Bitcoin & Bitcoin Mining

The Passenger

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Another rebound. Back up about $700. Peercoins doing very well on the rebound. Up 50% in a day.
 
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Can you update us on how this is going and how you are doing it? I noticed you're also mining dgecoins. On a forums, a guy said people should be mining primecoinds as well.

I'm still doing my research. Any help would be appreciated.

Hey mate. Yeah, I'm not going too well haha. I'm not doing it seriously or anything, only have the miner running in the back ground while I'm on the computer or leave it running over night if I'm downloading. At the moment I'm only using the CPU to mine, which is very, very slow. There's actually no real point in mining with a CPU, as the return is pretty much 0. Put it this way, with the Peercoins I'd say I've roughly had the miner going over 48 hours total. For that I've mined .00099 PPC. But I've been doing it anyway, more just to learn about it if anything.

I've just ordered a new graphics card from eBay the other day though******, more to get into PC gaming, but I made sure I got one that was OK to mine with (AMD 7950). Nothing special at all, I didn't want to spend too much, otherwise I could have just got a PS4 or something. But having just 1 card will do stuff all either really in terms of getting any real financial reward. But it will be good to have anyway just in case any new coins come out, as at the very start you can actually mine a fair few with basic equipment. After a while the difficulty rate goes up, that's when your basic equipment becomes obsolete. But if you can get a few right at the start of the coins life and hold onto them, who knows what they will be worth in the future.

Was very tempted a few weeks ago to get some USB Block Erupters (ASIC miner) from eBay. It's just a little USB stick that will do the mining for you. If you're doing your research, you'd probably know there is 2 different types of mining - scrypt and sha256. These USB things are good for the sha256 based coins (BTC, PPC), whereas GPU's mine the scrypt coins which are pretty much all the other ones. But if you want to get serious about the scrypt ones you'll need a pretty good set up.

Everything is really easy to setup though. There's heaps of tutorials around, and every mining pool (this is what you want to use) site will tell you how to get started. For Peercoin I'm on the http://ppcoin.d7.lt site. Sign up and go to the Quick Start tab. From there it will give you a link to download. Start up the program and that's it, you'll be mining! The coins will go directly to your profile on the website. That's a really easy one. Others you will have to change a few settings and what not. But as I said, every mining pool site will help you out. Usually they all have a Get Started tab or something which will tell you all you need to do.

For the dogecoin one, I followed everything on this video. . All the links you need are in the description.

I'm only still learning myself, but if you need any help feel free to ask. I was doing BTC early last year, but stopped for some reason. Really wish I got serious with that one haha. Sorry if none of this makes sense, I'm hungover as hell!! Do you have a graphics card?

*****HAHA I can't believe it. I ordered this graphics card on Wednesday, and I was seriously hoping it would be here on Friday (got express postage). Didn't arrive. Here I am still half drunk from last night on a Sunday morning and get a bang on the front door. It's the bloody postman with my card while I'm halfway through writing this post! Good times. I'll set it up now and start mining. Will tell you how it goes compared to the CPU mining.
 

quickstraw

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Cool, thanks for info. Had a bit more of a research session last night and it's hard to find one spot that answers all the questions. You answered a number of simple questions I had, whilst confirming some other stuff I'd learnt.

I don't have a good graphics card but my system is 3-4 years old and will need to upgrade soon. Depending on what feedback I get will determine if I get a good GC because I'm not into gaming (prefer to troll people on BF).

Again, thanks for info. Keep it coming.

Might show my utensil to gay dudes in exchange for bitcoins.
 

The Passenger

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I'm only still learning myself, but if you need any help feel free to ask. I was doing BTC early last year, but stopped for some reason. Really wish I got serious with that one haha. Sorry if none of this makes sense, I'm hungover as hell!! Do you have a graphics card?

*****HAHA I can't believe it. I ordered this graphics card on Wednesday, and I was seriously hoping it would be here on Friday (got express postage). Didn't arrive. Here I am still half drunk from last night on a Sunday morning and get a bang on the front door. It's the bloody postman with my card while I'm halfway through writing this post! Good times. I'll set it up now and start mining. Will tell you how it goes compared to the CPU mining.

I've not really bothered to look into the mining but will a graphic card do much for peercoin mining?

Peercoin's work on proof of stake rather than proof of work.

Anything using proof of work the graphics card will definitely help you for.
 

True__Believer

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checkraiseulite

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i don't think bitcoin can be correctly considered a currency yet. as far as i can tell, and especially given the recent epic swongs, no-one is actually using it purchase goods & services.

could be money in offering insurance on the btc/usd price for vendors using btc pricing. although i'm sure ppl are already doing this.
 

JuddsABlue

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Well being a poker player you would understand risk v reward. Bitcoin has overcome some pretty major setbacks and bounced back every time so far. For each their own i guess.


this bloke is putting up some serious risk but yeah doubt this will sell

cant wait to see how BTC develops over the next 12-24 months
 

The Passenger

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The one thing I can't understand is how some of these new coins just go berserk so quickly, unless coinmarketcap has some sort of glitch when it comes to new coins.

http://coinmarketcap.com/

Master Coin wasn't even on the list two days ago but now has a value of $132 and a market cap of 74 million... Seems a bit of an outrageous statement. A couple of others have done something similar too.
 

True__Believer

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Another negative story from China, another rush of panic selling. Reality is that the Chinese love bitcoin, and will still find a way to acquire them, just the way they still access google, youtube and facebook (all banned in China) from external servers. As mentioned earlier, the true worth of bitcoin is the way that it constantly rebounds from such hiccups. For a currency/commodity still in its infancy, it will fall over a couple of times, but will get back up and eventually walk and then run. I bought again last night, as this may be the last time we see prices that low.



As mentioned here, the Chinese have circumvented this ruling by buying vouchers which can then be converted to bitcoin. Price is now heading north of $800 again
 

ash_1050

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Currently holding 1.154 bitcoins purely as a speculative venture. Will be interesting to see how it develops over the next 12 months.
 

The Passenger

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Looks like the market has steadied a lot over the last 2 weeks.

Peercoins making a solid rise. Back upto 5.38 which is not too far from their highest trading value which i think was about 6.20ish (??)

My current portfolio sits at almost exactly $3k. 1.06 BTC ($815), 23 LTC ($562) and 310 PPC ($1667). Peaked at about $4.2K early December but after that China announcement last month dropped to as low as $1500.
 

ash_1050

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Purchased another 1.1BTC yesterday after a strong week of steady growth. Holdings are now 2.25BTC which is currently worth ~US$2200.
 

Engimal

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Purchased another 1.1BTC yesterday after a strong week of steady growth. Holdings are now 2.25BTC which is currently worth ~US$2200.


A great time to buy in. They've already pre-crashed the chandelier (Chinese market) so it should have some stable growth.
 

clogged

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i don't think bitcoin can be correctly considered a currency yet. as far as i can tell, and especially given the recent epic swongs, no-one is actually using it purchase goods & services.

could be money in offering insurance on the btc/usd price for vendors using btc pricing. although i'm sure ppl are already doing this.

http://kottke.org/13/12/is-bitcoin-a-speculative-bubble

It's a long way from being a currency. Its built in deflation prevents it from ever being a worthwhile currency.
 

True__Believer

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http://kottke.org/13/12/is-bitcoin-a-speculative-bubble

It's a long way from being a currency. Its built in deflation prevents it from ever being a worthwhile currency.



Those figures are far from accurate, and whoever wrote that article obviously has a vested interest. BitPay alone processed over $100,000,000 US in 2013, with more than 15,500 merchants now accepting Bitcoin as payment, with over 30% coming in the last quarter. To each their own i guess.
 

clogged

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Those figures are far from accurate, and whoever wrote that article obviously has a vested interest. BitPay alone processed over $100,000,000 US in 2013, with more than 15,500 merchants now accepting Bitcoin as payment, with over 30% coming in the last quarter. To each their own i guess.

Honestly mate, that's not much. The market cap of BTC is $11 billion. If only $100 million was processed over an entire year (even for a single processor) then that's vanishingly small. Commonwealth Bank alone would process far more money (that is, hard currency) than is actually in supply for the Australian economy.

For a currency to succeed as a currency the volume of money transacted should be in excess of the amount of money in supply. If not, then it is simply being parked and speculated on.
 

Caesar

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It's sort of a Catch-22. In order for cryptocurrency to have a stable value it needs to be primarily used as a means of exchange, but as long as its value is so volatile it is not much use as a means of exchange.

That's what makes me think that Bitcoin perhaps isn't the answer. Maybe it will take a bubble and a crash to drive all these speculators out of the market. Then the next generation product can come along, maybe fix some of the deflationary problems, and slowly build up a solid basis as a universal currency without all the distortion that is currently going on.

I dunno. All just guesswork, I need to read more on this topic.
 

Smiling Buddha

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My main concern with bitcoin right now is that its value is still tied to the dollar. That is how its investors/speculators/traders evaluate its value/performance: relative to fiat currency. And there is no other way to value it because there is no other genuine market for it. And it will never be more convenient than paper and metal currency so it will never overtake regular fiat currency as a popular form of currency. So it will only be used, at best, as an alternate currency - alternate in that it is dependent on the ongoing existence of the very institution (central banking) that some of bitcoin's champions believe it might one day replace in order to have meaning.

It can't be a currency in its own right, it will depend on fiat, and so it is in a way simply, at best, a proxy for fiat currency, and at worst a mere method of storage of fiat currency 'value'. A solution to the true fundamental problems of federal reserve banking, fractional reserve, fiat currency etc and the evils they wreak, bitcoin is not.

That said, I still think it cryptocurrency in general has a huge role to play in subverting the system...

Posted while under the influence.
 

clogged

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It's sort of a Catch-22. In order for cryptocurrency to have a stable value it needs to be primarily used as a means of exchange, but as long as its value is so volatile it is not much use as a means of exchange.

That's what makes me think that Bitcoin perhaps isn't the answer. Maybe it will take a bubble and a crash to drive all these speculators out of the market. Then the next generation product can come along, maybe fix some of the deflationary problems, and slowly build up a solid basis as a universal currency without all the distortion that is currently going on.

I dunno. All just guesswork, I need to read more on this topic.

It ultimately faces a similar problem that gold always has - how does the money supply grow to meet the increase in volume and quality of goods and services?

For gold the solution was simple - when gold became worth more, it made sense to mine more of it. The same ostensibly applies to BTC, however there are two problems - whatever capital investment you make in bitcoin mining is likely to be out of date fairly quickly, and the amount which can be mined in any given period is fixed - fiat backed by algorithm. Gold does not have that problem - there is nothing dictating how much gold can be extracted in any given year.

If you then open up the deflationary problems then you run into the similar issues with fiat currencies. Like fiat, Bitcoin is backed by nothing tangible.

Maybe many iterations of the concept in the future will hit that sweet spot, but IMO Smiling Buddha is probably the most spot on - it will exist as a supplement to existing currencies for frictionless micropayments and subversive transactions.
 
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