Am I too stupid for Bitcoin?

[fastsports]

Some very good replies here.

[Sigmoid]

Honestly, using an online wallet sounds like the absolute stupidest idea anybody could conceive.

Imagine that there are no actual banks, instead you can go into a dark alleyway, and there's a shady guy in a trenchcoat standing there, with a tattered sign which says: "checking accounts".
And you can go to him, tell him your name, "open an account", and give him your paycheck. Which he'll "transfer to your account".

Really now.

[tescomatty]

remember this is a currency not an investment tool

Well I can't yet pay for food, gas or rent with Bitcoin, so until then, what other option is there?

And would you pay for food now with the difficulties exchanging USD to Bitcoin? It needs time, first is make the exchanging USD to Bitcoin much easier...

[Sigmoid]

by driving the price up, all you are supporting is giving money to drug dealers who accept bitcoin.
remember this is a currency not an investment tool

Well lol. What kind of currency is it that buys a chocolate bar one day, and a used car a week later? I've seen derivatives less risky.

In order for bitcoin to settle down, it needs non-speculative volume. Currently I'm estimating 95% of users are just exchanging bitcoins for dollars and vice versa. It's not a currency, it's a collective gambling platform.

A user-friendly, foolproof locally installable wallet / client, as well as an automated merchant platform (just as idiotproof) would be paramount in order to get any meaningful activity.

EDIT: ...and some reputable dealers. Names like JPM Chase or Deutsche Bank or Lloyds or Fidelity or whatever.

[Juynimo]

you are not stupid , just buy bitcoin and hold then you are clever

[cakeboss]

I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop with a 1.80 GHz Intel Celeron processor; it runs at ~5%-10% during idle time. How much money can I make if I find a reliable mining program?

Nothing. Forget about mining. You can only profit from mining bitcoin if you use expensive ASIC devices, such as the KnC Jupiter. GPU mining is dead (and CPU even deader). Most people who are interested in bitcoin agree that it's a better investment to just buy some BTC and wait for the price to go up.

[c789]

It looks like you already have a wallet and receiving address at Blockchain.info. That's good, but as others have said, online wallets are much less secure than desktop wallets. You can have more than one wallet, and each wallet can have (and does have) multiple addresses. You can have a wallet at Blockchain, but you should also have a desktop wallet on your laptop, and Electrum is probably the easiest to use.

Your laptop wallet will be only as secure as your computer. I have a Win7 laptop that I dual-boot with Ubuntu Linux. My wallet is on the Ubuntu side because the general consensus is that it's more secure than Windows.

In any case, make regular backups of your wallet file (wallet.dat) and keep those backups in a different location from your laptop. I'd suggest putting your backups in a TrueCrypt container for additional security.

As for mining, unfortunately you won't be able to mine with that laptop. Yes, you could mine and get about 10 M/h, but laptops aren't designed to handle that kind of load and heat. You'd burn out your fan, or worse. Plus, you'd actually lose money since the electricity required would cost more than ~10 MH could return. You could buy shares on online mining, or get a dedicated box and GPU mine for alt coins. Or, you could spend a ton of cash and get one of the newer ASIC devices (which you could run from your laptop), but who knows when it would be delivered.

[tescomatty]

In order for bitcoin to settle down, it needs non-speculative volume. Currently I'm estimating 95% of users are just exchanging bitcoins for dollars and vice versa. It's not a currency, it's a collective gambling platform.

It is because buying BTC is hard. If people get paid for their work in BTC, they will spend the BTC instead. Long way there, but possible

[jongameson]

remember this is a currency not an investment tool

Well I can't yet pay for food, gas or rent with Bitcoin, so until then, what other option is there?

And would you pay for food now with the difficulties exchanging USD to Bitcoin? It needs time, first is make the exchanging USD to Bitcoin much easier...

when is it EVER gonna be used for anything besides drugs, illegal things??

[OnkelPaul]

I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop with a 1.80 GHz Intel Celeron processor; it runs at ~5%-10% during idle time. How much money can I make if I find a reliable mining program?

Such a machine has not enough computing power to be used for mining. You claim that you watched hours of youtube videos about bitcoin and mining, obviously you selected the wrong ones if they did not tell you that mining will not work for you.
You always need to consider that miners compete for a limited daily amount of bitcoins (currently 25 per block, at 6 blocks per hour that's 3744 bitcoins per day).
Statistically, your computer would get a fraction of this amount that is proportional to your mining power in relation to the total worldwide mining power.
Actually, the mining work is nowadays mostly done using specialized hardware that is thousands of times faster than an ordinary computer (for mining, not general purpose computing).
So forget about mining. If you want to get bitcoins, you have to buy them, sell stuff for them, or work for them.

To handle bitcoins (whether with an online wallet or a wallet on your computer) you need to have a computer that is virus-free, and you need to use it in such a way that it stays virus-free. If you aren't sure that you can do this, forget about bitcoins altogether - sooner or later you will come here complaining that your bitcoins have been stolen.
Your best bet might be to buy a reasonably powerful computer to replace your laptop for regular work, do a fresh re-install of the operating system on the laptop (or install linux, might be safer), and use the laptop for bitcoin wallet management only.

I would generally prefer a local wallet over an online wallet - there are so many reports of bitcoins stolen from online wallets that I feel it's safer to keep everything on your computer.
The bitcoin-qt wallet works but is a bit dated and requires the download of the complete blockchain (and you need to keep the blockchain up-to-date), Electrum or Armory are more modern and don't require the complete blockchain as far as I know (but don't take my word for it). Whatever you use, make sure you keep a proper backup of your wallet and store it in a place where it can't be stolen.

Onkel Paul

[c789]

when is it EVER gonna be used for anything besides drugs, illegal things??

People can buy lots of things in stores that specialize in BTC, albeit, most of those are tech-oriented products. The good news is that I read about such-and-such a store is "now accepting Bitcoin" in the news on almost a daily basis. The outlook keeps getting better.

[reannypleas]

when is it EVER gonna be used for anything besides drugs, illegal things??

In fact SR is closed and I believe majority of transactions are legal and not much different legal/illegal ratio from other payment methods like banks

[dancupid]

The only way you can learn about bitcoin is to use it.

Download a wallet app on your phone, download Bitcoin qt, and another wallet like Electrum, and set up a wallet at blockchain.info.
Spend some time playing with these.

Buy a small amount of bitcoins and then send them to one of these wallets - then send them from that wallet to another wallet and watch the transaction confirm.

Go to HumbleBundle.com and pay $1 for a couple of computer games - see what happens and how it works.

You'll start asking the right questions naturally as you use it.

Is encryption possible?
Can I make backups of the wallet?
Do I need to be online when I receive a payment?
Why is Bitcoin QT taking so long to synch?
What is a paper wallet?
Why do I need to pay fees?
etc

Just buy some bitcoins ($20 would be enough to start) and play around with them.
Don't worry about doing anything complex just for a few dollars - once you are confident you can buy more bitcoins and explore ways of storing them securely.
But you need to just jump in and try it.

[Sassy59]

QuizmasterChris  you express my feeling entirely-


"The honest BTC community has to figure out how to let average people participate with some confidence or this will never be better than an asset class for rich institutions, IF that much"

I'm exhausted trying to understand it all. I've just about managed to create a wallet but its taken me the best part of a day. I've come away feeling this is just a game for the tech savvy.

Definitely not a user friendly experience for the average woman in the street with only basic computer skills! A long way from being currency for the masses.
 

 
  
 

[Ulysses1994XF04]

QuizmasterChris  you express my feeling entirely-


"The honest BTC community has to figure out how to let average people participate with some confidence or this will never be better than an asset class for rich institutions, IF that much"

I'm exhausted trying to understand it all. I've just about managed to create a wallet but its taken me the best part of a day. I've come away feeling this is just a game for the tech savvy.

Definitely not a user friendly experience for the average woman in the street with only basic computer skills! A long way from being currency for the masses.
 

 
  
 

+1 this comment.

[LiteCoinGuy]

maybe the topic starter is to lazy but he is not to stupid. so there is hope.

the solution is: come back in a few years! everything will be easyer & safer and you can buy 0.1 BTC for just 1000 USD.


 

[Sigmoid]

when is it EVER gonna be used for anything besides drugs, illegal things??

In fact SR is closed and I believe majority of transactions are legal and not much different legal/illegal ratio from other payment methods like banks

You can't HONESTLY think that with Silk Road down, the bitcoin black market has suddenly evaporated. That's like asserting that since they demolished the Kowloon Walled City, crime has disappeared from Hong Kong.

It hasn't.

Anyway, black market is a market too, and it should help stabilize the bitcoin economy.