If you're just speculating on the price going up, and don't actually want to use coins to pay for something, it might be worth having a look at these charts before you do buy any:
by the time mainstream publications like the BBC are reporting on spectacular gains in an asset, it's far too late to invest speculatively in the hope of finding a greater fool and cashing out before the inevitable crash, even if you believe in the long-term future of this currency.
Disagree. When I can get a bank account with a UK bank denominated in bitcoin (at whatever cost), then it's too late to invest speculatively. Until then, the barriers to entry are exerting downward pressure on the price.
Coinbase.com is by far the easiest to simply buy or use Bitcoin if you have a US bank account (and it is a YC company). Unlike MtGox.com (originally the most popular) the site is fast, stable, well designed, and can connect directly with your US bank account. They've also got a set of merchant tools and APIs.
The only downside is that it's not a real time trading platform / you wouldn't want to do day trading of BTC on it.
This link will give us both $5 in BTC if you buy 1 BTC.
Coinbase is nice, but dealing with their support is not a fun experience at all. For about a month they held about $2000 of my funds due to one of my purchases being marked as high-risk. Support took anywhere from three to five business days to respond to each email. I eventually got my money back after threatening with legal action. Would not do business with them again.
In case you are European, I can highly recommend bitcoin.de for hassle-free, legit buying and selling of Bitcoin. Similar to Coinbase, they're less a day-trading platform and more a place to buy and sell Bitcoin within a few days. They have a partnership with a "real" German bank (Fidor) which makes them highly unlikely to have regulation issues any time soon.
For those who've been involved in this for some time: Do you think it's too late to get into mining Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) to make any significant payoff? I've been looking to get into Litecoin and others because I think I may have missed out on Bitcoin (and buying them at the current value just isn't feasible), and I'm trying to assess whether this bubble/trend/fad/craze will extend to other cryptocurrencies and if going in early now on them will be worth it. I know I'm asking you to look into a crystal ball, but anyone who's been in this game from early on knows much more than I do.
These are benchmarks of Bitcoin mining hardware. GPU's outperform CPU's by a large margin, then FPGA's outperformed GPU's and now ASICs (programs on a chip) absolutely kill everything else. Look at Xtreme Miner's "The Lion" specifically. It's only going to (alegedly) be available in Jan/Feb time, but the benchmarks they're claiming are scary.
Also there are some very very large ASIC data center deployments being worked on in China with some fairly innovative stuff like teflon shelves to avoid rack/rails and innovative cooling systems all designed to provide higher ROI per watt and capital invested. China really seems to be leading the field in mining.
Also keep in mind that as coins dry up they will be replaced by you collecting transaction fees. So it's not all about getting coins.
If I were to start mining today, and I believed Feathercoin and other smaller variants have promise (which I do) I would buy a dedicated ASIC box that can do SCrypt hashing (keep in mind you'll need more memory than dedicated ASICs for BTC) and give that a shot. With Bitcoin you're up against some very serious players at this point and the fact that ASIC boxes have a bigger advantage with Bitcoin than they do with Litecoin or Feathercoin makes it less attractive.
If you plug the numbers in you'll see that to all intent and purposes, private mining for BTC is now useless unless you invest in a USD$5K+ ASIC mining rig and even then the rewards are not guaranteed as the overall network difficulty (how hard it is to find a block) keeps jumping every few days (see http://bitcoindifficulty.com). Basically, you'll end up underwater if the value of BTC drops from its current high.
I also missed the BTC mining boat and instead have decided to mine Litecoin (working on the assumption that a rising speculative tide floats all ships).
Litecoins use a different hashing algorithm (scrypt) which is designed to prevent a mining arms race and keep it feasible for CPU miners to continue finding blocks.
I joined the liteguardian.com pool 5 days ago and have three servers mining (each has an Intel Xeon CPU E31245) and I will have made 1LTC tomorrow. At the moment 1LTC is trading at just over $40. It was $6 a week ago.
Another option which I discovered yesterday is http://www.kraken.com - they appear to be a fully fledged FX platform that allows margin/leverage trading on BTC. Risky though unless you know what you're doing (I don't).
Edit: have just sent you an invite to the liteguardian pool in case LTC mining interests you.
Mining bitcoin is thoroughly impractical. It would cost you significantly more in electricity than you would make in bitcoin. The only effective way to do it is with specialized hardware built specifically for mining bitcoins.
It's not too late to buy bitcoins, though: you don't need to buy a whole one. For example, if you think bitcoin will double in price over the next month, you can easily buy 0.1 bitcoins for about $100 and sell it next month for $200.
One of the benefits of bitcoin is that it's highly divisible- the idea of "1" bitcoin doesn't really matter for most purposes. If Bitcoin becomes commonly used as an actual currency, people will almost never deal in whole bitcoins (any more than they would deal with $10k bills if they existed). You'd buy a loaf of bread with 0.0001 bitcoins, for example.
So, if you think the trend/fad/craze will continue, you might as well buy fractions of a bitcoin. I can't speak to the alternate crypto currencies, though.
Mining bitcoin isn't worth it and has not been for quite some time (from a newbie perspective looking to jump in.) I did some Litecoin mining about 6 mos ago, and experimented with: a) firing up EC2 clusters with MIT StarCluster http://star.mit.edu/cluster/ (which is awesome for other reasons) b) buying my own rigs with expensive, high-end AMD GPUs. It was worth it for a while. I also pre-ordered some Butterfly Labs HW, but bailed on it when they couldn't produce a timely delivery.
tl;dr: it is fun for dorks like us, but at this point, don't expect to build your retirement nest egg mining -- just buying coins on an exchange is going to have a much better chance at ROI.
It may be possible to profitably mine Bitcoin using ASICs if you time it right, however you have to ask: why would mining hardware companies sell machines that can literally print money when they could run them themselves?
Hardware manufacturers are likely well aware they're dumping more hardware on the market than Bitcoin can profitably absorb. They're enabled by customers willing to preorder hardware months in advance who are essentially gambling that the mining difficulty won't rise too quickly to make their brand new hardware unprofitable.
Unless you are in the business of chip design/manufacturing, it is too late to get into Bitcoin mining. However, due to a rapid price increase in Litecoin, it's actually pretty profitable to mine them with an ATI GPU at the moment. On the order of $10-20/day per high end ATI GPU. However, this is only likely to last a couple days until the difficulty catches up to the price. If you have free electricity, you'll probably still be able to make a few dollars per day long term with litecoin, but not if you have to pay for it.
I'd say it's really not worth it as an individual these days unless you're just doing it for fun. I sold my miner and bought some stock in a mining operation instead. Beware that there's plenty of scams! https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=78.0
If you can afford an ASIC then no: it's not late, although is not really simple...
GPU mining on Litecoin is still profitable since it uses scrypt, making the processing power of an ASIC or FPGA not that significant. Some people mine Litecoins just to sell them for Bitcoins, you may do it as well :)
I would just like to mention, that "buying at the current value isn't feasible" is only your opinion, and might be wrong. I for example buy BTC even now, since I think the value in the future will be much higher. (but I also might be wrong).
If you have the skills and capital to design and fab your own bitcoin mining chip you can make money mining. There is nothing you can buy off the shelf though that will make you more profit than just buying and holding Bitcoin.
It's too late to realistically mine Bitcoin (save highly specialized hardware). It's not too late for some of the alternative cryptocurrencies. Litecoin, for example, has gone up at an incredible rate.
Regarding BTC-e and it being a shady site: no matter what they say it is the only exchange able to really properly trade into other currencies. Quick. I made a few thousand minute-trading between btc-ltc-ftc-nc et cetera. Got to love the bubble.
Yes I agree. The lack of data makes it seem shady - that's really what I was trying to get across. But I use it and love it too. Love the range of currencies, the interface is very responsive, trades execute quickly and when I make a deposit I can trade within minutes after it's confirmed. Besides the Bulgaria jurisdiction and lack of data on who owns it, it's absolutely awesome.
What about Kraken for trading? They support a number of altcoins and a few fiat currencies (I believe USD, EUR, and KRW). They seem to be a whole lot less shady than BTC-E.
What about trying to buy Bitcoins from a country that isn't the US? I shouldn't have to send you the left arm of my first-borne to verify I'm a human being and then be limited to performing any transaction in dollars.
If you ask for non-US based services, it's probably worth specifying where you are. BTC exchange services are very jurisdiction-specific at the moment.
Kraken, an EU exchange, allows you to trade up to $10,000.00 a month without scanning in your ID; just need to put in your name, DoB, phone number, and address. The downside is that not many people trade on it.
Used https://bittylicious.com/ for small amounts (UK, NL, CZ, used to have KR but seems like not anymore). The price was 20-30% higher than Bitstamp, but that got covered by the increase, and at least I don't have register my bank account, wait few days, then denied (language barrier here in Taiwan) like they did.
Edit: Well, currently they seem 50% overpriced, so maybe this is not such a good idea, unless you really just want "some" BTC to use instead as an investment.
In Europe you may want to use Bitstamp, otherwise I would suggest you to buy through LocalBitcoins (as the blogpost says), or if you understand the concept of WoT then you can try with Bitcoin-OTC :)
You can use Virwox, but it's a bit expensive unless you live in Argentina. If you happen to live in Argentina, you can get the cheapest BTC on the world by buying with your credit card in Virwox.
Yep, I find coinbase really easy for buying / selling. Before coinbase, selling bitcoins was such a hassle...
For buying, I use to just buy through blockchain.info, once you created a wallet, you could just put an amount you wanted to add in and run down to the nearest moneygram / western union. The process was fairly painless, took me 20 minutes. You type in the number of bitcoins you want, print out a piece of paper with instructions. Head down to moneygram or western union, follow the instructions of hand it to the person there, they do everything for you, you pay in cash. Refresh your bitcoin wallet and you should see your coins there shortly.
Credit card transactions are reversible and the numbers are easy to steal, so it would be too easy to scam an exchange in this way. It's just as hard to convert local currency into any other currency, so it's not really unique to Bitcoin, and it probably won't get much more "effortless".
I think the way you could probably do this is that you could let people buy using credit cards, but then not actually give them the bitcoins until the credit card chargeback timeline expired. The risk is obviously that as the exchange operator you become a bitcoin speculator because you're holding bitcoins that may not end up being paid for by a customer, so not a good idea with the volatility we are seeing, but I think that's the only way credit cards would work.
Sometimes it's easy to buy Bitcoins with local payment methods. Here in the Netherlands you can buy them with ideal and receive them immediately: https://bitonic.nl/
Any way to buy Bitcoins through a bank in Mexico? I can't find any. I'm surprised that even though Mexico is so close to US, there's still no practical way to buy Bitcoins yet (other than person to person).
Thanks. I tried to reproduce this in Chrome and Firefox but it works for me. I'm not using anything sneaky or that modifies browser history so not sure why you're seeing this. Which browser are you using?
[+] [-] grey-area|12 years ago|reply
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360zigDailyztgSzm...
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg730zigDailyztgSzm...
by the time mainstream publications like the BBC are reporting on spectacular gains in an asset, it's far too late to invest speculatively in the hope of finding a greater fool and cashing out before the inevitable crash, even if you believe in the long-term future of this currency.
[+] [-] peteretep|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philfreo|12 years ago|reply
The only downside is that it's not a real time trading platform / you wouldn't want to do day trading of BTC on it.
This link will give us both $5 in BTC if you buy 1 BTC.
https://coinbase.com/?r=4fedfb2d6cbd3b0003000845&utm_campaig...
[+] [-] zachlatta|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epaga|12 years ago|reply
https://www.bitcoin.de/
[+] [-] esusatyo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoers|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyro|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmaunder|12 years ago|reply
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
These are benchmarks of Bitcoin mining hardware. GPU's outperform CPU's by a large margin, then FPGA's outperformed GPU's and now ASICs (programs on a chip) absolutely kill everything else. Look at Xtreme Miner's "The Lion" specifically. It's only going to (alegedly) be available in Jan/Feb time, but the benchmarks they're claiming are scary.
Also there are some very very large ASIC data center deployments being worked on in China with some fairly innovative stuff like teflon shelves to avoid rack/rails and innovative cooling systems all designed to provide higher ROI per watt and capital invested. China really seems to be leading the field in mining.
Also keep in mind that as coins dry up they will be replaced by you collecting transaction fees. So it's not all about getting coins.
If I were to start mining today, and I believed Feathercoin and other smaller variants have promise (which I do) I would buy a dedicated ASIC box that can do SCrypt hashing (keep in mind you'll need more memory than dedicated ASICs for BTC) and give that a shot. With Bitcoin you're up against some very serious players at this point and the fact that ASIC boxes have a bigger advantage with Bitcoin than they do with Litecoin or Feathercoin makes it less attractive.
[+] [-] corford|12 years ago|reply
If you plug the numbers in you'll see that to all intent and purposes, private mining for BTC is now useless unless you invest in a USD$5K+ ASIC mining rig and even then the rewards are not guaranteed as the overall network difficulty (how hard it is to find a block) keeps jumping every few days (see http://bitcoindifficulty.com). Basically, you'll end up underwater if the value of BTC drops from its current high.
I also missed the BTC mining boat and instead have decided to mine Litecoin (working on the assumption that a rising speculative tide floats all ships).
Litecoins use a different hashing algorithm (scrypt) which is designed to prevent a mining arms race and keep it feasible for CPU miners to continue finding blocks.
I joined the liteguardian.com pool 5 days ago and have three servers mining (each has an Intel Xeon CPU E31245) and I will have made 1LTC tomorrow. At the moment 1LTC is trading at just over $40. It was $6 a week ago.
Another option which I discovered yesterday is http://www.kraken.com - they appear to be a fully fledged FX platform that allows margin/leverage trading on BTC. Risky though unless you know what you're doing (I don't).
Edit: have just sent you an invite to the liteguardian pool in case LTC mining interests you.
[+] [-] fishtoaster|12 years ago|reply
It's not too late to buy bitcoins, though: you don't need to buy a whole one. For example, if you think bitcoin will double in price over the next month, you can easily buy 0.1 bitcoins for about $100 and sell it next month for $200.
One of the benefits of bitcoin is that it's highly divisible- the idea of "1" bitcoin doesn't really matter for most purposes. If Bitcoin becomes commonly used as an actual currency, people will almost never deal in whole bitcoins (any more than they would deal with $10k bills if they existed). You'd buy a loaf of bread with 0.0001 bitcoins, for example.
So, if you think the trend/fad/craze will continue, you might as well buy fractions of a bitcoin. I can't speak to the alternate crypto currencies, though.
[+] [-] zenocon|12 years ago|reply
tl;dr: it is fun for dorks like us, but at this point, don't expect to build your retirement nest egg mining -- just buying coins on an exchange is going to have a much better chance at ROI.
[+] [-] tlrobinson|12 years ago|reply
Hardware manufacturers are likely well aware they're dumping more hardware on the market than Bitcoin can profitably absorb. They're enabled by customers willing to preorder hardware months in advance who are essentially gambling that the mining difficulty won't rise too quickly to make their brand new hardware unprofitable.
[+] [-] gibybo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingrolo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pera|12 years ago|reply
GPU mining on Litecoin is still profitable since it uses scrypt, making the processing power of an ASIC or FPGA not that significant. Some people mine Litecoins just to sell them for Bitcoins, you may do it as well :)
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] greyman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmorici|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acangiano|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nly|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamb_|12 years ago|reply
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/
[+] [-] pearjuice|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmaunder|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] droidist2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangero|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taylorm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jalev|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nl|12 years ago|reply
If you ask for non-US based services, it's probably worth specifying where you are. BTC exchange services are very jurisdiction-specific at the moment.
[+] [-] vertex-four|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imrehg|12 years ago|reply
Edit: Well, currently they seem 50% overpriced, so maybe this is not such a good idea, unless you really just want "some" BTC to use instead as an investment.
[+] [-] pera|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jafaku|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|12 years ago|reply
Polish version of this market was rock solid for last few years (still is): https://pln.bitcurex.com/
[+] [-] rickyc091|12 years ago|reply
For buying, I use to just buy through blockchain.info, once you created a wallet, you could just put an amount you wanted to add in and run down to the nearest moneygram / western union. The process was fairly painless, took me 20 minutes. You type in the number of bitcoins you want, print out a piece of paper with instructions. Head down to moneygram or western union, follow the instructions of hand it to the person there, they do everything for you, you pay in cash. Refresh your bitcoin wallet and you should see your coins there shortly.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] matponta|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RussianCow|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangero|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomGullen|12 years ago|reply
I think in the UK debit card payments are meant/are to be non-reversible. Couldn't find a clear answer on this though.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] koenbok|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] salient|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abjr|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] 3pt14159|12 years ago|reply