it's a 'rich get richer' sort of thing where those who have money can buy more powerful hardware and make more money faster so people create coins to combat this to distribute coins out more evenly.

it's worth adding.... how many people typically lose their money from a bank account or safe deposit box in raw percentage terms? The percent is very low. With that said the writing was on the wall to leave Mt Gox for quite a while now... people still blindly using it into January and February of this year had it coming..... greedy people who used it because it reported a higher bitcoin price and thus was a 'better' exchange also have it coming...

typical elitist remarks from internet messageboard posters or actually anyone in general who has an interest or knowledge in some area that a lot of people lack... to them it is second nature and they are baffled at how hard it is for someone else to pick it up.... the unwashed masses, yada yada...

Missed out because I did not send a donation in time and the thread got locked (did reserve a spot on page 20) . Had to remove my signature avatar. Good luck to those that got in.

the average joe doesn't really stand a chance getting a good domain because the people into them for a living own massive numbers of them as evidenced by the above post.  Personally I wouldn't spend a dime on any of those domains because a good business will do well through word of mouth, just like a site like coinbase.com has done which really you wouldn't figure would be a bitcoin exchange looking at it. I suppose having bitcoin in the name might help them and if they were smart they'd take their profits and buy up a better name.  I'd say maybe after you have some cash flow use it to buy a better domain if it's needed.. but a crappy service on a good domain is still a crappy service.

In any case I look forward to the day a domain name can be any extension and shortages of good names become somewhat a thing of the past. That day is getting closer and closer. Of course if there are a million possible extensions of a site you'll find a person buying a million of them up...

fastest way is to try to get in early on altcoins and then dump them.. lots of money to be made that way for those with the right hardware... these people who have $20,000 setups are capable of easily making quite a bit of money mining crapcoins.. for everyone else not really. Buy, hold, and hope the coin gets hyped otherwise.

It was possible to make huge money accumulating dogecoins before it spiked way up. Unobtanium and veritcoin are two examples of coins that just spiked in the last couple days. It seems to be a crapshoot as to which ones will spike sometimes. Just have a bit of coin in both cryptsy and bter and make some educated guesses or visit forums and see what people are saying.... it doesn't take a lot of money chasing a coin to get it to spike in price... a high market cap in bitcoin benefits all altcoins and vice versa.

Actually if you look at bitcoin as an investment that's not wise... it feels good to say it and lots of people love to say it about their 'investments' but it's simply emotional pandering, not absolute truth.  Lots of people continue to hold losing stocks as they crash down to zero, being emotionally stubborn when a simple stop loss would have saved them tons... not saying that's the case here, I'm just applying this in a broad financial sense.  Saying it's not a loss until you 'sell' that it's just on paper is another thing said by people losing money. Winners know better.  Also keeping to the position that bitcoin is a currency thus no need to convert it to USDs again is a very noble philosophy. We shall see how it plays out.

We should organize a collective effort to find the identity of the owner of coinbaise.com and give him some major hassle. Get reddit in on this if needed. What say you?

Everything I've read suggests coinbase is one of the better ones and there hasn't been major issues this year with it.. all your posts link to 9-12 month old stuff... there are growing pains when you see huge influx of new people on exchanges but things have stablized the last month or three allowing these services to hopefully improve their servers, etc.

There does seem to be a brick floor around the 800 dollar price level. I've been waiting for it to crash to 500 to get in but perhaps it won't happen. I'll say this, those at the top holding these mass amounts of coin seem to be pretty smart about not selling it off in large amounts... who knows if that's intentional or just dumb luck.

I figured by now it would have crashed to 400 for a reasonable period of time, shaken out some weak hands, gotten some fresh blood like myself in, and spiked back above $1200 again. That actually would be healthier for the speculators, but harmful for the coin as a whole because it would be seen as too volatile for commerce.

yep... hold the gold for wealth and spend the silver in the marketplace.

I'd say the scammers brought this on themselves... too many people going to ebay or paypal claiming they did not get what they ordered and creating hassle for ebay/paypal. The buyer of a couple of ASIC block erupters did this to me and I got an email a week ago saying ebay fixed a buyer protection case that was filed against me by erasing it from my record, meaning for whatever reason they looked at the accounts and my good feedback and account that was created in 1999 and sided with me. Nice, but people here think it's some grand conspiracy when in reality bitcoin seems to be filled with more scammers than other areas where ebay gets sales. Honestly the dumbass ordered 2 block eruptors and claimed he only got one... a claim trying to scam 50 bucks out of me at the time... get a job.

well thanks for the warning regardless. I added by bank account but did not yet verify the account with their 2 small transactions so I'll give everything a good look over before I decide anything.


that is a unique feature of bitcoin. It would be interesting if there was a way to 'back up' a bank account balance independently from the bank's control but I suppose the FDIC insurance wouldn't apply then. I don't think anything will happen that will cause people to lose their money outside of a hyper-inflationary explosion in which any number of investment vehicles including bitcoin could be handy. Still I love the paper wallet idea.. wealth in the palm of my hand, good as cash, yet able to back it up unlike cash.

like it or not profit is a motivating force behind any activity and it's unlikely, though not impossible, that crypto currencies would have formed without the potential for profit. I'll give them early adopters credit though... they nailed it, and you can see what the effect is...  the profit in bitcoin is the only reason it got media attention at all.

As a dad I would encourage the kid to stick up for himself if he seemed kind of timid, or at least trying to laugh it off and make friends of his/her own. Telling them to do this and having it done are different things though, especially when the bully uses his pack of friends to help. Some people are just genetically wired to be more timid and are going to have a harder time of things... that's life. It's not pretty, it's not fair, but it is what it is. You'll always have the quiet kid sitting in the corner by himself, while the pack makes fun and turns him into potentially another movie theater massacre waiting to happen. It takes the parent to notice and dedication on their part to instill self confidence in the child in order to help reverse this.

Ripple seems much to my bewilderment to be pegged to around a 2 cent price level or 2 billion dollar market cap. If the US dollar collapses that peg won't do them any good if the dollar were to crash in value 90%. In order to manipulate the price to adjust for the inflation the coins would have to be bought up by a central authority and either destroyed or sat on with the good faith of the users that the coin won't be misused or abused. If the price got high the central authority would release new coins into the system. In this way the price achieves stability. The question is.. who decides what the correct price should be? Also the mechanism for removing and adding the coins would have to be determined.

Better to just leave it up to the market to decide.

looks like CHAG used to be an oil and gas exploration stock that saw the popularity in bitcoin and decided to take advantage. Pink sheet stocks can be risky but for can make for some great money from pumping and dumping and pretending you care about the company for awhile.

Have you been watching "Money As Debt" .. if not you nailed it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=jqvKjsIxT_8#t=1457


It's only the time lag between money's creation and repayment that keeps the entire system from collapsing. Everything said when this video was released applies more than ever right now. Ultimately with fractional reserve debt based compound interest banking you have to have constant 'growth' or inflation of the money supply to keep the interest from overburdening the system. That's why flat growth is so bad and even 3% growth is not enough...

If it wasn't for quantitative easing and the federal reserve openly buying bonds we would have crashed much worse instead we've blown up another bubble.

haha well played.  In truth money's value comes from the goods and services it purchases and the faith people have in it. Anything can 'be' money. I could see bitcoin as a viable place to store money in the event there is a major economic disaster, but it needs support from services that can convert between it and other currencies, online marketplaces that will continue to accept it, and I suppose at the very least the government to look the other way, which I suspect they will not do forever. If they said that no company could accept bitcoin... and tigerdirect and overstock.com and every other business vanished.... that could be a problem... that's why this is still the 'wild west'

As a latecomer I don't even acknowledge that exchange's existence and I find it funny that other sites reference it just to inflate the bitcoin price.  Magic the gathering online exchange?  Other than the off chance a person can get away with some arbitrage I don't see it's usefulness at least in the US market where there are far superior services.

Do what I did... search google until you come up with the answer. Learn about the currencies and what makes them tick, how the wallets work and what the public and private keys do, etc. Sorry just being honest here. It takes a level of technological understanding to use bitcoin safely at this point. Safer if you spend a couple of hours learning rather than looking for a quick fix.