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There are only 7.2M in circulation right now, so USD$7.2M would let you back it at $1 per.  As more are mined you would need additional donations of course.

If you did that in this market, people would sell into it heavily and you'd end up holding a lot of coins and a little fiat.  It would certainly hold the price rock solid at $1 for a long time since you'd presumably also keep an open sell order at $1 and it'll be quite a while before you sell them all off again.

So, two things:

1) where will you find someone willing to donate millions for this project?

2) Who can be trusted to run an account this large?  I think it can't be distributed because that would allow people to pull out their funds - you'd have speculators "backing" it as a pump tactic, but as soon as the price fell to $1.20 they'd pull out before having to actually use their money.  What centralized authority can be entrusted with that much?  Is that even a good idea?

I like SMPPS since it has the best of everything: low variance, easy auditing, minimal to zero fees, no problems with poolhoppers.  The only downside is your payouts are slightly delayed.

I left Eligius because I object to littering Christian prayers all over the block chain, but in every other regard they run a good shop.  Arsbitcoin is my new choice for a midsize SMPPS pool.

Thank you sir for your part in an unusually long run of civil and intelligent debate.

Transactions are nearly instant, but most places wait 6 blocks (about an hour) before they'll ship the goods you purchased.

What was the final destination?


The transaction actually occurred as soon as you clicked OK, and it was "confirmed" in about an hour.  The delay was while your bitcoin client (the wallet software) was downloading all the transaction history.  It only has to do that once and everything should be quite fast thereafter.  I do agree that it's cumbersome and it doesn't communicate why it doesn't see your transaction yet while that's happening.


A planned improvement for the software is to make it work without downloading the entire blockchain.  This will prevent the first-time startup delays you experienced.

Mining with that rig will roughly break even right now, or probably be a little bit negative.  If the exchange rate falls (Likely in the short term; long term it's entirely speculation but I'm speculating it'll go down) his profitability will become more negative, since difficulty trails price.  Newer more efficient GPUs will drive profit down as well (difficulty will rise).  Long term mining is only really profitable when the price is rising faster than people can buy GPUs.

I advise against speculatively investing in BTC.  My reasons are over here:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40214.msg498449#msg498449

It's real easy.  You just click "trade", then under "Buy Bitcoin" tell it how many you want to buy (say 4), and the max price you're willing to pay (for a small order just add $0.50 to the current "ask" price shown on the left).  The market will automatically buy them for the best available price under the "asks" chart.

If it can't be filled immediately (ie, the price went up more than $0.50 while you were filling out the form) your order will stay open until someone offers to sell at your price.  If you don't want to wait, you can cancel the order and then open a new one with a higher max price.

This will usually get you a better deal than buying for cash in person.  If you want I can send you a few bitcents to try trading back and forth.

http://www.tradebitcoin.com/

Streetcorner dealers are standing by.

I stand corrected.  Synaptic has the right idea.  Lord knows I got my $50 worth.

Gold may be a commodity, but unless you're planning to produce something with it, it's just another currency.  Trading to gold directly reduces friction, but that doesn't increase stability unless you're planning to offer a long-term fixed exchange rate.

rageredsonic:

Your parents are probably right.  If you only have $10 per week to spend, there are probably better things you can spend it on.  You should understand that BitCoins are high risk, and I would not recommend that you buy them unless there's something you plan to buy with your BitCoins.

So, that said, if you still think you want them, here's what you need to tell them:

The point of an allowance is for you to learn how to manage money.  That doesn't mean spending it on things that your parents think you should.  It means giving it to you, and you learning to deal with the consequences of the choices you make.  If you lose a few weeks of allowance but you learn an important lesson about markets and economics, it'll be probably the best $50 you'll ever spend in your life.

It's been there before.  I believe it's going there again, based on market fundamentals. I've ranted enough about it in Economics and Speculation, so I won't repeat it all here.

There's no force that holds it over $1 (other than a bump in market support that will make it hover there for a few days), and there's no reason it becomes useless at that point.  There was a small but successful BC economy when it was a small fraction of a dollar.

Their volume is around USD$2M per week, give or take.  They keep about 1%.

BitCoin fluctuates so much that I doubt you could make any definitive correlation.  Admittedly I haven't tried.

What would you use as an objective measurement of value that's responsive on such a short timescale?

You can see the difficulty history here:
http://btcserv.net/bitcoin/history/

True, that protects the vendor against currency risk (as does any other automatic trade back to local fiat).  It still leaves them having to reprice their products constantly.  It's hard to advertise when your prices can't stick for 12 hours at a time.

I agree in regards to economics, though it's been an interesting experiment to see how an economy behaves at a small scale.  (So far: it's an awful lot like a penny stock, and there aren't any really big surprises if that's what you expected early on.)

There are other things we're learning, though.  The technical proof-of-concept is great.  Seeing how people react to confirmation delays is interesting.  People would never put the work into more advanced clients if we didn't have a functional network to motivate them, and I'm eager to see how light clients really pan out.  An ATM in this kind of world is an interesting challenge.  There's a lot of stuff like that that that we're learning.

+1.  This is why I'm still here.  I want to see where this goes.

I'm still mining, even though it's only roughly breaking even for me, and even though I'm just selling off the proceeds.  I'm not willing to put fiat currency into the system right now (for the reasons I've mentioned before), but I don't withdraw my fiat either, and I trade back to BTC whenever I want to use it.

Even if BC doesn't succeed in the long run, we are pioneering a new economy.  The next system will benefit from what we've learned.

You already can, and many do.  I did for a long time, but these days a VPS is cheaper than the electricity to run a computer.