Bitcoin
 

Anybody here tried out Bitcoin, a new cryptographic digital currency?

I've been (trying) generating coins for ages now, but not having a graphics card with the fancy new general-purpose GPUs, I'm not being terribly successful. Would be nice to generate some though since their value has increased from about $1 per Bitcoin a month or so ago, to about $15/coin today.

Also, if anyone happens to want to donate to me, you know, for being a fantastic admin, paying to keep this place online etc. etc. you can send coins to: 1LYog1JExoinAVisqK7YWfjyJxpQ62zoiE

Thoughts?

The increased utility bill for power consumption to mine for the things and the recent Bitcoin crash from $30 something to $12 doesn't really make this a viable currency.

The cost (in terms of time and energy - hence higher utility bills) is in part where they derive their value. The use of the term "mining" is therefore relatively appropriate, since it too takes time and money. Of course for something to have value requires it to be accepted for payment for goods/services, which is currently a little difficult with Bitcoin, although one would hope that the array of people accepting it does start to increase.

Would certainly agree that it's volatile at the moment, but that's not particularly surprising either. It does seem to be back around $24 now (which strikes me as still probably overvalued).

I'm intrigued. I've got an nVidia 460 GTX, I'll see how well that works...

Edit: A calculator I came across (http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php) says that I should be able to generate just over 3 BTC a month, or about 50-55 USD. And that is, I'm assuming, if I leave it mining 24/7, which I don't intend to do.

The client is still downloading blocks, but it should be done soon. I'll leave it on overnight and see what happens.

Alright, the estimate the calculator gave seems fairly accurate, and it really doesn't seem worth the effort.

If you're really dedicated to the endeavor, you can buy/build rigs that can mine coins significantly faster than normal. The one I found includes up to three ATI 6990s (apparently the best card for the task), and purports a mining output of 2010 MH/s (with three cards). It costs $3,799.00, which you could theoretically recoup within two months of mining, depending on exchange rate fluctuation.

I honestly just do not understand what the hell this thing is. Guh.

i've gotta post just to let you know how much yours made me laugh. i'm drunk and was trying to follow the conversation but pfttt your post summed it up for me. i'm still laughing now. no, sorry, in seriousness, this is news to me... pretty cool.. interesting, expected, but i hadn't heard anyone talk about this before

It's a semi-anonymous currency (not quite as anonymous as cash, but much better than PayPal or whatever). New currency is created and added to the system by people solving some sort of cryptography something something whatever, which high end video cards happen to be good at apparently. It's complex.

It's not widely accepted, but there's a list of places that take Bitcoin somewhere. It's also apparently quite popular in the deepweb, Silk Road and such, since it's relatively hard to trace transactions or link them to actual people.

never heard of the deepweb. what sort of content do they hold?

Silk Road is basically an eBay for drugs.

It's the internet's Mos Eisley, and going there without at least 7 proxies results in a party vanning.

I can participate if you want someone with more powerful video cards.

Have a gtx 470.

Perhaps we should set up a Nexodyne mining pool. Anybody been able to find an open-source server for such things?

My friends have been talking a lot about Bitcoin as well. My one friend bought a $200 graphics card and has hence mined 5 (or thereabouts) Bitcoins. It seems pretty awesome to me. If you want to get a Nexodyne pool going, I'm down!