Please Help Me Understand BitCoins

Nice forum. I am actually looking for some help understanding BitCoins.




If anyone has any advice or suggested reading for a novice such as myself it would be greatly appreciated! Where do you buy them? Where do you keep them? How much is a BitCoin worth? Are they safe to buy/use? I would love to have a better understanding of the whole BitCoin scene so I can share my new found understanding with my friends. I get asked questions about BitCoins all the time and have to tell them I don't understand how they work enough to answer. Help?


Thanks in advance!

Is this a thinly veiled plug for your website?

Edit: The original post had a website listed on it in a way so that it wouldn't actually show up as a link. Just wanted to point that out so you understand why I asked the question I did.

assuming billygoat's question is not correct (ie you are trolling and promoting your website which probably will get you banned...and rightly so), a simple google search give you this....

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+...utf-8&oe=utf-8

there is even a youtube video explaining it.

Are they made of Gold? We like Gold here! Mmmmmm Gold Coins!

Originally Posted by sledge

are they made of gold? We like gold here! Mmmmmm gold coins!

hahahaha....

Originally Posted by alloy2

No gold just another form of fiat currency all of which eventually fail.Not that I'm telling you something your not already aware of. I myself am a believer in gold.

Not really a fiat currency. Fiat money is currency which derives its value from government regulation or law. I don't know what bitcoins would be classified as other than digital currency.

Originally Posted by AuburnEwaste

Any wagers on this person never responding again?

What is the timeframe that we have to wait to pay you your booty for the correct call?

I'd take you up on that offer but I'm lactose intolerant.

Originally Posted by billygoat

Not really a fiat currency. Fiat money is currency which derives its value from government regulation or law. I don't know what bitcoins would be classified as other than digital currency.

Bitcoins, Dodgcoins, etc.. are considered cryptocurrency because their online only. Heck any online game that lets you convert dollars into virtual coin is cryptocurrency. I dabbled with it a few years ago but not worth getting into. Heck of a learning curve and as Alloy2 said, will end eventually.

Bitcoin itself has had more falls then rises from "banks" being hacked to the owner of the then largest bitcoin bank going out of business, not refunding anyone, and moved to Japan for amnesty screwing alot of people out of alot of money. To make bitcoins you have to mine for them(ie: your computer uses software to find hashes) with high-end graphics cards or ASIC hardware. Every time a hash is found, the difficulty of finding the next hash goes up. I remember seeing a guys setup one time that had 20" video cards set up in a 10x10 room to mine bitcoins. This of course in turn, saw the price of these cards go up because to video card mfgrs saw it that a bunch of people bought their cards. Nowadays you need dedicated ASIC hardware to mine and you might get a fraction of a coin.

I understand the dynamics of it and while the ratio to USD is still high, it's still high risk and not worth getting into now because of difficulty. If say, I was asked 15 years ago, it would've been worth it then because the difficulty was lower and you could get away with mining on a basic graphics card or CPU.


There, now SMF has an entry of what Bitcoin is lol.

Originally Posted by t00nces2

I think Bitcoin is going to be the way of the future. Maybe not "Bitcoin" itself, but cryptocurrency. I The real value is in the hash that allows every bitcoin or fraction of coin to be tracked. I think Bitcoin has a leg up on the other currencies because of their development of the algorithm, but the algorithm will probably be the way of the future for many things. Voting can be tracked and verified to protect from fraud. The real value is the open source equation. Contracts can be enforced and payments automated. My guess would be that Bitcoin has a leg up for having "invented" the equation that makes Bitcoin possible. The real proof that they have come up with a winning idea is that fact the governments of the world are wanting to hijack the technology for their own cryptocurrencies.

I have a bitcoin and have a wallet set up. I have become somewhat familiar with the process of buying and selling and moving between wallets. The fact that I can creat a bitcoin wallet full of coin and walk through an airport and fly out of the country (or in) and have nothing on me, yet go to a library or coffee shop and log into e-mail and print out the wallet I have created and have access to the money I placed into the wallet and have no currency exchange charges and have access to the money instantly is a big plus for the currency.

If they could find a way to keep government control out of it and stabalize it so it isn't so high risk, I could see the potential. I mean, last year they came out with a physical machine that took bitcoin and operated like a bar top. Haven't heard anything of it since then.