megalolman
My thinking about the success of a virtual coin is very simple.
 
All will fail in the near future, because is only profitable in countries where the price of the electricity is cheap enought.
If the electricity is cheap,  people will start to use more energy to made coins from nothing, so the electricity will up in price because the greater demand of raw power. A new energy plant takes years to being build. If the demand is high enought and the supply is the same, the price will be very high.
 
When the time to make a coin surpass these actual profit margins, the countries where the big part of coins are made will be stopping the production, killing all these virtual money instead. 
 
For me, the virtual coins is a way to make money in THE PRESENT time, nor in the future. Only my .2 cents.

rjohnson11
Bitcoins need a valid exchange and support system as well as regulation.

wmmills

The bankster scumbags that keep us all slaves with money are never going to let something like this catch on enough to compete with them. This is the beginning of the end for mining. Its only going to get worse from here on out with theft, feds, crime, investigations etc.... and they will make sure all that happens to put enough anxiety into the system that most people walk away and play it "safe" with the old standby's.

megalolman
My thinking about the success of a virtual coin is very simple.
 
All will fail in the near future, because is only profitable in countries where the price of the electricity is cheap enought.
If the electricity is cheap,  people will start to use more energy to made coins from nothing, so the electricity will up in price because the greater demand of raw power. A new energy plant takes years to being build. If the demand is high enought and the supply is the same, the price will be very high.
 
When the time to make a coin surpass these actual profit margins, the countries where the big part of coins are made will be stopping the production, killing all these virtual money instead. 
 
For me, the virtual coins is a way to make money in THE PRESENT time, nor in the future. Only my .2 cents.

starsmine

Brad_Hawthorne

megalolman
My thinking about the success of a virtual coin is very simple.
 
All will fail in the near future, because is only profitable in countries where the price of the electricity is cheap enought.
If the electricity is cheap,  people will start to use more energy to made coins from nothing, so the electricity will up in price because the greater demand of raw power. A new energy plant takes years to being build. If the demand is high enought and the supply is the same, the price will be very high.
 
When the time to make a coin surpass these actual profit margins, the countries where the big part of coins are made will be stopping the production, killing all these virtual money instead. 
 
For me, the virtual coins is a way to make money in THE PRESENT time, nor in the future. Only my .2 cents.

The problem in that premise is that these crypto-currancies only have a finite amount of coins that get progressively harder to mine as time goes on. That means that they are only valuable to a finite amount of people within a finite window of opportunity by design. What prevents these people from just inventing a new crypto-currency every time they wish to pump and dump and then create yet another currency after that to rinse and repeat? Every day I hear of new crypto-currencies and hear of everyone jumping on the me-too bandwaggon to get in early on the difficulty rating to mine. It makes me want to facepalm.

Because all but the serious ones get ignored.
Like no one actually thinks dodgecoin will actually be a viable thing.
 
Also its not really a finite amount, there is a constant stream of new bitcoins entering the market, just with more flops mining, they make it harder so only that constant stream comes out. Its very similar to what the gold standard does. At least in terms of money entering the market.
 

Brad_Hawthorne

Shadowfoxy
In the case of MT.Gox is just a small blip on the screen, that won't have a lasting effect in the overall scheme of things that involve Bitcoin. The fall of Mt.Gox just proves what would have happened to bad companies such JP Morgan, RBS, HSBC, and any other big bank had they not been bailed out by the U.S Taxpayer. Fact of the matter is what your seeing is what happens in a free market. And in a free market bad actors get weeded out, and Mt.Gox won't be the last to be weeded out of the market.
 
My heart goes out to those who had money lost any amount of cash in this Mt.Gox debacle. But most bitcoiner's who have been in it for a while have known for years that Gox was trash and stayed away from it's exchange. And most of us know that bitcoins biggest weakness is the exchanges, until those become decentralized as well, which is very close at hand. As a general rule and this applies to all exchanges involved in crypto currency, never leave any cash or coin on the exchanges wallet. Purchase or withdraw your coin or dollars as soon as your done with your transactions.
 
If you have any questions about Bitcoins or cryptocurrency in general shoot me a P.M I would be glad to answer it, and if I can't at the moment I'm sure I can find the answer.

The problem is people don't know or care who are good or bad exchanges with crypto-currency. They just want to cash in however they can. You explaining it away as a bad exchange does not effect that mindset. There is nothing in the way from having a repeat of MT.Gox several times a year at this rate. That does not instill confidence in crypto-currency.

Shadowfoxy
I guess its because I'm new I can't reply back to PM's yet so this reply is toward "kaninja" who asked me a question in PM. To answer your question I would highly recommend if you can to make a backup of your wallet to a USB thumbdrive even  if you don't plan to "cash out". And I also recommend to encrypt your wallet with a strong password. Now if you plan to cash out at some point there are a couple of ways you can.
 
One way is in person you can go to localbitcoins.com and setup a meet with someone in your area. Or you can do it through an exchange I recommend which is campbx.com. I recommend reading through there FAQ section, it tells you the procedure of how deposit/withdraw from them. It's an easy process once you signup. 
 
 

Shadowfoxy

Brad_Hawthorne

Shadowfoxy
In the case of MT.Gox is just a small blip on the screen, that won't have a lasting effect in the overall scheme of things that involve Bitcoin. The fall of Mt.Gox just proves what would have happened to bad companies such JP Morgan, RBS, HSBC, and any other big bank had they not been bailed out by the U.S Taxpayer. Fact of the matter is what your seeing is what happens in a free market. And in a free market bad actors get weeded out, and Mt.Gox won't be the last to be weeded out of the market.
 
My heart goes out to those who had money lost any amount of cash in this Mt.Gox debacle. But most bitcoiner's who have been in it for a while have known for years that Gox was trash and stayed away from it's exchange. And most of us know that bitcoins biggest weakness is the exchanges, until those become decentralized as well, which is very close at hand. As a general rule and this applies to all exchanges involved in crypto currency, never leave any cash or coin on the exchanges wallet. Purchase or withdraw your coin or dollars as soon as your done with your transactions.
 
If you have any questions about Bitcoins or cryptocurrency in general shoot me a P.M I would be glad to answer it, and if I can't at the moment I'm sure I can find the answer.

The problem is people don't know or care who are good or bad exchanges with crypto-currency. They just want to cash in however they can. You explaining it away as a bad exchange does not effect that mindset. There is nothing in the way from having a repeat of MT.Gox several times a year at this rate. That does not instill confidence in crypto-currency.

I agree with what you are saying, my comment was specifically in regard to Mt.Gox and any other business within the bitcoin world that does the same thing as Mt.Gox. Now going with your new topic about instilling trust within Cryptocurrency in general. This situation and any like it will of course make it hard for the normal everyday joe to want to even think about messing with it. So I agree in the sense that Crypto-currency isn't truly ready for prime-time yet because its still in its infancy.
 
The infrastructure is still being built around it. And its not like you can look to any examples in the past to something of this magnitude to reflect on. So its going to be a touch and go situation. But like I said the bad actors are just going to keep getting weeded out until business realize that if they want to stay around for the long term they need to get their stuff together.
 
But in the meantime while that is happening and a person is interested or curious about crypt-currency its going to be very vital that they take the time to investigate things before getting involved. At the moment crypt-currency isn't ready for the "Regular Joe" yet.

Shadowfoxy
I took this little bit straight from Wikipedia because it explains what the Bitcoin protocol better than I can: " a peer-to-peer payment network that operates on a cryptographic protocol. Users send bitcoins, the unit of currency, by broadcasting digitally signed messages to the network using Bitcoin wallet software. Transactions are recorded into a distributed public database known as the block chain, with consensus achieved by a proof-of-work system called "mining". The block chain is distributed internationally using peer-to-peer filesharing technology similar to BitTorrent." This pretty much sums up the protocol.
 
Now as far as what the protocol "produces" which I think your asking what type of service does this provide, if I'm understanding correctly. The service its providing is a secure way to send your transactions anywhere in the world with close to zero cost, while remaining anonymous while doing so. Now granted transactions are are done within an open ledger but you can't but a specific name to the individual to sent or received the transaction unless you are informed of such information.
 
As far as regulation goes as I've stated before crypto-currency is in its infancy and each country will have to figure out for themselves how they want to regulate these types of currency's. The protocol is open source so therefore no one country owns the rights to the protocol. So how it will be regulated in the future is up for debate but it currently has guidelines such as here in the US by FinCen on how businesses who operate with bitcoin should work within those guidelines. But its still being debated about at this moment.
 
With your example about MasterCard again that's an example of a company that has decided to take steps to reassure the customer that if a problem arises such as what you have described they will essentially have your back. And I agree that exchanges that want to work within the bitcoin world should have policy's like that. But again that is up to each company/merchant to make decisions like MasterCard to install such policy's. That's not Bitcoin's problem, its the merchant's.
 
I agree that there are more things exchanges/merchants can do to make sure their websites and business as a whole more secure. The Bitcoin protocol as I've stated is secure and still to this day has not been hacked.
 
Yes there is no difference from a transaction standpoint between how a Euro is accepted and a Bitcoin is accepted. But the differences start to show when we talk about other aspects of the currency. The two that I will mention for example are the privacy aspect of the currency's which is a big deal believe it or not. And also the fact that it can be accepted anywhere in the world where there is an internet connection. There are many places in the world for example where master card nor visa are not accepted due to the fact that those company's don't do business in those country's for whatever reason. But bitcoin does not have that limitation.
 
The Euro and any other nations currency was created by those nations so therefore should naturally be protected by those countries. The Bitcoin protocol was created by the people not one particular nation so therefore it is up to the people to provide those protections. And the market is responding to try to create those protections. We have to remember this protocol when talked about as a currency is still very new, and is doing phenomenally well in such a short period of time for itself. If you look at the history of other nations currency when they were in their infancy you will see similarities to what's going on today.
 
And lastly about the mining its fairly simple. When a person decides to use there computing power to support the network through the process of mining. The network rewards the individual with bitcoin. The mining is a proof-of-work process that is verifying a transaction process. Its verifying that the block your computer is currently trying to solve is valid and not fake or allowing for Bitcoins to be double-spent by some other node within the network. It's much more technical than what I'm saying here but this is the gist of it.
 
I hope I answered your questions to the best of my ability.