I was just going to write something similar.  A way to separate people from their money.

No one can tell you your risk level.  A single bitcoin could be worth a lot in the future or worth nothing.  Many people believe it has a ton of potential and will be worth a lot, but there are no guarantees.

If you are not sure, think of it as a lottery ticket - it either is worthless or pays off a lot.  But whether or not you should put money into it, that only depends on whether you could afford to lose it if it came to that.

My own take is that I think bitcoin has a lot of potential, a lot of uses, and a great future, but that there are always risks.

:-)

Extremely unlikely.  It is a very good bet to take too since they are taking them in bitcoin: heads you win, tails they lose.

Good point. I think the more accurate statement based on history is:

"Central authority makes fiat a risky form of money. "

Sure.  There is a lot of information here and online, many times it is difficult to know where to start to find an answer.

:-)

Encrypted wallet, making sure your machine is not infected by malware - or better, not connected to the network.

See:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet

I agree, the so-called economics books like The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and A Treatise on Money are the "astrology" books of economics to the "astronomy" books like The Road to Serfdom, or A Program for Monetary Stability. BTW, great analogy shawshankinmate37927.  If you are learning economics from books like TGTEIM, there is no point in discussing.

 

Good advice.

Also OP, think about what you mean by "actual money". Look at the actual nature of the euro or dollar or yuan. What are they backed by, if anything. What is the purchasing power history of each.

No one can tell you the answer to your question because no one knows. It is all speculation based on use, supply, demand and adoption.

Because people who say it is deflationary mean it is after around the year 2140 but conveniently leave that out to try to confuse people - or are uninformed. 

Running it Online? Yes, that is risky.

Downloading and running locally (from a site you trust) and not connected to the net while running it, safe machine etc, that is safer.

I agree that at the next halving prices will change for the better. But at the last halving nothing much changed for quite a while. It will be interesting to watch in summer 2016.

Frankly' explanation is a good one too.  Prices are set at the margin.

Good article. Somewhat telling is the comments - only a few idios commenting (so far). A year ago the ratio would've been reversed.

That depends on the actual question:
1. What if no one uses Bitcoin Core and they only try to use light wallets?  No one is processing transactions, building blocks etc.
or
2. What if no one uses Bitcoin Core but uses some other non-light wallet?  Everyone is just using different software.  If the question 3 years ago had been "What if no one is using Bitcoin-qt 0.3" then they'd see the answer today.  It is just running different software.

#1 - If no one is processing transactions or blocks, bitcoin is dead.
#2 - Things continue using different software.


#1 won't happen as long as there is economically valuable activity with bitcoin.  And there is plenty of economic activity now.

+1

When people like it, it is "saving".  When people don't like it, it is "hoarding". 

When someone wants "saving" the "consumer culture" is attacked and people need to spend less; when they want spending, it is "hoarding", people have bought too much and need to do something else with it.

Also, to ask a bit more than DannyH asked, what computer?  What OS?  How much memory?  What speed CPU?  You just said "PC".

What speed is your connection?  


Think about this:  The current largest block is about 1MB (1,000,000 bytes) , every ten minutes (on average, maybe 7-8 sometime when hash rate is increasing rapidly), meaning, even if it is every 7 minutes on average you have:
1,000,000 bytes/(60 seconds/minute * 7 minutes) = about 2300 bytes/sec bandwidth needed to keep up.  A 28.8kbit/s dialup modem should be faster than that.

Full blocks are not the norm so you should be able to keep up with an even slower connection.  (This is just downstream, not upstream speed).  This is why we're are curious about the specs.

As others have said, if the bottleneck really is connection, one of the light wallets makes the most sense.

:-)

This belongs in a different section too [edit: it was in the Dev and Tech area]. But without valid transaction IDs etc it will be hard for anyone to help except the two parties you list above.

I guess not reading and not caring about it.

People just stopped reading the format and no one seems to be moderating the section so for the past 18 months it has been pretty much anything goes. Likewise, many of the links are not "notable" but just spammy links to non-notable sites that are reprinting other people's news.

This section at one point was useful, but now you have 5-10 copies of the same article, just repackaged on different sites and so it is not super-useful to actually find new information.  It is useful if you want to send traffic to your web site.  ;-)

That is wrong too.  See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=246823.0

It should be 2014-09-13  - no brackets, not in August, two digit month, plus site plus headline.

E.g.:
POST FORMAT: YYYY-MM-DD SITE - HEADLINE

2014-08-14 Cointelegraph.com - Is The Paypal/Braintree Deal Good For Bitcoin

The format is completely ignored now by almost everyone now, but if you are going to correct the format, at least do it properly.


And this is good for bitcoin.  Anyone using bitcoin is good for bitcoin.

Yes. They can't be lost due to an orphaned block.

Just don't lose the private keys.