POLL: How do you found out about bitcoin?

[Swishercutter]

Article about a mining rig mistaken for marijuana grow op...I thought can someone really get the money back from the power.  Price was about $9 when I ordered parts to mine...$30 by the time I was up and running...and soon after they just kept going down.

But I am over even on the hardware and Bitcoin has always paid the power/internet at my shop.

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[Kluge]

Was mentioned on a political forum a few times. Interest really solidified when I noticed how some US Congressmen reacted to SR.

[Seal]

A friend mentioned he did a PHD paper on it... I remember his PHD lecturer taking us all to to the casino once... a slave to money lol

[Costia]

Found out about Bitcoins on the Tor network, but didnt pay much attention to it at the time.
Got back to it a few days ago due to interest in virtual currency and all the technical stuff.
Looks like there are quite a few "in game" currencies that are being taken seriously today (EVE,WoW, second life, and probably diablo 3 money is down the road)
So far i found 3 problems with bitcoin that will prevent it going mainstream:
1) Confirmations are slow. Each transaction takes an hour to confirm. If i want to buy milk at the local shop i am not going to wait for an hour. And using a 3rd party for instant transaction nullifies all the advantages of bitcoin, so you will be better off using a regular currency (cach,credit,paypal) since they have a better protection against non currency related fraud.
2) Big mining pools can destabilize the entire network. While i think the big pools cannot actually profit from their computing power, they can split the chainblock at will/ According to Satoshi's paper there is a 1/1000 chance of deepbit generating a 89 block long split. there are 1k blocks generated each week and most people wait for 6 confirmations. meaning deepbit can invalidate all transactions made in the past 14 hours once a week. The transactions will probably be included in later blocks, but this instability will be unacceptable by most professional traders.
There is an easy fix for that though - split the 50 BTC reward. You need to encourage people to mine, but since the process is random people looking for lower difficulty blocks will find high difficulty blocks as well.
so for difficulty level A - the highest - you will get the transaction fees +5BTC
for level B - 10 time easier - 2BTC
for level C - 100 times easier - 0.2BTC
This way the overall reward stays the same, but the people are no longer encouraged to do pooled mining since they can get the same average reward by mining solo. And unlike now the income from solo mining will be a lot more stable and predictable.
3) transaction fees. While most of the technology oriented people are comfortable with paying per KB, most people will find it confusing and unfair (since it will seem random). In addition this adds unnecessary complications to speculative trading in bitcoins - i.e. you have to trust an exchange to do the trading since doing it by yourself can lead to huge transaction fees in the long run.

[jekker]

I heard about bitcoins, but i never really thought about them until i got tired of using paypal for my money. Then i just used google and educated myself by reading through online tutorials and whatnot.

[DiThi]

I found out the 17th of october, the day of the "crash" of bitcoin, a lot of news suporred across the sites I visit. I was not very interested (and I was about to dimiss it) until I saw a comment explaining bitcoin very well in the sea of misleading comments.

1) Confirmations are slow. Each transaction takes an hour to confirm. If i want to buy milk at the local shop i am not going to wait for an hour. And using a 3rd party for instant transaction nullifies all the advantages of bitcoin, so you will be better off using a regular currency (cach,credit,paypal) since they have a better protection against non currency related fraud.

Merchants can use 0-confirmation transactions for small amounts of money. With a tx radar and waiting 10-30 seconds you'll be sure there isn't a double spend. To double spend such transactions you would have to mine a block yourself, which is much more expensive.

[Costia]

I found out the 17th of october, the day of the "crash" of bitcoin, a lot of news suporred across the sites I visit. I was not very interested (and I was about to dimiss it) until I saw a comment explaining bitcoin very well in the sea of misleading comments.

1) Confirmations are slow. Each transaction takes an hour to confirm. If i want to buy milk at the local shop i am not going to wait for an hour. And using a 3rd party for instant transaction nullifies all the advantages of bitcoin, so you will be better off using a regular currency (cach,credit,paypal) since they have a better protection against non currency related fraud.

Merchants can use 0-confirmation transactions for small amounts of money. With a tx radar and waiting 10-30 seconds you'll be sure there isn't a double spend. To double spend such transactions you would have to mine a block yourself, which is much more expensive.

I dont like the 0 confirmation idea - i would rather give merchants higher priorities in blocks - so a 10 minute wait will get them 2 blocks.
The slowness of the system is one of its defense mechanisms...
and mining a block is not necessarily more expensive than the trade, like when buying a tv/smartphone - you wouldn't wait for an hour to get your payment approved, which introduces risk into the transaction.
Today most people expect everything to be instantaneous.
Physical bitcoins are not a bad solution for this, since no transaction needs to be recorded for the exchange.
A more evil solution would be to have a trusted 3rd party, a role generally filled by the police/government.

[DiThi]

I dont like the 0 confirmation idea - i would rather give merchants higher priorities in blocks - so a 10 minute wait will get them 2 blocks.
The slowness of the system is one of its defense mechanisms...
and mining a block is not necessarily more expensive than the trade, like when buying a tv/smartphone - you wouldn't wait for an hour to get your payment approved, which introduces risk into the transaction.
Today most people expect everything to be instantaneous.
Physical bitcoins are not a bad solution for this, since no transaction needs to be recorded for the exchange.
A more evil solution would be to have a trusted 3rd party, a role generally filled by the police/government.

Do you know how blocks are generated? They are generated at random times, for everyone (but the average time always approaches 10 minutes).
0 confirmations for some groceries or 1 confirmation for something e.g. in the $200 range is already safer (and cheaper) than credit cards (chargebacks vs double spends), I think.
Also, if you trust the merchant, you can give it your money when you enter the shop, and on checkout it returns you the change (or everything if you didn't buy).

[Costia]

until a transaction is in the blockchain nothing is certain . I might to a ddos attack against the merchants node, so the transaction never gets to the network and/or show him a fake bit coin client on my side of the transaction. 1 confirmation is a bit better since it requires a block to be generated, but i am still not sure it is enough. most people now wait for 6 confirmations - i am assuming there is a reason behind it...
the thing with credit cards and USD is that the merchant or you can sue each other or report to the police about the fraud.
So although the method itself might be less secure , its enforcement is (supposed to be) strict. As long as countries do not recognize bitcoin as a valid currency you will not have this protection from the authorities in bitcoin transactions, and will have to rely on the technical difficulty of "forging" a transaction.

[DiThi]

I might to a ddos attack against the merchants node, so the transaction never gets to the network and/or show him a fake bit coin client on my side of the transaction.

How do you know where's the merchant node? Also, if I'm being DDoSed, I can't see a tx being popagated across the globe, so I would do nothing.

[SgtSpike]

until a transaction is in the blockchain nothing is certain . I might to a ddos attack against the merchants node, so the transaction never gets to the network and/or show him a fake bit coin client on my side of the transaction. 1 confirmation is a bit better since it requires a block to be generated, but i am still not sure it is enough. most people now wait for 6 confirmations - i am assuming there is a reason behind it...
the thing with credit cards and USD is that the merchant or you can sue each other or report to the police about the fraud.
So although the method itself might be less secure , its enforcement is (supposed to be) strict. As long as countries do not recognize bitcoin as a valid currency you will not have this protection from the authorities in bitcoin transactions, and will have to rely on the technical difficulty of "forging" a transaction.

I agree - merchants can't really start accepting 0 conf, or people will find ways around it to trick them.  There will be modded bitcoin clients available to buy (similar to hacks for games), and those modded clients will automatically do the required shenanigans to automatically make it look like the merchant is receiving the monies.

One way it could do this (I believe) is by creating a transaction that will take a long time to go through for the merchant, then, shortly afterward, creating another transaction that would go through very quickly.  The first transaction, make sure that it will require a fee, but don't send it with a fee.  The second transaction just spends all the money from the address(es) used in the first transaction to a different one of your own addresses.

Anyway, the only solution I see is similar to what is used now - debit cards that indicate a promise to pay Bitcoins.

[coinft]

I read an article in a friend's c't magizine during vacation. Months later during a upgrade, waiting for stuff to d/l, I stumbled over another BTC link and installed it along updates.

-coinft

[Seal]

3) transaction fees. While most of the technology oriented people are comfortable with paying per KB, most people will find it confusing and unfair (since it will seem random). In addition this adds unnecessary complications to speculative trading in bitcoins - i.e. you have to trust an exchange to do the trading since doing it by yourself can lead to huge transaction fees in the long run.

I've always been confused about this... it does seem real random to me why sometimes I'm forced to pay the 0.0005 btc transfer fee??? Can someone explain?

[Costia]

the fees are based on the transaction size in Kbytes
The BTC you have in your wallet can either be:
1)from a single transaction and stored in a single wallet
2) from multiple transactions - potentially stored in multpile wallets (and currently the gui won't show you that - it will only display the total)
in the first case when you want to make a payment the transaction block will have 1 input - your wallet and 1 output - who ever you are paying to
in the second case the transaction must include all of the sources for the funds you are trying to move - sot it will contain more input addresses and thus take more bytes

(and i think on the age of the transactions matters as well- the older the inputs are the cheaper it gets)

[Myrtlewood]

I got into bitcoin last year, took some time off and got interested when we broke $5 again.  This authentication system is stupid.

[DiThi]

I've always been confused about this... it does seem real random to me why sometimes I'm forced to pay the 0.0005 btc transfer fee??? Can someone explain?

Think of cash: people give you coins and bills. 100 cents ocuppy much more than one dollar. The same applies with bitcoin transactions: you recollect previous transactions to you and send them into new addresses. Sometimes you send more money than you want to send (like when you pay with a bill), the remaining (the "change") is sent to yourself.

The size of a transaction is proportional to the number of "coins" (independently of the value) and the number of outputs (usually one or two if there's change). If you pay with 100 cents instead with a dollar bill, you pay more fees. That transaction becames a new "coin" for the recipient to use.

[SgtSpike]

I got into bitcoin last year, took some time off and got interested when we broke $5 again.  This authentication system is stupid.

What authentication system?

[ZodiacDragon84]

I was in the cab of my garbage truck reading a finances magazine I had found, and saw an article on bitcoin. I did my research, and decided, what have i got to lose. I still have that magazine somewhere, Ill edit post when I find it

[take5]

Can't remember exactly how I came across it first, but I think I was reading up on some stuff about Evan Ratliff and digital anonymity. I kind of forgot about it until a few months ago. Now of course I wished I had invested a few bucks in it when I had had the chance.

[ChocolateSoda]

I was big into HYIPs and e-gold a little while back. The outcome of that adventure... well, what do you think? HYIPs are scams. I was a sucker.

But the concept was intriguing. I was making money (or i thought i was) starting from just a few cents by clicking ads. It felt great to see this happening.

E-gold had one weakness however; it was vulnerable to attack by a hostile government. Sure enough, Babylon didn't like the "money laundering" side of it. This is also known as, Uncle Sam wasn't getting his cut.

A few years back, there was a warrant, a court case, an audit and a ruling. E-gold was to be liquidated by order of the government.

I was pissed. I only had something like 14 cents in my account, but I told myself I would discover a new way to move money around; a way with plausible deniability for everyone involved. You're damn right, I want the crooks to get away with it. There is so much unnecessary violent crime in the world simply because there is such a thing as victimless crime. If nobody had to be silenced because they knew about the meth lab, that would be one less murder. I do not do drugs or engage in any illegal activity. It is a matter of principle. The government is too large and too powerful, and unless Ron Paul is elected and lives long enough to do what he has to do, it will only get worse.

I kept searching for an alternative currency. I don't remember how or when, but I found Bitcoin. Thought it was weird at first, "How could this ever work?", that sort of thing. Watched it for a while, downloaded the wallet, used the Bitcoin faucet... and forgot about it for a year or so. Missed the big bubble-- probably a good thing; that would have solidified my skepticism. I built myself a gaming rig, long overdue, and started running F@H with the wasted cycles at night. It was interesting of course, but I didn't see anything come from it.

Then I remembered that Bitcoin thing. And that if GPU's were superior at crunching numbers one way.... well... I could be rich!

...  Not rich yet. But I am making about 1.20 BTC a week!