It's "stable" and "pinned to the dollar" in the sense that the value is stable at 0.00000000 USD 

If you are interested in being verified by the community, I would be happy to visit your company location in Toronto sometime in the next two weeks at your convenience. If everything checks out and you have a working prototype, I will purchase two of the 2.2TH/s models on the spot and can pay in bitcoin or in cash, USD or CAD.

I know that I am a relative newbie here on bitcointalk, but I am an active user on Localbitcoins.com with Pro Trader status and over 1000 trades in the past year. I believe that my reputation on Localbitcoins and on BTCjam would allow me to serve as a strong endorsement for your company. Please let me know if you are interested in taking me up on this offer.

Agreed on both points.

Doing an analysis like klao's, one could determine an upper bound for their revenue. Even assuming that every single trade is by a new user, those 1000 BTC trades would already put you in the 0.46% category and make a fairly large dent in their revenues.

Gox originally posted that fee schedule back in Dec 2011, so the values of those BTC figures has gone up ~40x since then. I doubt that most large traders would have been willing to trade on the same fee schedule even last year when the fiat values were in the 3-4x range, let alone now.

Anyway, I'm glad I found this thread before I started attempting arbitrage myself. But if I can find a friend with a bank account in Japan...

It's actually not that simple, as traders with higher 30-day volumes are given discounts on the trading fees. Even a relatively small trader could get down to rates of 0.50% and larger traders, who probably make up a significant percentage of the volume, could get as low as 0.30% without too much trouble.

https://www.mtgox.com/fee-schedule

I would guess that their revenue is more in the $6-7 million range, and is potentially lower than that, depending on what percentage of the total trade volume is accounted for by the largest traders.

That said, I think there are some things that could be done to improve bitcoin, such as further developing the idea espoused in this article:

http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/04/zerocoin-making-bitcoin-anonymous.html

The cryptography underlying this technology seems to still be in it's infancy, but when it's ready I think that it would be an excellent addition to bitcoin (no need to start a whole new coin, let's just integrate it into the Bitcoin protocol).

Pretty much +1. I bought some LTC recently, but will be selling it off for BTC as soon as Mt.Gox lists it and the price jumps up. To me, Litecoin has no fundamental advantages over Bitcoin and has the significant disadvantage that it does not have the same market penetration that Bitcoin does.

I'm pretty comfortable in bash, writing scripts, etc., just not a computer science major (although I've met a few of those who could barely code, so...).

Not to argue the point, but I'm pretty sure that at least as recently as Windows 7, booting from a USB stick was not possible (I'm not referring an HDD or CD/DVD drive connected through USB, but rather specifically to USB pen-drives, e.g. similarly to Linux LiveUSB). Something makes me think that this capability was perhaps added with Windows 8, but I don't know for sure and it may be only in certain versions.

In any case, I'm leaning towards Linux.

I'm thinking that I'll go with a closed case, as I'll be running the rig in my basement, which is cool but definitely not clean-room-clean, so the dust would probably be more of an issue than the temperatures.

This is completely wrong. Coinbase is legitimate and reputable and I've used them for about a dozen purchases. In fact, one of the main reasons to use Coinbase is because you lock in the price at the time that you place your order and the bitcoins are then later released to you after the ACH transfer clears. Compare that to say, using Dwolla and Mt.Gox, where it takes just as long, if not longer, and you'll be paying the price a week from today instead of today's price.


+1

I've had this happen a few times and it seems to happen on transactions for <1BTC. Sometimes it takes longer than I would like, but they've always restored the transaction when I requested it. The real trick is to ask for your account to be white-listed, to avoid having your orders caught by the fraud detection system.

Thanks to both of you for the info! I'll definitely start working through the mining subforum.

I'm reasonably experienced with Ubuntu, so I was thinking that it or another flavor of Linux would be best from a stability and possibly power consumption standpoint, but I wasn't sure how the drivers and utilities compared with Windows. I was hoping to run the OS off of a USB stick, to avoid running an HDD or CD drive and save on power, so I think that might limit me to Linux also (or can Windows 8 do that now?).

Also, is the general advice that it's best to use an open/no case with a box fan or similar, or to use a well-ventilated but closed case?

Thanks!

Hello all,

I've been involved with BTC for six or eight months now, having first heard about it in NPR's Planet Money podcast in summer of 2011, and have been lurking on the forums for a while. I bought in back in October, figuring that I could afford to risk a few $100, only to now regret that I didn't put every cent that I had into BTC. I went to the Bitcoin conference in Philly in December, which is what really got me excited about what Bitcoin can and will do in the future. My personal 10,000 BTC pizzas will be the two T-shirts that I purchased there for 1.2 BTC each (facepalm).

The reason that I finally decided to make an account is that I just purchased a 7950 to start mining (the $250 after-rebate sale that Newegg was running) and wanted to use the time that it was in transit to get my account set up. I haven't done too much research into the details of running my mining rig, so if anyone could point the way, that would be great. Specifically any good resources on mining pools, operating systems/mining programs/drivers, tips and general best practices, or anything else that you think a new miner should know would be great!

Thanks!

-FreeMeBTC