Newbie questions that need anwsering and discussion

[madara]

ok first off right off the back my bitwallet is taking forever and a-half to "load godamn blocks"

1. what are these blocks its loading,what do they do and what is there porpuse, how much space are they taking up on my comp and do i have to do this everytime i open up my wallet?

2.i use to have a bitcoin 24 account but found it was far to complicated, is it easier to purchase bitcoins with a debate card with bitcoinwallat?

3.i have a HP vista dual core, nvidia 4500 series graphic card and a decent laptop with specs idk, how many bitcoins could i mine per/hoour (x.xxxx)?

4.whats a good service people manly do to get a little bit of bit coin with minimal effort i already know of the free bitcoin and have made 0.5 so far which isnt bad considering ive been workin for maby 6 hours?

EDIT: thank you everybody for your awnsers you guys have been a big help

[Foxpup]

ok first off right off the back my bitwallet is taking forever and a-half to "load godamn blocks"

1. what are these blocks its loading,what do they do and what is there porpuse, how much space are they taking up on my comp and do i have to do this everytime i open up my wallet?

Blocks are groups of transactions which have processed by miners. This process requires a huge amount of computer power, making it extremely difficult to produce a "fake" block with different transactions. Essentially, once a transaction appears in a block it is almost impossible to reverse or alter it after the fact. Blocks are linked in a structure known as the blockchain, and each block includes data from the previous block in the chain, so that removing or replacing any particular block invalidates all the blocks that came after it, making it almost impossible to alter a block after additional blocks have been mined after it. The blockchain is fundamental to the security of Bitcoin and is the reason why Bitcoin transactions cannot be easily reversed.

The blockchain is currently about 2.75 GB in size and growing by the minute as new blocks are mined. However, you only need to download the whole thing once: when you run Bitcoin, the client will download only the blocks you don't already have and add them its copy of the blockchain, instead of redownloading the whole thing from scratch every time.

2.i use to have a bitcoin 24 account but found it was far to complicated, is it easier to purchase bitcoins with a debate card with bitcoinwallat?

Due to the risk of friendly fraud, very few people will accept debit/credit cards when selling bitcoins.

3.i have a HP vista dual core, nvidia 4500 series graphic card and a decent laptop with specs idk, how many bitcoins could i mine per/hoour (x.xxxx)?

About BTC0.0005 per hour, give or take. Nvidia cards are pretty much worthless for mining.

4.whats a good service people manly do to get a little bit of bit coin with minimal effort i already know of the free bitcoin and have made 0.5 so far which isnt bad considering ive been workin for maby 6 hours?

As with anything of value, the only way to obtain bitcoins is to either buy them or earn them. There are no ways to get significant quantities of bitcoins for free without effort.

[every1pewps]

Hi Madara. Welcome to the forums. To answer your questions,:

1)  When a Bitcoin client is loading blocks, it is loading a complete history of every transaction that has taken place over the Bitcoin network. When a "block" is successfully mined by a user, that block contains all of the transaction information that has taken place over the entire network since the last block was found. The 0.5 BTC you have made so far was carried on these blocks, and the entire network confirms that these 0.5 BTC indeed belong to you. Think of it as a way of proving that the transaction(s) took place. As for the amount of space taken up on your PC, you should have at least 3GB of hard drive space (not to be confused with RAM) free and dedicated to storing the block index. As of this writing, the block index is only 2.7GB large, but will get bigger as time goes on and more blocks are discovered by the network. When you open your wallet up again in the future, you will only need to load the blocks that have been discovered since the last time the wallet was up-to-date.

2)  This question is hard for me to answer; I've never tried buying BTC directly with a debit card. Credit cards are a no-go because you could just charge-back the charge and reverse the transaction, so nobody will accept credit card payment for BTC. However, you can buy Second Life Linden with credit, and then sell those same Linden for BTC. As of this writing, Second Life Linden is the 3rd largest volume exchange for BTC.

3)  Unfortunately mining with Processor power is no longer viable, so your dual-core won't do much good here. The nVidia 4500 GPU is not capable of OpenCL, and OpenCL is needed for mining with a GPU(even so, nVidia cards are no good for mining. You want ATI/AMD video card/GPU). As for the laptop, it's typically not a good idea to mine for BTC with laptops due to heat issues, even if they do have an ATI/AMD GPU in them. You don't want to overheat your laptop and have it permanently crash on you. A typical dual-core CPU will mine at roughly 2 megahash/s, which would yield all of... 0.000001 BTC every 24 hours? Rough estimation, but yeah, not worth it. You want to mine with a GPU/video card, or specialized mining equipment such as an FPGA or ASIC.

4)  Other than the free bitcoin "faucets" which you have apparently already found, there is no way to get "free" bitcoins without mining them yourself, and I've covered mining with the 3rd answer above. However, there are ways to get Bitcoin by doing "work" over the internet; www.bitcoinjobs.com , www.reddit.com/r/gonewild ... These sites offer to pay you in Bitcoin for jobs/services.



I hope these answers help!  Enjoy, and good luck!