I'm not sure BitCoin was designed with any agenda in mind.  My theory is Satoshi had an idea for a neat hack and threw it out there to see what would happen.  I think he's getting everything he wanted: it's been damned interesting.

I'm really not sure where I fall on your spectrum.  Some people call me a socialist, others say I'm a libertarian.

What I want out of BitCoin is a decentralized currency so I can send money to whoever I please.  I want to do so anonymously, so I can donate to worthy (but politically unpopular) organizations without The Man breathing down my neck.  I want to do it peer-to-peer, rather than paying a percentage for the privilege of obeying the rules and whims of some middleman like Visa or PayPal.  So that kind of falls under your "libertarian" bracket.

But I don't have a self-centered, sleazy, scammy agenda.  I'm a very generous person.  I take care of my community.  I can't really prove that without handing out more information than I care to post publicly, but since I'm not begging for a BTC loan, perhaps you can take my word for it.

How does it really matter, though?  It's money, and people are going to do what they always do around money: lie, cheat, steal, and get all bent out of shape over small percentages of value that they'd never care about in any other part of their life.  The rest of us will ignore them and go on producing an economy and try to grow everyone's wealth.

It's already unprofitable where electricity is expensive (Hawaii, California), so some miners will drop out.  That's already happening, which is why the difficulty is starting to drop.  I expect this will be a relatively slow process since there are a lot of miners who will keep mining even if it's slightly unprofitable.  The difficulty will keep gradually dropping as the exchange rates drop (roughly in proportion).

If a very large percentage of miners suddenly left we'd have a rough time for a bit.  That happened to NameCoin, and they had to get through some really slow blocks until the difficulty was adjusted.

If the problem was extreme (like, an overnight 99% drop in hashrate), we could push a new version of the bitcoin client that overrides the difficulty temporarily.  This is very unlikely to be necessary.

Yes.  My personal opinion is that the fundamentals are still really poor - there aren't very many merchants accepting BTC, so the purchase cycle (Buy BTC on the market, go shopping, pay BTC, merchant sells BTC on the market) can be fulfilled with very few coins - you only need enough to sit in the buyers' wallets until they make their purchase, which realistically means a few days.  That's what I consider to be the fundamental price of the BTC, and it's much lower than where we are now, and it will be until more people accept the BTC for payment.

What's holding the price up right now is speculation: basically, people are hoarding it hoping the price will go up.  Short term the only way that will work is if people can push enough hype to get more people to "invest" (IE, keep speculating and hoarding).  That's what you're seeing in this thread, and from anyone who keeps saying "Up up up!".  People who keep saying the sky's the limit without mentioning any downside are usually the ones holding the bag, and they're trying to pump the price back up because they're losing their investment.  Long-term this never works.

If all the speculation ends (and it's starting to look like we're running out of suckers), the price will fall to the level supported by actual use as currency.  That means cents, not dollars, until we have much more real commerce happening in BTC.  That's fine by me because I want to use BTC as a currency, and it doesn't really matter to me what the price is - I just want it to be somewhat stable, and I think that will happen at a much lower price.

Next post: a bag holder with an insightful rebuttal. 

I assume you're trying to automatically decide if a sale can be marked as paid.  Try doing it like so:

Customer makes a purchase.  You generate a sales order number, 00001.
API: getaccountaddress sale-00001  >> returns: address
You invoice the customer and provide that address.
Customer pays.
API: getreceivedbyaccount sale-00001 6  >> returns: 0 (since we don't have 6 confirms yet)
Wait a while.
API: getreceivedbyaccount sale-00001 6  >> returns: 20 (You're paid!)
Ship the goods.

You can also check:
listreceivedbyaccount  >> returns: array of account records, select the one you want
getreceivedbyaddress  6 >> returns: total received to that address with at least 6 confirms

Small transactions or ones that are composed of many small coins sometimes need a transaction fee.  This is to prevent people from abusing the network by flooding small, complicated transactions.

If you post your wallet address we can look at blockexplorer and give you a better idea what's happening, or you can just pay the fee.

To mine you need mining software, not wallet software.  Use this: http://bitcointalk.org/?topic=3878.0

You'll also need an account with a mining pool (solo mining is basically impossible unless you have a very expensive rig).  Here are some pools:  https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools

It's like the stock market - no one knows for sure.  It could theoretically go down forever.

I personally expect it to keep declining for a while.  The current price mostly reflects a speculation bubble and the actual economic need for people to hold the BTC as a currency could be fulfilled at a much lower price (well under $1).  The only ways I see for the price to start going up again are: a) more hype (not likely, I think that one is burned out); b) more merchants accepting the BTC as a currency, which will increase demand.

If he tries to sell off fast, the market will crash.  If he sells off slowly, the high price he created will slowly drop back down before he can unload what he has.

The technique is called cornering a market.  Usually it results in huge losses for whoever tries to do it.  The exception is after you buy up the commodity (in this case, BTC) to drive up the price, you're in a position to take advantage of the high price without actually selling the commodity.  Generally this only happens if you can do it to such a degree that you can have a monopoly on a resource like precious metals.  Even then it's very hard to accomplish regardless of law; and once you have a monopoly antitrust law prevents you from doing most of the things you'd want to do.  In the case of BTC it's basically impossible anyway since it has no intrinsic value that you can hold hostage.

More info here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market

Yep.  The first thing the client does on a new install is download the whole blockchain and verify everything which takes a while, especially on a slow computer.  Once it's fully caught up it should only take a few minutes after you start it before it catches up again.

Your transaction is in block # 143,358.  When your client (the app) reaches that block the transaction will appear, and then each block it processes after that will click the "confirmations" up by one.

17MH/s with the current difficulty will earn you about BTC$0.01 per day, which is about USD$0.08 per day at current exchange rates.

Here's a good chart of common GPUs: http://bitminer.info/  You'll get somewhat better MH/s than the chart shows because mining software has improved.  Figure an extra 30%.

Here's a profitability calculator you may find helpful: http://bitcoinx.com/profit/

Good luck!

You can get the estimate here:

https://blockexplorer.com/q/hashestowin

It's just based on the current Difficulty value.  Note that this is to get 50BTC - you never get individual coins from mining, just blocks of 50.

Thank you MagicalTux for being sensible and level-headed amidst a mob with pitchforks and torches.  I'm not currently a customer, but I'm now considering it.

Make sure you use your "worker" username and password - it's different from the one you use to log into the btcguild web site.

Can you post the BitCoin address you're trying to send to?  If it's a BitCoin problem we can look to see what the problem is.  If the problem is with WalletBit, you might be better off asking them directly, though we might be able to help if you provide more information like the exact error message.

It also cuts down on FAQs in the rest of the board.

The only downsides for a highly-active site like this (which isn't dying for lack of users) is that it's annoying for those of us who're already conversant in the subject, and it makes the newbie forum's signal to noise ratio pretty low.

... due in part to posts like this.    I'm doing my best to stay relevant until the hazing is over.

Mineral oil makes a great heat sink but it doesn't have a good way to radiate the heat after absorbing it.  You have to pump it through a radiator to get the temps back down.  Be sure the electronics aren't on the very bottom in case some water condenses inside.

It depends what your goal is.  How many GPUs?  Are you doing this for fun or profit?

The only way I could see it being a practical solution is if you're running a large number of GPUs and want them cool and quiet.  Then the cost of the liquid heat exchangers in a traditional (tubing) watercooling setup would be significant, and the dunk tank might be nice as a low-noise cooling solution.

Otherwise, if you want a cost-effective way to cool your video card and don't mind some noise, use air.  If you want it to be quiet but still reasonably practical, use coolant in a tubing system.  It's much less messy.  But if you want something that looks cool, go for the tank!

Tell you what: let's use your ebay rating as collateral.  Create an ebay listing; let someone buy it; and that person lends you the money.  If you pay it back, you get a positive review; default and you'll get burned back at least a little.  People will laugh less if you have at least a little skin in this game.

You can also find someone who will trade for cash locally: http://tradebitcoin.com/

These guys will let you fund with cash by visiting a Wells Fargo or Chase branch, or with a check: https://www.exchangebitcoins.com/account/deposit

This is a little different from PayPal, which is a way to send dollars.  It's another currency, so you have to trade something to get it - kind of like using gold as a currency.  You have to buy the gold first, and then use the gold to buy something else.

Since it's a currency, you can also sell things for bitcoins!