Registered!  Thanks for holding this!

Guardian

Hang on a minute, I'm confused here 

I thought Silkroad was either

(a) A free, pretty, but kind of stunningly hard (if you don't pay) online MMORPG, or
(b) A historical path for trading goods from Asia to Europe

Am I missing something here?  If it's (a), what's so bad about it?  I mean, I played years ago, but I never wanted to pay for their premium items and it got old after awhile.

I really think my first question is the key, though.  If no one uses (or if people are scared to use) this technology, it won't take off.  It's the same reason we pay for large transactions with checks or cards instead of cash or gold coins.  People don't want to be carrying around that sort of risk of loss.

I think the BTC concept is brilliant.  Isn't there some correspondingly brilliant way to deal with this problem? 

As near as I can tell, people around here are spooked from Paypal because you (the buyer) could protest the charges and the seller would be left empty-handed.  Maybe you can find someone, though.

Hi.  I'm new, as you can tell by posting this forum.  I have some questions I'd like to throw out there with regard to the Bitcoin (BTC) economy and how it will grow.  I promise I'm not trolling (not that you can ever trust someone who says this), just curious and I'd like to see what the feedback is.  If these issues are discussed elsewhere more appropriate, point me to it and I'll take my questions there when I get out of Newb Mode.

1.  How do we make BTC easier to use?

Imagine trying to explain BTC to your [insert non-technical family member here].  I consider myself a fairly technical person, and I'm struggling to understand how to actually keep my pile of bit-cents safe.  If the average person could use BTC safely and understandably, then the economy would grow vastly beyond where it is now.  As it is, there's an 8-step process involving making a boot disk on some flash drive to secure your BTC.  Let's be honest, that's too much work for most people. 

Also, I forget passwords on a regular basis.  The idea of putting my money into a locked vault so secure that I could lock myself out of it (along with everyone else) does not sound smart or feasible.  How can we solve these issues?

2.  How do we convince people BTC is about more than buying illegal crap in the US?

Do a Google News search for BTC and you're likely to find stories about how BTC is evil because people are using it to buy illegal stuff (principally drugs) more anonymously.  The only thing that's going to accomplish is getting various US legislative bodies to make our life more difficult.  I'm not suggesting we try to control how the BTC is used; we just need to replace the negative publicity with something positive.  What is that positive thing, and how do we get it out there?

There are likely some people with a "screw you" attitude towards any US legislative action.  So be it.  However, if you want the BTC economy to grow (and your BTC to appreciate in value), then I think that's a bad attitude for business.  Constructive solutions would be more productive.

3.  Who will be BTC's first major user?

I feel like the BTC economy would gain much more momentum with one star user.  It could be a person or a business, but someone or something that turns a lot of heads when they announce they'll use it.  Maybe Amazon?  Google?  What would it take?

Honestly, I want to buy dollars.  Barring that, I have to wait until a confluence of something I want and someone who will accept BTC for it occurs.

This was helpful to me!  I'm like a more amateur version of what you're doing.

• I'm also running a 6870, but just one of them.
  
• I'm also running GUIMiner, but had no idea about how to set these flag things.  I tried the ones you suggested above, and they boosted my Mhash from about 245-250 to 260-275.

Thank you, and any other hints would be appreciated. 

I also got to my first coin today. Now I'm trying to figure out what to do with it (and how to do that, once I figure it out).

Hi everyone.  As you might have guessed by this post, I'm new here.  I'm still exploring what BTC can be used for.  My normal machine can be used to mine in its downtime (Radeon 6870), so it's serving as a miner when I'm not using it (about 22 hours of the day). 

I haven't tried an actual transaction yet.  I'm still trying to figure out whether or not I can secure my wallet on my side or whether an online wallet is best.  Online seems much more practical, but much less trustworthy.

IRL, I have a math/financial career.  I like crypto, and I've had an introductory class to it, but nothing serious.  I'm not as pie-in-the-sky about BTC being worth huge amounts of money someday, but I'll be happy if I can get an electronics slush fund out of it.