I would be nervous taking out a loan in bitcoins.  I am paid in fiat not bitcoins so the rapidly changing price of bitcoins could bit you in the butt if it goes against you.  And it almost certainly would at some point, assuming a decent sized loan.

Actually yeah, thanks for reminding me of that.  There are legit cloud miners out there, I like hashnest.  But if it seems too good to be true then it most likely is.  You can check here, not just for cloud mining but for other bitcoin related sites as well.  If it isn't on this list that doesn't mean that it is safe, as lemipawa said you should do your homework before putting your money into any investment, be it cloud mining or other.

This is why I think pushing side chains, which are unproven in practice, is not the best solution right now.  It is the hard way, the easy way is increasing the block size limit.  Sidechains might be great in the future but they need lots of work to deal with the problems mentioned above.

You don't want to solo mine, join a pool instead.  Also you might want to think about cloud mining.  I guess it all depends on your budget:  If you have a ton of cash and cheap electricity then you might be able to do very well at mining.

I agree.

China has a vested interest in the dollar being the international currency.  They are one of the biggest buyers of usa government bonds so they want a strong dollar not a weak one.  If this did happen it would be a slow process taking many years.  I doubt that it would be a fast change.  Even if the big players want to change the international currency, they dont want to break the system to do it.

Interesting.  Even if they are not technically on wallstreet this is a good development for bitcoin.  Any time it gets in the news is good, and overstock isn't exactly small potatoes.

Start with your cost of electricity and then go from there.  The equipment you can get varies quite a lot in power and efficiency.  If you are interested in mining, but your electricity costs are too high, then you can go to hashnest and buy some hash there.  But it has gotten really difficult for home miners to make a decent return.

This site looks awesome.  I suppose I will have to wait a very long time before they expand to the usa

I was sort of scratching my head a little bit at this one as well.  I just don't see the big deal with those articles.  Sure they are pretty well written, but so what?  Maybe the chinese have a spell checker and grammar checker or something.  I just don't see any evidence of a shamwow.

I only need to see as far as the free .5 btc.  Now way can a company afford to give that out to customers, unless they have a huge minimum to qualify for it.  Something like a 10 btc minimum.

Are these for the usa?  Do they include state laws as well?  I figure eventually the big software companies like turbotax will include bitcoins, but personally I am not holding my breath.  Do you have a longer, more in depth review to offer for these programs?  It is always helpful to read about things from someone who has actually used them.  Thanks for posting this I will have to check them out.

This is just another piggy bank for lawyers to dip their hands into.  Before too long there will be (more) convoluted laws to traverse when using bitcoins.  This is where they make the big bucks.  They write the laws in some secret code that only they know, and then you have to pay them to decipher it.  Damn I hate lawyers.

Cool!  Every time a new business starts accepting bitcoin it is a huge win.  Slowly the exposure of cryptos is gaining.  In a few years I bet the average person knows what bitcoin is, even if they don't personally own or use them.

Ah I see.  Now that you mention it I could see one of the major social medias accepting bitcoins as a publicity gimick.  Especially second tier ones like google+ or myspace.  I think people still use myspace, don't they?

But what does everyone else think.  Would it really make a difference of facebook started taking bitcoins?  I wonder if it was effective for taringa, a local social media site, because their user base already used quite a lot of bitcoins?

Oh god, someone has opened pandora's box.  You could have at least posted this thread in local or somewhere that not all the noobs will see. 

I eagerly await the storm of new posts 

So, in plain english what is the stealth bip and why should the average non-techie noob like me care? Is is a modification to make bitcoins more anonymous?  That is what it sounds like to me but I am not sure.

I am not convinced that this will have a large impact on the price of bitcoins.  Also margin trading is dangerous.  I never do it because I am not confidant enough in my abilities to not get called.  Maybe some day!

I think the difference is that with stocks and related funds you can put some numbers behind the movements.  If earnings go up then generally the stock price will as well.  BUT interest rates are sure to go up soon which should have a negative impact on the price of stocks.  Also corporate earnings have been lowering.  I think that in the short run buying any stocks has a lot of risk because the market is generally overvalued. 

Bitcoins on the other hand are really hard to predict.  I think it can basically be boiled down to how much money is coming in or going out.  This can be really hard to predict with any accuracy.  Past performance of a CEO for a stock can be a good indicator that he will perform similarly in the future.  A company producing good can be researched.  You can find out how much demand there is for the product.  For me bitcoin is more mysterious. You never know what will happen.  As an investment I think it is a high risk-high reward kind of game.  If you hold them long term and they are still around in 10 years then bitcoins will almost certainly be worth a great deal.  But on the other hand you just never know what will happen in the future.  It is risky and as others have said the best thing to do is diversify.

Wait what about that article that says he was found in California?  Is that just an April fools joke or something?  Or is it that we like to have our conspiracy theories regardless of the truth

I never even heard of taringa before.  I guess I am getting old lol.  I doubt major sites like facebook and twitter will start accepting bitcoins any time soon, bit it would be really cool if they did.