sgornick
Then there is another type of crowdfunding ....equity crowdfunding. Instead of donation-based such as KickStarter, equity investing is where the contributors can earn profits if the project's revenues does more than just cover expenses.
Cyber-equity exchanges include BitFunder.com and BTCT.co.
One problem, however, is that there might be jurisdictions where this type of crowdfunding isn't allowed. In the U.S. the JOBS act signed by President Obama means offering this type of investment will be made legal when certain rules are followed (e.g., use of a crowdfunding portal). The type of anonymous investment occurring of BitFunder.com and others is not likely to be an acceptable method by the SEC with regard to their rules for the JOBS act.
What are the limits for Level 1?
But certainly the bulk of the value remains from speculative interest rather than organic demand for the coins for use in commerce.
But that's the thing. Merchants are worried about the downside risk, and basically ignore that there is an upside gain possible as well. Sure, the merchant shouldn't be speculating with revenues that go to employee's salaries and inventory purchases, but if there's 10% profit, keeping 10% of revenues without converting that to USDs might be beneficial.
BitPay is a merchant processor that lets the merchant specify what percent of revenue to convert and remainder of bitcoins are paid out without conversion.
In addition, if ASIC hardware starts shipping, GPU is completely out of the game and FPGAs will be hard pressed to stay powered on.
GPU mining had a good run for nearly two years, but it is about to be obsoleted.
It isn't an either/or scenario. Parallel currencies for the win!
Sales volume is estimated at two million dollars a month: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/08/06/black-m...
Let's say it takes a week between when a person buys bitcoin and when those coins are spent.
That mean about half a million dollars of currency is tied up for these users. That's about 50K BTC. That's less than one week's production from mining.
This marketplace has almost no impact on the exchange rate directly. What it might be doing is introducing a number of people to bitcoin. They might then speculate on the exchange rate (simply by buying more than they plan to use for purchases, in anticipation of the exchange rate rising), or use bitcoins for purchases or for person-to-person payments.
Bitcoin made it through because nobody knew that a proof-of-work based cryptocurrency would ever end up being worth several hundred million dollars or more.
Now that bitcoin exists, any competitor risks getting spanked down. Even bitcoin is at risk of getting spanked due to a 51% attack, except that it will cost more than $10 million in hardware to do that.
One alternative is using scrypt instead of sha256(), and thus GPUs aren't as effective and the one crypto currency doing that has avoided attack thus far. That currency is worth under half a million dollars of valuation at the current exchange rate and there are hardly any exchanges where it is traded so there's little financial gain from attacking it sooner rather than later. But it is still very vulnerable, in comparison to bitcoin.
Up 80% in the third quarter so far.
Up nearly 30% in two weeks.
Ya, crazy stuff.
So it took 4 years from 0 - 10.5 million, then the next 4 years sees 5.25 milion minted, then 2.125 million in the 4 years after that, and so on for decades until all 21 million have been minted.
There are metrics showing Bitcoin becoming more widely used, but there's not 100% more use in two months.
Maybe it finally registered that the upcoming block reward (to 25 BTC per block) was coming and people bought some up ahead of time.
The thing is, the first users didn't get all the first ones.
Bitcoin was in Slashdot more than two years ago. It is open source, anyone could download the software and mine on their CPU.
Mt. Gox has been open for even longer. Anyone, anywhere in the world could and still can buy on the exchanges. There's no members-only trading.
If you bought after Slashdot you would have paid around a dime or less. But Slashdot readers called it a ponzi scam and didn't take it seriously.
You could have bought thousands of bitcoins at a dollar when Steve Gibson talked about it in February 2011. But Leo poo-pooh'd it "Not government issued" he balked.
Then again, you could have bought bitcoins at $30 after the July 2011 bubble, and today be down by 66% yet and still be bitter.
That's the nature of speculation. Nobody knows if bitcoin will increase or decrease in value. But it definitely isn't a ponzi. Ponzi means paying dividends to early investors, using funds from later investors. Everyone who held bitcoins yesterday when they were $9.20 could have sold today at $11. Everyone, not just the early miners.
Today, just like a year ago, mining will generate bitcoins at a little more than the cost of electricity to generate them. If you want bitcoins, then mine, buy, or stand on the sidelines.
Just don't bitch when it hits $100.
But also, nobody who also works with Intersango had access to either of those two accounts. [Update: I may have been mislead on that as there is now conflicting information: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=93074.msg1028157#msg1... ]
A hacker hostel for Bitcoin startups. 41 rooms. Discount, of course, if paying rent using bitcoins.
"Bitcoin's Hogwart's"
If not (and likely not, considering PayPal does not allow for their payment network to be used for "pre-sales"), then GitTip can only charge for the actual amounts tipped (and claimed by the donation target).
Right now, let's say I'm willing to tip $150 per year. I can then donating $0.25 to ten people. Since I carry no balance myself (from received tips), that means every Friday I get a charge for the amount I tip. So I would see a charge of $2.50 (10 X $0.25) plus $0.30 plus ($2.50 X 3.9%) = $2.90. So that is a 16% payment network fee.
Certainly this can be optimized, but Bitcoin doesn't have such high fees. The sender pays the fee, and even then it is a fraction of a penny. And the conversion from Bitcoin to USDs is generally under one percent.
Cash (USDs) can be received once each week by GitTip as an ACH direct deposit (using BitFloor) or through Dwolla (using Mt. Gox, Intersango or Camp BX) so easy cash-out methods are covered.
And there are no chargebacks.
So regardless of your politics or what you want to use as a store of value, Bitcoin solves problems very well. Especially for micropayments problems like this.
This things solve the computational work at a couple orders of magnitude greater than GPUs (the currently prevalent mining hardware) does.
So instead of 70% of the cost of mining going to pay for the electricity, it will be 10%, and the cost of the technology consuming the remaining 90%. I.e., in terms of total kWhs consumed for Bitcoin mining, we probably are already past the peak.
One single bank building in Manhattan consumes way more power than Bitcoin ever has.
For merchants, just like if VISA/Mastercard/Debit card, etc., goes out due to power problems (and there there is no battery backup or local generation), a merchant can't accept payments until power is restored.
As far as power outages for those mining -- there is no disturbance to Bitcoin even for lots of power distruptions. If the entire world goes dark, your inability to spend bitcoins will be the least of your problems.
- http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40264.msg1000405#msg1...
The URL that is sent is a bearer code (spendable by anyone with access to the data). I question whether this approach, and consider another problem due to SMS being a channel controlled by the government here:
But those "investing in bitcoins" wouldn't have lost from this unless they also happen to have been speculating at Bitcoinica with them. Bitcoinica is a service where a financial product called a contract for difference (CFD) is traded.
With fiat, the muggings when using a payment card incur a 3% loss each time the currency is used, impacting every person on every transaction.
Great service though, I use it as both a supplier and a customer!
And found a couple new songs for my playlist!