Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

anyone using the site silk road, to buy shit with bit coins? buddy can set me up with it but i havent looked into how it works etc, was looking for some pure mdma. etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubQD-EoHTSE

youtube is best, who wants to sell me bitcoins, where is the cheapest place to get some bitcoins?

Chris_sl said:

How do you mine these things? Can we get a guide on page one or something?

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Short litecoin mining guide. Even at current prices, litecoin is more profitable mining with GPUs.

1. Buy one or more voltage unlocked ATI video card(s). 7950 for the most khash/watt. nVidia cards don't mine well at all.
2. Install the AMD APP SDK
3. Sign up at a mining pool or use p2pool
4. Download cgminer. I recommend not using the GUI front end as the command line version is easy enough to use and has menus in it, although you will have to pass arguments to it.
5. Figure out what settings to use for your card. Optimal settings vary for each type of GPU and even brand of the same type of GPU. People post their settings in threads all over the place. Google it.
6. Undervolt your gpu so it consumes substantially less energy and to reduce heat/noise. Disable aero if you see what look like artifacts around window borders in win7 while running at high intensities. Your UI will lag a bit while mining at high intensities. You can easily adjust mining intensity on the fly using the command line cgminer.
7. Sell coins at btc-e.com or hold them longer as an investment. At the current price and mining difficulty, you can expect to mine 2 coins a day at ~$2.2-2.5 each or $4.40-5.00/day total using a 7950 at full speed.

If you want to sell your coins immediately, it might bemore profitable to mine PPcoin or terracointhough. I don't really expect them to outlive litecoin in the long term however. Bitcoin mining on GPUs is about to die due to specialized hardware. (FPGAs, ASICs)

Since you got all of the info, I am going to remove the post.

is litecoins next?

It seems that all you do is grab images and other crap from the negative nancy's on the bitcoin subreddit. We get it, you aren't a fan.

A crash just means it's a good time to buy in, which I did. I was going to buy litecoins since BTC was so high, but the crash allowed me to buy into BTC. Sellers can't seem to break through the 2+ million dollar $50 wall so far.

Even at litecoin's current $1.50, I still mine at a rate of ~$60 a month at current difficulty (would be more if it were a dedicated miner) costing me about $5/mo in electricity. (it's cheap here. yay for me)

Naive question: what is the volume of 'currency for goods/service' transactions (mining - the service of helping run the system - excluded)? From a distant and mostly uneducated point of view, it seems the bitcoin is, for now, almost purely speculative in nature and destined to crash and burn if it does not manage to find a solid base of 'actual' transactions.

Well mining uses hardware/electricity which has "real value". So you could say that 1 btc = price of electricity to mine said bitcoin. Now depending on what type hardware you're using to mine, it's anywhere from ~3 mhash/W for video cards to 20mhash/W for FPGAs to 90mhash/W for ASICs.

Szlia_sl said:

Naive question: what is the volume of 'currency for goods/service' transactions (mining - the service of helping run the system - excluded)? From a distant and mostly uneducated point of view, it seems the bitcoin is, for now, almost purely speculative in nature and destined to crash and burn if it does not manage to find a solid base of 'actual' transactions.

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Silk road is about $2.5 mil a month with everything else combined amounting to less than a mil per month off the top of my head. In almost all cases it is used as a proxy currency pegged to the USD. The price is almost wholly determined by speculation since neither party cares what the exchange rate is on a proxy currency, and it isn't even a good proxy due to the large volatility.

gogusrl_sl said:

Well mining uses hardware/electricity which has "real value". So you could say that 1 btc = price of electricity to mine said bitcoin. Now depending on what type hardware you're using to mine, it's anywhere from ~3 mhash/W for video cards to 20mhash/W for FPGAs to 90mhash/W for ASICs.

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That's pretty much irrelevant, because it's not like you can buy a bitcoin and use it to power your house. There's no "real value" there.

In other words, if I put 10 lbs of water on my stove for 10 hours then the resulting product is not worth 10 gallons of water + the energy I put into it.

gogusrl_sl said:

Well mining uses hardware/electricity which has "real value". So you could say that 1 btc = price of electricity to mine said bitcoin. Now depending on what type hardware you're using to mine, it's anywhere from ~3 mhash/W for video cards to 20mhash/W for FPGAs to 90mhash/W for ASICs.

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Story time:
Companies are usually valued by either their accounting profits, the cash they generate, or the value of the assets they hold. In some cases, where the company has no assets and no profits in the short term, it might even get valued based on their revenues.

Back before the Dotcom bubble burst, the financial markets were struggling to figure out how to value technology start-ups. They all had promising ideas that sounded like they could potentially earn an undefined large amount of money at some undefined point. However, without assets, profits or sales, investors and equity analysts couldn't figure out how to place a value on the companies.

Eventually, one method became popular and frequently cited in research reports:Technology start-ups are worth a multiplier on invested capital. After all, since the idea is good, any money spent to bring it to fruition must create value, right? If the company burns $10 million per year in power bills, internet bills, office rent and salaries, it should surely be worth at LEAST $50 million in 5 years, right? In essence: The more money the technology start-ups spent, the higher they were valued. Companies were basically valued as a multiplier on cash burn rate.

We all know where that went. I'm not saying Bitcoin will go that way (although, as I've made clear here, I'm extremely skeptical and wouldn't put my money anywhere near it), but keep it in mind when you try to justify the value of Bitcoin by saying "it takes x amount of resources to create". Value is determined by demand, not by cost of production. Something doesn't get more valuable just because it's expensive to make.

Just like companies consisting of thirty cocaine snorting engineers with an expensive office and the world's coolest espresso machine wasn't worth anything in 2003.

There are a lot of bit coin projects in the works that could mainstream it, a bit coin credit card, bitcoin ATM's, things like that. More online stores are starting to use them but currently the only real value bit coins have is money laundering, drug sales and a speculative currency. As adoption becomes more widespread, I would imagine you'll see the price stabilize more and we won't get the wild bubbles that we've seen.

Explain to me why I, as a consumer with zero interest in drugs and no need for hiding my money trail, would want to get a bit coin credit card and use that for making purchases? What value would it provide to me, to make up for the significant added exchange rate risk I take?

This is a genuine question.

Lower transaction fees might make it more attractive to a business owner. Would probably make international transactions easier. That's about all I can think of but someone must think they can make money off of it.

Passenger_sl said:

We get it, you aren't a fan.

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I am a fan of decentralized currency that aren't utter crap. The way bitcoins and the current VC are acquired, traded/sold, stored, secured is a joke. I would stay far away from them unless your looking to do what most of the people who have these coin are doing, trying to make some quick risky cash.