what is ripple XRP/BTC exchange rate? and is it exchangeable anywhere?

Is the mtgox price still the standard to use when trading coins for USD?

yes, afaik

You can buy btc ~$10 cheaper at btc-e (right now $122 gox and $112 btc-e), ofcourse if you are able to deposit there without big fees. and btc-e doesn't need account verification.

So do you guys believe that Shinichi Mochizuki is Satoshi Nakamoto?
http://projectwordsworth.com/the-paradox-of-the-proof/

lol the crazy japanese

I doubt it, I haven't watched the video where the guy names him, but I heard it was a 10 minute, rambling thing with no real evidence.

One thing that makes it seem overly facile at first glance is simply the whole "hey they both have Japanese names!" thing. The idea that someone as careful about privacy as Satoshi actually picked a Japanese name is silly. I mean, it's possible, but it's much more likely he wouldn't leave such an obvious clue.

Also I just can't get past the idea that it's those 3 guys who filed the patent 2 days before bitcoin.org was registered, that contains the exact phrase that's in the whitepaper. IMO that was the one screwup, the one loose string. Who knows, it's always fun to have some mystery, I look forward to watching the video later and reading the theories on this new guy.

(oh also quick note: I skimmed the first few paragraphs of the article you linked and it said he solved some big math theorem - is it likely Satoshi had time to solve some huge unsolved math theorem and also single-handedly come up with a completely novel cryptocurrency that has all the bases covered?)

I've been lurking on bitcointalk.org and some guy was talking that when these asic miners will be shipped it could drop the btc price, as a complete noob I completely don't understand how's that can affect the btc price? I thought that the more hashing power there, the more secure bitcoin network is.

On bitcointalk there are no shortage of people predicting the price will go up or go down for all sorts of reasons.

Most often they just take a graph from a carefully selected timeframe, impose a linear trend on top of it, and then make bold predictions because, ya know, that's science.

I think ASICs bring more good than harm and I also think it's priced into the market if for no other reason that there are already plenty of them running.

I guess the argument is that ASIC miners want their investment back as soon as possible so they will sell their coins when they mine them. But it is just as likely that the first people that receive them are the miners that have always been ahead of the curve and they already have plenty of bitcoins.

There's also the argument that it will make mining less profitable for more people, so it means people who want to invest in Bitcoins will now have to buy instead of mine.

Probably there will be a short period of faster than normal bitcoin creation, as there may be some delay in adjusting the difficulty to the increased hashing power of the network. I wouldn't expect it to be a big effect.

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

So if someone wanted to put $5k into mining bitcoins today, what should he buy? Seems like a lot of the machines are either not in production atm (Avalon) or are just vapourware.

buy btc and asicminer-pt shares. i think they're returning a few % per day.

I am currently 6 minutes into the Ted Nelson video where he says Satoshi is Chinichi whatever, and it is hilarious. I think he has no evidence, it's a pretty crap theory, but the guy is very likable and when he starts doing his Sherlock Holmes stuff, it's pretty entertaining.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emDJTGTrEm0

ASICMiner is the only competent and available ASIC mining company IMO.

You can buy shares if you want to passively invest. This gets you a piece of their mining activity and their miner sales. The shares are ultra hard to value.

You can also buy ASIC mining blades from them but they are over-priced IMO. 50 BTC for something like 12 GH/s. Quite a gamble considering how much uncertainty there is. I wouldn't buy them unless you will get significant entertainment equity, if you want to help strengthen bitcoin, or you want a miner to increase your bitcoin anonymity (which would probably be easier with local bitcoin purchases with cash).

You can buy Avalon miners second hand but not in that price range.

All other options that I know of are either too expensive (GPU, FPGA) or vaporware (BFL, custom Avalon designs).

Disclosure - I own two (LOL) ASICMiner-PT shares.

+1. good business, imo

whoops my last post should have read "... returning few % a week"

ASICMINER just paid .02 btc dividend, 0.8% (42% APR). Love this company !

guys, is this true that some transfers need a lot of time to confirm? like 3+ hours if you don't pay some miner's fee or something? the transactions with highest fee are included in the next block? just making sure I didn't get scammed right now

I was wondering about that as well. I thought I read somewhere that most transactions would take ~10mins but sometimes it takes much lmuch longer for me. Why does it take so long if it only needs 10 network verifications? Shouldn't we expect this to improve vastly in the future?

What's nice though is the fee to pay is usually a flat fee of only about 2 cents.

10 minutes is very short

most services will include the miner's fee by default, but it could still take some time. i've had transactions take a few hours to confirm even with the 0005 fee.

most of the time within 30 minutes i will start getting some confirm.

if the transaction shows up as "unconfirmed" that doesn't necessarily mean that you've been scammed. i think a scam only happens if someone attempts to double-spend the same coins again

Combining the above Bitmessage capabilities--which we already proved out experimentally--with Open-Transactions, makes possible fully-decentralized p2p markets, as well as p2p escrow across OT federated servers, easy p2p and server-to-server wiring of funds and conversion of currencies, both within OT and also between OT and the conventional banking system.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=212490.0

Seems like this Bitmessage technology is a biggish deal according to the users there. From what I understand it does seem so.

its not really bitmessage that is new here as bitmessage is an iteration of the satoshi client.

open-transactions is a p2p transaction protocol. but what they lacked was a p2p messaging system. this is where bitmessage comes in. bitmessage uses the satoshi/bitcoin protocol to secure sent messages, tagged to bitmessage transactions. but bitmessages in the blockchain are removed after a couple days, so theres no bloat. it is assumed that the messages will be sent and received/stored somewhere else after that time.

so what happens is anyone can log onto an OT node, broadcast and receive messages using bitmessage (e.g. "4.2 btc for sale @133.7"), and complete the transactions using OT.

OT can accept multiple inputs, bitcoins, colored coins, sepa transfers, etc.

this could be huge and donations/bounties are building up fast.

as i understood it, bitmessages were stored in its own blockchian, not bitcoin's chain

I tried to send some coins the other day with no fee and it took about 5 hours for the first confirmation.

In the past I've always paid the automatic fee per Electrum (now .0005) and usually get first confirm in around 10 mins or so.