The Internet “pirate” accused of running the notorious illegal-drug-peddling Web site Silk Road claims that the feds are the real buccaneers — robbing him to the tune of $33.6 million worth of the encrypted, virtual currency bitcoin.

Ross Ulbricht — who was arrested in October for allegedly masterminding the mysterious “deep Web” site — recently filed legal papers in Manhattan federal court admitting he “has an interest as owner” of the more than 173,000 bitcoins the government seized through forfeiture from Silk Road.

Now that we are on full custom ASICs we are done with the multiple order of magnitude increases in efficiency.

From were on out advances in mining hardware will be bound by Moore's law, doubling every 18 months so, as die shrinks and incremental architecture improvements are achieved.

I would expect that by this coming summer (Northern hemisphere) we will be able to purchase equipment that will not be obsolete nearly as quickly as we see now. 

...this kid is only 18 ...

I would like to encrypt my wallet.dat file on my PC and flash drive, etc.  What is the best encryption to use for it?  I have PGP Desktop Encryption and know about TrueCrypt as well.  I guess I could use both of these together or are there other ideas.  Thanks.

(And I am not considering a paper wallet, so please don't go off on a tangent about those.)

Everyone reading this post is an early adopter. When I got into bitcoin in 2011, people were posting, "I wish I were an early adopter." Now people call me an early adopter. In 2015, people will tell you they wish they were an early adopter, just like you.

Hello Bitcoin Forum,

after hours of reading the Forum, i´m still not grasping all of this bitcoin-terminology and phrases and abbreviations. I looked for a sticky post at various places in the forum but couldn´t find one. Does such thing exist here?

oh ok, so it has to do with the computing power, not the total amount of bitcoins. makes sense to me

Is it possible that Bitcoin will be regulated? And if it will be, then how would we know I have heard stories, speculating that if someone holds 51% of the total amount of BTC they will have kind of a monopoly position and can make or break the coin alltogether. Is this true?

I suspect it will begin to climb this week and sustain a positive trend through January.

Another major factor to consider is that here in the US we have another government shutdown looming in February...

I'm very confident that all cryptos will increase in demand after that.

So there are 2^160 public keys but only 2^96 private keys? Ho does that add up?
Are there private keys than unlock more than one public key?

On the flat lava plain of Reykjanesbaer, Iceland, near the Arctic Circle, you can find the mines of Bitcoin.

To get there, you pass through a fortified gate and enter a featureless yellow building. After checking in with a guard behind bulletproof glass, you face four more security checkpoints, including a so-called man trap that allows passage only after the door behind you has shut. This brings you to the center of the operation, a fluorescent-lit room with more than 100 whirring silver computers, each in a locked cabinet and each cooled by blasts of Arctic air shot up from vents in the floor.

...

At the end of each day, the spoils are divided up and sent to Cloud Hashing’s customers. Last Wednesday, for example, the entire operation unlocked 225 Bitcoins, valued at around $160,000 at recent prices. Cloud Hashing keeps about 20 percent of the capacity for its own mining.

...

oh, yeah, my mistake. How much money it need to push the market to 14 billion depends on the proposition of bitcoin flow in the market. If just half of them are trading, half of the cap changing is the new money in to push the market that high.

Overall, the project is a great idea.

Regarding the mining. Consider that if you spend 25 BTC on mining equipment now, it is unclear if it will ever mine 25 BTC. You don't need expensive equipment to experience the mining process. A Block Erupter will give you the same understanding as a Neptune.

The beauty of Bitcoin is that it takes only a small investment to get started using it. Once people are comfortable using it, they will find ways to make use of it.

I don't understand why Chinese guys want to sell bitcoins and get CNY.
The smartest move would be spending all remaining on exchange CNY to buy cheap bitcoins. This will be the best investment in their life.
I bet the owner of BTCchina has already grabbed as much as possible BTC and has become the part of bitcoin elite.

Even if you need to convert some of bitcoins in CNY, you can just go to Hong Kong, sell BTC for USD and then convert it into CNY.

Yes I watch network hashrate every day. I know it's increasing but that's my point.

You don't have to believe me, just look at the network hashrate increase. That's my point. Even with such network hashrate jumps teh difficulty shoudl exponentially decrease but it seems to be rising steadily at the same pace. There hasn't been any sudden technoogical advancement in chip performance so even if number of hashing chips grows the diffculty should increase should slow down until there is new more efficeint technology instiruduced (even much faster chips).

By the way, do you have any ideas where recently plugged in rigs may be coming from? Some larger companies introducing their own bespoke rigs maybe?

Does the market cap increase reflect the cash in?  The market cap can increase simply by a price increase without any new cash in?  Am I missing something?