Mt gox seized by Feds?? Rumor? Why no discussion of this?

Cause the only thing seized thus far is the Dwolla-linked funds. Wires still working normally.

Imo the attack on dwolla is just an attack on dollars, not bitcoins.

A friend of mine has taken a sudden interest in litecoin mining and has just invested $2k into a mining rig. At first, it just seemed like harmless fun for him and his family. Building a computer with his kids, make a couple hundred dollars, then sell the excess parts when it stops becoming profitable, and using the rest for a gaming PC.

Now he's really gung ho about this, wanting to get friends and investors to put up money so he can get several rigs up and running.

I looked into to it, and it seems like it won't really be profitable or maybe barely profitable. But he has pie in the sky dreams of making his money back in a year . . . even sooner if litecoin skyrockets like bitcoin did.

Having only barely researched this topic, I'm not sure if my conclusion is right. The biggest flaw I see in his strategy is that he seems to think that he can make $150/month with his super duper rig and that will be steady. But it seems like, even if he makes $150 the first month, the result is guaranteed to go down the next month. Not just in theory, but built into the mining algorithm is that it is guaranteed to be more difficult to get coin X+1 than it is to get coin X.

Again, I've only researched this for a half hour or so and would just like to get more throughly researched opinions on mining.

You're right. He's banking on LTC skyrocketing, which isn't going to happen. Even if it does, the difficulty is going to be super high, as people who can no longer mine BTC get into LTC.

This seems signficant: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-0...ts-bitcoin-bug

"As if all this isn’t enough, there’s additional interesting news on Bitcoin recently, in this case with regard to the partnership between Bitpay and Gyft. This story is getting some mainstream media traction as CNN Money covered it today. The article notes how you can now spend Bitcoins at 50,000 merchants versus 8,000 before this deal. But yeah, BTC is the same as beanie babies…"

why LTC is bad? I was thinking about it, it's generating blocks 4 times more faster than btc, is this a downside of it? what else?

The network effect, stability, and acceptance are all non-technical reasons that LTC is inferior. People buying into LTC just don't want to miss out on the next BTC. It's like buying ubid because Ebay is huge.

Here's a decent thread you should read:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=188891.0

Timing of blocks is not set to ~10 minutes for no good reason. There are significant trade-offs to decreasing this value.

If he's convinced that LTC is going to skyrocket, he would be better off buying LTC. Most miners are idiots, and they cannot understand simple concepts like this, though.

Agreed

The biggest advantage I see from the smaller block times is having more people mine coins. This will increase chances of bootstrapping, since you will likely get wide distribution of initial LTC. Wide distribution means it will be easy to come by. This is great in theory, and may have been superior to Bitcoin, if Bitcoin wasn't already bootstrapped and available now. The GPU based mining distribution of coins is superior to Bitcoin due to the democracy of it. Whether or not that kind of network is easier to defeat or not remains to be seen, although Bitcoin getting ASICs widespread now helps out a lot, it makes it a lot harder for one group to take over Bitcoin than before. If someone who wanted to destroy Bitcoin created ASICs a year before they became publicly available, you'd have a serious argument for LTC. But, that cat's out of the bag now, and Bitcoin seems to be secure, widely distributed, and commonly accepted. LTC's advantage is as a ponzi scheme for moronic miners.

ASIC for scrypt is possible but not worth it because the payoff is too low. Just like Bitcoin, except in this case the prospects of smaller, cheaper ASICs are limited by processing and memory and would ultimately lead to more mining concentration than Bitcoin.

Curious as to why you are so anti-mining? I guess it's just not cost effective?

Exactly.

That ship has sailed.

I've built 2 mining rigs in the last 30 days and currently have 9 video cards running. 7 of them are full time and 2 are when I'm not using my main computer. I've put about $2,000 into equipment and $100 into electricity costs for running the rigs.

I've stayed up to date on the new alt-coins through bitcointalk and have been one of the first people to jump on the garbage coins that have been coming out (such as FeatherCoin, ChinaCoin and now WorldCoin). Yesterday I crossed the threshold of break-even, including electricity costs. I convert all my crap coins into BTC or LTC once they hit the exchanges. This could obviously be worth less than my initial investment tomorrow, but it goes to show that mining is still profitable if you pay attention.

Why do people buy altcoins ? You can't spend them anywhere, can you ? All I see is people mining garbage coins and trading them for BTC as soon as they can.

Pretty much same reason why people ask same questions that are answered in last 3 pages

if i am reading this correctly, you have made $2000 worth of alt coins in a month from 2000 invested? if so, i am impressed. i didn't realize that was even possible nowadays. i really wish i was more tech savvy.

holy ****, so pokerstars now essentially accepts btc? i just got a boner.

Mining is a race to the bottom. And most miners are delusional about their profitability and only are profitable in a time of rising coin prices. And in that case, they would have been better off buying coins and waiting.

He fails to mention what would have happened if he invested $2000 in altcoins and sat on it for a month.

Not the same. He has a $2000 dollar mining rig that can mine every alt coin the moment it comes out. He only risks his electricity bill on a coin that totally flops. This is much less risky than putting actual money in those coins. However he has to be really quick and good at setting up new coins to have made that kind of money.

What he doesn't mention is the time he needs to invest into setting up the new coins each time and then selling them. I expect if he adds that into the costs then his hourly rate is not going to be that great.

It is never going to be like bitcoin again where you set up your PC and left it running for a couple of months and now you realize that you are a millionaire. At least if you didn't sell them already at $3 or bought 2 pizza's.

If you already have a rig, sure. If he has to buy a rig, the risk is the same, except he can try to unload his rig if it's unprofitable and crashes. And assuming the rig is useful even if he doesn't use it for mining, it's a simple electricity calculation. I am referring more to people who go buy rigs.

Yeah, I neglected setup time and maintenance time, which isn't insignificant.