This is very good news. However, what they're doing isn't exactly new. I believe Ukraine was the first to do this when they updated the software on 4,000 regular ATMs to accept BTC roughly a year ago:


Source: http://coinreport.net/btcu-biz-launched-4000-bitcoin-atms-ukraine/

A service in South Korea is currently attempting the same thing too:


Source: http://www.coindesk.com/coinplug-enables-bitcoin-buying-at-over-7000-regular-atms/

Anyway, it's nice to see that what happened in Ukraine wasn't a one-off thing. Hopefully we'll be seeing more and more countries incorporating BTC into their existing ATMs in the future.

Technically speaking, any computer that is attached to a network is not immune to viruses and Linux malware does exist although it's very, very rare and much less likely to cause any significant damage.


That shouldn't be a problem if your computer is encrypted with a 30+ character password via Truecrypt. Even if only your wallet is encrypted, it should still be OK.

Laszlo hasn't been around these forums much these days but he did pop back in a few months ago to reveal that he spent the vast majority of the bitcoins he mined in 2010:

I think most people would agree that all things being equal, Windows is more prone to viruses and malware than either Linux or OS X. Not only because of architectural reasons, but also because there are many more Windows users than Linux or OS X users so obviously more malware will be written for it.


I happen to be in the minority of people who actually prefer Windows XP even after trying Windows 7 and 8. Security issues will definitely be a major concern in the coming years however since Microsoft has ended support for it.


From the reviews I've read, Windows 8 shouldn't be significantly slower than Windows 7.


The start button in Windows 8.1 isn't really a proper start button since it simply brings you back to the start screen with all the tiles.

Ah, OK thanks. I guess if it ever happened that it wouldn't hurt to edit the post a bit before pressing "post" again - i.e. perhaps add an analogy that might explain things in a better way, etc. so that it brings something new to the discussion.

I'm not a miner myself but I understand that dogie (a user here on the forums) has a number of useful tutorials for setting up and configuring miners. Each miner is a bit different but most should work with wireless connections although I've heard that some efficiency is lost compared to a wired setup.

Here is the tutorial for the Antminer S1 but you can click on any of the other miners at the top of the post to view the one for your particular model:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355387

Here is a useful link:

http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparison

As others have said, you can't really mine any significant number of bitcoins using a CPU or GPU setup. You need something called an ASIC which is a type of specialized hardware that is specifically designed to run the calculations used for mining bitcoins and is useless for anything else. These days, you can buy a used ASIC such as the Block Erupter or the Ice Fury for $5-10 that is 10 times better than the best PC's and despite this, they will still only make about a cent or two per day.

But just for fun, I decided to plug in the numbers:

Your Dell PowerEdge R610 has an Intel Xeon X5650 processor and a 8MB Matrox G200 graphics card. The G200 is a graphics card that was introduced in 1998, but is still used today on many servers because it's very cheap (since servers don't need to do any intensive graphics work). It also doesn't support OpenCL which means that you'll need to mine using your processor.

According to the link I posted above, an X5650 running at 2.67 GHz is capable of 28.6 MH/s. And according to Coinwarz, 28.6 MH/s will get you 30 satoshis per day or 0.00000030 BTC at the current difficulty. But since you have five of them, your total earnings per day from mining will be 150 satoshis or 0.00000150 BTC.

Preev says that 150 satoshis is worth 0.0004197 USD. So how long would it take to make a cent? About 23 days.

EDIT: But not all hope is lost! You will be able to make far more money by mining CPU-mineable altcoins. Coins that use SHA-256 (e.g. Bitcoin and Peercoin) or Scrypt (e.g. Litecoin and Dogecoin) are now dominated by ASICs. However, there are many altcoins that use algorithms that do not have an ASIC built for them yet. Many of these are dominated by GPUs but some can still be mined using CPUs. Take a look at the list below for some CPU-mineable coins:

http://www.cpucoinlist.com/

Don't like altcoins? Not a problem! After you mine your coins, you can open an account at an altcoin exchange such as Cryptsy or Poloniex and trade these altcoins for real bitcoins. You should be able to make far more bitcoins using this method than by mining bitcoins directly.

Actually not even IP addresses are sufficient proof that two accounts are separate or that an account isn't a bot. There are bitcoin faucet bots being advertised (e.g. link) which use proxies and various other techniques to evade detection:

Any malware that uses computers to mine bitcoins would be pointless nowadays due to ASICs. Such malware did once exist but those days are now long gone. The only exception is malware that secretly mines altcoins since many altcoins can still be mined on CPUs and GPUs. The article posted by the OP seems to be talking about bitcoin users specifically:

This idea is already being implemented by Bitmixer.io although it measures characters rather than words (the limit being 75 characters).


IMHO this doesn't sound like a good idea at all, and I might even go so far as to say that it goes against the spirit of Bitcoin. Many people here are reluctant to give out their phone number let alone documents proving identity, address, etc. In the past year, I changed my location 3 times and my IP address 4 times (I'm a student). Multiply that by the thousands of members here and it would quickly become infeasible.

How easy/hard is it to get money out of BTC-e?

I have little experience with BTC-e and none whatsoever with Bitstamp but if this is true, then it does sound like a reasonable explanation. Back in mid-late 2013, it was much easier to get BTC out of Mt. Gox than fiat. So naturally more people exchanged their fiat into BTC and withdrew instead of exchanging their BTC into fiat and getting their withdrawal delayed. That resulted in increased demand for BTC and a BTC price that was significantly above every other exchange operating at the time. Usually these sorts of price differences between exchanges can be explained by the ease of getting fiat and BTC in and out, as well as trading and/or deposit/withdrawal fees.

I'd like an opinion from the community about a similar hypothetical situation: Let's say you spent 30 minutes creating, editing, and proof-reading a detailed reply only to find that someone else posted a similar reply that also answered the main points just seconds before you did, would it be best to scrap the post or not?


I'm almost certain that he's talking about marcotheminer. See the message in his sig.

I'm confused about the "withdrawal without fee" part. I'm aware that PrimeDice doesn't require verification procedures but isn't there a withdrawal fee? Granted, it's only there to cover the transaction fee as it's only 0.0001 BTC but it's still something that would otherwise normally be paid by the sig campaign operator.


I remember this too. Stunna said that there was an issue with the bot which counted deleted posts in rare circumstances. The sig campaign seemed to be almost ready for launch by then and tables showing how much each post in what category was worth were posted, but apparently there were a few more delays...

900 satoshis isn't very much and it seems that the site has already been running for about a year. Gotta admit the purpose of the site was a bit confusing at first. I could see that it was an economic game of some sort but there wasn't much information about how exactly it works and whether the things traded there are "real" or not. I found this article to be quite helpful:

http://onbitcoin.com/2013/11/13/goodbye-second-life-hello-bitcoin-new-economy-seventh-continent/

So basically, it's like Second Life - i.e. a virtual world where you can earn money by selling online wares. Second Life was able to create a $500 million internal economy so the idea is that Seventh Continent will do the same for Bitcoin.

"In the past year" means from about early 2014 onwards - i.e. only a couple months after the November-December 2013 spike. Back then, the price of Bitcoin was much higher ($700's) and there were a lot more new people entering the community compared to today.


Someone else already mentioned inputs.io as an example of why it's not a good idea to store your coins on a third party exchange or wallet site and they are correct. There have been many other "hacked" online wallet services and exchanges in the past - the most famous being Mt. Gox which was trusted for many years. One of the first to be hacked was MyBitcoin which was a service that even Satoshi recommended (but only for small amounts). Recently, Bitstamp and Bter suffered major hacks too. I wouldn't feel safe having my coins stored on an exchange. For long term storage, offline or paper wallets are the best solution.


Even for someone with a botnet, it would be pointless trying to mine BTC using ordinary computers. The introduction of ASICs made the threat of botnet mining farms obsolete for Bitcoin. It would make much more sense for a botnet operator to silently mine a CPU or GPU mineable altcoin instead and then convert these coins to BTC via an exchange.


Electrum prompts for an (optional) password after installation so I'm not sure why Bitcoin Core doesn't. In fact, even the ability to encrypt the wallet in Bitcoin Core was a recent addition. Before late 2011, it was impossible to encrypt your wallet unless you used a third party tool. It wasn't until allinvain's 25,000 BTC hack (link) in the same year that prompted the devs to add encryption.

It's a bit off-topic but since the point was introduced by the OP, I'll chime in.

While your idea sounds nice, I would think that it would simply consume far too much time and energy to check each and every single post except for the smallest of campaigns. And it might not be enough to check just the post itself to see if it was constructive or not because sometimes you have to read the entire thread to see where exactly the post fits in and whether or not it actually adds to the discussion. That would require a full-time manager working several hours per day which would increase the expenses of the campaign considerably. In fact, the trend is now towards more automation - presumably since that cuts down on manager/escrow costs.

And I'm not sure if I agree with you that the forums are degrading more and more. The introduction of signature campaigns did degrade the quality of posts but we have had plenty of time to reach a plateau. Signature campaigns aren't a new thing, and even back in 2013-2014, people were spamming their PrimeDice sigs all over the forum.

Ignoring the possibility that everyone here today will be early adopters if Bitcoin's market cap reaches trillions, I think there are different phases of early, mid, and late adopters.

The very early adopters were those who knew about Bitcoin before it started receiving mainstream attention in the run up to the June 2011 bubble. Before then, very, very few people knew about Bitcoin and its price was measured in cents. In fact, it only reached dollar parity just 2-4 months before the first bubble burst. Some of these very early adopters were involved in the cypherpunk community, some had conversations with Satoshi, and many - if not most - were libertarian computer geeks. These people mined BTC on their CPUs and later GPUs although there weren't many places to spend them at the time.

The rest of the early adopters came during and after the June 2011 bubble. By then, Satoshi had long gone and bitcoins were being mined using high-end GPUs. The price was in the single digits for most of this time.

The distinction between the latest early adopters and the earliest mid adopters is quite blurry. Despite staying under the mainstream radar for all of 2012, numbers of Bitcoiners were still growing and the price was steadily rising, albeit slowly. By early 2013, references to Bitcoin were beginning to rise again and the run up to the April 2013 bubble could be considered the transition point between early and mid adopters. Mid adopters bought their coins in prices at the double digits and low triple digits. Early 2013 was also when the first ASICs were introduced.

As for the late adopters, I think it's fair to say that they were the ones who came after the November 2013 bubble.


What do you mean by "investing these bitcoins"? Do you mean that he should set up his own website or trade or that he should invest his bitcoins in a website like a dice site?


I'd hate to sound negative but if it's "meaningless paper" and "numbers on a screen" that puts food on the table, clothes on your back, and a roof over your head, then I would say that it's pretty important.

Hi, I'd like to join the PM only campaign thanks. My details are:

Name: Bizmark13
Posts (including this one): 592
Activity: 336
Position: Senior Member
Address: 1PFMGybSCDnoq8bHtzQD2vUfyHohsH8FF5

And who is the escrow/manager for this campaign? Is it hilariousandco or Muhammad Zakir?

Some very interesting threads in the marketplace lately. There was somebody else around here who wanted to buy a hero account with negative trust so that he could advertise his site in the signature space. That could be an idea. And would possessing a banned account and posting from other accounts using the same IP be considered ban evasion or not?

If you want to go even lower than the S3, then Samsung also has a number of mid-range phones with 4" screens that can be bought for $70-100 new. They have lots of names, e.g. Galaxy Trend, Duos, Ace, etc. They're not as good as the high-end flagship phones but they're still pretty good value for money:



Left: Galaxy Ace Style
Right: Galaxy Trend Plus


$95? That's a pretty good deal. Seems to have good reviews too:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/htc-one-x-1-review
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/phones/mobile-phones/htc-one-x-1101086/review