I go camping a lot, and yes it is a tent. I go backpacking camping with some friends and no we don't use no wussy two-can stove thing, too much extra weight to lug around, Just find brush and tree branches, cut them up and build a fire.

Probably because they were dealing with criminals and knew full well they were laundering money. I don't think they would have made $1 mil by dealing with average Joe's looking to exchange a few BTC every few days. As someone else pointed out, this is more of a case of people doing something illegal more than it does with anyone having an agenda against BTC. They just happened to be using BTC for the illegal transactions, it could have been them exchanging Tide for $$ with the same results. Its just a little easier to handle BTC than truck-fulls of Tide laundry detergent.

If you want mainstream adoption, we need someone like Ticketmaster to accept BTC. Either through Bitpay, which is meh but still would be good publicity, or directly which would be huge. I personally despise Ticketmaster, but for the most part they are the only game in town for most big venues.

This! +1

Also, this CIA visit sounds intriguing, anyone care to put up some links on the details of this so us new comers can get up to speed?

As some have suggested you should offer this for sale with payment in Bitcoin. If you were serious you would just order the last 3, or maybe 30-50, yourself in various sizes and offer them for sale for BTC in the marketplace section of the forum.

I run a full node only because I currently mine alt coins and have computers that are on 24/7 anyway. I also run other nodes as my wallets, but only on occasion when I need to use them. Basically let them sync for 10-20 minutes, make my transaction then shut them down again, so they really do not count.

I do think this is one of the disadvantages of bitcoin in that there is no PoS mechanism to encourage more people to run full nodes full-time except for pools, exchanges, etc, which is leading further to centralization.

This is the thing for me as well the high price, I would hope the price would continue to come down a bit more. I have read the reviews and think it is a good idea, but the $120 price is a bit high, even if they have come down from $300+.

For me, I would think the trezor is best suited to carry 1-5 BTC around for easy of access with some piece of mine they are secure. For people with larger amounts of BTC to secure (10's or 100's+), I believe they would prefer to keep them in separate paper wallets for maximum security. I just cannot see trusting high amounts of BTC to a single wallet or device.

Actually it might be worse than that as some exchanges charge both on the buy and sell side.

So using your example:

You bought 1 BTC at 1000 $/BTC
You sold 1 BTC at 1001 $/BTC

Trade profit: 1 $
Buy Fee: 1000 * 0,002 = 2 $
Sell Fee: 1000 * 0,002 = 2 $
Net profit: -3 $ (aka loss)

So here you would only be in profit by waiting until the price is high enough to offset all your fees, in this case you would need to sell > $1004 to be in profit, as you already "lost" $4 in fees.

Always good to have another pool to help spread the hash around.

Just a suggestion, but you might consider offering a 0% fee period to encourage people to give it a try. Otherwise it may be hard to convince people to switch from a pool routinely finding blocks to yours just for a 0.01% fee discount

Obvious scam as many other people have already pointed out, but just for fun let's look at this proposal a bit.

Since it is all in fun, let's just go with the big profit opportunity:


Ok, so assuming we go with even the minimum here of 30 BTC, in 34 days this will a bit more than double and become 63 BTC. If say I like your program and continue to re-invest we would have something like:

Day  Starting   Ending
0      30          30
34     30          63
68     63          132.2
102   132.2      277.62
136   277.62    583
170   583        1224
204   1224       2570
238   2570       5397
272   5397       11333

Anyway, I think you can see where we are going with this, if you really had the means to make these types of returns, in under a year you are going to be wealthy enough as to not be posting such drival on these forums, much less needing other people's money to make it happen.

Well watching a number appear on the screen is pretty much any online gambling and in fact a lot of offline gambling as well. Sure, they take different forms, but in the end its the same result. Even with lotteries, numbers get drawn, sure maybe a fancy ping-pong ball machine for some entertainment is involved, but in the end they display the numbers on a screen and that's that, win or lose. Same with most slot machines and electronic devices, the random numbers behind the scenes may display as cards or cherry's or take some other form, but most of the time it boils down to some random number being drawn.

As far as your argument that you can't win in the long term that is true for just about all gambling as well. All casinos have the house edge, or they would not stay in business. State lottery's have a huge edge in that they only pay out 50-60% of what they take in to begin with. So unless you are that lucky guy who just bought one lottery ticket in his life and won the grand prize, you will come out losing in the long term. I know people who have won lesser amounts ($50,000-$250,000) and over the long term they have probably gambled all their winnings back.

In the end most people play for the entertain value and "rush" that gambling can bring. If done in moderation I liken it to being no different than spending my entertainment dollars elsewhere. A dinner and a movie, a round of golf, a day at the amusement park, many of these activities will set you back over $100. If you spend $100 a week or so gambling, really no harm done, and even if you lose over time it is still fun in the moment when you do win.

Basically it sounds like you need to find a different game than dice. However, I think most any gambling games are really not that fun unless you are winning money.

Yes, it is almost impossible to get a direct payout to your wallet anymore. Even sites that claim to offer direct payment do so only after you have accumulated a minimal threshold, oftentimes higher than faucetbox's. Gone are the days where you could simply enter your bitcoin address and click submit (without captchas even) and receive your bitcoin in a matter of minutes.

But even with that siad, I used to play around with faucets more than I do now. Once you find more profitable ways of earning BTC you quickly learn what a waste of time faucets are, but I think they are still a great way for a beginner to learn about BTC. They can help you learn how to transfer your BTC to a wallet, maybe even trade on an exchange, gamble a little, etc. without having to invest money right away. Once you are familiar with the basics, you will be a bit more comfortable investing your own money into bitcoin.

One other thing I have noticed lately is that some sites are now even queuing up your payouts to faucetbox. Meaning you may need to meet a certain minimum on their faucet, say 5,000 or more satoshis before they will even let you cash-out to faucetbox, where you again would have to meet a threshold and wait for you payout. This double queue if a disturbing trend I think will only continue. I know one site HourlyBitcoin was recently hacked so users lost any finds int he payout queue.

In short, you can earn indeed free bitcoin using faucets, but expect to jump through many hoops and obstacles to do so.

I think you unintentionally made my point. For one, your caveat "average Joe who's familiar with Computers and Internet" is not an average Joe. Sure a lot of people can probably logon, check their email, Facebook, etc., but I would not consider them computer savvy. They have a hard time adding a printer or setting up a backup to an automated external drive. Why do you think the plug and play or zero touch configuration market is so huge, most people just want to download an app or program, plug in a device, or use a website and be done.

How are they to know Brainwallet is any less secure than Electrum without putting some time and effort into it? In most cases it would be more than simply visiting a few websites as their technical competence is not as high as almost anyone posting here and they would have a hard time understanding what makes one more secure over the other.

The average Joe I referenced puts his fiat in the bank, if bank gets robbed or if his CC gets compromised, he is still ok with minimal (maybe $50) or no liability. This same Joe maybe hears about Bitcoin, does a bit of research and all he sees is hacked wallets, hacked exchanges, scams, Mt Gox was a scam, etc. on and on. This is what is keeping Bitcoin from exploding. You are not getting 10's of millions of users until much more progress is made in this avenue. it is not simply making something more secure, it is making it more secure and something your grandma, barber, bartender, car mechanic, waitress, little league coach, and so on can use. I think hardware wallets are a step in the right direction but much more needs to be done on all fronts.

As I posted above, it basically comes down to two things. Number of unique users, meaning one individual, as many people have multiple accounts on forums, at different exchanges, possibly even some have multiple accounts on single exchanges. This would be probably be very hard to get an accurate number, thus all we can do is estimate.

The second important thing is how much BTC, or BTC equivalent (in the case of users holding alternative cryptocurrencies), a individual controls. I use the term controls as they may have amounts spread out amongst different wallets, exchanges, or even holding different types of alts.

I would guess there are a lot of people who may have a wallet somewhere and got some dust from a faucet, giveaways, or some other method and would not necessarily be considered a user. If we count all those, I could possibly see 1 or 2 million. But if we count only people who have 0.1 BTC or more, I again think it would be closer to the 250,000, maybe 500,000 number.

Exactly, and the all the useless posts that usually accompany such sad events saying the victim should have done this or that, or used this other wallet, or they were foolish for using said wallet, or site, will not change this basic fact. Until a secure wallet can be developed that doesn't take a month of hard core research to figure out all the ins and outs before using, the average Joe will stay away.

I only have 280x cards, and I get 500 MH/s each which at the current difficulty yields about 11 VNL per day for each card.

Estimating a 270x might get 350 MH/s, you would get around 8 VNL per day. Granted, it's just an educated guess, but it should be somewhat close.

Sorry, but there is no way there are 10-15 million bitcoin users around the world. There are only ~15 million bitcoins that have been mined, with less than that in circulation due to lost coins, burned coins, satoshis abandoned million, etc.

If each person held one BTC the price would be more than the current $280 each and the interest in BTC would be skyrocketing. Considering the fact that we know of several people who control 1,000's of BTC, if not millions, we could dilute the needed amount to be considered a Bitcoin user to say possessing .25 BTC. I think even using this lowered criteria it would be a stretch to say there are 10 million users. I think the 250,000 figure is pretty accurate if we stick with people who either hold or at least use .25 BTC or more routinely.

I suppose if one were to count total addresses, etc. there would be maybe a million people or so, but is it fair to count someone as an "user" who maybe created an online wallet, had some dust deposited and never touched it again? You can argue over the exact amount needed to be counted, even drop to say .1 BTC or roughly $28, but again I can not see a significant increase.

As far as the 500,000 BCT Forum users, as pointed out by others this I am sure can be deflated to probably 200,000 or less unique people. The one pumper dude was recently found to have over 100 accounts by himself, so it is not unheard of to have multiple accounts. With signature campaigns, shills, countless other reasons, I am sure having multiple BCT accounts is more common than not. Say the average was maybe 3 accounts per user, this would put BCT user-base at ~175,000 users. The Reddit accounts, mentioned elsewhere, would mostly contain duplicate BCT users, so the additional unique users would be almost negligible, so even giving lots of benefit of the doubt, I could see the 250,000 users figure as pretty spot on.

Well, I hate to point this out but your username is not the most confidence inspiring one either. No disrespect, but would you loan money to someone going by the nickname badluck?

I filled out your survey, and hope it is useful for your research. I PM'd you my address, thanks!

To others, the survey is short and very straight-forward, should take no more than 2 minutes of your time.

OMG, I never read anything so foolish in my life.

They are both based off the latin root crypt, which means hidden or secret.

cryptosporidium: New Latin, from crypt- + spora spore + -idium  i.e hidden spores (can make you ill)

cryptography: New Latin cryptographia, from crypt- + -graphia -graphy i.e. hidden writing

And cryptocurrency is named because it is a currency based of cryptograpic mechanisms.

There are tons of words that share common roots which have nothing to do with one another, this is just a bad attempt at trolling.