Just curious; who still believes 9/11 was purely an unprovoked attack by Muslim zealots in an attempt to terrorize Americans?  Back when I was in HS, you couldn't mention 9/11 was fishy 'cos people would beat you up for implying anything other than what we were told is the truth.  Now that I'm in college, suddenly everyone's in agreement that, in the very least, some of what happened behind 9/11 was fabrication.  I'm not sure if that's due to time, or because college students are huge conspiracy buffs.

No point to gold if you never use it.  People will be encouraged to save and spend on the things they need, and stop buying junk they may or may not want.  Problem with a depreciating currency, you're inclined to spend it sooner, rather than later.  With a depreciating currency, Joe's gotta work his whole life to make ends meet.  And if there's no work left to do, Joe's up shit creek, like Joe is right now, and he'd be further up the creek without a paddle if Mr. Obooba decided to pull most soldiers and bring them home; then there'd really be no jobs.  So the war keeps going with fiat contributing to the reason why there must be war in the first place; war creates jobs, and lots of them.

However, war is such a waste.  Yes, it creates jobs, but what's the point of a job when all you're doing is destroying, just so you can build all over again?  That's the magic behind fiat; you're a slave to it, until you manage to store up enough to ride the rest of your life on.  So wherever the jobs are, that's where you must go, and if that job is warfare, that's that.  Cash that works like gold suddenly looks much more attractive; considering work is becoming a thing of the past now that a single machine can replace an entire factory of workers with a few guys to run the thing and make sure it's working right (heck, machines are even replacing soldiers now), people need to save up now more than ever.  Fiat works when you live in a nation that must be constantly worked on.  But everything's pretty much there, now.  We have the infrastructure, we have the cities and the towns and the schools and the electricity and the Internet in several different forms, we have the parks and the farmland and the machines to run that farmland, we've got almost all the work done to live comfortable lives.  Everything's going to hell because we're still stuck to this depreciating currency, and nations can't expand any more than they already are.  Soon we'll have to colonize the moon, wage a war against it, destroy it, then colonize it again, just to keep jobs flowing.

Sorry, I think that was slightly off topic  But the point is, a currency like Bitcoin is exactly what we need right now; something to use sparingly, for necessities, and maybe then life will look up a bit.  There's nothing stopping someone from going hungry with 10k bitcoins sitting in their wallet--that is, unless they're a miser.  But they probably deserve to die if they're so cheap, they won't even buy food for themselves.

Too popular?  It's hardly entering the world, here.  I don't see how Bitcoin could possibly be "too popular".  The dollar is too popular.  Bitcoin can take the #1 slot any day.

Did he not bother doing any research at all?  Jesus Hernandez Christ, where can I sign up for writing half-assed articles for a living?

Thanks for this, I finally understand why everyone keeps talking about bubbles

C'mooon dip!  I can't be a permabull if I don't have enough coins

Vircurex AFAIK

I'm in agreement that they'll both co-exist, along with all the other alt-coins.  As long as people are mining them, the network will always be running for those coins, making them all useful in some way.

I made this connection just the other day You're absolutely right OP. The west is centered around producing as much crap (and crap is the correct word here) as possible to keep their nations afloat. We're long overdue for a change.

There should be a thread about terminology on this board, look at the very top.

As for mining, your computer is essentially trying to find a needle in a haystack.  Every time it finds that needle, it mints a set amount of coins, and awards the miners transaction fees.  Normally, miners work together in "pools" which they all contribute a certain amount of hashing power (denoted by how fast your computer can solve the computations required to make the coins) to attempt to find the needle.  When a mining pool does find one, it splits the proceeds between the miners depending on how much power they contribute to the pool.  Specifically, you'll want to invest in ASIC technology.  Before, you could get a few high-end graphics cards and put them to work mining coins, but ASICs are going to make them obsolete soon, so don't waste the cash.  The more hashing power other miners have, the less you make.  From another point of view, the whole point of mining is to process transactions made by users.  You're compensated for doing this by transaction fees and minting.  Once minting is all over (long after we're dead) miners will be paid solely in transaction fees.

The reason I recommend Litecoin is because you can still mine it well with CPU and GPU.  It uses a different hashing method that ASIC technology is incompatible with.  You can find other threads in the mining section that'll send you in the right direction if you're interested in more (because I only know so much )

Greetings from Arlington

Thank you!  That's been bugging me since I heard it

My only regret is not spending my life savings on Bitcoin back when I first learned about it, when it was going for $15 a piece.

Oh well.

Pretty soon you'll be able to buy Papa Johns for .05

In the long run, it's gonna hit a gabillion per coin.  You lose!

Naw but really, hope the price goes back down some, cos you wanna buy back in ASAP.

You'd just burn electricity and your laptops out.

You could try Litecoin, but Bitcoin is definitely out.

Gross, what would I do with $5? 

But in all honesty, from what I've come to understand, it's a by-product of industry.  The folks who advocate fluoridated water must be paid off or something, because the type of beneficial fluoride (I believe it's called Calcium Fluoride) that is naturally found in water is not the same type of fluoride they're dumping into the water supplies (I believe this one is called Sodium Fluoride.  Confused me at first, because I thought this was the same thing as table salt (or is it?))  So, instead of disposing the waste properly, they dump it into the water supply and call it healthy for your teeth.  In this case, it's an issue with profits.

On the other hand, there's also suspicion that it's being used as a social experiment.  Purportedly, the sodium fluoride causes people (among a slew of negative health effects) to be much more tame and docile.  If there's any method someone would employ to control not just one society, but any society they saw fit, they would insist that putting sodium fluoride into the water supply was great for your teeth (even though there's been studies that show non-fluoridated water has no positive effect on teeth.)  I could be wrong, but this started...1920's?  1950's?  One of the two.  And I've noticed there's been few uprisings in America despite a lot of horse shit lately.  Whenever I hear someone say "Wake up, America," I find it funny that they chose those words specifically.  Also, apparently Hitler used the same method to calm prisoners in prison camps, to prevent uprisings.

Whichever one you wanna roll with, I suppose.  I'm inclined to believe the reasons are more likely to be complex, as there is not just one person with one mind running America, but rather many, and many minds have many interests.  So both may be true, depending on who you ask.  I just don't buy into the "it's great for your teeth" game.

I'm thinking about getting a few myself   The prices is bound to jump like BTC's.

I predict crypto-currency is going to stay for as long as the Internet is still around.  So if the feds wanna duke it out, they're gonna have to play by our rules, too.

And I'm with you bud, I've learned crazy amounts about how money works and how the economy works just by being around peeps here.  Funny, because my high school economics class was half a year of wasted time.