Its important to look to the future of things when getting into mining, and what your personal goals would be with it.

Each node no matter how small contributes and diversifies the network, if your desire to mine is based on fun and being an active part of it, and not serious mining operation, the Erupters are perfect for this as barrier to entry is pretty low and setup is minimal. The Erupters are still not ideally suited for a large mine as their density cannot compare to the latest industrial miners nearing release. But if anything, they do carry some cool factor.

The price per mhash is still much too high compared to other offerings on the way to be useful in heavy mining where ROI is a significant factor, which should drive the price down quite a bit soon. With the network hashpower exploding ROI is very marginal until the market is either saturated to taper off of this rise and/or Bitcoin rallies once again higher to restore mining ROI to a better place.

Remember also that Bitcoin has only grown positively overall from day one. They were worth $266 this year at the high point, if it does a similar rally again soon, even a little bit of a Bitcoin could be worth a lot.

Mining is interesting, as per their vague definitions technically miners are issuers of money (however miners are not exchanges of money, particularly from BTC to USD), but can also be classified services business because technically a miner is just a transaction processor, from which you are granted new currency as a reward for operating one. I doubt FinCEN has any classification that actually fits this accurately.

Seems FinCEN still isn't sure what to make of this, and so much the better.

Bitcoin would remove the control of money from government, which in a world where they can't simply just print more money whenever they please. In a deflationary economy a government would have to be fiscally responsible and transparent. With Bitcoin the people have direct control on whether their government gets funding or not for its initiatives. I hope it leads to governments taking a crowdfunding approach. Since the practicality of taxing a Bitcoin infrastructure would be futile since there is no direct way to track transactions, this may be the only way a government gets funding in the not too distant future.

In a way Bitcoin is also the voting system of the future this this kind of fundamental change occurs. A government would actually then need full support of the public to fund its goals. I don't think there would be war in this world if they had to be crowdsourced.

Not sure about OP, but I do beliee that NVC is insanely overvalued on BTC-e. As long as it is trading higher in NVC/BTC than LTC/BTC, the coin is total bs. There are surely more vendors that accept Litecoin over unknown Novacoin, and Litecoins market cap is higher, I don't understand how it is valued that highly without some form of manipulation behind it.

One other point to consider is that while Goxzilla is running itself around, many new exchanges have come online in the wake of the last disaster that crashed the entire market. The trade is diversifying, and to that I say thank you Gox for your hard work and pioneering business, but Gox simply had too much traffic to be good for the crypto-economy. It is only a good thing that the exchanges are spreading out along with trade volumes.

Without even watching this video (I will when I get a chance away from work), it is hardy the end of anything. The investigation is just that, they have created no new laws or pushing to limit what Bitcoin can do, though I have no doubt once they realize that Bitcoin is a direct competitor to Federal Reserve ponzi-banking they will do everything in their power to kill it off. They don't want us to use something they dont control in the slightest, as I imagine doing legitimate  and fair business in an open field of battle is appalling to them.

But they can do this no more than they did to BitTorrent, which in the end after millions of dollars were burned on legal suits, resulted in nothing.

Even if they did kill Bitcoin dead somehow, there are about 40 other blockchains out there to take its place. They simply cannot regulate it all, much less control because unlike fiat no one owns the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin is the antithesis of money control, designed to deflect such regulation.

 

I have indeed resigned the OP so I can focus on BlockBurner, as well as my newly founded local group called MBEX as our local Bitcoin authority 

Though I would still be wary of newcomers to the scene, I think there are many more companies now that are proving to be legitimate to partner with that these mining scams are losing steam. That is not to say this thread can't still be a discussion about on these new businesses.


100% scam, their CEO is attached to a Kickstarter scam as well, and have not shown a working device at all.

All of this is avoided by actually researching your investments beforehand. Scammers would be out of a job if people would just think a little.

Great move by WikiLeaks to go broad with the Snowden fund, which seems to be building up a template for future whistleblowers to be granted safe haven when exposing how completely corrupt and out of control our governments have become.


It is good to see the Bitcoin magnates stepping forward as well

Terrorism is not really a thing, just an intangible concept used by governments to remove freedoms from the populace by justifying it in the name of protecting the state. Like 9/11, the Patriot Act could not be passed fast enough to remove rights and freedoms from American citizens in the name of securing America from "terror", which has been ongoing for 13 years and counting as more and more freedoms are eroded and destroyed, pushed along by false flag attacks (The Boston Bombing) that seem created to get us used to fully militarized police.

A "terrorist" activity essentially means any action against the state that they don't like, which gives them much flexibility in enacting unconstitutional laws and power to go after anyone they please, for any reason. In this the US is highly guilty of pushing their "War on Terror", which if you think about it, how does one have a war on an intangible concept. It is just a smokescreen and nothing more.

That said, US dollars and other fiat currencies have been funding war and terrorist activities long before Bitcoin came along. The only pundits who push that as a negative point about Bitcoin have nothing else bad to say, so this is them spitballing. Much like the "Bitcoin is used to buy drugs!" arguement...pretty sure the drug trade is Dollar based and still basically is, but no one calls for a ban on Dollars to stop the problem. If this is the only ammunition they have against digital currencies they are a desperate bunch indeed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb-ts8fUhB8

An interesting TED, which I am always glad to see Bitcoin being discussed in this setting.

It does point to an interesting side of the Bitcoin economy that is not talked about usually, which is trust.

Trust in banks, governments, and giant corporations (dividing those is difficult these days) is fading fast. I think the Cypriot bail-ins earlier this year are a siren for this, in that now banks are desperate enough to rob their own customers to save their own asses. I myself no longer keep my wealth in any institution tied to fiat currency because my trust in them is less than zero, and even less in our governments to correct it because they are hooked on money like a drug.

This societal and economic sickness is being met in the field by engineers and scientists using technology to solve the problem. Bitcoin is the pinnacle of this, by entrusting the system to pure mathematics and peer to peer computing instead of any central body led by corruptible people.



Thoughts?

That is true and for convenience's sake would be best, though it may become that way naturally, I only posit this as a possible scenario. More the point was simply that bitcoin and its many offshoots won't be decided by the borders of countries, but respective industries and societies. We really don't know what happens next, only that it will probably be spectacular.

That looks great  I will grab an account and give it a spin

I'd like to announce the formation of a group for my local area, namely Missoula, MT (US) and surrounding cities. The intent is to have a local portal for Bitcoin and related activities, such as mining, securities funds, and coin exchange, as well as advocating for local business involvement and adoption.

 

M-BEX on FaceBook

M-BEX on Twitter




I intend for the group to meet twice weekly at the local library, times TBA. I intend to have a full website available in due time.

I was just about to say the same thing. The only thing this will affect maybe are any entities that translate Bitcoin to fiat and vice versa in a proper currency exchange. Mining may feed those exchanges to an extent but they are a far cry from "money transmitters" and any related regulations.


I take it as a good sign though. First, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. They are starting to see that Bitcoin isn't just some fad or a joke now, and naturally want to kill it before it kills Wall Street and their entire global ponzi scheme.

However what this has to do with mining specifically is beyond me. The only consumer protection needed there is not being an idiot when it comes to making your hardware purchases.

The same does not apply to gold because gold cannot be spent as a day to day currency as it is not accepted anywhere, because raw gold is unsuitable to be a currency in this age. Bitcoin however can already be used to purchase goods and services from a growing list of vendors. So yes, Bitcoin is currency. Gold is a store of wealth and speculative tool.

Bitcoin =/= Gold, stop comparing the two this way.


As far as ponzi schemes, it is a crime weather it was conducted in fiat or Bitcoin, I don't see why the means really matters in the eyes of the law. Pirate defrauded a bunch of people, and should be punished for it.

The rPi is it's own self contained computer, should be able to plug it into an ethernet port and ride the hashtrain

There is no reason to believe anything they say given their track record

GPU's as converters to what?

Though SHA ASIC made sense for SHA, but Scrypt is a very different animal that will not benefit from ASIC nearly as much as SHA coin did. Scrypt was designed deliberately to be a tough hash requiring much more intensive memory usage, economically ASICs for Scrypt may not be that much better than FPGA solutions in performance vs cost, but we'll see. The good news however is that FPGA implementations can be carried over to ASIC hardware