Someone I know seems to be into bitcoins trading. He’s abroad posting up on Facebook that he’s paying for his trip/ holiday, eating out everyday and making money to pay for it all on his bitcoins card.

What’s it all about? It’s not that easy to make loads of cash, surely everyone would be doing it?

He’s either:

A: Got some bitcoins from a number of years ago and cashed out

A2: Made some money on the exchange by risking capital (unlikely)

B: Speaking absolute bollocks

You can’t make money from bitcoin unless you’re willing to risk your capital on a rise/fall. However, bitcoin is probably the most volatile investment in the world and is a seriously stupid thing to do to count it as an investment.

You can’t make money mining it anymore – those days are over.

Bitcoin has gone up well in the last month, up almost 10% today!
your mate might be living it up from this.
Check out bitstamp.

seems to be into bitcoins trading

“Seems” “trading” ? As far as i know bitcoins are often used as payment for drugs, maybe thats what he’s trading ?

You can also do quite well by stealing it from other people.

A few years back I had an enormous leccy bill from my son bitcoin mining with seven machines running 24/7.
Not sure if he made any money but he still lives at home.

A few years back I had an enormous leccy bill from my son bitcoin mining with seven machines running 24/7.
Not sure if he made any money but he still lives at home.

I bet he made some decent money a few years back. Guess he spent it on something.

Agreed with the above; check some graphs online, the days or personal mining are over.

Bitcoin mining in China:

[video]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nDiDHjLFmK8[/video]

Now gone up to 10.60%

Wtf are they? How are they mined? How are they currency?

surely this picture clarifies it for you

I’ve still got circa 12bit coin and 400lite coin from my personal mining rigs from around 3 years ago. No rush to exchange them and haven’t been keeping an eye on the markets at all, so happy to see them increasing again.

This is still all completely over my head! What was that graphic about above…? Mining?

Seems he’s going to meet someone at the bit coin hq or something in Madrid. I can’t help thinking he’s got involved in some scam/ pyramid thing .

Every time he’s using his bitcoins card he’s posting a video on fb.

He doesn’t seem to have a job, just calls himself a motivational entrepreneur or something….

I bet he made some decent money a few years back. Guess he spent it on something.

I bet he didn’t.

It’s all about mining Ether coins these days 😉

I no longer understand the world..

Can I mine bitcoins? Like, rub a USB stick near some mud or something?

DrP

This is still all completely over my head! What was that graphic about above…? Mining?

I am not sure how i could make it any simpler TBH

Not got a **** clue either mate

Love bitcoins. It paid for my masters a few years back.
I bought a fair few around $100/bitcoin and sold when the market spiked a few months later for over (IIRC) $800/bitcoin. Lucky I did, a few months later Mtgox collapsed (who where essentially my bank).

I would guess some people made a heck of a lot of money from this a couple years ago. Looks like it’s spiking again, so your friend could be selling some off- maybe that’s what he means by ‘trading’.

The people who don’t have a clue, do you understand fiat currency and fractional reserve banking? i.e. the “old” world.

No…
I still pay for things in chickens and wives.

DrP

You can buy them and sell them like a commodity or try and ‘mine’ your own. They’re a digital code, running a load of computers trying to match one of those codes is the mining that code becomes yours and the amount of bitcoins it’s worth varies. You can the sell it or use it to buy things, not just drugs.

It’s interesting as the value of most commodities is based on their sparsity on this planet..
Technically (from a really daft, unaware brain – mine) surely you could have an infinite number of bitcoins?
Who made them?
Could I make DrPcoins and sell them?

DrP

I still pay for things in chickens and wives.

Your poor sod. The price of wives has nosedived in recent months. Chickens are holding up nicely though. Have you considered goat futures?

They’re rare so that’s how they work as a commodity.

There was a guy came forward a few months ago to say he created the code, it was later claimned it wasn’t him.

It’s all a bit odd to create something out a digital code to become a commodity that is sort after.

Head. Hurts.

It’s all a bit odd to create something out a digital code to become a commodity that is sort after.

Agreed!

So somewhere the’s a little black book with lots of codes in, that is like the motherload of bitcoins?

I bet they just use CRC codes for “£10 off £75 spends” tbh…

DrP

I believe there are a maximum of 21,000,000 bitcoins mine-able, in fact this from the wiki page

Supply growth 25 bitcoins per block (approximately every ten minutes) until mid 2016,[2] and then afterwards 12.5 bitcoins per block for 4 years until next halving. This halving continues until 2110–40, when 21 million bitcoins will have been issued

One of the reasons for the recent price rise is the imminent halving.

The people who don’t have a clue, do you understand fiat currency and fractional reserve banking? i.e. the “old” world.

Do you seriously think bitcoins is the new world?

I understand currency, I don’t understand bitcoing mining and so far no one on this thread has explained clearly what it is.

they’re a digital code, running a load of computers trying to match one of those codes is the mining that code becomes yours and the amount of bitcoins it’s worth varies

Still doesn’t make any real sense to me. Why does it become your if you match a code?

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx9zgZCMqXE[/video]

It’s interesting as the value of most commodities is based on their sparsity on this planet..
Technically (from a really daft, unaware brain – mine) surely you could have an infinite number of bitcoins?

There’s a finite number that can be created, and due to the mathematics of computing (mining) new bitcoins, the more that have already been created, the harder it is to compute new ones.

So if you got in early a few years ago, it was ‘easier’ to mine them – so early starters could have a big stash of them, which were then not far off worthless, but which are now worth a load of cash. If you were to start now then it would be pointless as the electricity needed to to the computation would probably cost more than the end value, and there are big outfits in places like china where they have racks of dedicated hardware trying to mine as many as possible.

Wtf are they? How are they mined? How are they currency?

This is still all completely over my head! What was that graphic about above…? Mining?

Essentially it’s a very long winded but simple mathematical problem.

You know what 128bit security is when you checkout online? It’s a binary number 128 digits long, your computer generates one, the shop has one, they match and the payment goes through. If at some point a hacker intercepts your transaction all he sees is gibberish because that 128 digit number has been used to create a code to cypher/decipher your details.

Now imagine you only have 127 of those numbers, you’ve got 2 options to pick to figure it out (0, 1), 126, 4 options (10, 01, 00, 11), 125 8 options (000, 001, 010, 100, 101, 110, 010, 111), and it goes up from there as 2^number of missing digits. So if you start off with a puzzle that involves solving a ‘hash’ it takes a lot of computing power to work backwards to a solution by random iteration.

So a bitcoin-mine is a bit like a gold mine, you spend months digging through solid worthless rock of numbers repetitively with your pickax/PC, until you hit gold/the solution.

The downside is like real gold (or to be fair, any currency), it’s only worth something because someone else thinks it is, if all 70million people in the UK opted to barter with chickens instead then the pound would collapse. The difference is there a re a lot more people invested in gold/pounds so the odds are less likely.

Do you seriously think bitcoins is the new world?

Well it is demonstrably part of the “current world”, but my flippant reply was an answer to “I no longer understand the world” – DrP.

The point I was making is that bitcoins do seem complicated but then again so is “money” in the post gold standard world.

Oh – and as for bitcoin being the future, personally I think it’s a fad and it will go away at some point in the future. However a lot of the major banks / financial organisations have paid very close attention to the way that it works and are looking to apply some of the principles to ‘real’ digital transactions – eg. the way that bitcoin verifies what you have mined is valid and then shares the details with everyone else could be used for online transfers / payments / currency transactions to prevent fraud.

Still doesn’t make any real sense to me. Why does it become your if you match a code?

It’s a mathematical equation that has limited results ok 21m but it’s still limited. It becomes yours as you found it and it links to your account, put in the simplest of terms of course.

Seems a bit like glorified Pokemon

Nah! Pogs.

Could I make DrPcoins and sell them?

DrPence?

Is there a definitive list of the codes somewhere that is checked when someone submits a new one, at which point they say ‘yes, well done, you have a Bitcoin!’ And notes down who they are?

If not, I have 10 of them for sale if anyone’s interested, I can send them over when I get home.

Is there a definitive list of the codes somewhere that is checked when someone submits a new one

Yes, that’s the blockchain.