It'll be a fun ride for us in the US, assuming we pick the right moment to step off the train before it wrecks.
Bitcoins will proliferate elsewhere, and it will creep back here one day, when our country realizes that unless it competes with the countries utilizing this superior currency, it will straggle and die off as a world power.
You're assuming that a significant number of people will stop using it because the government tells them to. I think this assumption is less and less valid every day. This. Remember those riots in Bolivia a while back after they tried to privatize the nation's water supply to the point of making it illegal to collect rainwater or drink from a stream or lake? I think people are starting to figure out that the corporate way isn't always the best way and that the government way... Well, let's be honest, it's usually the same as the corporate way. |
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yea, I'll pay taxes.
The free healthcare that I get in this country has saved my life on several occasions... if it was like the American system then my parents would have lost their house long ago.
In this country being poor isn't a life-threatening condition, and this makes a massive difference to the quality of life here.
My education was free - instead of being sold into indentured servitude in the guise of a student loan, I was paid a grant to go to university.
I'm happy to contribute to the welfare of the nation so young people can have the same freedom I had.
That's an excellent way to look at it. I don't personally believe that we *need* a government but I think that a well-run government has a lot of benefits, like your free education or health care. I don't mind paying taxes either; what bothers me is unnecessarily complex taxation systems that hide how much we actually pay. First they tax us on our income, then on our property, then they tax all of our sales. There are special taxes on things they don't want us to do (like smoke) and tax breaks on things they do want us to do (like buy efficient cars). I'd be all for a simple income tax, flat, bracketed, whatever, just make it a simple system and I'll be ok with it. The fact that I can't actually calculate exactly how much I'm actually paying in taxes is a problem. |
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Yeah never mind, I guess that was a stupidly obvious question  |
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Do "capital gains" add to your total income for the purpose of determining your tax bracket or are they taxed at the rate of your income-only tax bracket?
I do not believe capital gains adds to your total income for determining your tax rate. So what about students and the like, who perhaps have no income or have income so low as to qualify as exempt? I would assume they'd pay at the lowest bracket, right? This is correct. In 2011 for a non-married individual, if you make less than $34,500 you would pay 0% capital gains taxes. So, before you sell your bitcoin, ask for a reduction in your salary, then wait a year  My fiancee is a full-time student who has no other source of income. Since bitcoins aren't legally recognized as money or stock would it be considered evasion if I gifted them to her and allowed her to liquidate them? Honestly I'm at work all day while she maintains the rigs anyway so really I'm less like the owner/operator and more like a contractor who build and installed the things  Well, you can gift up to $13,000 per year to an individual (or seperate individuals). That is for your tax benefit. Your beneficiary would still have to pay relevant taxes on the asset. I'm not an estate planning attorney, but one of those guys would be able to answer these types of questions. There are definitely legal ways to get to the coin on a tax favored basis, but it usually makes sense if you are uber wealthy (IE, you will meet hit the 5Mil lifetime gifting limit) OK, what if the coins are never actually mine? I.E. she owns the MtGox account, the Dwolla acct and the bank account? That could be set up pretty easily. |
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Do "capital gains" add to your total income for the purpose of determining your tax bracket or are they taxed at the rate of your income-only tax bracket?
I do not believe capital gains adds to your total income for determining your tax rate. So what about students and the like, who perhaps have no income or have income so low as to qualify as exempt? I would assume they'd pay at the lowest bracket, right? This is correct. In 2011 for a non-married individual, if you make less than $34,500 you would pay 0% capital gains taxes. So, before you sell your bitcoin, ask for a reduction in your salary, then wait a year My fiancee is a full-time student who has no other source of income. Since bitcoins aren't legally recognized as money or stock would it be considered evasion if I gifted them to her and allowed her to liquidate them? Honestly I'm at work all day while she maintains the rigs anyway so really I'm less like the owner/operator and more like a contractor who build and installed the things |
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Do "capital gains" add to your total income for the purpose of determining your tax bracket or are they taxed at the rate of your income-only tax bracket?
I do not believe capital gains adds to your total income for determining your tax rate. So what about students and the like, who perhaps have no income or have income so low as to qualify as exempt? I would assume they'd pay at the lowest bracket, right? |
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(we need a government - would you believe that?)
No. If this forum featured a facebook-esque "like" button, I would have just clicked it. |
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Do "capital gains" add to your total income for the purpose of determining your tax bracket or are they taxed at the rate of your income-only tax bracket?
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That's not true. That's only true if the number of coins you can mine are less than the number of coins you can buy for the same amount of money. At 30% difficulty increases mining rewards you much more greatly than buying. At 60% difficulty increases however buying rewards you more greatly.
And since there are both mathematically-minded people who will see this and choose to buy rather than mine as well as a sort of "evolutionary cost" associated with making the wrong decision to mine vs buy at the appropriate time, the number of miners will naturally decrease once this threshold is crossed. Mining will continue on a downward trend until it reaches another critical threshold at which point market evolution selects against buyers and mining increases once again. A homeostatic curve created by market evolutionary selection between two opposing populations  Well, I've been arguing that the simple growth model is wrong for some time now. I was merely pointing out that the advice "its more profitable to buy than mine because..." is often touted but is only correct under certain circumstances. Freakin's graph is awesome and helpful. I don't know that it will necessarily hold true though in the future, so buyer beware. Quite true, all markets have some element of inherent risk so definitely "caveat emptor" That said, I'll keep on mining so long as it's at least paying the electric bill. I may not keep buying additional hardware but the rigs will keep doing their thing; not just because it's profitable, but because I believe in the project and want to see it succeed. |
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That's not true. That's only true if the number of coins you can mine are less than the number of coins you can buy for the same amount of money. At 30% difficulty increases mining rewards you much more greatly than buying. At 60% difficulty increases however buying rewards you more greatly.
And since there are both mathematically-minded people who will see this and choose to buy rather than mine as well as a sort of "evolutionary cost" associated with making the wrong decision to mine vs buy at the appropriate time, the number of miners will naturally decrease once this threshold is crossed. Mining will continue on a downward trend until it reaches another critical threshold at which point market evolution selects against buyers and mining increases once again. A homeostatic curve created by market evolutionary selection between two opposing populations |
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That's beautiful Freakin. I like the look of that straight line, which clearly states "bitcoin price is directly proportional to difficulty" |
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But remember if that's true then just buying BTCs is way better than investing in hardware. Difficulty is growing at like 30% a week, if BTCs keep pace with that than it would be the best investment ever.
I'm also betting that mining is not exponential but homeostatic as well. If we get to the point where the difficulty is too high, there will be less incentive for new miners to join and eventually incentives for old miners to quit, at which point the difficulty:price ratio will decrease again. Simply put, mining is a long-term investment; if you buy at $10 and sell at $20 who cares if the market crashes after, you made your money and got out. Buying is for those who want to make bank and don't care about the movement. Mining is for true believers. |
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As long as the bitcoin value rises at a fair rate along w\ the difficulty, the difficulty really isn't too big of a deal.
Make 1 btc per day and it's worth $8 or make .5 bitcoins a day but they're worth $16...
That's exactly what I keep saying. It's hard to really argue whether mining difficulty and price are *actually* linked by the market or if they just *seem* like they are, but they tend to fluctuate within a certain range, sort of a homeostatic curve if you look at price/difficulty and difficulty/price ratios. To an extent I'd be willing to say that it's a simple supply/demand thing considering that we the miners are, in fact, the supply. |
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Please god tell me they're going to re-stock them...
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Add the ability to switch pools if one goes down and I'd download it.
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That's awesome! I've been funding my upcoming (Sept. 5) wedding with proceeds from bitcoin mining but I never thought to put an address on the invitations, which is frankly brilliant. Unfortunately I've still got to pay the vendors in USD otherwise maybe we really *would* be competing to have the first "bitcoin wedding" |
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Ah, those are overclocked numbers. By pure chance I did find a way to boost it without overclocking to 184MHash by adding a -v argument to poclbm. Does anyone know what that means and are there more of such arguments? Thats 20% more! -v tells the miner to work in vectors, which is more efficient on some cards. -w128 specifies the work size, there will be a "sweet spot" for your card, try adjusting the number (must be a power of two, so w64, w128, w256 are all valid while w99 is not) agression is... well it's pretty much what it sounds like  I only managed to pull about 18% more with flags alone, the big boost came with overclocking the core clock and underclocking the memory clock, that's what took me from 192 to 277 MH/s |
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Play with your parameters and try over/under clocking.
On my 5830 I get ~192 MH/s just running the miner with no flags and stock settings
Adding -v -w128 agression=11 gets me ~226 MH/s
Using MSI Afterburner to up the core clock to 975 MHz and knock the memory clock down to 675 MHz gets me ~277 MH/s
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Another valid reason for a geographically dispersed operation is that many cities/states have tiered pricing for electricity. Maybe you pay 12 cents per kW/H up to a certain amount and then after that you pay 18 cents up to another arbitrary amount and then they consider your use "excessive" or "abusive" and charge you 25 cents per kW/H. If you're getting close to that "excessive" tier and want to control your overhead you'd do well to physically locate your mining rigs in a physically separate location with a separate electricity bill.
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Very nice! Still I think I'd rather whip together a dummy plug than insert leads directly into my card. At least if I break a wire off in the dummy plug it's only a $5 adapter I've ruined |
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