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Bitcoin is doing well even given how early we are in the process, but ease of use is sorely lacking. The technical minded can do it, but it needs a Netscape-type increase in ease of use, or an iPhone-type innovation in terms of smartphone ease of use. Bitcoin will do well without that, but the market will expand tremendously if it is as easy as using a credit card.
That my 0.02 BTC
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From the New York Post: http://nypost.com/2013/12/23/government-robbed-me-of-33m-in-bitcoins-silk-road-pirate/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. ... |
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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.
I believe you are right. Going from CPU to GPU had a similar ramp and then slowed until the ASICs this year. |
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...this kid is only 18 ...
KID? He is 18 and can vote etc. This isn't some 11 year old. That said, sorry that he lost it, as others have said, hopefully he can earn it back and get back to where he was. ;-) |
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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.)
Beware stuff from RSA after the potential news last week about selling weaknesses to the NSA for $10 million. |
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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.
This. Eery year it is the same thing, so you haven't missed the boat! |
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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?
I haven't seen a page with it, but if you ask, people will help. :-) |
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Welcome back - glad you found some of them! Did you check any backups too? :-)
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oh ok, so it has to do with the computing power, not the total amount of bitcoins. makes sense to me
Yes. :-) And even that is unlikely for many reasons. |
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Amway has been around since 1959. Those who joined 15 years ago, we're late adopters. It has made lots of people lots of money, bitcoin is not a multilevel marketing scheme though.
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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? It is nearly impossible for anyone to "hold" 51% of all bitcoins and if they did it would mean little. It would cost 100s of trillions of dollars to buy 51%. What you may have been referring to is a 51% attack: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_computing_power |
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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.
They reached a deal on that so as of now it seems to be a nonissue. :-) |
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http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/into-the-bitcoin-mines/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.
...
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No, you are right. Investing one million dollars in January 2013 might have pushed the entire market cap up by $20 million due to an increase in the demand causing the price to rise. It is definitely is an interesting phenomenon - thanks for pointing it out - but to get the market cap to go from $1 billion to $10 billion does not mean that $9 billion was invested. $500 million (or whatever) in demand could produce that. Prices are set at the margin.
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. :-) Yeah, and I don't think there are good stats for the percentages that are trading. Regardless, this is interesting to discuss. |
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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.
This is a good point - a few pieces of inexpensive hardware will let everyone learn, while you are not worried about ROI. |
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Exactly. It doesn't take a lot, in percentage terms, of Chinese people who have some extra money to put them in bitcoin to protect themselves from the currency controls, inflation, seizures etc. to make a large difference in price. At worst they can eventually cash out overseas and have an escape valve if it comes to 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.
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If the hash rate is increasing, the difficulty will not decrease, let alone exponentially decrease. The differences in the process used by Avalon (110nm) and now (28nm?) is tremendous so there has been a large advancement in the chips this year let alone comparing with last year. Even this fall the number of ASICs using a smaller process is large. I agree that eventually the performance increases per chip will slow, but we're not there yet. Difficulty increases will slow when most miners are running 28nm process or smaller chips. Like the shift between CPU and GPU - there was a huge increase, then a leveling off.
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?
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When I check the market cap of bitcoin after every price spike, I found an quite interesting phenomenon, half the fiat money poured into bitcoin will stay in bitcoin network and never go back.
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? No, you are right. Investing one million dollars in January 2013 might have pushed the entire market cap up by $20 million due to an increase in the demand causing the price to rise. It is definitely is an interesting phenomenon - thanks for pointing it out - but to get the market cap to go from $1 billion to $10 billion does not mean that $9 billion was invested. $500 million (or whatever) in demand could produce that. Prices are set at the margin. |
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If we are looking at it from a UI perspective, we're definitely 1993 or before. Pre-Netscape, using gopher, ftp etc etc. While obtaining and using bitcoin is easier than before, it is not yet easy enough for everyone.
From a search engine perspective, we are pre-Google, around an aliweb, web crawler, lycos.com search, so maybe 1994-1995.
If we are looking at it from a domain name perspective, I'd say we are 1995ish. A lot of the really valuable domain names have been registered, there are some still out there, but a lot of are gone - a lot of coins have been mined, you can still mine them with ASIC etc, but not like even a year ago.
Whatever the case, although the link doesn't really involve bitcoin, it hopefully is a good indication of where we are on the adoption curve.
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