The government will intercept large amounts of cash going in or out of the country.

I've lived in lots of places.  Rural, residential, never near airports.  And yet all these people with airplanes have to fly them about 50 feet above the ground.  I'm not talking police helicopters, but regular airplanes.  Law is they must fly them 1000 feet above the ground.  But they just fly their airplanes 50-100feet off the ground and do that whenever they fly them.  And it's very common, dozens of them each day.

Why... is it just to be noisy?

@Synaptic

There was a Wikipedia article about how the US government in the 20th century forced everyone to hand over their gold, and if I remember correctly, it was for no compensation either.

This is what they all just started doing years ago.

I don't mind if it's unstable, I just don't like how it's unstable.  It sits in an artificial stablity for several weeks, then it jumps to some new artificial stability.  This is bad.

I would like if it stablized at around the same point and jumped a few bucks up and down but always stayed mostly around the same point.

Governments can't seize your bitcoin.  You can hide it on a flashdrive or you can just turn your wallet.dat into some pattern on clothing to hide it.

Here is how it changed mine.  This is not copypasta.

I started Bitcoin mining quite a while ago. I already had a decent build with 2 5850s in crossfire that I used for gaming. After mining for a while, I earned enough money to buy more mining hardware from Newegg and Amazon. In the end, I had a total of 4 PCs with 2 5850s in each of them, except for 1 of them, which had 3 5850s. I won’t bother listing all the specs, since they’re nothing special aside from the 5850s.

I overclocked the core clocks of the 5850s to squeeze a little more performance out of them, and underclocked the video ram in order to reduce heat. I had them running at 100% fan speed to try and cool them off a little better, but they still got pretty hot anyway.

I’m a freshman in college and unfortunately still live with my parents (living in a dorm is too expensive), so I don’t really have any other place to put my PCs except in my own room. So I kept all 4 machines in my bedroom, which is not very big. So they were pretty close to my bed.

My parents’ house doesn’t have central heating/AC, but instead we have window AC units that we install in the summer, and space heaters for the winter. However, I procrastinated and didn’t install the AC unit in my room because it wasn’t too hot yet. They are big, bulky, and heavy, so I didn’t want to do it until I absolutely had to. But, being the summer, it did eventually get hotter. Faster than I had anticipated.

One day, when I was sleeping (yes, I sometimes sleep in the day due to being up very late at night/early in the morning), it got very hot. And I still didn’t have the AC unit installed in my room, and my 4 mining rigs were still mining bitcoins (I left them on 24/7), generating lots of heat. It was extremely hot. I eventually woke up due to the heat, but it was already too late.

I had a terrible heat stroke, and it was quite frightening and disorienting. I not only felt physically terrible, having trouble breathing and terrible nausea, but I was also mentally and emotionally confused and saw all sorts of unpleasant hallucinations (but after doing some googling, apparently that’s normal for people who have heat strokes). I eventually staggered out of my room, which took quite a lot of effort, and my parents saw that I wasn’t doing too well and then realized I needed medical attention.

They rushed me to the ER, and at this point I was barely conscious so I don’t remember everything, but they put bags of ice on me and made me drink tons of liquids. I have no idea how long it lasted, because every second felt like an hour. It was terrible.

After I was in a stable condition, they did some general check-up stuff to make sure that I didn’t have any organ damage or something, and I told them that my head felt awful, so they did either a CT scan or MRI scan (I forget which is which, but it was some scan or another of my head), and said I basically had minor brain damage (they used a fancier term for it, but I forgot exactly what it was… but it was basically just minor permanent brain damage). I don’t notice much of a difference in my ability to think… it’s not as if I’m mentally retarded or anything now, but even so, no brain damage is good.

I eventually went back home and rested up for a while. My parents installed the AC unit in my room before I went back in. I just slept and drank lots of water for a couple days. I had mostly recovered from the heat stroke, but my body was still dehydrated, so I needed to rest and drink more fluids. And during this time, I turned off all of my PCs. Only the AC was running in my room.

I am aware that this was all my fault and that it could have prevented it, but it’s too late to change anything now. And after all this, I am no longer going to do any bitcoin mining. I will probably sell my mining rigs, or maybe find some other purpose for them. But they definitely won’t be on at full load 24/7 like I used to have them, even though I have a good AC unit in my room.

And despite this whole situation being rather shitty, I still feel pretty damn lucky. Heat strokes can be fatal if they aren’t treated quickly enough. But fortunately for me, I was able to get treated in time. A little brain damage is still better than death, after all. It still sucks, but it also could’ve been worse.

In conclusion, if you are mining bitcoins, or plan on mining bitcoins, make sure that your hardware doesn’t get too hot, and if you’re like me and have your hardware in your bedroom, definitely make sure you have AC! Don’t repeat the same mistakes I made. Even if it only feels a little more warm than usual, you never know if the weather will get worse.

Now most keyboards have the home, end, delete, page up, and page down keys mashed together and sideways while the insert key is shoved up where it doesn't go.

Gold has practical value:
* electronics
* decoration on pimp outfits

My point is that it's not stable.  It seems to stablize for a month, then jumps somewhere else the next month.  It would be nice if it stayed the same amount and just swung about $2-3 dollars every few days but continued to stay the same amount.

When will there be stability?  When we get enough websites going like "Okay $X per bitcoin is our exchange rate and we won't change it more than once a month".  Then people will get accustomed to that price.

Bitcoin stablized around $13-14 then collapsed.
Bitcoin stablized around $10-$11 then collapsed.
Bitcoin is presently stablizing around $8-$9.
Then it will collapse.

"Next shitcoin fork to come out is gonna get raped."

Nasakioto, you are Japanese so what's your favorite anime?  Mine is Naruto.

smoothie??  He criticized forks and then supported them in his signature.

A guy came to Tinychan and Minichan back in spring 2010 telling us about bitcoins.  He claimed he was Satoshi on these forums.  I was new to bitcoins and didn't realize that was the name of the founder of bitcoins.  But maybe it was him.  He did say not to tell people this.

I had a good quote on a website I was making that was going to be exclusively bitcoin.  Unfortunately I couldn't get any visitors, didn't have millions to advertise and shut it down 11 months ago.

One good quote was the more laws you make, the more criminals you make or something of that nature.  Then the more people learn, the stranger the world becomes.

Vladimir, that's why I made this thread.  People create forks without serious investments in how to create an improvement to bitcoin.  We really need to spend a year at least working on making an improved bitcoin and then it is crucial that the founders set aside a bunch of coins so if bitcoins crash because their new currency replaces it, they can give them the new kind of coins in exchange for bitconis.  Without this later thing, you devalue bitcoins and thus ruin your new currency.

smoothie, ironic that you criticize forks when you give a namecoin address for donations.

After seeing this http://www.libertariannews.org/2011/08/30/bitcoin-fbi-admits-to-engaging-in-infiltration-disruption-and-dismantling-of-competing-currencies/

Is it possible for all that mining power and difficulty be traded for better encryption?

She might have and they had trouble tracing her cell phone.

Drug cartels have to smuggle money across the  border as well as drugs.  Wire transfers leave records governments can view.  And they can't trust any banks not to let their money be seized for drugs.

So if they smuggle it via bitcoins, that'll make mining profitable again for Hawaii residents.