well, now we know bitcoins weren't a ponzi scheme

[rcjordan]

Silk Road collected 9.5 million bitcoin—and only 11.75 million exist
http://qz.com/131084/silk-road-collected-9-5-million-bitcoin-and-only-11-75-million-exist/

[BoL]

Some 'schoolboy errors' in there for sure, revealing his identity.

That's a lot of dough he accumulated, that sunny beach and drink in hand must have seemed so close

[thesaintv12]

From what they seized, the FBI now have 0.22% of the total Bitcoin currency (probably more if you take into account lost wallets and other recent raids). Especially important as there is a finite amount of bitcoins.

It is an interesting foothold into something which they must be either trying to kill or use to their advantage.

On the upside the price has come back up very quickly which hopefully points to a healthy market without the need for crime (well, no more than cash anyway).

[Rumbas]

I still dont get it, Bitcoin.
Even tried to read Shak's site about it but I'm still clueless. Might be that I'm just dumb

[Chunkford]

Don't worry Rumbas, I don't either.

[rcjordan]

It appears that by generating a bitcoin you are creating a "proxy coupon" for money laundering.

<added>
With the above, it's starting to make sense to me.  People are willing to pay for the (supposed) anonymity. They do it all the time, in various forms, to avoid the taxman or the law.  Simple bartering is taxable here in the US, but no one reports it.

[BoL]

Lucky man

Bitcoin: Man Buys Flat With Forgotten Fortune
http://news.sky.com/story/1161340/bitcoin-man-buys-flat-with-forgotten-fortune

A Norwegian man who bought £15 worth of bitcoins and then forgot about them for four years has been able to buy a flat in Oslo thanks to the huge appreciation of the virtual currency.
....
His 5,000 bitcoins were suddenly worth around £430,000.
....
After spending a full day trying to remember his password, Mr Koch cashed in £116,000 by selling a fifth of his newly-acquired fortune.

luckily he remembered his password

[littleman]

That's a hell of a lot of appreciation in a short amount of time.  I am sure this will drive up Bitcoin even more in the short run.

[Rumbas]

I started to read up on it and "think" I get it now.

Might even buy some just for the fun of it. Dont know where spent it though, but with that increase and more focus, it might be good investment?

[rcjordan]

i think the better investment is in the hardware to roll your own.  i know some guys i trust who do are building cheap-ish supercomputers to do this. they've already produced a few BC's and are sure they can get it down to hours rather than days for around $8k hardware.  these guys deal in petabytes for their day jobs, so that's why i'm considering buying in.

[Rumbas]

Good point RC, I was thinking the same. Maybe a talk with our tech and hosting guys and see if they have any iron around they're not using. I know they get electricity at very low price..

[rcjordan]

I haven't heard back yet. Very quiet ...and you know what I've always said about guys that go quiet; they're either bust or making big money.

>iron

From what I can tell, there is a special/custom chipset needed to really go high-speed.

[JasonD]

> From what I can tell, there is a special/custom chipset needed to really go high-speed.

the maths behind Bitcoins is based on the SHA512 checksum - it's very easy to compute but the specific of Bitcoin are that you can compute lots (many thousands, millions, billions) before you might get one that "pays out"

Originally these sums were done on standard CPUs
then they scaled by using GPUs and got order of magnitude better throughput
then they scaled using FGPA (Field Gate Programmable Arrays) - think about them as hardware you can program for diffrernt tasks, and the throughput went through the roof
then they scaled using ASIC ( Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) IE - Custom hardware.

That's where we are at the moment and most of the ones that are being touted out there atm seem to be vapourware - Money taken, no product exists yet, apart from a few small players and those that have it, also have the ability to control the market.

It's interesting -:)

[rcjordan]

>using ASIC ( Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) IE - Custom hardware.
>That's where we are at the moment and most of the ones that are being touted out there atm seem to be vapourware

Sounds like what one of them was telling me.  These guys work in various departments a heavy-duty research division of a top US hardware and corporate/government services  company --their customers are major banks, visa, mastercard, us treasury, etc.  I've known one for years, and that's really the only reason I'm interested in  buying in.

[thesaintv12]

I have a bunch of USB ASICs running controlled by Raspberry Pi's.

I originally started with Graphics cards, but they are no longer up to mining bitcoin.  They are useful for other coins such as Litecoin though.  Well, they would be if the bloody fans would stop burning up!

The price of Bitcoin has doubled since the start of this thread.  I'm not saying that it is a trend that will continue.  I personally feel the current price is too high and will come down.  However, over the long term (I am in for at least 10 years) I feel it should rise (assuming it continues to become more widely accepted).

I'm happy to help out if anyone want to have a go at setting up their own mining experiment. I have learned more about Linux, power monitoring and networking doing this than any other single job/experiment.  I have just been asked to help out setting up with a new client.  I hope it might be the start of a new and interesting sideline.

I would probably say that you might be just as well off if you just invested in the coin at the moment (high risk money you could live with losing of course).