Hi All

[Stokesy]

Hi, Si here 27 from the uk  been lurking on here now for a couple of weeks and got to say its a good forum you lot have here! Anyways I have some savings I'd like to have a bit of a play with rather than watch it depreciate in the bank, roughly £1000 was going to buy into bitcoins about 2 weeks ago but through over thinking seems I'm going to be paying quite a bit more now, so I'm tempted to go into the mining contracts currently seen 200ghs for a year costing £600 which doesn't seem to be too bad? Am I over speculating in thinking I will get 3 bitcoins over the year? Also what does fiat mean?? Thanks in advance and sorry to bore you if you've been asked these questions 100's of times already...

[chargers9]

Hi, I'm new too. If you go to the Wikipedia page for fiat money, there are a few definitions, and the Webster definition seems somewhat limited. I think the most of the meaning comes from "fiat" in the sense of a decree by government.

[Stokesy]

Ahh right, seems you've done a bit more research than me on it then.. Shall have a look on there now thanks.

[petemoss]

Hi Stokesy,
Welcome to the forum. I'm pretty new myself and just lurking so far.

Pete

[Stokesy]

Hi Pete! Seems there's a few newbies today then! Do you pair already have bitcoins or looking to buy?

[mobley]

HI. I'm a noob too. The word "Fiat" as it is used around here refers to your traditional government-backed currencies (US Dollar, Yen, etc.).

From what I can tell, the difficulty required to solve a hash is becoming overwhelmingly difficult due to significant advancements in technology used for mining over the past year as compared to previous years. The protocol is set up (paraphrasing) so that a block is solved, and thus bitcoins rewarded to the winning miner, once every 10 minutes. With so many people joining the network due to bitcoins increased popularity, and so many people mining with "mega machines", the hash has to get extremely difficult to solve in order to maintain a constant drip of bitcoins into the population. Therefore, it is hard to calculate the probability of you getting any exact number of bitcoins unless the service you sign up for upgrades their hardware to keep their hashing rate proportional to the growth rate of technology AND the population. This seems highly unlikely to me...but, again, i'm a noob.

If you have a few extra computers laying around with some solid GPUs, maybe try mining for other cryptocurrencies?

[Stokesy]

Hey mobley, spent a quite a bit of time into researching difficulty rates etc.. Came to a very rough conclusion that if rates continue as expected I should getting in the region of 1.6/7 bitcoin in the first five months so 3 may of been an over estimate, my theory is that if ppl stopped making mining rigs now then wouldn't the difficulty level even off? Maybe Evan come down abit? Seems its a money making game for the mining producers wouldn't surprise me if there are 4th rigs out by spring they only way profitable I see it is in the long term so plan was buy a couple on coin base etc then take a share in mining and hopefully bitcoin price will ought weigh the money spent?

[ubermata]

wellcome to this nice place man

[Dr Bloggood]

I'm new too. The blind leading the blind here, ha ha..!

All over the forum, they say mining doesn't pay off - that's all I can tell you.

And a fiat currency is a currency that isn't backed by any real value - eg gold. Till the early seventies, anybody could always trade in his dollars against gold with the central banks anytime, which made the currency a lot safer and more stable.

Now everything is just fiat, which means "be it" in latin, because fiat is currency created out of thin air.