VTR1000.ORG

Anyone here work in finance, banking or software engineering?

Anyone heard of bitcoin?

I just found out about it tonight, and i dont know what to make of it. Some things I have read make it sound like the future and something that will bring down the current corrupt banking system. Lots of places talking about pre-emptively banning it as it could be that powerful.

I downloaded the app and have left it running on my PC. Im into computer games and stuff so have a pretty fast gaming PC which it turns out is ideal for 'mining' these bitcoin things and making money. Worked out using these calculator things that I should be able to make about £150 a month at the current BTC/GPB exchange rate, but people expecting exchanges to rocket over next few years so im wondering if it will be a good investment?

Anyone else do this or buy/sell this?

Read about it on Wired.com - There's a mail order service that's like Amazon but for buying drugs! which uses bitcoins for purchasing anonymity (quite how they post it to customers??). Then funnily read today there were problems with the security of bitcoin being compromised which devalued it significantly.

"ideal for 'mining' these bitcoin things and making money. Worked out using these calculator things that I should be able to make about £150 a month at the current BTC/GPB exchange rate"

All sounds a bit too good to be true - but hey like gambling only spend what you can afford to lose.

Yea, I thought that too, but the thing is you dont have to spend anything.

If you want, you can buy bitcoins for cash and use them to buy goods and services, including illegal stuff. You can however get bitcoins for free, by 'working' for them just by letting your PC work on these coded blocks. For every block you discover, you get 50 coins, worth about £500. It takes quite a while to do that though, so you do it in a pool of people, and get a small constant flow of these bitcoins.

Once you have them, that is it, you own them. You can spend them or trade them for other currencies, such as £ or $ etc.

Im struggling to find the scam in it when I dont have to pay anything to make money

"You can however get bitcoins for free, by 'working' for them just by letting your PC work on these coded blocks. For every block you discover, you get 50 coins, worth about £500"

Are you sure that's not the digital equivalent of forging? undermining utopian aspirations for this Brave New Currency....

During early June 2011, there have been media reports of individuals purchasing "bitcoin mining rigs", hardware-customized computers specifically dedicated to generate bitcoin hashes, following the rise in bitcoin prices in the past months.

http://www.dailytech.com/Inside+the+Meg ... e21942.htm

edit: Digging around, the difficulty for later adopters to generate currency by computational 'block crunching' seems to be designed to be significantly raised or at least random.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=693.0

Yep, the peer-to-peer crypto-currency. Max Keiser had Jon Matonis on his show explaining how it works.
http://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/ep ... er-report/
An interesting concept that certainly has the potential to challenge the status quo of fiat currency. I'm keeping an eye on it.

As for CPU mining, you're right, it's a waste of time now. The difficulty always rises so you now need a top end gpu to 'mine'. A good ati gaming card will do well, mine gets about 400 mhash per sec which is about £150 ish a month.

It may or may not take off but the value of bitcoins has risen from nothing to £9.60 each as of now. As they reach their limit they will only ever increase in value apparently, so sound like a good investment as you can only mine for a limited period, as difficulty increases it will become too slow.

A mining rig can be made quite cheap, my pc cost about £1500 built as a gaming pc, but you wouldn't need a lot of the stuff I bought with it, like £100 keyboard and £90 mouse, expensive sound system and monitor etc...reckon a basic pc with top end graphics card for mining would cost less than £600. Temp not an issue with most ati cards, my 5870 runs at 58 degrees at full load which is fine. The newer 6870 will run slightly hotter but not much. Graphics cards can run up to 100 deg before hitting problems.

set up 10 of those and you would be making like £1500 a month tax free. I'm half tempted to invest in like 5 to 10 of these pcs.