How to Get Started with Bitcoins

Re:How to Get Started with Bitcoins by Groxx on Sunday December 12, 2010 @06:37PM (#1998495)

The idea behind it is that they're (nigh-) infinitely divisible. One bitcoin in existence, forever, would be enough; 21 million just makes the numbers nicer to look at. The ability to generate more offers the ability to make up for lost coins, and slightly mitigate deflation, and not much else.

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Re:How to Get Started with Bitcoins by hugh3 on Sunday December 12, 2010 @07:29PM (#1998643)

The ability to generate more offers the ability to make up for lost coins, and slightly mitigate deflation, and not much else.

It's also a key part of the marketing spiel -- selling people on the idea that they can get bitcoin-rich for free is a key part of getting people hooked on bitcoins. If I tell you "I've invented a new currency, want to buy some?" you'll tell me to sod off, but if I tell you "I've invented a new currency, you can mine it yourself as a background process" then you might be persuaded to give it a go. Pretty soon you've got some bitcoins of your own, and every incentive to start talking them up to everyone you meet.

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Re:How to Get Started with Bitcoins by kiba on Sunday December 12, 2010 @07:57PM (#1998724)

Bitcoiners already downing everyone that think they can generate bitcoin for free.

"Unless you have a GPU farm, go buy bitcoins instead" and variations thereof.

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Re:How to Get Started with Bitcoins by hugh3 on Sunday December 12, 2010 @09:10PM (#1998923)

And as a computational physicist I think the thing that probably annoys me most about all of this is the amount of CPU time which is going to be wasted before this particular bubble ends. I could be using those millions of CPU hours to actually do stuff, y'know.

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Re:How to Get Started with Bitcoins by cypherpunks01 on Sunday December 12, 2010 @09:51PM (#1999053)

Agreed - it would be really great to be able to have a currency that gets issued to the solver of protein folding problems or something, but unfortunately I don't think those solutions have as nice mathematical properties as spinning and computing SHA hashes all day.. : )

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Re:How to Get Started with Bitcoins by vessenes on Monday December 13, 2010 @09:10AM (#2000477)

I think the BitCoin community would be interested if you could combine folding@home, say with BTC. It seems possible to me, but of course, you'd need to be able to verify the work quickly. I agree it would be nice to do something useful with the GPU/CPU time.

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Re:How to Get Started with Bitcoins by iwwr on Monday December 13, 2010 @10:12AM (#2000658)

The total ammount of BTC is fixed and so at some point it won't be worth it to allocate any more computing resources to it.

Even right now, I doubt you can just grab a high end GPU and get cranking for a profit, unless you manage to steal electricity or steal access into a computer you don't own.

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