is it normal to take over 8 hours for the wallet to sync? its been over 8 hrs, and it says there are still 31k blocks left. it also seems to be going much slower than at first. i have basically the cheapest computer you can buy. do you need a good pc to run this? i knew that mining was out of the question, but i didn't think basic buying/selling would be a problem.

You don't actually need that kind of wallet to receive, hold, and send bitcoins. Electrum is very fast to set up and can do everything you want without trusting anyone else. The reason it is getting slower is that the later blocks are larger (contain more transactions). The reason Electrum is faster is that it just gets the parts it needs when it needs them.

lot of $ has entered the space, heard about some $150k orders being filled on gox etc. having WP accept btc certainly hasn't hurt, having a bitcoin booth at CES gave a lot of visibility to the currency in the target market as well.

think 30 is a huge fave

thanks for the help. apparently 2 days of research was not enough to prepare me for the awesomeness that is bitcoin.

Blockchain.info/wallet another great option. FYI the next version (0.8) of the client you downloaded (bitcoin-qt) will support a much faster initial sync.

Cliffs?

You're an optimist aren't you? Sure, someone taking the time to condense 211 pages for you into cliffs is a piece of cake, I mean it's so easy it should practically be a cream for someone not to do it!

I mean really? Cliffs?

I've seen cliffs of threads way bigger than this one.

nbd just thought I'd ask.

Partially the halving of the reward. That decreased supply of new coins. Speculators would have accounted for this and raised prices earlier, although it's not clear those speculators are unloading now, especially as it keeps moving up. So you have a chance of a bubble where everyone wants to ride it up, lowering supply, riding it up and up and up until finally some event causes a sell-off, and everyone waiting for the top sells (similar to 2 years ago). But you also have increased demand (my guess is a lot of silk road gains), and increased speculation that a somewhat major gambling site will accept bitcoins. If that happens, you could see a tremendous rise.

+1

except i think a lot of the gains are in anticipation of a real poker site accepting btc (infiniti?). i've been dabbling on seals, but 1-tabling on their software is too tilting that i end up just spewing out of boredom.

really kicking myself bc i've been buying up handfuls of bitcoins on coinbase the last couple of months. would have bought more but coinbase caps purchases fairly low.

Ok, here's cliffs for ya:
1) Bitcoin is awesome
2) you should use it and play poker on sealswithclubs.eu


There

I want to try some BTC sports betting for the super bowl. Anyone want to sell me $200 worth for Dwolla or paypal?

Seems really dumb for Avalon to sell their mining ASICs for ~$1500. They can make over $200/day each. Ideal strategy seems to be first to market, but only by a few days.

I think its a much better business plan to sell all the asics, than try to mine this many coins and sell them all.

Also im pretty sure these companies mined using a few tester asics for a month or more.

Anybody know why the price spiked to 40 then back down?

u mean $31 in 2011? hype.

Want to sell some BTC for Stars(timoshi), ftp, party nettusd etc.

3%vig pm me if your interested.

According to coinbase, they spiked up to 40 and back down to 20. Maybe it's an error with their site.

Amazon coins coming out soon. Impact on Bitcoin?

I'm assuming any legitimate companies like wordpress would switch over to Amazon coins, and all that would be left for bitcoins is drugs/gambling, which is pretty much what they are limited to long-term anyways.

Totally disagree.

Perhaps you should do 2 minutes of research before drawing this conclusion. The fact that it has the word "coin" in its name does not make it a competitor to bitcoin. Steve from BitPay had this to say about it:

Please read the bitcoin FAQ: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ
If you are still skeptical, read the "myths" section to see if your concern is addressed: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ

amazon coins are about the same as microsoft points

Exactly.

Step 1: Get a loan from btc-jam at 25% interest when at $13/btc
Step 2: Spend all coins
Step 3: Kick a cute kitten across the damn room when you realize you now owe coins at $20/btc

/badbeat
/degen
/allaroundbaddecisionmaker

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

Borrowing to spend is stupid and you are suppose to get hurt doing stupid **** so you can learn not to do it anymore.