so much in this community seems to be dedicated to enabling the scum that go around stealing form peoples wallets, and so many seem opposed to anything that might stop them



WHY??

I would like some advice on what type of CIS classes I should take if I wanted to become involved in the the technology of Bitcoin i.e. programming, Linux hacking (I don’t mean anything nefarious) etc. I work in IT for a really terrific company that will flat out pay my tuition to get a Bachelors Degree. I don’t mean I gotta pay and get reimbursed but all I have to is get C's or better and they pick up the tab for the semester. I have already started by just taking some MAT, PSY, ECO, and ENG classes but now I want to get into some computer science stuff and my new-found interest in this technology  has me wanting to take some classes that will relate to this technology. Any advice on some classes that would enable me to both understand what is really happening with this technology and to contribute to it?

I want to build an scrypt miner and buy the parts from tigerdirect and/or overstock and pay with BTC (1BTC budget) I don’t know which cards are best for mining except that the more expensive ones must be better..lol I was thinking of building a rig around an AMD Radeon HD7970 with a corsair 600W power supply. Combining those with a cheap mobo/cpu/ram combo and gaming case I could stay at about 1 BTC. Any thoughts?

any dealings with payeer.com? I would like to buy some btc from btc e since the price is low there to buy. None of the options for sending USD are familiar to me, and just some basic searching made payeer.com seem like the best choice. Any thoughts?

Seems a shame I have to ask this question but could someone briefly explain escrow? I am a homeowner, so I am familiar with escrow in the fact that part of my mortgage payment gets set aside to pay for insurance and property taxes but how does this apply here when I see people wanting to use escrow to trade BTC for fiat or purchase miners from other users on this forum?

I really dont have a strong knowledge of good trading practices but I was thinking of taking about .5 to 1 of my BTC and converting it to LTC. I only have a few BTC but I thought it might be a good idea to diversify a little bit. Looking for advice.

I've been at this about a month now, I knew going in it was going to be hard to profit but still held out hope. At the current BTC rate I'm mining at a loss big time. But it's OK because I'm learning a lot and I am having some fun which is one of the reasons I wanted to start mining. About 10 days ago I earned my first full BTC (milestone one) since then I have earned another full one. Milestone two came after earning that first full coin, the payout that put me over 1 left me with 1.08 or so. I took the extra .08 and bought a $75 game stop card from Gyft, yay first purchase with BTC. I used the card to get a couple of controllers and a copy of Diablo3 for my PS3. Third milestone is that I sold a couple of NMC on btc-e last night for about $11 and it felt pretty damn cool  Also got my gaming rig finally hashing away for LTC. Thanks to cudaminer I'm getting at least 100kh/s from the nvidia card and earned first .1 in just under a week.

Mining at a loss is at least fun. I figure I just as well could have spent the money on TV's and other gadgets but this is providing a very unique kind of entertainment. And who knows what BTC will do. People say it could reach $10,000 this year. I try to remind myself that is just wishful thinking by the Bitcoin community but hey you never know, and now I am part of the Bitcoin community and if it does get to 10k then I'll either be looking pretty lucky or pretty smart. 5 full coins was my goal. I have 2 now and 400Gh/s to get me 3 more before rewards diminish too greatly. After that I'm not sure what I will do. It would be close to summer time I imagine and I would either have to move these down to the basement or just turn them off. It gets 100 degrees here in the summer time and I really don’t want that extra heat. But if they are still earning at least .1 a month at that time I suppose it would be worth trying to move them down to the basement and keep them running.

I had heard about bitcoins back when I could have solo mined with a graphics card but had some preconception that it was a difficult thing to do. I found out just how simple it was just a few weeks ago when 1btc hit 1200 bucks. I started looking into it and thought "this is easy!" But of course my research lead me to the whole difficulty factor and how much processing power it continuously takes to earn a descent reward. One of the first (if not the first) articles I read about getting started in mining stated in beginning that you shouldn’t go into mining to get rich but rather to have fun as a hobby. I have tried to take this advice to heart and hey,  what’s more fun than a hobby you can throw a bunch of money into on pricey computer gear...yay =)

About 2 - 3 weeks ago I setup my Alienware gaming rig to mine from its graphics card just to see if I could do it. It was pretty easy and it took me about 15 minutes from start of beginners guide and I was mining on slush's pool. Getting like .00002 per share and hasing at about 80M hashes I was actually pretty stoked just to see results. It was kind of fun. If you've played Starcraft, I was reminded of mining for crystals and Vespine gas. After a few days though I just wasn’t digging the tiny reward. I knew I was way behind the game so I started to look on eBay for asic miners. I was able to score a 5G BFL Jalapeno but way over paid for it and I knew it. It's either over pay on eBay and get it in a few days or buy from a manufacturer and wait for ever for it. So I got it, I had an Ubuntu Linux box loaded up with bitcoin-qt and bfgminer and was able to get it to recognize the BFL device. I was feeling really cool and geeky at that point since I really consider myself to be a Linux perma-noob! the device hashed away at 5.5G and I was getting about .00025 per block. I was hooked at that point. Since then I have added 2 more Jalapeno devices (one doing over 6G and another doing 8G) altogether I am getting about 20G and about .001 on a good round and .0008 to .0009 as of late. But still I wasnt done. Over the weekend I eBayed an Avalon Gen2 200G hasher, an Avalon dual module 60G haser, and another Jalapeno 8G haser. They should all be here by or before this Friday. So for this expected 290 to 300G hashes I hope to get I paid a total of $7140! ouch...I think I needed to read that. I still contend I am not trying to get rich but, I damm sure do want to see some full BTC in my wallet!! I dont know how to use those calculators, it is confusing for me but I'm thinking I could get around 7 to 9 BTC by around March before difficulty renders even 300 GH/s useless =( considering I can get these up by this weekend and keep them up. I'm also very intersted to see what my January elecric bill will look like =/

I would also like to look into building a custom rig, if I do reach my BTC goal all proceeds will go towards building  my own rig. I dont know much about it, I have not researched it much on the interwebs but I'm thinking it isnt that hard providing you can get your hands on the right equipment. If anyone has any suggestions or links on the subject I'd  love to check it out. Well, thanks for reading if you're still here. How is that for a newbie post? I think I earned the right to post everywhere else with this I hope.