them to bitcoins. That's the nice thing about having exchanges, if I earn USD I can convert them to bitcoins, or if I want to pay somebody who does not take bitcoins yet I can convert my bitcoins to USD.

I get it now! Ciuciu is actually a MP sock puppet, and he drums up interest in all the MP threads by being a useless troll/devils advocate, thus bumping the threads to make sure everybody sees them. Genius!

It was not a matter of the website being slow, the domain name registeration expired and we still have not heard any response from Evoorhees. Could he at least pop into the thread and say "Hey, I noticed that, fixing it now"?

I think ripple will actually increase the bitcoin market. They are complimentary, Ripple does not fill the same niche as bitcoin, but it does allow things like instant transactions and community credit creation.

The average day trading income does not have to be 0, since there are other people in the market. People who are investing for the long term will just do a market buy, or people who are taking out their savings will do a market sell. The spread between the buy and sell prices allows the market makers to make money while holding the price relatively steady. Basically, the speculators are earning some profit for providing liquidity to the market for the other market participants.

I have used bitcoins to buy and sell things, mostly shares in companies (at places like btct.co and bitfunder.com). Do you have any proof that most people only hold bitcoins as a speculative asset? Look at how many transactions are in every block, clearly people are using bitcoins. If nobody used them for anything but speculation, then they would all just sit at MtGox and nothing would be on the blockchain.

Today I earned about a bitcoin worth working at my job. (Hourly wage for 8 hours, I earn USD, but I earned the USD equivalent of a bitcoin)

Or maybe it is just the cyclic nature of using bitcoins: A bunch of people buy some bitcoins, which pushes the price up, they then go buy stuff with the bitcoins, the merchants then sell the bitcoins which pushes the price down again.

This did not make sense, if btct.co waived the fees for the traded shares, then they would not support the site. The fees are pretty low, if you are not making enough money in trading and dividends to basically ignore the fees then you are doing something wrong.

The price has only gone up ... MPOE is in a massive bubble! SELL SELL SELL 


This is a nice example of an investment that does not go down in price when the price of bitcoins rises.

I bet if you do a google search for 'bitcoin hashrate calculator' or some variation thereof you can find one of the websites that has a calculator where you input your hashrate and the difficulty and it will output your expected btc generation speed.

The fundamental reason people quote the hash rate and not the btc rate is that the hashrate is basically fixed, and determined by the hardware you are running on. The btc rate will fluctuate according to the current difficulty, so while you might be making 1 btc per day now, after the difficulty changes you might only be making 0.5 btc per day, even though your hardware is still running at the same speed.

This is a good point. People talk about how savings or 'hoarding' cuts money out of the economy, so it is bad, but maybe it is actually good for the economy to have some low-risk savings slowing things down. That way, when the inevitable boom-bust cycle turns downward the effect is smaller. It is a matter of pacing, like running a long race, if you start running too fast you will collapse.

Clearly you have the cause and effect of the Shyamalan one backwards. His movies started to suck before the newspapers sales dropped off. Therefore, we can blame the decline of newspapers on Shyamalan's crappy movies.

It is well described by the term address, similar to sending mail to a physical address or sending email to an email address. Send bitcoins to a bitcoin address.

Once you actually use the system it makes perfect sense.

+1

I don't think he even tried to get data. There are better researched articles in the speculation forum here with titles like "SELL SELL SELL". How does this count as press? It seems more like the mad ramblings of a bored college student.

Looks like the price is stabilizing at about 8.1 or so. I predict this is like a repeat of last summer, we will have generally stable price for a while, perhaps with a gentle rise and fall, and in a few months the price will start moving down again.