I did some no-fee transaction awhile back and one went through fairly quickly (within 4 hours) and the other took a while longer, maybe 2 days.

Update: Just for fun, I tried again sending a small amount to Polo using a 0 fee transaction. I will report back on how long it takes. Transmitted out just before block 411108.

Transaction ID: 6d10574175e76c7801d7dd0b41f7bfe6c81ff10796ae6968356e52c671375460  if you want to follow along, 0.03834 BTC consisting of several (recent) small inputs from signature payments.

Let's wait to see if it can break $500 before aiming for $5,000, I feel that is a long way off yet.

I am sure you could base your answer on the value of any alts if they were converted to BTC.

Many more people would probably qualify as a coiner this way.

I think that now is still an excellent time to be buying Bitcoin. There is some speculation that the BTC price is currently being suppressed somewhat, but the pressure to go up will only get stronger once the halving occurs. This doesn't necessarily mean an instant 2x on the day of the halving, or that we won't see some dips along the way, but the overall trend has changed and the price is slowly going up.

China is a big player obviously, but it will be interesting to see how it shakes out after the halving. With each halving event, next one in 4 more years, the mining will become less and less relevant except for the mining fees.

So unless the fees get to a point where they are consistently offering 12.5 BTC/block to offset the reduction after halving, we will no doubt see some reduction in mining. The question remains where that reduction will come from. While China does have some big farms, I believe the North West US has cheap electricity and some big mining operations as well.

Be careful if you downloaded the wallet from the Litecoin.com website within the past 2 weeks:

https://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/4ihbao/litecoincom_compromised/

https://twitter.com/litecoin/status/729480636675829761

It appears this only affected wallets downloaded from Litecoin.COM and not Litecoin.ORG, but you may want to take actions to be safe in either case.

I am not sure if it is allowed officially, but it is listed in the virtual currencies section. I would be more worried about charge-backs, as most people on eBay use PayPal. It has long been known that it is very risky to sell BTC for PayPal as it often gets charged back with no questions asked, while your BTC is per design non-refundable.

Only $1 million and change to reach the number two spot. It would probably be there already, but the price of ETH is going down somewhat. I expect it to easily be at the number two spot by the time the DAO price increases in 5 days, probably sooner.

I think this is the point most people are not getting. Before any funds are dispersed by the DAO, the proposal first needs to be presented and voted on. All these questions will need to be included within and addressed by the proposal, such as if there will be or will not be equity in the firm asking for the funds, etc. If the proposal is along the lines of simply "Send us 50 million ETH and we will put it to good use", then yes a good chance there would be little recourse or protection so you better not vote for it.

In essence, the proposal and its acceptance will be the "contract" that will protect the investors, so if there are any deficiencies these will need to be brought up and the proposal modified before it is voted on and approved. The only recourse available will be what is outlined in the proposal and associated code to execute it.

I think it is nearing its equilibrium price, maybe by July it will have settled down somewhere in a normal trading range. It was too soon to be valued over $10, but with the increased interest in Eth and now with the funding of DAOs, I think sub $5 is also too low. Somewhere in between these two points is probably its fair value for now, so I am going to say $7-8 is its fair trading range.

For the next few months, if the price is over this range it is good time to sell, if the price goes under it is a good time to buy.

You realized you just contradicted yourself with the whole cryptocoins are decentralized but they need an official forum part? This is the true form of decentralization separating the central point of information dissemination "forums" from those that have a vested interest "developers". The more independent parts the Ethereum community has, the more truly decentralized it becomes.

This concept of decentralization was even mentioned a few times last year as the end goal, that the official forums were there to help incubate the emergence of Ethereum and give it time to develop and mature, but the end state was to always have these go away and be taken on by an independent party.

This whole $300/month forum thing and Buterin selling 25% of his stake thing are just FUD by people with ulterior motives. For a decentralized coin, these are actually good events as they each further help push Ethereum toward that point.

Exactly! The curators and the 51% controller of funds could simply be one big colluding bunch, but at some point you need to trust someone. Keep asking questions! Legitimate questions such as these are good for the community and help others out, and possibly allow others to provide insights we do not have and share them as well. I think with honest community opinion and involvement we would be able to pick out and spot any outright fraud.

From my understanding you will have to vote on the proposal, which not only includes the proposal itself but the code that will control the contract. So if you see provisions in the code allowing the types of things you mentioned to occur, you would obviously not want to vote for it.

You are right at some level you will have to give up some control, as with any investment. Even if the proposals and code are legitimate, the proposal or business plan may not work out. Their are 1000's of business that startup each year, with their owners investing possibly their life savings to get their business going, only to fail in within the first few years. These people certainly did not invest in a scam, as it was their own business, but nonetheless still lost their investment. The point is, no matter what is proposed there are still going to be risks.

With an entirely new concept such as the DAO there are not only going to be the same risks as with any other startup, but new risks due to the functioning of the DAO, its code, and its new and unproven concepts.

There is no guarantee of anything if that is the answer you are looking for, and as with any investment you need to be prepared to lose 100% of your funds.

What you get in exchange for your investment is that you are participating in the first of a totally new concept and way of financing a business. If, and that is a big if, it does take off and one of the first proposals becomes the next Facebook, Google, etc. you will be not only participating in history, but stand to make a substantial gain on your investment.

TLDR - Only invest with funds that you are prepared to lose.

It appears that is exactly what is was, price is on the rise right now. We will have to wait and see if it continues.

There you go, fixed it.

With that much hash power I highly doubt that he is stupid. Anyone can cobble together a few miners in their basement, but that type of operation requires some knowledge, planning, foresight, and obvious capital, not things a stupid person usually has access to.

Balls of steel is basically saying the same as stupid, except the person gets lucky in the end. This is the same kind of distinction as there is between a hero and a fool. A hero runs into a burning building and rescues someone. A fool runs into a burning building and ends up dying too. The result is not based on skill just shit luck.

He knows something. I pick this as the most likely choice. Despite the numerous scam and pump/dump posts all over, Ethereum keeps delivering. Not only in code and tech, but funding other new technologies such as The DAO. It also is being picked up by the big exchanges, Bitfinex, BTCe, and now Gemini. Just today Governor Cuomo of New York announced the decision of Gemini to add Ethereum trading with the approval one of of the toughest states there is for cryptocurrency. It's one thing for it the be approved, quite another for the governor of New York to help announce it.

Listen to the naysayers if you want and give them your coins for cheap, but looking underneath the covers I can see something is afoot, and that something is big.

It will definitely hit the number 2 spot, less than 5 million dollars to go and it still has 22 days left. The number 1 spot may remain elusive though, as Star Citizen and its $111,262,157 total raised will be hard to beat.

To be fair though, it appears Star Citizen has been raising funds for several years, they should make a new top 10 list and use an average raised per day metric and then the DAO may come out on top.

Go here https://daohub.org/

Click Get DAO Tokens

Click Start Wizard

It will walk you through various steps depending on how you plan to buy and if you have a Ethereum wallet (Mist) or not.

Kind of a disappointing ending to a otherwise exciting week. Not that I thought Wright was ever Satoshi, I just thought his exposure as a hoax would have been more spectacular.

Dang, well that ended quickly. I was just starting to take an interest in this whole "some part of the Sartre text might possibly result in same hash" discussion.

Well even this wouldn't necessarily prove it was Satoshi, only that the person controlled Satoshi's coins. To me if the real Satoshi wanted to come back in the spotlight, this is what he should have done on day 1, not months later after several botched attempts at proving he is who he claims to be.

If and when these coins are ever moved, the more time and false attempts that occur in-between, the less likely the person who ultimately moves them is the real Satoshi.