Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Arative

Vyemm Raider
2,991
4,610
Well, I hope it lasts a while longer and the ASICs stay off the market as long as possible. Daddy needs a new (insert bunch of tech shit here) and bitcoins are gonna pay for it.

That rig I just put together with the 3x 7970s is mining coins right now.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I will use the mining box to game when it's no longer useful for mining, so this was not its sole purpose when I purchased it.)
Well BFL just upped their prices and lowered their performance. So that might keep people from buying more. They claim they will start shipping in the last half of April but who knows with them. Has a lot of people with their jimmies all rustled over at bitcointalk.org over it but then anything BFL rustles a lot of jimmies there.
 

Tripamang

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
5,186
31,688
Well BFL just upped their prices and lowered their performance. So that might keep people from buying more. They claim they will start shipping in the last half of April but who knows with them. Has a lot of people with their jimmies all rustled over at bitcointalk.org over it but then anything BFL rustles a lot of jimmies there.
Wow, I would have bought a second SC unit if I had known they were going to literally double the price. They're really capitalizing on the higher bitcoin valuation.. when the bubble finally bursts I expect a pretty big drop in their prices.
 

Chancellor Alkorin

Part-Time Sith
<Granularity Engineer>
6,029
5,915
Well BFL just upped their prices and lowered their performance. So that might keep people from buying more. They claim they will start shipping in the last half of April but who knows with them.
They might actually be close to release if they're upping the prices now. Who knows. I mean, they claimed they would ship in December, too.
 

Arative

Vyemm Raider
2,991
4,610
Well batch 3 for the Avalon was priced at $5400 I think and it sold out quick. BFL probably saw that and said shit let's cash in. But then Avalon had a working product so they could up their prices.
 

Chancellor Alkorin

Part-Time Sith
<Granularity Engineer>
6,029
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Just read a bit on bitcointalk. You weren't kidding, people are seriously rustled over there. But, really, it's for good reason.
 

Arative

Vyemm Raider
2,991
4,610
Just read a bit on bitcointalk. You weren't kidding, people are seriously rustled over there. But, really, it's for good reason.
Oh yeah some have good reason, some I suspect are trying to get people to cancel their orders so they move up in the line. Others just have a hard on for bfl
 

Soriak_sl

shitlord
783
0
Up to $140... modern-day tulips?

Seriously, it's not that I think bitcoins are a bad idea, but given the actual uses of the currency at this point, this is certainly a speculative bubble. Supposedly there's now at least one hedge fund investing in them, although I have no clue how much money they'd put into this. Still, the trading volume is pretty small, too.
 

Arative

Vyemm Raider
2,991
4,610
Up to $140... modern-day tulips?

Seriously, it's not that I think bitcoins are a bad idea, but given the actual uses of the currency at this point, this is certainly a speculative bubble. Supposedly there's now at least one hedge fund investing in them, although I have no clue how much money they'd put into this. Still, the trading volume is pretty small, too.
Its going to pop sooner rather than later. It is getting a lot of press though, mainly because of the Cyprus banking problems. I did see an article for a bit coin ATM on cnn money yesterday. So its certainly starting to catch on
 

Chancellor Alkorin

Part-Time Sith
<Granularity Engineer>
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Definitely a speculative bubble. I just want to pay off the rig I bought by mining, which is certainly doable at these prices.
 

Arative

Vyemm Raider
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4,610
Definitely a speculative bubble. I just want to pay off the rig I bought by mining, which is certainly doable at these prices.
That's the way I feel too. I've long since paid off the video cards I'm using and I've already paid off the 3 jalapeno's I bought so if I get those before the difficulty really goes up, I should make some decent money.
 

Passenger_sl

shitlord
104
0
For those that didn't get in early with Bitcoins, a few things have been released over the last few days about Mt.Gox possibly listing Litecoins toward the end of the month. They were around $.80 a few weeks ago and peaked around $5.50 a couple of days ago before starting to hover around $3-4. I have a feeling that once they are listed, they will be pushed toward the Bitcoin users and they will be much easier to purchase vs. the current situation. I wouldn't be surprised if they hit double digits once made more available to the masses.

If you are interested in picking them up, the easiest way that I found was to buy bitcoins, transfer them to btc-e.com and swap for litecoins. Also in terms of mining them, apparently the productivity rate is something like 5x that of bitcoins. I haven't done any mining but I kept seeing that number thrown around everywhere.
 

Torrid

Molten Core Raider
926
611
Really kicking myself for not investing in bitcoin sooner. I've been interested in it for the last couple of years and expected its value to rise, but never got around to putting serious money into it. I did turn $34 into ~$200 though. I mostly used it to pay for my VPN.

Thanks for the heads up on litecoin and mtgox. I bought some litecoins and ordered a 7950 to mine with since I needed a new card anyway. I figure it might end up paying for itself.
 

Arative

Vyemm Raider
2,991
4,610
Bitcoins are at 173. I'm wondering how high it will go before the bubble pops and how low it will go when it does pop. Saw some post on Google+ that a backer of bitcoin had the price between $400 and $500 a coin.
 

greefr_sl

shitlord
7
0
Dusted off the BTC mining hardware and started mining Litecoins today.. I'm skeptical that Litecoin's faster confirmations will overcome Bitcoin's first mover advantage.. Guess we'll see if/when MTGOX starts dealing in LTC.
 

Chancellor Alkorin

Part-Time Sith
<Granularity Engineer>
6,029
5,915
Bitcoins are at 173. I'm wondering how high it will go before the bubble pops and how low it will go when it does pop. Saw some post on Google+ that a backer of bitcoin had the price between $400 and $500 a coin.
From your mouth to <insert deity here>'s ears. At that price I could pay off my rig in a month or less. And potentially build a couple more.
 

Arative

Vyemm Raider
2,991
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From your mouth to <insert deity here>'s ears. At that price I could pay off my rig in a month or less. And potentially build a couple more.
Well current price is $182, was a high of 194 earlier today. Lot of volatility in the market. I'm wondering if buying and selling might be slightly more profitable than mining but I never try to time the market or hold on to anything I mine. Basically I have a auto pay out set with my pool of 5 coins, transfer those to mtgox, sell, transfer money to dwolla account, transfer money to my bank account, rinse and repeat.

At the current difficultly and price, if I get those BFL jalapeno's, it would be something like $4k a month. Kind of crazy to think about. But I know the difficulty will be through the roof when I get mine and the price will drop and I'll not make anywhere near that.
 

Torrid

Molten Core Raider
926
611
I wouldn't bet against bitcoin hitting $500. Few people thought it would hit $200 a couple years ago and yet here we are. Consider that the number of potential bitcoin users is virtually unlimited. The more people that begin using the coin, the more motivation new users have to use it as it loses risk. Not to mention the convenience. I paid for a new VPN provider a few days ago, and the payment system they used was quite impressive. It made paying by credit card seem archaic. I pasted an address into my client, typed a number, hit send, and the AJAXed webpage in the background window updated with 'payment received' in like 2 seconds. After I saw that, I realized just how stupid I was not to buy coins back when they were $2.

Also, when this bubble collapses, I think it won't be as severe as it was in June 2011. That bubble was much shorter lived. This bubble has been going on for months. Bitcoin has a history now; it's less risky than it was 2 years ago. It recovered and thrived after the first crash in a big way. I expect more bubbles in the future after this one pops, and I don't think the coin will lose as much value as it did in 2011's bubble. People are waiting for the crash to buy in-- if I wasn't buying litecoin instead, I certainly would.

I'm investing in litecoin instead not just because of mtgox, but also because services are starting to use it. A silk road alternative using litecoin just went up. Also the developer for the client seems active and the currency is essentially 'established' unlike other alternatives which often end up being a pump and dump. The current difficulty in obtaining litecoins vs. bitcoins and the narrowing of that gap makes it an investment worth considering I think. It will ride the coattails of bitcoin but potentially rise faster in the near future. Even if it doesn't rise faster than bitcoin, it still beats money sitting in my checking account doing nothing.
 

Soriak_sl

shitlord
783
0
Any suggestions for litecoin mining? Is crunching with a CPU worth it? cgminer vs. others? Any favorite pools?
 

Torrid

Molten Core Raider
926
611
I just started mining it so I'm far from an expert, but I can tell you a few things.

The currency's hash algorithm (scrypt) was selected specifically to allow CPU mining to be viable. However apparently the designer of the protocol used bad parameters which allowed people to figure out a way to enable GPU mining. The gap between CPU and GPU mining is smaller compared to SHA256 coins though. Also I hear that FPGA and ASIC mining will not be possible for litecoin. Even if it were, they couldn't use the bitcoin ones for it, so it would be some time before they were used. That is good news for GPU miners.

I'm pulling 43 Khash/s on my ivy bridge i5 3570K. A Radeon 7950 (the preferred card to mine with, ~$300) should do around 600 Khash/s. At current prices that should be around $9 a day if I'm not mistaken. Mine should arrive Wednesday.

Most people use cgminer as far as I know. I signed up with coinotron for no particular reason.

https://github.com/litecoin-project/...are-comparison
https://github.com/litecoin-project/...f-mining-pools
http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/
http://cryptocur.com/litecoin/litecoin-mining/
http://cryptocur.com/litecoin/litecoin-ltc-gpu-mining/
 

Arative

Vyemm Raider
2,991
4,610
Bitcoin is at $209. Bubble has got to pop sooner rather than later.

Isn't litecoin much more susceptible cpu botnet's than bitcoin is? To be honest I really haven't looked too much into litecoins.