Bitcoin mining - using school computers

[Sdrawkcab]

You could apply the same logic to trading any other kind of stock

 

Pick a short period where MS or Apple stock drops and say 'Who still thinks these are a good investment?'

 

 

They aren't anywhere near as volatile as BTC though, and are somewhat predictable by following company news etc. The value of BTC is tied to nothing, and on their own bitcoins are worthless - they only have value if someone is willing to exchange them for something which does have value. There's no reason to own a bitcoin other than to spend it on something else, and so few businesses accept btc that this generally doesn't happen. On top of that the protocol is actually massively limited (only handles 10 transactions per second) which makes it totally impractical to actually use for sales. Bitcoin has been kept afloat by media attention up until now, but with the MtGox withdrawal freeze and the slow decline in prices we've seen over the past month or so, I don't think it will recover. The reason it's rebounded from crashes in the past is because the price has always fallen so dramatically that it becomes attractive to buy in, which in turn causes a big spike in the price and generates more media attention. If the price continues to decline slowly like this it won't generate any headlines, and so the protocol will just die a slow and quiet death in obscurity.

 

In the future, a single bit coin will either be worth a small fortune or nothing. Whether they are a good investment is, IMO a question of how you like your risk. As with all investment (AKA gambling), don't 'invest' more than you can afford to lose.

 

In the future a single coin will be worth nothing. Bitcoin value requires you to trade bitcoin for stuff, and people aren't actually doing that very much.

[Sdrawkcab]

This was a double post but @plexer replied while I was typing so I'll use this to reply to him too.. (apologies)

 

Oh I've got a good place local to spend them Bitcoins for beer now in the UK - Mind Of The Geek

 

Ben

 

This is one pub out of how many thousands in this country? I like how they don't mention that customers paying with bitcoins would have to stand around for 10-30 minutes waiting for the transfer to be confirmed before they could actually have their beers. Or they could pay a bigger transaction fee to get their beer faster, I suppose.

 

The thing is, the bitcoin protocol literally cannot work in any of these situations. If any significant volume of traders started accepting payments in btc, the network would grind to a halt and only the highest-fee transactions would be processed by miners. Do you find it annoying when you're paying with your debit card and you have to wait ~1 minute for the machine to dial the bank? Bitcoin delays would be ten times as long as that. This delay isn't something you can "fix" either, it's hard coded into the network.

Edited July 2, 2013 by Sdrawkcab