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FrozenGate by Avery

Bitcoin

Anything over $100 for under about 150Kh/a won't see a ROI with scrypt mining. It just won't happen. And that's with today's prices ignoring the halvenings and fighting against the multipool downward pressures. Those big gpu rigs also eat a ton of power which ears away at ROI. The R9 290x gets about 600-800Kh/s which nets about $2/day if you're efficient and pick your pool and coin well. There is a tipping point like with the ASIC miners where it becomes profitable quickly, but again you're looking at the four to five digit mark.

If they came out with a 350Kh/s USB scrypt ASIC for $100 then you could get solid ROI with today's prices in about 3.5months. And again that's for an individual having one unit without them first springing up as farms.

The problem is that in a GPU market the introduction of ASICs destabilizes the market, so no one can accurately predict the end result. The coming ASIC farms could make gpu mining obsolete like it did for BTC. If that happens then no one except $$$$ and up ASIC farms will see a ROI.

That's why I chose DOGE. It's the easiest coin to mine that has even a snowball's chance in hell of surviving for long. It has the highest adoption rate, awareness, and growth since BTC. When the ASIC farms hit and wipe out most of the scrypt coins we'll likely see only BTC, LTC, and DOGE after the dust settles. Perhaps VTC will survive as well, but no one is sure. DOGE has a huge user base and aside from BTC and LTC is the only one that has people using it as a direct fiat replacement. All the other coins have to be converted first before they can be widely used in place of fiat.
 





New paypal fees from May:
https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/upcoming-policies-full

3.9%+fixed fee for international transactions.. Bitcoin ranges from free to ~1% even when converted back to fiat money. This means that if a company sells for $100k a year, they'd save at least $3000 on payment fees if everyone had paid in bitcoin instead of paypal. Not to mention the savings from eliminating chargeback fraud.
 
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Grix said:
New paypal fees from May:
https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/upcoming-policies-full

3.9%+fixed fee for international transactions.. Bitcoin ranges from free to ~1% even when converted back to fiat money. This means that if a company sells for $100k a year, they'd save at least $3000 on payment fees if everyone had paid in bitcoin instead of paypal. Not to mention the savings from eliminating chargeback fraud.
Click to expand...

I thought those fees were always the case, and the paypal policy change was just a clarification.

(Fixed fee + 2.9% for CONUS, and +1% for all international transactions.)
of course, as with all merchant processors.

If they are doing 3k a month they get merchant discounts, so 2.5% (+ intl if applicable), and if over 10k it's 2.2%. Not terrible but yeah, bitcoins are nice.

As of now I find it more of a transaction device than a currency. the network has become too bloated just from this (extremely) low adoption, compared to Visa's network: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

We'll be accepting BTC eventually, but through another payment provider (coinbase). It simply is not worth the liability to hold, and tax paperwork would be an immense pain : IRS Virtual Currency Guidance : Virtual Currency Is Treated as Property for U.S. Federal Tax Purposes; General Rules for Property Transactions Apply
Our transactions would be direct to USD. That makes our fees 1%, not bad at all.
However, we'll be renegotiating our fee structure with paypal and eventually it'll be at around 1.9%.

Eventually we'll be using a different payment processor who can do around 1% for debit, with bits of percentages added on for reward cards, et all. Fees aren't that high if you know where to look.


Still, Bitcoin is an interesting concept and (the concept) will stick around.
 
Several huge companies have started accepting bitcoin recently, including DISH and Expedia!

EDIT: And now also Newegg.com! Pretty big endorsement.
 
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Mmm, interesting topic. I love the idea and the backside tech. I have mined for a month, but now isn't profitable. I sold my antminer and my ghash.io's ghashes. I hope that the bitcoin grow and grow up, could it be like PayPal, paysafecard and all these companies? Or the money revolution? Yes, but no with quantum computers
 
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well.

I bet those that have had bitcoins from the start are laughing (all the way to the bank) now?

This is something that I've known about for years but never looked into, although I took great interest a few weeks ago and have been glued to the topic in my evenings ever since. Kicking myself that I didn't take more notice earlier, though like a lot of working people I had little in savings to invest back then. It's only since a pay raise that I've managed to scrape together an emergency fund.

I currently have a little bit invested in bitcoin and ethereum, with the intent to invest more of my savings over time. I figure it's better than having it rot away due to inflation, and with a bit of luck if it all comes good I won't have to be working all my life.

It'd be great to continue the discussion here. I definitely believe in BTC as a store of value, ethereum I am not too sure about; some think it will fail where others think it will go to the moon...
 
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I'm up a whopping $20 :crackup:

Have a friend who bought one at $205, so he's quite a bit happier. Would absolutely love to see a nice drop. I was hoping for one the day after Trump was elected, but surprisingly, the markets did not react badly at all.

There was a dip for ~480 a couple of months back. That would have been a fantastic time to buy some.

Not sure about etherium. Put in $100, and just going to wait and see. That it's been recognized by coinbase is a good start, but the risk there is far greater.
 
I'm using coinbase at the minute as my buy and sell, but as my portfolio grows i'll split or offload that to other wallets. Not sure I have much faith in litecoin, and while some think DOGE will grow, the fact that there is an unlimited supply deters me.

I currently have 1 BTC and about 6 ether... I have savings and I've sat on it for long enough now that I feel I need to do something with it. What I don't spend on seeing the world I'm putting into cryptocurrency. Fuck it, I might get rich, I might end up in the gutter!

Interestingly Trump being elected caused the price of silver and gold to drop. The changes are probably mostly speculative but I'm not knowledgeable enough to say more than that. I bought just before thinking Hillary would get elected and the price of bullion would rise.. I was probably right, I just banked on the wrong candidate getting the hot seat!
 
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I feel about the same way. While for once I have a small reserve of savings, it bothers me to have the money just sit there, and unfortunately I don't have anywhere near enough that I can get anywhere close to a decent interest rate from banks.

I also banked on shillary, and expected to be able to pick up 2-3 more bitcoins, if price dropped nicely, since she was strongly in favor of more control over cryptocurrencies.

Incidentally I've mostly booked my most ambitious trip to date last week. 21 days, at least 4 cities and 4 islands :p
 
Ethereum is an interesting one.. I think it's better to think of it as a distributed computer rather than currency. It's really cool tech but I am unsure if it will take off. It is kind of like a solution without a problem right now.

As for bitcoin, it's been a bull market this year for sure. But from a development and political aspect there's a bit of trouble. Block are full so it needs to scale up pretty soon if it is to not stagnate. There are multiple solutions out but the problem is that the community can't seem to agree on which to implement. I fear a stalemate where no solution gets the necessary consensus.

It's really cool how far it's come since I made this thread though. Used to be only me accepting it, now there are plenty of other laser businesses in the game too! Wicked Lasers, Sanwu, Fasttech, Eudaimonium, etc. DTR used to too but there were some trouble. I still always pay in bitcoin when the store accepts it :)
 
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