I'm interested in this.

Google trends seems to show that this is more than just a few geeks and hackers interested:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=bitco...ate=ytd&sort=0

I've been waiting to cashout my roll from the online poker sites so I could invest a large percentage into bitcoins. As I've been waiting, the price has gone from 0.70 USD to the current price. Pretty annoying.

Tom Collins, I'm looking to buy some BTC if you're able to buy them.

IRC is your best bet for avoiding the exchanges and their fees. There is no easy way to exchange with paypal. The main reason for this is that paypal is not guaranteed funds. So anyone who sells to you is taking a risk.

Verified paypal users?

This is classic disruption.

A small competitor moves in to fill a niche void in the market. The market leader can't compete easily out of fear of cannibalizing it's own market. The market leader resorts to anti-competitive behavior.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology

http://twitter.com/#!/bitcoineconomy

according to this twitter feed bitcoin transaction volumes range from 100k-700k per day. MtGox is typically less than 100k per day and usually much less.

Sure some transactions are trading or exchanging, but there aren't a ton of real products available yet, so I imagine most of the volumes are speculative in one way or another.

Are there any laptops out there with a sufficient GPU onboard to effectively mine bitcoin?

There are laptops with upper end ATI graphics cards anyway. These tend to be less powerful than their desktop versions and I've no idea how they do with Bitcoin specifically.

You can find a hardware comparison for mining bitcoins here. Two mobile devices are show. The 6310M gets 9.8 MHash/s while the 6490M gets 16 MHash/s. I have a lenovo w510 laptop with an nvidia card, it gets 9 MHash/s. These pale in comparison to desktop GPU cards.

I see the 5870M does 116.5 Mhash/s, which is reasonable. They don't have the 5850M listed which seems to be a more common card.

I was getting 6MHash/s with my 4 year old laptop, no idea what kind of card. It was good for about .10BTC/day until it failed to boot up this morning. I'm thinking the video driver I had to put on it screwed it up or fried something due to too much heat.

obv overheating is gonna be a big issue with laptop gpus. i wouldn't risk it unless you can put ur laptop on top of a AC or something.

Good news is my computer started after I reformatted the drive and reinstalled windows. It's still getting hot, so I'm concerned a fan is out. Lost a lot of stuff, though. Annoying.

Bitcoin transaction volume is completely meaningless...
Because the transaction cost is zero...
For, example, look at this 10 minute block...
Which has about 4,000,000 in BTC volume.

Some clown broke up 89,000 into 1,000 pieces...
But instead of racking up 89,000 in volume...
He did special trick to rack up 4,000,000 in volume...
Because transaction cost is ZERO.

This demonstrates how easy it is to manipulate BTC...
Wait till the real sharks move in...
They will be pushing the price around up/down at will.

The scary thing is...
No one even mentioned this block at BitCoin Forums...
No discussion whatsoever = Cultish Silence.

http://blockexplorer.com/block/00000...802fc1f1e9e80c

My best estimate is about $50,000/day...
Of actual BTC commercial activity...
Which is completely irrelevant anyway...
This is a pure speculative bubble...
And should be traded like one.

Why would anyone mention it? I'm pretty sure few people are concerned with volume of BTC sent via transactions. There's the occasional mention when one of the addresses with a big balance gets moved, but just from curiosity more than anything from what I can tell.

People are more interested in volume traded at the exchanges for other currencies.

Lol, when coins are sent the complete balance of an address must be spent. Since you don't always want to pay it all you send part to the recipient and part back to yourself as "change". Someone with a lot of coins sent 1000 to a bunch of different addresses. Maybe it's boring or maybe it's a cult, whatever.

So how do I buy bitcoins exactly? Can I find someone to meet face-to-face in LA or something? I'm a total noob on this.

u can buy bitcoins with a few different methods here-
http://mtgox.com/users/addFunds

LA is big enough you just might find someone. There is a guy who does cash by mail too.

If you want to do it over the PC, then your basic options are mtgox or IRC.

Interesting.

Is it a long-term concern to anyone that Bitcoin doesn't offer much in the way of fraud protection? Or does it and I don't realize it?

I'm just thinking a lot of person-to-person transactions are sort of high-risk which is why payment systems like PayPal have such highly-emphasized protections.

This came to mind because I was thinking about trying to get some BTCs by selling some stuff around the apartment online (Xbox 360 games or what not). I figure it helps the cause if it's used somewhat as a currency. The lack of protection seems to make it risky for the buyer though.

Build a website that helps facilitate buyer protection. Have the buyer escrow and release the funds to the seller when they say they received the product. Charge a small fee to cover your time when you need to arbitrate a dispute.

If you don't, someone will eventually, and there's suddenly buyer protection.

There already is such a website. ClearCoin.

Meh, that's a far cry from what is needed for true customer protection. Obviously, it's better than nothing, but not what a final customer protection business or customer arbiter will look like. Plus, competition is never a bad thing.

Actually that isn't what happened there. Someone with 89k sent 89k to another address but did it by snaking the coins through different addresses with each address sending 1k to the target and the rest to the next address in the snake.

I can't think of a way of stopping people inflating the BTC volume due to the nature of bitcoin. You could stop people redeeming coins for X blocks but this would obviously cause problems. I guess this means you just can't trust Bitcoin volume to have any meaning, which is fine.

As a side note you have to spend the complete value of an output, not of an address.