I want to know the same thing. wtf is going on?

And back to double digits again

I read these forums everyday. I read Bitcoin news everyday. I mine and I trade bitcoins almost everyday. I follow bitcoin about as closely as you can.

The problem with it is indeed everything right now is just news. Coinlab promised us a new, awesome, easy-to-use exchange. Where did that go? Where is my bitcoin ATM? Where is my bitcoin debit card? There are two restaurants in my area that accept bitcoins but those have been doing that for months with no signs of anymore jumping on the bitcoin bandwagon. All these startups getting funding is great, but until their ideas come to fruition bitcoin is going to mean nothing to the average joe.

When my girlfriend needs cash to take the bus to come see me, I still have to western union her money and pay 10%. She has a bitcoin wallet and I can send her bitcoins but are useless to her.

The current $100 bitcoin price is already based purely on speculation on what is to come. Some of these promises need to become reality and we need some more good news coming up to keep interest up. The first thing that needs to happen is a decent exchange for those of us who wish to trade bitcoins for US dollars. CampBX is the closest we have but they are horribly slow and buggy even when there is no volume and they could never deal with any reasonable amount of volume.

Where are you located? Will you do escrow?

The chances of bitcoin actually succeeding are very slim. Very few people actually use bitcoin and even fewer haven even heard of it. We need to build some momentum if it's ever going to succeed.

Bitcoins have actually become much harder to trade in the past couple of months (no more dwolla on mtgox, and no more usd mtgox bank transfers) and it is still way to hard for the average person to obtain bitcoins. And many of the Bitcoin promises (bitcoin ATM, bitinstant debit card, paypal and western union looking into bitcoin) have yet to become reality.

There doesn't seem to be much on the horizon for bitcoin right now other than increased government regulation.

It's been a bear market for a month now. Bitcoin likely can't survive another extended bear market. Those of you who want cheap coins be careful what you wish for.

There hasn't been any good news from the Bitcoin market in about a month now.

I've just been watching the value slowly decrease every day.

It's a lot more disheartening than the sudden drops we've seen in the past because with those we know that what drops fast can go up fast too.

But Bitcoin has not risen fast in quite a while.

It still feels like the bubble is deflating and it seemed to many that the wall at $100 would hold it. But that doesn't seem to be the case and unless something good in Bitcoin news happens soon I fear it will continue to deflate with no bottom in sight. Bitcoin needs to something exciting to generate interest in it again but I don't know what that it is or when it is coming.

Seems like a scam as they cost waaaay more than 5 bitcoins.

People understimate how difficult it is to get these licenses and how much they cost.

It can cost millions per state and a lot of record keeping must be kept.

The only way the bitcoin ATM could happen is if a large bank that already has ATMs (Bank of America, Citibank, etc) decides to get involved.


In other news, I'm still waiting for bitcoin debit card!

Pools are a MUST. You aren't likely to find a block in any reasonable time even with that much hash power because difficulty will be so high in September.

I'd love to solo mine but if the average time to find a block is more than a couple of days, it is not worth the risk.

I think no one is bothering because there is no reason to chose BFL over Avalon. BFL is far riskier and sketchier operation and people are going to stick with the more reliable company and technology given that their chips are pretty much the same price.

What you consider a reasonable profit and what a large scale mining operation with cheap electricity in another country consider a reasonable profit are completely different.

If your SC Single is only making a dollar a week, is it profitable for you? Probably not, but it might be for someone else who has 10,000 singles running for nearly free electricity.

They don't exist because Litecoin isn't worth it and most likely will die completely in the next year or so. No one is going to invest millions in designing an ASIC for an alt coin that has 0 use as currency.

Yes you could build an FPGA miner and maybe someone has but the advantage of FPGA miners is really only for the power consumption. They aren't actually any faster or cheaper than GPUs. Again, it's just not worth it for Litecoin or any other alt coin.

There are dozens of alt coins and all of them are just basically bitcoin with a minor tweak. None of them will succeed as there is no reason to choose one of them over the original.

no, because they it would be cheaper to buy coins directly.

Dollars should not enter the picture at all.

Look at the costs in bitcoins only.

ASICs are AWESOME for bitcoin.

Think of what we had before... anyone with a reasonable amount of money, whether it be an individual, corporation or government could buy up GPUs and 51% attack the network.

Now if someone wanted to, they would have to spend a lot of money researching and developing their own ASIC just to have a chance. They could not buy enough commercial ASICs right now to do so and by the time they've developed their own ASIC the difficulty will be so high that even that might not be enough. Right now we are secure from everyone except maybe the NSA. And we've just made it significantly harder for them too.

Neither.

They won't pay for themselves if you are just buying them now.

The answer is simple:

1) As I said many times before MtGox will never actually implement Litecoin trading! You heard it here first!

2) Litecoin and all other alt coins are going to die. They offer no advantages over bitcoin right now and are purely speculatory. As GPU miners switch to Litecoin mining watch the price plummet as many new people are selling and no one is buying. (Yes, I know the number of LTC created a day is constant, but i believe more people will try to sell the Litecoin they mine, instead of holding).

Pre-order is the ONLY way you will ever make money back on mining.

If you wait long enough that you are buying from stock or from a reseller then you are too late!

Why would someone sell something that they could make more money with if they just kept the hardware for themselves??

I'm more worried that JohnK might die with my bitcoins in escrow. What if no one knows his password and those bitcoins can never be recovered?

Who gets the product purchased if the funds can never be released?

1) Just because you don't trust the ASIC companies doesn't mean at least some of them won't deliver (and all of them look like they are so far, so later than others, but still delivering).

2) GPUs will never sell for what you bought them for. GPUs will be mining so few bitcoins these days that you will have no chance of making the difference between what you buy and sell the GPUs at. Don't forget that they use far more electricity than ASICs.

3) The difficulty of those alt coins is going to soar as all the GPU miners do this. Alt coins are all going to die anyways within a year as there is only people mining them with no one buying them or using them as they are pretty much useless.