Bitcoins

[Caged Great]

What about Litecoin and Novacoin? What are they about? Is there a reason why they are so cheap in comparison?

[Miniac]

Is this a bad time to start investing in BTC?

[Fire]

I'm going to start Firecoin so you can all suck it.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by Miniac

Is this a bad time to start investing in BTC?

I would say yes.

[Miniac]

Originally Posted by Rathji

I would say yes.

Even if I were to hold on to them for a year or two?

[Rathji]

$600 is still a really high mark, which is roughly what they are selling for on VirtEx right now.

Sure it hit $847 at once point this week, but I am pretty confident that that bump was speculative and not reflecting increased demand created by Cryptolocker. Increased demand is the only thing that will drive the price up in the long term.

I am not an investment guy though. I just have a bunch of USB things plugged into my computer and set my sell points high enough that I can expect to recoup my investment if the price rises enough. If I don't, then I can spend my bitcoins on Humble Bundles and be a happy man. I didn't start mining for profit, I started mining because it was immensely interesting to me.

If I was putting in cash at this point, I would have money in my account have a buy trigger somewhere around $300 and then not look at it for a month unless the trade went through. Thats me though, and it is easy for me to say that because I am still making bitcoins, regardless. Set up your account, get verified etc and see where things sit at that point. It likely won't happen for a week, since I am guessing that the account creation is happening at a high rate right now, so they are probably swamped.

[Azure]

I actually think it still goes up to $1000/BTC by the end of 2014.

So I'll say yes, it is good time to invest.

But, who knows.

[Kelekin]

One of the biggest problems I've noticed is that, due to the delay of all the new higher speed machines that are coming out, people have been trying to buy up some of the cheaper ones...but I get the feeling most people don't pay attention to ROI%. Some guy paid $3000 for a 60 GH/s on ebay, which is ridiculously overpriced compared to everywhere else on the internet and is likely to never make their money back. I think long term it is better to buy a couple bitcoins but put some of it into other unique coins - logically speaking, it is easier for a coin at $1 to go to $2 than for one to go from $600 to $1200 and many investors are starting to look at the alternatives.

I think the truth of the matter is that bitcoin is popular because of what it represents but it is the beginning. It isn't what people are going to be talking about in ten years. Not only is there more promise cryptocurrencies more suitable to international businesses, but there are tons that are learning that you can do more with it. A really neat one coming out soon is called CureCoin - effectively incentivizing the folding@home program which does protein folding using your CPU in hopes of curing diseases, which is a brilliant ploy to get more computational power trying to cure disease.

I could probably write a ridiculously long post about all the alternative cryptocurrencies in the work but ain't nobody got time for that.

[JohnnyB]

Bitcoins are very appealing here in China just for the ability to move money out of the country freely. China is very tight on restricting the removal of currency either by Chinese or by foreigners. Bitcoins allow a nice way to bypass the laws that govern the banks. Whereas to move money out of the country through wire transfer I would need to take my passport to the bank, get all sorts of forms stamped and be subject to a restriction on the amount of money I could move each month. With a btcchina I could take all the currency I have in the country and have it changed over to bitcoins within 10 minutes, have those bitcoins in my wallet in another 10 minutes and take them where I like without regulation. I'm sure that's not only appealing to me. There are a lot of people who want their money out of China.

[Caged Great]

Originally Posted by Kelekin

One of the biggest problems I've noticed is that, due to the delay of all the new higher speed machines that are coming out, people have been trying to buy up some of the cheaper ones...but I get the feeling most people don't pay attention to ROI%. Some guy paid $3000 for a 60 GH/s on ebay, which is ridiculously overpriced compared to everywhere else on the internet and is likely to never make their money back. I think long term it is better to buy a couple bitcoins but put some of it into other unique coins - logically speaking, it is easier for a coin at $1 to go to $2 than for one to go from $600 to $1200 and many investors are starting to look at the alternatives.

I think the truth of the matter is that bitcoin is popular because of what it represents but it is the beginning. It isn't what people are going to be talking about in ten years. Not only is there more promise cryptocurrencies more suitable to international businesses, but there are tons that are learning that you can do more with it. A really neat one coming out soon is called CureCoin - effectively incentivizing the folding@home program which does protein folding using your CPU in hopes of curing diseases, which is a brilliant ploy to get more computational power trying to cure disease.

I could probably write a ridiculously long post about all the alternative cryptocurrencies in the work but ain't nobody got time for that.

Realistically, if you drop $600 into Litecoin at say $5 per, if it only goes up to $9, you've got over $1000. Not bad.

[Azure]

Well, now the question is whether or not LTC will actually go back down to $5. It dipped slightly over the past week, but is back at $8 again.

Not bad if you bought in at $2.

[Codes]

Well, I think I've missed the boat on bitcoins.

I wouldn't mind getting in on litecoins, or another alternative. Do you guys have a preferred place to buy them?

I'm reading the wiki, but your experience would be appreciated.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Kelekin

One of the biggest problems I've noticed is that, due to the delay of all the new higher speed machines that are coming out, people have been trying to buy up some of the cheaper ones...but I get the feeling most people don't pay attention to ROI%.

I told my co-worker about Bitcoins and he went out and bought an older ASIC rig off Kijiji locally here in Calgary.

After doing the proper ROI calculations, he realized it wasn't worth it so he ebayed it and turned around and sold it for double what he paid after some frenzied bidding from people who are making the mistake you described.

[Miniac]

Originally Posted by Codes

Well, I think I've missed the boat on bitcoins.

I wouldn't mind getting in on litecoins, or another alternative. Do you guys have a preferred place to buy them?

I'm reading the wiki, but your experience would be appreciated.

https://btc-e.com/

[Azure]

Posted this in the buy/sell forum but it could go here too.

Looking to purchase a single Gigabyte 7950 video card. I'll pay in BTC.

[Kelekin]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

I told my co-worker about Bitcoins and he went out and bought an older ASIC rig off Kijiji locally here in Calgary.

After doing the proper ROI calculations, he realized it wasn't worth it so he ebayed it and turned around and sold it for double what he paid after some frenzied bidding from people who are making the mistake you described.

It took me a month to prepare myself for entering the world of cryptocurrency. Spend every night shift reading about it. In that time I watched Bitcoin triple in price, but I still know that it was smart for me to not rush into something.

There is supposed to be a guy with a bitcoin physical store in Calgary. Every time I replied to his kijiji ads he would claim the items were sold out, and then he doesn't reply to any e-mails on his actual site. Quality business.

I just bought the parts needed for my first litecoin/scrypt mining machine. I still have to go out and get a hard drive though or a USB key and figure out how to set it up because I'm pretty bad at hardware. I get bored quite easily though and doubt I'll spend much time on Litecoin, there are lots of other fun ones out there with potential (Cryptogenic Bullion is 90% mined and just posted a 31 page whitepaper outlining potentially huge concepts).

[Hack&Lube]

Richard Branson just came out endorsing Bitcoins, said certain Virgin operations will accept them.

[Regular_John]

Fill me in here, what's the intention of the alternate coins (EG: litecoin) at the end of the day? With Bitcoin I can at least see there's a desire & drive to get merchants to accept them and lead to consumer adaptation as an alternate currency, but it kinda looks like the alternate coins are just playing to the spectators game.

No one seems to be talking about using litecoins at Subway, but simply the lower spectator/entry cost at the current time. Am I missing something here? Are people backing litecoin in hopes it overtakes bitcoin or becomes another strong alternative currency?

[Caged Great]

Originally Posted by jaydorn

Fill me in here, what's the intention of the alternate coins (EG: litecoin) at the end of the day? With Bitcoin I can at least see there's a desire & drive to get merchants to accept them and lead to consumer adaptation as an alternate currency, but it kinda looks like the alternate coins are just playing to the spectators game.

No one seems to be talking about using litecoins at Subway, but simply the lower spectator/entry cost at the current time. Am I missing something here? Are people backing litecoin in hopes it overtakes bitcoin or becomes another strong alternative currency?

I'm assuming that they are hoping that Litecoin will be the "Silver" to bitcoin's gold. There will be 4X as many Litecoins down the road, so they are figuring that it should have around 1/4 or slightly less the value of Bitcoin.

[Azure]

Finite supply of any crypto currency means that alternate currencies will always have a chance as well.

NMC went above $2 last night too.