Bitcoins: Make money by generating cryptographic hashes.

So I recently stumbled upon http://bitcoin.it
Basically it's a digital currency that is growing in popularity. It has no centralized server, so the governments can't shut it down (so that you have to pay their taxes with their currency). Basically, users devote CPU power to the Bitcoins program. Said program works hard to generate new hash codes that can be allocated to people as Bitcoins, giving the person who deycrypted it a few coins for doing so.

The bit coins are all stored via complex cryptography (which is why new ones have to be generated) and bitcoins must be sent via a public key generated by each user.

Lots of people have been starting to accept Bitcoins as currency, and you can sell a bitcoin for about $6 (you get 50 for each successful generation, which can take hours or years depending on your computer.) If you work in a group those coins are split between everyone (so if 50 people of equal power are generating at the same time, each success will earn everyone 1 bitcoin).

Anyways, it's an awesome online currency that can't be controlled by the government, and can be 'minted' by anyone with sufficient computer power. And then you can sell it for the currency of your choice.

It's a pretty awesome concept, and I can totally see it replacing all currency one day.

1CaG3qYyDDphYVRZqAo1GLoXpLuSjFrFJ -- My public key if you'd like to send me bitcoins (you can get 0.02 bitcoins for free from a couple sites to play around with..)

If anyone is interested in setting up a mining co-alition you should say so! 4 people is better than 1, right? (Even if you're on a laptop, you might get lucky and generate a working block of bitcoins and get the payout )

 

Like?
The U.S. Dollar has no insintric value, it's not like you can trade it in for gold.

And I suppose you could call the insintric value of BTC the demand for BTC.

 

Why do you ask this about every single topic I create?

Why would I NOT be allowed to post this here?

 

It's not a site. It's a peer2peer client. That means it connects directly through other computers to work, and there is no central point.

That's the whole point of the program.

 

Not that I'll ever actually get any bitcoins unless this takes off in a huge way.

Mining on my laptop will aparently take 540,000 years for one block ($300).
Aparently you need a good graphics card and fast computer if you want to mine anything near decent xD

 

Please divide 540k years by 4.
Unless a few people have really nice graphics cards it will be quite unlikely that any of us get any blocks.

Also we would need somebody to host the pool software, and it'd be easier just to agree to split it if any of us find blocks.

 

I could sell said Bitcoins, as I said, for USD. Or buy things from one of these many sites: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

Really I'm not that interested in the long term of bitcoin. But right now they can be sold for a decent amount of cash. I shall leave the long term projections of bitcoin's future to other people

 

Well I think Mining is quite out of reach for many people, unless they make and devote a computer to it.

It could be interesting for people who were interested in buying bitcoins and selling them if they raise in value. Hrmm...

 

The USD is now a "fiat currency", it is not insintrically backed by the government in the form of gold or anything. Sure, you can trade it for gold with a third party, but you can do that with bitcoins as well.

Also there are a limited amount of bitcoins to be had, and they get harder to make as more are made. If anything there will eventually be a huge deflation, but you can trade up to eight decimals of bitcoins, so I don't see that as being a large issue.