For example, I've been buying $20 to $50 worth of BTC every couple of weeks since early this year, and I'm still at 0.3 BTC (or about 0.25 BTC excluding altcoins). I also got about 0.02 BTC from the PD faucet, and a tiny percentage from other faucets like Freebitco.in.

In 2009, it would have taken seconds to minutes to reach 1 BTC. In 2010, maybe a couple of hours. And in 2011, perhaps a day to a week depending on the month. Generally, how long do you think it would take for a person living today to reach 1 BTC? 10 BTC? 100 BTC? (heck, is that even possible now?)

Is it possible?

I'd like to try mining with a graphics card but I've only got a laptop, not a desktop. Is there a way to connect a desktop graphics card to a laptop and mine with it? For example, a PCI-e to USB or PCMCIA adapter?

Or alternatively, is it possible to buy an extension cable/riser cable for a laptop GPU? So that way I could keep the GPU cool since it would be mining away from the other components of my laptop.

Everyone says that mining on a laptop is a bad idea because it will overheat and fall apart. They say that laptops weren't designed to have their CPUs or GPUs running at 100% for long periods.

But how is mining different from running Crysis on max settings? I've never heard of people having their laptops break because they played too much video games. Shouldn't both mining and intensive gaming put an equal amount of stress on the laptop's components?

Just curious because I'm going to buy a new laptop soon.

I have Electrum, MultiBit, and MultiDoge installed on my computer.

Electrum is currently my primary wallet and in order to back up my coins, all I need to do is write down the 12 word seed.

I also have a small amount of coins in MultiBit and MultiDoge as well.

Now I understand MultiBit and MultiDoge aren't deterministic wallets so they don't use a seed.

So if I wanted to back up my coins, is the coins.key file that is produced using the "Export Private Keys" feature all that I need to keep my coins safe or do I need to backup the other files as well (e.g. coins.wallet file, coins.info file, everything in the coins-data folder)?

I once heard that most financial trading is done by automated computer programs.

So my question is, what percentage of traders are geeks (i.e. those who are good at programming, mathematics, working with algorithms, typically younger) and what percentage are suits (i.e. those who have a background in finance/business, typically 30+)?

And what about the big investment banks and financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley? Do the staff there mostly consist of geeks or suits? Or is it roughly 50:50?

I know Satoshi's posts are technically copyrighted but wouldn't it be a good idea to create some kind of Bitcoin bible? I don't mean "bible" in the religious sense but rather as an all-in-one technical reference guide that explains everything about the whole Bitcoin protocol. That way, someone who wants to understand the inner workings of Bitcoin (e.g. a programmer) could simply consult the guide instead of downloading the source code and scouring through Satoshi's posts.

It would contain the whitepaper of course followed by the entire Bitcoin source code with snippets of Satoshi's forum postings beside it to explain how the whole thing works, why something was done in a particular way, etc.

Then it could end with a chapter where Gavin Andresen discusses the changes to the code made since Satoshi's departure from the project, bug fixes, etc. After all, according to Wikipedia he already wrote the reference manual for the VRML 2.0 specification - which is what he was working on before Bitcoin.

C++ has one. TCP/IP has one. Perhaps Bitcoin should have one too?

What happened to them? They were one of the first to accept bitcoins as payment back in 2011. That and the famous 40,000 BTC pizza of course. Did they keep the thousands of bitcoins that they must have received? Or did they exchange them to fiat?

And what happened to the guy who sold the famous pizza? And the guy who bought it? Or was it two pizzas?? Are they still around? 40,000 BTC would be worth millions today. Anyone know what happened to those bitcoins?

What do you think about Bytecoin and its forks?

If I were to invest, I'd probably put about 40:60 in Bytecoin and Monero with a little bit left for the other two forks (Fantom, Quazar) just in case.

Bytecoin was the first to implement CryptoNote technology and having the original developers behind the coin is a good thing of course but the fact that early adopters had already mined 80 percent of the total supply while the coin was only known in the deep web community is a bit worrying because that means that everyone else is pretty much fighting over the 20 percent that's still remaining plus if only a couple of the early adopters decided to dump their coins, the value would surely drop.

Out of the three forks (Monero, Fantomcoin, and Quazarcoin), Monero seems to be the most established fork as well as the oldest and the distribution seems a lot more transparent compared to Bytecoin which is a good thing. On the other hand, the Monero devs - while they seem competent, didn't actually write the code themselves so that's a bit worrying as well.

EDIT: Also does anyone know why Bytecoin isn't showing up on Coinmarketcap.com? Monero seems to be there but I can't seem to find Bytecoin anywhere.

College is expensive. College degrees are expensive. Education could always be subverted for political and/or religious goals. Could we create a peer-to-peer decentralized education system? There would have to be a way of storing and transmitting courses and course materials. You would also need a way to distribute and verify certifications, degrees, mark tests, etc.

Since fiat is a product developed by the Government, doesn't it have the right to tax it?

For example, if Satoshi Nakamoto or Sunny King or any other developer created a new cryptocurrency called "Taxcoin" and put a tax into the protocol, then obviously by choosing to use that alt-coin, you are accepting the tax that's built into the system.

I think there have been coins like this. Freicoin had 80 percent of the mining profits redirected to the developers for donation to charitable causes. Devcoin also has 90 percent of the mining profits go into open source projects and 10 percent to miners.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Bitcoin is that it is extremely volatile. This has always been the case until the past few weeks when the price seems to have stabilized in the 400-600 USD region. Of course such a wide range would still be considered extremely volatile if Bitcoin was compared to fiat currencies but do you think that Bitcoin is in the beginning stages of finally converging onto a stable price? Or do you think that there will be more bubbles and crashes in the future?