How do I know if the port is forwarded?

Thank you cody, could you please elaborate more on trading? Is that something like the stock exchange?

Hello forum,
Today was frustrating. I am trying to get my wallet up and running, and I've been synchronizing for something like 10 hours now just trying to download all of the block chain, and it's still only at 65%. I'm in the red connection wise, not sure if there is anything I can do about it. I read up on why it's taking so long and I guess the block chain is close to a gigabyte in size, which is strange because I can dl torrents much faster.

Anyway, is it expected that the block chain to get much much larger? Can I expect to be up to 8 gigabytes in size someday? I am wondering if there is flash drive that would be best for this, or even an SD card. What does the forum recommend?

Thank you Joint. I appreciate your support. I have many more questions, but they can wait for a new day. I will learn more now.

Hello everyone.
I'm new the BitCoin scene. I read some of the beginners guide but admittedly not all. It's hard for me to wrap my head around this whole thing so I have a lot of questions, but this thread is for mining right now. I'm not a computer geek but I'm not computer illiterate.

I'm interested in Solo mining.
The BitCoin lingo is hard for me to understand. When I read about hear a lot about hardware. I hear something about the difficulty of mining blocks goes up every 2 weeks. So for me to be a solo miner, I have to have good hardware. I imagine this means a good computer. What is good hardware? Is this in regards to processing power?

Say I go out and buy a server, and I earn me a few bitcoins. Then the difficulty goes up, and it gets harder for me to mine a block. Does this mean I will have to purchase a new server to be able to continue mining solo?


In regards to pool mining, is this something like Folding@Home where each user in the pool lends his/her computers processing power to one computer and then they split the earned bitcoins evenly amongst everyone in the pool? Would this not mean that the more people in a pool the less btc's I get?


I'm sure these questions have been asked before, and I will ask more newbie questions. In the meantime, I thank you all in advance for your assistance.

Regards,
Ymous