Is this a scam?

[Tinker]

I would like to think not but I am not sure.

Just how do you get anything to start with? There are links to places to get free handouts but I have not found anything that pays anything, at least so far. There is mining though the consensus seems to be that for solitary miners there is almost no return and it may soon be not worthwhile trying, I have yet to find out how it all works myself so I cannot really comment on that yet, I'm still trying to get my head around the jargon.

So it seems that maybe the only way to get bitcoins is to buy them using real (as in what is defined by governments) money which leaves me with the idea of scam in the back of the head.

I do see a lot of beggars asking for free handouts, I pretty sure not of lot of them are successful any more than the ones I see on the streets in real life.

[1714131992]

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[1714131992]

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[1714131992]

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[killer2021]

if you are interested in the technical side, watch this video. It explains it. Also I can assure, this is not a scam. If it were a scam then the hundreds of business and trading sites that formed around it would have never started. Likewise, the source code is openly available and can be verified by everyone. If this were a scam, then someone would have noticed in the code and made a big deal about it. That has never happened.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTOhti7wxXk

[Jonathan Ryan Owens]

I would like to think not but I am not sure.

Just how do you get anything to start with? There are links to places to get free handouts but I have not found anything that pays anything, at least so far. There is mining though the consensus seems to be that for solitary miners there is almost no return and it may soon be not worthwhile trying, I have yet to find out how it all works myself so I cannot really comment on that yet, I'm still trying to get my head around the jargon.

So it seems that maybe the only way to get bitcoins is to buy them using real (as in what is defined by governments) money which leaves me with the idea of scam in the back of the head.

I do see a lot of beggars asking for free handouts, I pretty sure not of lot of them are successful any more than the ones I see on the streets in real life.

lol.

[bitcoinewbie]

I would like to think not but I am not sure.

Just how do you get anything to start with? There are links to places to get free handouts but I have not found anything that pays anything, at least so far. There is mining though the consensus seems to be that for solitary miners there is almost no return and it may soon be not worthwhile trying, I have yet to find out how it all works myself so I cannot really comment on that yet, I'm still trying to get my head around the jargon.

So it seems that maybe the only way to get bitcoins is to buy them using real (as in what is defined by governments) money which leaves me with the idea of scam in the back of the head.

I do see a lot of beggars asking for free handouts, I pretty sure not of lot of them are successful any more than the ones I see on the streets in real life.

'scam' simply isn't the case, there is no trickery - the program is open source, meaning you can see the inner workings of it. now that does not mean you cannot lose money if you buy bitcoins, you can. This is not a get rich quick scheme, as many have recently learned with the recent decrease in value, it is a long-haul, new way to exchange monetary value. You should only invest your 'real' money if you want to support the system and you know why.

[killer2021]

I would like to think not but I am not sure.

Just how do you get anything to start with? There are links to places to get free handouts but I have not found anything that pays anything, at least so far. There is mining though the consensus seems to be that for solitary miners there is almost no return and it may soon be not worthwhile trying, I have yet to find out how it all works myself so I cannot really comment on that yet, I'm still trying to get my head around the jargon.

So it seems that maybe the only way to get bitcoins is to buy them using real (as in what is defined by governments) money which leaves me with the idea of scam in the back of the head.

I do see a lot of beggars asking for free handouts, I pretty sure not of lot of them are successful any more than the ones I see on the streets in real life.

'scam' simply isn't the case, there is no trickery - the program is open source, meaning you can see the inner workings of it. now that does not mean you cannot lose money if you buy bitcoins, you can. This is not a get rich quick scheme, as many have recently learned with the recent decrease in value, it is a long-haul, new way to exchange monetary value. You should only invest your 'real' money if you want to support the system and you know why.

agree entirely. Only buy in if you like the idea, otherwise wait for the network to get stabilized.

[Tinker]

Thanks for the replies.

As I am totally against anything that any government does that is one good reason to hope this works out. I am certainly not looking to get rich quick, or even to get rich slowly, all I ever want is to be able to do what I want when I want completely independent of any sort of government. What I will be looking for is to earn enough to satisfy my simple needs.

[Light]

I would like to think not but I am not sure.

Just how do you get anything to start with? There are links to places to get free handouts but I have not found anything that pays anything, at least so far. There is mining though the consensus seems to be that for solitary miners there is almost no return and it may soon be not worthwhile trying, I have yet to find out how it all works myself so I cannot really comment on that yet, I'm still trying to get my head around the jargon.

As stated by people before me, Bitcoin is open source, and thus you're able to see it's inner workings yourself (if you wanted to do so) and check for yourself whether you should trsut this system or not. Well, as far as free handout's go, there are some links in the wiki page and on the Official Bitcoin pages, and you can just use this http://lmgtfy.com/?q=bitcoin+faucet (it's let me Google that for you, incase for some reason you haven't heard of it before!)

Personally, mining is a hard slog unless you have the proper hardware, and while I don't (I have a Nvidia card ) it's still is quite contenting to see you earn some BTC little by little.

So it seems that maybe the only way to get bitcoins is to buy them using real (as in what is defined by governments) money which leaves me with the idea of scam in the back of the head.

I do see a lot of beggars asking for free handouts, I pretty sure not of lot of them are successful any more than the ones I see on the streets in real life.

Well, as I said, it's open source so you can check for yourself, and this project isn't exactly that small. So unless everyone using Bitcoin is in on some sort of scam (which I'm not aware of), I'm pretty happy to say it's legit for now! *hope's Tycho doesn't fork the chain anytime soon!*

As for handout's, most people don't like beggars, rather they give it out to people they feel like, this all the addresses in people's signature's so that you can send them some BTC if you like them or their posting or whatever.

[Tinker]

 Well, as far as free handout's go, there are some links in the wiki page and on the Official Bitcoin pages,

I have not found any of the links there that actually do anything like giving something for nothing, not that I am expecting something for nothing 

 
The Bitcoin Faucet site has apparently be displaying

Code:

Faucet is being Fixed

The Bitcoin Faucet is closed for maintenance. Please come back later.

for some time and many of the other links require that you have some small amount to gamble with before you can try to win more. But I will persist.

Not being able to post in other fora sections is also very limiting, but that is another story.

[gmk80]

It's not a scam. Apparently it's something called a singularity:

http://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.com/2011/06/bitcoin-is-economic-singularity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheMonetaryFuture+%28The+Monetary+Future%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

[emmanuel322]

No its not its I have invest a couple dollars and making profit

[smackdaddy]

It's not a scam, but there are certainly people out there manipulating the markets for their own profit.

[gmk80]

there are certainly people out there manipulating the markets for their own profit.

Isn't that the idea?

Market manipulation is tricky and rewarded economically. You have to assume that's going on in any currency, as painful as it makes it for those that need to rely on less volatility. Plan accordingly.

[yeponlyone]

It's not a scam, but there are certainly people out there manipulating the markets for their own profit.

PEOPLE?! are you not ballsy enough to call them out, cmon man you dont even have that many posts. or maybe, you don't realize it but, unfortunately, effect 11 hours ago this forum has begun openly censoring opinions that they feel may cause new users to make choices which hurt the price of bitcoin. This said, I still believe it will rise for a while, but now I am a lot more weary and will be looking a lot closer at signs of collapse. After all, those who instill fear in others are generally afraid of something themselves, and in this scenario I am concerned, considering those peddling fear in this particular instance are the people who run this forum, and I feel they much more insider information than I do.

It is possibly that they are not doing this intentionally, that it was a mere oversight and an accidental implementation of a policy, the result of a rushed decision to please long-time friends in the main forum, in which case they will rectify the situation ASAP, however until that time I am trying to see deeper into the situation via the method of showing others what I am seeing.

[Ruxum]

there are certainly people out there manipulating the markets for their own profit.

Isn't that the idea?

Market manipulation is tricky and rewarded economically. You have to assume that's going on in any currency, as painful as it makes it for those that need to rely on less volatility. Plan accordingly.

Yes, countries do this all the time.  Japan manipulating the YEN by buying or selling massive amounts is a great and well known example.  (other countries too of course)

[dinzy]

It's not a scam, but I am sure it will evaporate at some point. 

It's a good hobby if you are not a lunatic about it.

[Oldminer]

Ever played Fallout 3?

In that game they use bottle caps as currency. IE the community agrees bottle caps have a value and so they pay for goods and services this way. Bitcoin is similar. Its a kind of barter system if you will.

[Capitan]

I would like to think not but I am not sure.

Just how do you get anything to start with? There are links to places to get free handouts but I have not found anything that pays anything, at least so far. There is mining though the consensus seems to be that for solitary miners there is almost no return and it may soon be not worthwhile trying, I have yet to find out how it all works myself so I cannot really comment on that yet, I'm still trying to get my head around the jargon.

So it seems that maybe the only way to get bitcoins is to buy them using real (as in what is defined by governments) money which leaves me with the idea of scam in the back of the head.

I do see a lot of beggars asking for free handouts, I pretty sure not of lot of them are successful any more than the ones I see on the streets in real life.

'scam' simply isn't the case, there is no trickery - the program is open source, meaning you can see the inner workings of it. now that does not mean you cannot lose money if you buy bitcoins, you can. This is not a get rich quick scheme, as many have recently learned with the recent decrease in value, it is a long-haul, new way to exchange monetary value. You should only invest your 'real' money if you want to support the system and you know why.

I would caution people against thinking that just because it's open source that it's not a scam, or that it's not somehow benefitting some and not others. Every system that is governed by rules is all about balance. Systems created by humans are never perfect upon first try. Look at RTS games like StarCraft. They first create the engine that has all the rules about how fast each unit moves, how much each costs, defense against different types of attacks, and strength of different types of attacks, etc. After the engine is created they go through a lot of testing to balance the different races (good guys vs bad guys, protoss vs humans vs zerg, etc). That applies to other games as well, like Quake, COD, etc. THe same goes for any system governed by manmade rules. This is why governments and societies always have inequalities, and ton of problems. The rules of a country and its economy and society can start out fair (like in the USA), but people see loopholes and try to exploit them. Those get patched, others crop up. New technologies create the need for more new rules, and all the rules have to evolve with how people are treating and exploiting them.

Bitcoins are just another system of rules. There will be imbalances just like there are with the US Dollar, and with all other national currencies, stocks, and commodities. If you are putting any of yoru own assets into something, be educated about what you are doing and make sure you are using the rules to your advantage. I also urge people to make ethical decisions even when they see a loophole through the existing rules. Sadly I don't think humanity can ever be trusted to do "what is right", especially when people stand to make personal gains.

[darkskypoet]

The thing about BTC is that it is a proof of concept about creating a type of currency that is not subject to counterfeiting. In order to do so there must be an incentive to play the game and stay ahead of would be attackers, via the expenditure of power and cpu/gpu cycles. If you consider what a BTC is worth to you, ie what you can do with it or gain for it, and compare that to the electricity and utilization of your hardware; you too can decide if its worth your time or not.

However, the value per unit of said currency, when the number of units of said currency are small and with the lack of information held by the majority about what its 'value' should be or is; is hard to determine a normal as both factors lead to a massive amount of volatility in price. As someone else said before, if you are concerned, then by all means avoid playing / trading / buying / selling until such values, information, markets, etc stabilize.

Else, you could inadvertently benefit others through your actions, without receiving the desired level of utility for your time / energy / money / etc.

For me; my electricity costs are roughly $0.08 per KW/h, and my two miners are probably burning a good 12KW/h per day (hopefully less, but I am rounding up). So for roughly $1 a day, I am achieving about 1.1BTC... Which means the price per BTC can fall tremendously before I fail to break even. However, because i find this all very neat, and quite an interesting project... my gained utility easily exceeds the $1 a day i am burning. So I doubt i would stop mining even if the price did fall to below my break even point of $1 /day.

Besides, there is a site in my country that will sell me the new kicks i want for BTC.. and I am only 3 away (I started mining the other day)

So if you are skeptical, mine and see where it gets you, if scared.. then run away. If interested, mine and see where it goes... But I know for me, i am not going to buy them to speculate... I have other stuff that takes my money

[nhodges]

Think of it more as a science project that has a chance to change the world.

[darkskypoet]

The funny thing not mentioned in the white paper to any great degree, is that with the proliferation of GPGPU hashing to mine, the left over, nearly (relatively) useless compute power of say a botnet (low hash/s infrastructure) has no incentive to mine vs disrupting the mining efforts of others to allow its own GPGPU farm to attempt a counterfeiting operation. The case put forward in the whitepaper is that any assailant playing a direct attack game would be better off mining, then trying to deceive the peers as to who has the right transaction list.

However, if one has the ability to make/buy and trade a large amount of BTC, then suppress the mining operations growing and protecting the transaction objects, they then would have a much better chance of catching up and poisoning the pool to an extent where there is sufficient doubt as to which object is the accurate representation of the state of BTC accounts...

Hmm... perhaps this explains the DDoS attacks on pools... Attacking MtGox is just an attempt to bring clients over to other exchanges, or to devalue the BTC temporarily by threatening its 'stability and liquidity'... Scare people, they sell at disadvantageous terms, then buy up the BTC at a lower cost... essentialy then, rushing to sell in the BTC market is as disasterous as in any other physical market... you simply depress the price while being stampeded to the exits. Much like any economic market in the world, faith is required for its functioning. People, by and large, tend to distrust the virtual, and until that overwhelming impulse in the majority of older people goes away, the information economy will not grow to its potential. Similarly, how luddites attempted to hold back the industrial economy of yore.

hmmm.. interesting.