More like tripled. Bitcoin was at about $3 in late December. Casascius was saying the coin would cost about $5000 total. Now it would be worth $13,300 (value of coin) + $1,689 (value of gold) = $14,989.

This will be difficult until ASICs come out because BFL FPGA Singles are incompatible with p2pool.

Works good now.

It's really more like saying you can't know what is the right price to buy futures contracts on Gold in commodities market. People will guess one way or another, but only when the time comes is the number really known.

I think that the idea that people were pricing in the halving is a little bit far fetched. The main issue is that a halving has never occurred before, so how are people to know what to expect afterwards. On top of that, I don't think that anyone really has much of an idea on why bitcoin prices rise when they do nor fall when they do. We can see large buys and sell hit Gox, but we don't know who is doing them and we don't know the motivations behind those people. Unlike traditional markets, we don't have pollsters trying to determine sentiment, so we have no leading indicators. All we have is a random walk with a bit of volume. Getting information from that is barely better than scrying with chicken bones.

Mining can easily be done on the darknet. Some pools even have onion websites.

If any Bitcoin activities are made illegal, people will route around them.

Anyone else having problems authenticating your workers?

That would only cost $1,366,236. No big deal 

Meanwhile, the hashrate is down around 23,000 GHps. I would say the halving is kicking in.

1 year CDs are at about 1.1%, 5 year CDs are at best 1.8%. I know that there are temporarily good interest rates to be had in Australia, but here in America I don't know where you think you're getting such a good rate.

6.7% on an item that has an lifetime warrantee like the BFL SC is all profit because of the capital that is stored in the machine itself, which can be sold at a future date. Saying that it's not profit is like saying a landlord isn't making a profit on the rental property they purchased. It might sound right to a layperson but is makes no sense in the financial world.

Basically everyone who responded to me proved my point: they don't know anything about the realities of finance and what a person can reasonably expect from an investment. Let's just assume that ROI is as low as 50% per year. That means you could open an account with $1000 in it and in 19 years have $2.2 million. But people don't retire on $1000 tucked away once when they are 46. It takes years of saving $1000 or more every month to build up a retirement account you can live on.

But this thinking is an epidemic in our culture and it has lead to people pushing tons of money into the hands of scammers. The only reason we have had this return so far is because we've been operating in an environment with 25% or more monetary inflation but it's been balanced by the exponentially expanding network of people being introduced to bitcoin.

5 years from now would see another halving. I guess it would depend on the profitability of it. I'd still mine if it was close to break even, but it doesn't make sense to mine at large loss.

I'm betting that this isn't the case here, but it's an interesting point. I'm not really familiar with how to phrase things to make sales like this feasible.

Do you have any suggestions on how to do this with Paypal? Everything I've heard says as soon as you say you are selling bitcoins, Paypal becomes uncooperative.

It's not ideal compared to what we are used to, but a 15 year payoff is 6.7% annually. This is considered to be a good investment in the non-bitcoin world. If you found such a good investment, you could ride it infinitely with a 4% Safe withdrawl rate.

Bitcoin people kind of have their heads up their asses when it comes to what a normal return is.

Difficulty is crashing now. I went through this last year when the price was dropping and thus making mining unprofitable for everyone. As it hit $4, I thought I'd have to turn off my miners, but the difficulty kept dropping, keeping me riding the profitability line. I was on both sides at different times, but I didn't care that much since I was also mining for principle and support of the network. I was never more than 10% unprofitable. From that it seemed to me that most GPU miners either paid more than I do in electricity (11c/kwh) or they didn't have cards as efficient as I (1.42 MHps/W measured at the wall). That system right now would be -1.5% profitable which in past experience has people turning off their rigs.

I think this goes against the spirit of the game. If he defaults on you, the circle isn't broken, but the purpose was to run the circle until it gets broken, or hits 100.

It seems to only offer Flat Rate now. Is that right?

To return bitcoin for bitcoin would be highly unfair. It would provide a perfect currency hedge against a bitcoin drop. Just purchase a few hundred thousand in BFL equipment. If BTC price goes down, you can sell your equipment (or even just your preorder ticket) and get your full value back. If BTC price goes up, then you can demand a bitcoin refund. From the way it played out, this would have been a risk free way to double your money.

Shouldn't you, like, be paying off your debts?

Welcome to the forum. Beware of trolls.