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Bitcoin $500

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Re: Bitcoin $500

#41
post #13

What happens to the price when only people with 500Ghash/sec+ can make coins next month? Early adopters are rightfully getting a nice reward now, but how do you get "fresh blood" when the difficulty is off the chart unless you have several thousand dollars in hardware?

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin $500

#42
post #13

What happens to the price when only people with 500Ghash/sec+ can make coins next month? Early adopters are rightfully getting a nice reward now, but how do you get "fresh blood" when the difficulty is off the chart unless you have several thousand dollars in hardware?

Difficulty does not affect the price at all. Bitcoins are produced at a more-or-less stable rate regardless of the amount of mining competition.

In fact, before hashrate was that high a lot of investors' money was going into mining, not to exchanges (30% growth every 10 days over the last 6-7 months). As mining becomes more and more competitive, less money will go there and more to BTC holders, thus moving the price drastically.

Edit: typos and more clarity.

Re: Bitcoin $500

#43
Here we go again. A thread full of financial experts, conspiracists and excessive naysayers. Let's keep Bitcoin off the frontpage until it crashes, okay? With this trend it will reach an all-time-high every week or so which every tech blog will wrap in a bag-full-of-fluff-blogpost, there will be new analysis et cetera.

Let it go. Just enjoy the ride.

Re: Bitcoin $500

#44
post #36
post #13

What happens to the price when only people with 500Ghash/sec+ can make coins next month? Early adopters are rightfully getting a nice reward now, but how do you get "fresh blood" when the difficulty is off the chart unless you have several thousand dollars in hardware?

> What happens to the price when only people with 500Ghash/sec+ can make coins next month? What do you even mean? That's what pools are for. You can make bitcoins even with a shitty CPU (but will probably spend more on electricity).

You cannot make bitcoins with a shitty CPU, or a shitty GPU. You can try, but the difficulty is too high, and is always increasing.

If this is a new concept to you, imagine:

When I first received my BFL Jalapeno (ASIC 5G mining rig) and started mining, to the time I sold it, the difficulty had increased enough that I was seeing a .05 BTC gain in twice the time. So now you can imagine how eventually only people above a certain mining speed will be profitable.

Re: Bitcoin $500

#45
post #20

I remember trying to buy some BTC on MtGox for fun, the last time the price crashed. What an unspeakably horrible service. I thought I was in for hundreds of dollars over budget, but it turns out that not a single BTC was purchased at all. I only intended to buy ~$50 worth, so I would only have earnt something like $200, but for the love of everything, stay the hell away from MtGox. It's insane how unprofessional the…

MtGox was handling 90% of exchange last year, but now - only 25-30%. Bitstamp is huge now, and Bitcoin-Central.net is easy to use (although it hasn't regained it's past volume yet).

Re: Bitcoin $500

#46
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens to the price when only people with 500Ghash/sec+ can make coins next month? What do you even mean? That's what pools are for. You can make bitcoins even with a shitty CPU (but will probably spend more on electricity).

You cannot make bitcoins with a shitty CPU, or a shitty GPU. You can try, but the difficulty is too high, and is always increasing. If this is a new concept to you, imagine: When I first received my BFL Jalapeno (ASIC 5G mining rig) and started mining, to the time I sold it, the difficulty had increased enough that I was seeing a .05 BTC gain in twice the time. So now you can imagine how eventually only people above…

> You cannot make bitcoins with a shitty CPU, or a shitty GPU. You can try, but the difficulty is too high, and is always increasing

Yes you can. It's called pooled mining.

http://mining.bitcoin.cz/

Re: Bitcoin $500

#47
post #13

What happens to the price when only people with 500Ghash/sec+ can make coins next month? Early adopters are rightfully getting a nice reward now, but how do you get "fresh blood" when the difficulty is off the chart unless you have several thousand dollars in hardware?

wat. The important figures for miners are the btc/usd conversion rate, the network difficulty, your hash rate itself, how much you initially paid for your rig ($/Gh) and how much power you're drawing ($/watt). All of these factors are important, but what will dominate over the coming months is power cost. Someone mining a 100 GH/s rig will make 5 times less BTC per day as someone mining a 500 GH/s rig, it's true, but if the 500 GH/s is sucking up proportionally more than 5 times the electricity then it can be better to mine with the lower hash rate. If the conversion rate improves that delays the period where electricity costs outweighs the income. For the difficulty to rise another order of magnitude (which would make BFL 60 GH/s Singles worthless), there needs to be about another 30 PH added to the network -- where's that coming from in only a month? In any case, people dropping their rigs because they're too power hungry may cause the difficulty to go down and make it worthwhile again for some who live in low-electricity-cost areas... There are variables you're not taking into account, hence the wat.

Re: Bitcoin $500

#48
post #2

Well now it must definitely be too late to invest. Don't even think about it guys. It's a ponzi scheme slash not real money slash libertarian wet dream. I'd rather trust helicopter Ben with my savings than some obscure open source software that eats 10Gb of my disk space.

> now it must definitely be too late to invest So said people at $3, $30, $100, etc.

That works the other way too...people who invest during a bubble are quick to say "it's not a bubble!" - I'm not saying this is a bubble (I won't pretend to know enough or have clairvoyance), but it's not a valid defense to say something isn't overvalued just because people had said that at prices it has since eclipsed.

Re: Bitcoin $500

#49
post #20

I remember trying to buy some BTC on MtGox for fun, the last time the price crashed. What an unspeakably horrible service. I thought I was in for hundreds of dollars over budget, but it turns out that not a single BTC was purchased at all. I only intended to buy ~$50 worth, so I would only have earnt something like $200, but for the love of everything, stay the hell away from MtGox. It's insane how unprofessional the…

MtGox was handling 90% of exchange last year, but now - only 25-30%. Bitstamp is huge now, and Bitcoin-Central.net is easy to use (although it hasn't regained it's past volume yet).

Bitstamp looks interesting, but Bitcoin-Central is down, ironically.

Re: Bitcoin $500

#50
post #19

"Bitcoin will have to change the mining hashing function (SHA-256) in 7 years" https://twitter.com/SDLerner/status/401467511784235008

For the purposes of hashing, double SHA256 is very far from being "broken" or drastically accelerated. If there's some ultra-fast chip that increases hashing by a factor of million, there are still enough of non-zero bits to have unique block hashes. And if, by chance, two blocks have the same hash, it does not break anything at all: each block has a unique serial number ("height") anyway. Hash is only used as a proof of work for a given height.
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