I do not know why people say a CPU plus a ton of RAM is cheaper and more efficient than an ASIC with exactly the same RAM, but they're wrong. An ASIC can be manufactured to do anything a CPU can do (a CPU is, itself, a type of ASIC after all), and can be made to do it more efficiently by not devoting power or chip real estate to all of the useless tasks a CPU has to be able to do. The only reason we don't have Litecoin ASICs right now is because the market is too small to justify the initial R&D costs. Hell, if I had a few tens of millions of dollars to spare, I'd design one myself just to make the Litecoin people look like idiots (while simultaneously collapsing the Litecoin market completely, since "ASIC-proofness" is its whole claim to fame after it was proved that it was not, in fact, "GPU-proof", as previously claimed).

You're forgetting the obvious: investing is risky. No investment is guaranteed to give a positive return. In a perfect market, the price of an investment is equal to the expected return multiplied by the expected probability that it will actually deliver that return. Companies (and individuals) will invest if they believe (possibly with good reason) that a particular investment is less risky (or would give a greater return) than what the rest of the market believes.

Take Bitcoin for example. I, personally, believe Bitcoin is grossly undervalued. It has the low value that it has because most of the market believes that it is very risky, and unlikely to generate good returns. I, on the other hand, do not think it's as risky as people say it is, and that it has the potential to generate fantastic returns. So I invest in it. All other investments are bought for ultimately the same reason.

It should. With old (<0.8) versions of Bitcoin disk access speed was a major factor, but the latest version uses a more efficient database engine to minimise disk access, so now your CPU is the main bottleneck. Note that if anything else is using your CPU (especially if running bitcoind with increased niceness) that will slow things down significantly.

Run make (with no arguments) from within the same directory that the Makefile is in. This is important. You also need to run ./autogen.sh and ./configure (again from within the same directory) first.

Assuming you unzipped it to ~/cpuminer-master, you should run the following commands:
This will create the executable file "minerd" in the same directory. Run ./minerd --help for usage instructions.

In dynamite, the active ingredient is nitroglycerin, a colourless, oily liquid that goes boom if you sneeze on it. Since this is an undesirable property to have in an explosive if you want the people using it to stay alive, it is mixed with other ingredients to make dynamite (and similar explosives). These ingredients are usually completely inert and serve no other purpose than to prevent the nitroglycerin from exploding when you don't want it to.

TNT, or trinitrotoluene, is a different chemical entirely. It is a yellow solid material which is very insensitive to shock, and therefore can be safely used in its pure form. It is significantly less powerful than dynamite and does not resemble dynamite in any way.

You mean dynamite. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, as he was so appalled by the number of people being accidentally killed by nitroglycerin that he looked to develop a safer means of handling it (dynamite is just nitroglycerin with diatomaceous earth added as a desensitiser). But apparently not everyone thought dynamite was a life-saving invention, as Nobel discovered when a French newspaper published his obituary prematurely, which is what led him to found the Nobel Prize in his will. And yet even today, people still think he was a bad guy. You just can't win.

You know why I did what I did, and you didn't even object to it at the time. Way to miscommunicate, there.

Alright, I accept this punishment... this time. But no more screw-ups, okay?

This one?

I was less excited when Kinect came out, because Konami had already tried something similar with their game Police 911. It was cool and all, but required a level of physical fitness most gamers did not possess.

Nothing. The requirement to upgrade before May 15 is because older versions are likely to stop working after that date. If you were not actually running an older version after May 15, you will not experience any problems. If you were running an older version after May 15 and experienced problems as a result of the bug, upgrading will fix the issue. You do not need to do anything else.

Every single block and every single transaction in the blockchain has to be cryptographically verified by your computer as you download them. That's what's taking so long. A fast Internet connection won't help in the slightest.

I think these people are idiots. Why would anyone accept it as a medium of exchange if it's not useful as a store of value? Being a good store of value or a useful commodity is a prerequisite for something to be used as a medium of exchange.

Hence why I used the qualifier "relatively".

2013-05-20 Entrepreneur.com - Accepting Bitcoin Payments: The Risks and Benefits

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=211871

www.entrepreneur.com/article/226716

Relatively good article, except for the part about bitcoins not being subject to tax. (While I hate taxes as much as the next person here, tax evasion is generally not a good business strategy.)

Yes, there is a chance.

Oh, you want to know what that chance is? Assuming you mine 24/7, and that the difficulty doesn't increase (which is a completely bogus assumption), you'd need to mine constantly for nearly 4 years to have a 50% chance of finding a block. But don't worry, you might get lucky: you have about a 1.5% chance of finding a block within a month. If you don't like those chances, you'd better join a pool.

EDIT: Typo.

Forget the PPA, just download the Linux tar.gz file, unzip it, then in the bin folder you will finds two subfolders, 32 (for 32-bit systems) and 64 (for 64-bit systems). Open the one that corresponds to you system and run bitcoin-qt. That's it. If you want to install it "properly", just copy bitcoin-qt to /usr/bin (requires root privileges).

I was already wary of Ripple before your waring, but thanks anyway.

A private space colony, so that I (and others who think like me) can finally get off this rock for good. It should only cost half a trillion dollars or so to build. I reckon Bitcoin can take me there. Hmm, maybe not.

More accessible exchanges.

The same problem that faces all communities: too many stupid people.

Yes. My thoughts? It's all going to end in tears.

It's money. Money isn't supposed to be fun. Money is supposed to buy fun. If your money itself is fun, there's something wrong with it.

Trading.

In general, most if not all altcoins are just ill-conceived attempts to make their creators rich, as none of them really solve any problem that Bitcoin doesn't and they don't add any real value at all.

I'd like more things to spend them on. That would be helpful not just for me, but also my wallet, as it would increase the value of my coins. Oh, and it'd probably be helpful for other people too, I guess.

18 months.

The latest version of the EasyList filter subscription for AdBlock Plus is blocking the ads on this forum. This is the filter in question:
So if anyone using AdBlock Plus is wondering what happened to the ads, now you know. And knowing is half the battle. (The other half is disabling that filter because I don't think the ads here are that annoying.)