One more thing I wanted to add.

MINING IS ADDICTIVE!!!  It's fun watching your machines make money. And when everything is working like it's supposed to, you want more machines to make more money.

I started out with 1 Antminer S1. Then bought 2 more. Then bought 3 more. And then 4 more. I wanted to keep buying more but I soon realized that mining is getting to the point of being unprofitable. Then I started looking at more efficient machines like the S4, Spondoolies, Terahash, etc. Final decision was to get out quick before I'm stuck with hardware that I can't even give away.

For me, bitcoins was a good learning experience. I actually made a few bucks overall when I got out.  I had a small farm of 10 Antminer S1's that I set up in my garage. I used the pencil mod to increase the efficiency because the cost of electricity was too high. And also running it at full voltage created too much heat.  In the end, I turned off all the miners and sold a few on Ebay and everything else to a guy locally on Craigslist. I took a loss on the hardware, but the bitcoins I mined during that time made up for it. When I sold my bitcoins, it was exchanging at about $650/btc. I suppose I'm one of the lucky ones that didn't lose a ton of money trying to get in the mining business too late. I learned a lot and I'm still very interested in bitcoins, although I'm not holding any bitcoins and don't plan on buying any. Mining now is completely out of the question because of the incredibly high difficulty and the cost of electricity. Any mining rig I set up now is going to cost me money as soon as it's turned on.

I'd like to ask the users here about how you got started in bitcoins and how you acquire bitcoins.

So the two questions are:

1. When you started, did you MINE or did you BUY bitcons?

2. If you are a regular user of bitcoins currently, do you MINE or do you BUY bitcoins?


To start off the discussion, I can only answer question 1. I mined bitcoins when I started. Then I bought and sold bitcoins through an exchange.
I cannot answer question 2 because I'm no longer a regular user of bitcions.

EDIT: Let me clarify question #1. If you did some sort of service and got paid in bitcoin, you essentially bought it. Even if it was a faucet, you still needed to do something to get paid. That is, the bitcoins were not given to you without any conditions. Would you have done the service for free if they didn't pay you in bitcoins? For any service, doing tasks, or advertising for someone, you would normally get paid in fiat. If you wanted bitcoins instead, you would have to buy it through an exchange. So in essence, you skipped the exchange, and got bitcoins directly. In the end, you still bought it.

Well, I watched the short promo clip on Youtube. Then I noticed something next to the title.
Bitcoin Documentary: Project Announcement: #theBITmovie
507 views 4 months ago

In 4 months, this clip only got 507 views. And probably most of them were from people reading this post today. I'm guessing this thing is going to be a bust.

I thought it said "#theBitch"

I respectfully disagree. Let's say Google starts to accept BTC. It'll make the news and all, but so what? People are still going to do business with Google using their credit card, Paypal, Google card, or whatever. What's the incentive for any of Google's customers to switch to BTC instead of some electronic form of fiat? It's almost like if some other company starts up a Paypal competitor and called it SuperPayMeNow. Why would people switch to SuperPayMeNow instead of what they've been using for years? Maybe this new payment system charges less fees to the merchant. Maybe merchants will offer customers a small discount. But I just don't think these small incentives are enough.

If you're waiting on wall street, it has to be a financially sound investment.  Even more so than traditional investments.
It may take a while because wall street wants to see less volatility and steady and somewhat predictable growth. If you are a large investor who typically gets 12% return, why would you choose Bitcoin over something else?

Perhaps I don't fully understand how bitcoins exchanges hands, either with or without confirmations.

There are a few restaurants that accept bitcoins as payment. If I order a roast beef sandwich and pay them with bitcoins, are they taking a risk if it does not get confirmed?  I realize that the cost of a sandwich is small so they might be ok with that risk. And besides, customers probably won't wait 90 minutes to get their food.

Perhaps this is the main problem with bitcoins that makes it difficult to go mainstream. With fiat, credit cards, or other types of payments, the payment is almost guaranteed immediately (unless it is reversed due to fraud or something else later on).

Just from personal experience, I was in a pool that mined consecutive blocks within about 20 seconds. That was a good day! Just lucky.

I'm sure the shortest ever in history is probably one second or less.

The main thing that countries are afraid of is losing control. Bitcoin is difficult to control from a governing point of view. How much restriction a country will apply to Bitcoin depends on how much they fear of losing control. China, Russia, and some of the non-democratic countries are probably the most fearful of losing control.

My fault, i wasn't clear in my message. I meant to say the first auction, back in June/July 2014. At that time, BTC was valued around $600 USD. And that was won by Tim Draper.

The recent auctions, it has been speculated that the bid prices were between 10-20% under current market value.

Was there ever a statement saying how much was paid for that auction? If I recall correctly, at that time, 1 BTC was valued at about $600 USD.

I turned off all my S1's in October 2014. And sold them all in November for almost what I paid for them. So in the end, I got my ROI plus a bit of pocket change. I would say it's a good experience on learning about Bitcoins and mining, but I won't be doing it again any time soon.

I still have two modded HP server power supplies that I don't know what to do with. They're only worth about $10 or so on Ebay.

Today's news said that the NSA and British intelligence were able to successfully hack into a Dutch company that makes cell phone SIM cards.

I'm thinking, what if Bitcoin hashing was actually a front to do a brute force attack into systems like this? A hidden code breaking hack?

I'm guessing this is why the difficulty has been going up and down the last few adjustments.

Some people (and perhaps farms) are shutting down. Then when they see the difficulty adjust slightly lower, they power up again. Then the next adjustment goes up slightly. Just back and forth until they decide to get out of the business entirely.

Is it possible to arrest someone for money laundering when the government does not officially recognize Bitcoins as currency?

Perhaps people who are broke shouldn't be in the BTC business in the first place. Same goes for any type of investments.

But you have to realize that anyone who frequents these forums are much more knowledgeable and smarter than the general public. Almost every day I hear on the news that people are getting scammed because someone called them on their phone saying that they owe the IRS $300 and need to pay right away or else they'll come arrest them. People fall for this and buy Western Union or prepaid debit cards and pay it right away. Obviously you wouldn't fall for that. Neither would I. But thousands of people do fall for it and they cry about it to the news channels. The fact is, the general public is incredibly dumb and gullible. Ask any random person and they wouldn't even know what the word "encryption" means. In a way, you could say bitcoins are for smarter people.
As a side note, you wouldn't believe how many people STILL put their house key under the front door floormats. I don't know that many people, but I know two people who still do that. It's incomprehensible!!!

That's why fiat have a central authority to try to stop hackers & thieves. If you dropped your credit card in the middle of the street and someone used it, the bank is going to help you. You'll probably get all your money back even though it was your fault.

With bitcoins, you're on your own. If you dropped your paper wallet, no one is going to help you. The same could be said about cash, but that's why I use plastic instead of cash most of the time.

I saw two things happen recently:
1. A big increase in difficulty
2. Exchange rates dropping

What this means:
1. It costs more to mine
2. Mines get less fiat for their BTC

At some point it is going to level off, where a large percentage of miners decide it is no longer profitable to mine (we already see this with cex.io/ghash.io). Another large percentage of miners who are still able to mine for a small profit probably because of cheap electricity (we see this with that  large Unknown miner). Over time, the exchange value for BTC will become stable. In my opinion the exchange value will drop to around $100-$150 before that happens. The up & down swings are making too many people nervous, especially large investors.