Bah been trying to buy some BC but it's impossible here from the UK without a bank transfer which I cba to do. Wish I could just buy a bunch with Paypal/Moneybookers/CC but apparently I can't.

How often does difficult increase? Looks like 50-60% increase every time Next one is estimated to be at 350-360

Yeah seriously... I've been waiting 3 days for a dwolla transfer

Do FTP transfers work atm? If so does anyone want to sell me $50 at mt gox rate?

Awful seems harsh. It doesn't account for BTC rising or falling either. You have to be aware of these things when you're using it. I haven't seen a calculator that does (i.e. one that takes into account electricity prices etc too).

Electricity is close to 20c/kWh here. The 260 is about 200 watts so if the rest of the machine is drawing <50w then it'd be a loss maker. Even if your electricity is cheaper there's no way it's worth the noise pollution, not to mention the flat out waste of resources for ~ 1 cent per hour.

Difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks. If blocks are an average of 10 minutes apart then that will be two weeks on average. Of course, if the hashing power of the network is increasing then blocks will be coming faster than every 10 minutes.

If you are in the UK, just do a bank wire.


BTC rising or falling is also another thing to account for. There was another guy on the forum (SgtSpike) I think that made a much better calculator. Difficulty almost always rises faster than price (only severe price shocks will lower difficulty, and a flat price will still result in a rising difficulty).

20c/kW-h is incredibly high. Definitely not worth it at those rates.

What happens if I order some silk boxers with my bitcoins and the other peer simply doesn't send them? How does one enforce a private transaction with no government or bank? And with no names attached to a wholesaler how do you warn others about him and hurt his business?

If there is demand for it someone will create something like PayPal is for the dollar for Bitcoin and you can have chargebacks. For now you could use clearcoin escrow.

Most businesses have a store front, so you would be able to warn people. Trade with randoms will require trust of some kind. I suggest buying your boxers from a trusted store front.

Won't this chargeback place be a centralized location that government can attack?

Of course. But the money doesn't stay there long, so there's not much damage they can do. Or it could be overseas.

I do think that Bitcoiners in general underestimate how much the government is capable of. "Just use Tor and Bitcoins, NO ONE CAN STOP YOU! GOVERNMENT IS STUPID!" It's a horribly naive view, and the hammer will come down hard on some of them. It does become a game of whack-a-mole for the hardcores, but for mainstream, no one will touch dealing with randoms.

A much more successful way to promote Bitcoins is to get a lot of legitimate uses and businesses involved where it actually makes sense, and then it's harder to justify shutting down.

Yeah, conceivably. But they could be located anywhere in the world and hide fairly easily. The only issue would be how public they need to be to be trusted by users. There could be 127 of them since the startup costs will be trivial.

I can see why anonymity is important to you.

article on slate
one of the links goes right to a tomcollins post with hiv after him "nerdy aficionados of online poker mostly, rather than international heroin dealers."

http://www.slate.com/id/2294980

clearcoin.com is an escrow site for that purpose created by gavin who runs the bitcoin show iirc. if they shut it down i'm sure a bunch of other escrows will come up.
or maybe some sort of reputation system could develop ebay style for each person, but just using bitcoin id#s so its still anonymous?

That is awesome.

If people just did people to people transfers I don't think paypal would be be too upset about it. I saw someone else do this and it seems would eliminate a lot of fees. I really like this idea, as all you need is a paypal address to send money or possibly even western union or some other means. Why use an exchange?

How much do you think the news coverage from hi profile sites like slate is contributing to artificially inflating the coins value? IE I wonder if this is a one hit wonder story or if it's going to generate continual interest.

Prices haven't moved since the recent influx of news coverage. It takes a while to get money on to Mt. Gox.

If prices rise as Bitcoin becomes more well known and gains new adopters, prices wouldn't be "artificially" inflating.

Because it takes a good few days to buy bitcoins, when a big story is released that's the perfect opportunity to buy up right? Wait a few days then the market should react? (I'm a noob though but it seems BC are unique in this way and it might be able to be exploited)

Oh yeah, I suspect you can make money by staying liquid on Mt. Gox and keeping an eye on google trends/news alerts.

Although I'm skeptical that keeping money on Mt. Gox for long periods of time is a good idea

The BTC market seems like it could be quite vulnerable to a reverse pump and dump, if someone feigned expertise, a fake IT security research company that had "An big announcement about a security flaw in the BTC network" it could send prices plummeting if the announcement went viral across the network. Something to look out for anyway, if you did spot it you would have a great buying opportunity.

Just ordered 3x HD5830 for $100 each

Gonna drop them in various non-dedicated mining rigs and hope to pay them off in 1-2 months. Even at 500k difficultly if I'm pushing 250mh/s from each one that is $300/mo at current exchange rates.

Wow, that's awesome

I cannot figure out why miners are helping everyone else learn how to do it