I remember trying to buy some BTC on MtGox for fun, the last time the price crashed.<p>What an unspeakably horrible service. I thought I was in for hundreds of dollars over budget, but it turns out that not a single BTC was purchased at all.<p>I only intended to buy ~$50 worth, so I would only have earnt something like $200, but for the love of everything, stay the hell away from MtGox. It's insane how unprofessional they are.<p>healthcare.gov may be bad, but this is five circles of hell down from that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it impossible to withdraw USD from MtGox at this point? How can this be a viable source of BTC->USD comparison when the only thing you can do with a USD balance on MtG is buy?
Well now it must definitely be too late to invest. Don't even think about it guys. It's a ponzi scheme slash not real money slash libertarian wet dream. I'd rather trust helicopter Ben with my savings than some obscure open source software that eats 10Gb of my disk space.
What happens to the price when only people with 500Ghash/sec+ can make coins next month?<p>Early adopters are rightfully getting a nice reward now, but how do you get "fresh blood" when the difficulty is off the chart unless you have several thousand dollars in hardware?
For those who are interested, pleasingly it's considerably easier to buy/sell btc in the UK these days, [32] and [33] are very functional - I used [32] to buy coins and then [33] to sell some just today. [33] looks much better value both ways but [32] is about as easy as it gets.<p>* Using comedy numbering scheme in reference to [1337].<p>[32]:<a href="https://bittylicious.com/" rel="nofollow">https://bittylicious.com/</a>
[33]:<a href="https://localbitcoins.com/" rel="nofollow">https://localbitcoins.com/</a>
[1337]:<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373</a>
I went to this talk in 2011 where Gavin Andresen tried giving bitcoin away to anyone that emailed him: <a href="http://blip.tv/amherstmedia/making-money-gavin-andresen-ignite-amherst-4789326" rel="nofollow">http://blip.tv/amherstmedia/making-money-gavin-andresen-igni...</a>
"Bitcoin will have to change the mining hashing function (SHA-256) in 7 years" <a href="https://twitter.com/SDLerner/status/401467511784235008" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/SDLerner/status/401467511784235008</a>
One of the most interesting things about discussions regarding bitcoin is you can always count on a few people getting quite angry and spiteful, as if they are personally offended by its existence.<p>Remember friends, keep your identity small ;) -- <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html</a>
Options for purchasing for someone in Australia? Coinbase appears to be US only. Their support docs suggest international support in early 2013, but no sign of that being realised.
No matter your take on bitcoin's long-term viability (or lack thereof), it can hardly be argued that this isn't damn interesting to watch unfold.<p>A cryptocurrency with zero backing that exists only in digital form is now worth many billions of dollars. Is it a bubble? Will this foment a currency revolution of sorts? If it doesn't crash, how will governments react? If it does crash, what will replace it? Obviously there is a demand for a decentralized currency, and as more people realize that something like this is possible, I can only see demand for it going one way: up. Most people have never even heard of bitcoin; I've only talked to a few people in my own life who are even familiar with the word, and fewer still who know what it actually is. Yet with even such a small awareness, bitcoin's value has grown from zero to billions in a few years. Unless governments step in and find some way to put the kibosh on decentralized currencies in general, it seems unlikely that demand is going to shrink as awareness continues to increase. We're so used to governments essentially owning currencies that it is very difficult to imagine a world where they don't, but obviously, if cryptocurrencies take off in a big way, the implications for the future are profound.
Here we go again. A thread full of financial experts, conspiracists and excessive naysayers. Let's keep Bitcoin off the frontpage until it crashes, okay? With this trend it will reach an all-time-high every week or so which every tech blog will wrap in a bag-full-of-fluff-blogpost, there will be new analysis et cetera.<p><i>Let it go</i>. Just enjoy the ride.
Is it possible to predict Bitcoin? <a href="https://www.facebook.com/coinalytics" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/coinalytics</a>