Im not going to explain trends again, view previous posts or figure it out on your own.

I've said many times before nothing is set in stone, just like difficulty rate and the speed it increases, which was the main argument.

You are describing a situation where the increase in difficulty drives increases in price which drives even more increases in difficulty in a virtuous cycle. Can you think of any reason why this might not increase forever?

To the point where bitcoins stop being generated (30 years) or when it becomes unprofitable which is impossible for bitcoin to continue.

Explain why then.

So opens The Economist's thoughtful and surprisingly technical review - http://www.economist.com/blogs/babba.../bl/bitsandbob

Good article was posted here.

Ah, my apologies.

Can't blame you no one wants to dig through this thread anyway lol.

It can be marginally profitable and still be a terrible idea. You are failing to understand this basic concept. If I already have a rig, I'm going to run it in cases where it doesn't make sense to spend money on a new rig.

Take this extreme example- say a rig costs me $1 million to buy. It costs me $100/day to run it once I own it.

As long as I can make $101/day, it's worth my trouble ONCE I ALREADY HAVE IT. It's "profitable". However, if the machine only has an expected life of 10,000 days, it would be completely foolish to buy more machines. The existing people who already have rigs would continue to mine and be just fine. The network would continue just fine.

However, if I expected to make $1,000 a day revenue ($900/day profit), it's a good investment. So I would buy more rigs and put them online (as long as my expectations are right).

If the revenue drops to $90/day, then it makes sense just to shut down the machine and stop losing money. THIS is the case you need to worry about. Fortunately as machines get taken offline, difficulty will decrease. This means that the cost would drop below $100/day, and it would become marginally profitable again.

The same thing that keeps things from getting too bad also keeps things from being too good. The difficulty will increase as long as people are adding rigs (which they will do if they either make mistakes, or already have the equipment, or if it really is real profitable). This means the large profit doesn't last long and quickly trends toward marginal costs. If you have large capital expenses but it trends toward marginal costs, you generally will not make much money. This is of course different if price increases, but in that case, JUST BUY THE DAMN COINS, especially if you need to hire someone to run a mining rig for you.

This thread used to be good

Thanks to you.

Most of what you just said is basically what ive been saying and helps proves my points. I havent missed anything, you have. Even people with existing miners have a expected lifetime and wont last long. Another factor being better faster more efficient gpus/hardware coming out.

Buying bitcoins isnt a bad idea either, but its more risky because if something goes bad with bitcoin and they lose a lot to no value, your left with nothing oposed to having a machine you build worth at least 75% to full value. You only need to make profit for the first week or so to break even.


Also within 30 days you could return it for a full refund, thats the policy newegg offers anyway.

all this fuss over a 1k investment idea shsssh - mine Twitter followers for 2 weeks with a 5 year old desktop with any skill and you can make more then 1k out of thin air

Cliffs - Tom Collins and most everyone else seem extremely smart or at the very least logical, understanding and conducive to progress.

Icy - Meh.

Bitcoin - is fun for everyone.

I liked it more when we were talking about how many Aplaca socks we were gonna stack up.

1 serious question: I was reading about silk road. So they sell drugs on it and people are like oh this is so cool and secretive. Then a guy in America was like oh yeah I just had the drugs shipped to MY HOUSE from Canada. Does this seem lol not private to anyone and very exploitable by the authorities that be. The odd part was the article said the drugs even cost more? Wheres the value in this?

This is the same thing people fought about when difficulty was less but bitcoins were worth hardly anything as well. Now look what has happened. This is the same thing. Ive been much more "logical" than any of those other guys have giving actual explantions to support everything ive said.

I like TC's Arb post - Now there is some meat. Do that 10X with success and there is magically a free 1k

We need more of those types of posts and less bitcoin infomercials imho

My dad always used to say "No matter how fine she is, there is someone, somewhere out there tired of hitting that"

Start with explaining to me why future price increases are not incorporated in the current bit coin price. That should be fun.

Go back and read.

dunno if it's been posted before or not, thoughts?
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16457.0

This has been going on for a while. People ship drugs across borders in vacuum sealed bags. They disguise it in things that make it not obvious that it's drugs.

This just adds an extra level of obfuscation. No one really knows who is selling them the drugs. So if you do get busted, you can't send cops to the dealer. You could be the victim of a sting where the government pretends to be a dealer, gets your info, then sends to your house. Supposedly there are ways around this since there is no way to prove you actually requested the package sent to your house. You could use a fake name, put it on a neighbors door, etc... Then if it is busted, there is little proof its you. You could even leave the package on your doorstep and write "return to sender" on it or something to make it seem like it's not yours.

I do expect the DEA to start paying attention to this, but it's going to only work making examples of people. There's no way to trace it back to the source. There's no way of getting people linked in and bringing in the bigger guy. It's very difficult to trace the money if you launder it properly. It makes it a very complicated problem. DEA might be able to find a way, but it's certainly much more difficult.

The whole system is so insecure, you have to jump through so many hoops, anyone with a trojan can still your entire wallet so easily. It's going to happen over and over again. This is probably the easiest way to make money at Bitcoins, make a fake Bitcoin tool, then get people to download it, then steal their wallet. Now you are rich.

It's a shame the developers have made security such a low priority.

Virus protection ftw

I don't think it's a case of priorities, I think it's a natural trade off against the pros of the current system. I don't think it's as easy as you are insinuating.

LOL @ this. This is even dumber than your normal posts. I'll give you a "mining" program. See if your virus detection finds it. Then I'll steal your wallet if it doesn't. This is incredibly trivial to write.

There is absolutely zero reason that the wallet file on disk should be unencrypted by default. It's absolutely absurd. At a bare minimum, that works. And it's trivially easy to do.

I don't know how it works as well as you so I'm probably going to slip up, but I can't see how an encrypted wallet would protect against intrusion (without knowing more about what you are suggesting specifically).

This all sound like additional layers ontop of their system though, not inherent flaws in the systems design, misplaced blame perhaps?

There's not really any way to protect against rogue clients. They could simply have undetected sleeper codes in them that transfer the total balance on a specific date. As you pointed out Icy's post is particularly ignorant as this sort of attack is ridiculously difficult to detect before it happens.