i've walways favor a dynamic blocksize myself. i support this proposal too.

quickly? yea, i have no idea. any movement of that kind of money is going to take time. 1100 bitcoin might not be insane amounts, but 2 million USD is a LOT of bills. doing it all through your bank and an exchange (or five) would same physical troubles, but you'd get noticed BIG TIME by feds and such. i believe banks automatically flag transfers over 10k? i don't know for sure.

in short: there probably isn't a way to do it by any reasonable definition of quickly.

i simply cannot wrap my brain around this action among the seeming chaos of the scaling issue. to judge by the talk, we should, at best, be stable, not climbing. Yet here we are, record highs.

i really am kicking myself over those 10 coins i sold to my brother for $1000. total. :| at the time, that was the price... heck, i think i actually did it in my favor by a percent or two. argh.

and then there's the 15 or so coins i spent on games and other crap... ugh.

seeing as my father in law is a supervisor at a nearby concrete plant, it seems likely that we'll go that route. forms and rebar, pour concrete, hey look, walls. more or less, anyway.

thanks guys.

that... is not how bitcoin works. at all. not even remotely.

BU = Bitcoin Unlimited. i'm not totally clear what they propose, but they're developing/have developed their own bitcoin client (i think) that will run with a different set of rules, i THINK using a dynamic system to increase blocksize. i'm not sure when this would be activated, but i've seen others posting that there's something around 30% support for it.

segwit is the proposal by Bitcoin Core, the devs of what was originally the satoshi client. it will activate at approval of 95% of nodes. (might be 95% of miners? i'm not sure) or ...some other way like a user activated soft fork or something.

ya know what would help here? more block space.

seriously though - .0003 is about 46 cents at stamp prices. that's kinda insane, as a per kilobyte fee. makes me a bit sick.

lack of block space. there isn't enough room to include all transactions, so the fee to get included in quickly goes up. and the number of waiting transactions just grows.

as to segwit... yea, controversy. i don't think there really is a concensus. three sides, as i see it. those who want segwit, those who want bitcoin unlimited, and those who are sick of the debate entirely and want to just get on with something, anything, to solve the problem.

oh, and subgroups of "anything BUT segwit" or "anything but BU!" of course too.

them green walls are looking strong!

aaand there goes the last bit of civility in this thread.

damn, i hadn't been aware fees had gotten to these kind of levels.

sig campaign earnings will cost a fortune to spend...

yes, the bitcoin software was created with the math built in, and yes, there's a reward for "mining" which verifies the transactions made through bitcoin. the reward is a small amount of bitcoin. the software was created to be a system of money and transferring it in a secure way.

since we can't ask the people who created the software originally, it's hard to say why. money independent of government perhaps? i'm guessing.

yep. it's a mess. ...still.

very complicated questions, i'll try to be simple.

the equation is a standard hashing one, SHA256. it's a way to take an amount of data and reduce it to a string of text that can be compared to others. mining hardware are doing the comparison, looking for a specific result.

bitcoin was developed by someone known as Satoshi Nakamoto. they used to post on this forum. we do not know if it was one person, or a group. we do not know if that's a real name. they have disappeared and not communicated without the public at all for some years.

each coin is not unique. it's more like "i have five apples, and send you three." then "i have three apples, and send you two." no one cares which specific apple it is, as long as they are all apples.

the limits of the mathematics relate to how big the numbers used in the calculations are. in simple terms, they are really, really big.

as for your 5th question, i'm not sure, honestly. other people, smarter than i am, figured that out.

the market does. people offer coins for sale at a price they want, and others either buy them at that price, or they do not. the price is adjusted as a result. if the sale price is accepted, the seller moves it higher by a small amount. if it's not accepted, he moves it lower. basic stock market stuff. sort of anyway.

i may be wrong on any or all of the above, but i think i got it. mostly.

...so, boring, uneventful week, eh guys?

think of a gold rush in the old days: who made more money? the guys digging for gold in the hills, or the guys selling shovels?

right, shovel sellers.

and exchanges profit for every single trade. you buy, they take a fee. you sell, that means someone else buys, so they take a fee. and this happens on every transaction, thousands of times an hour.

therefore, it's in their best interests to keep operating and to be legitimate. doing so, there's only one outcome - growth and wealth. doing otherwise risks that.

so why would they risk it?

i can't! i just got a job and it starts in the morning. sleeping now would mean not sleeping later. can't risk it!

you'll have to suffer.

so i (finally) got a decent job after quite sometime unemployed. yay! one of the things this leads to is figuring out where to live for my wife and i. we're at her parents house now.

one option is to build a house on their land. they own it free and clear, there is over an acre. i know loans from banks for homes are common, and that home construction loans when you already own the land DO exist. but i haven't got any idea how much i'd even be looking at.

i mean, how much does it cost to build a house? materials, different techniques (modular, prefab, stick build, poured concrete, brick?) labor? how much could we (and friends) do ourselves and what sort of legal stuff is there to deal with?

i just have no idea. not even sure where to begin looking for info, so here we are.

this is in texas, btw. i'm sure it differs by state.

any advice?

holy shit, we boomed. what the hell happened last night?