bitcoin questions

Are there any Bitcoin sites downloadable from CC?

Anyone have any other comments about Bitcoin sites? I just found out about them recently and am trying to figure out what is going on. Some good experiences, some bad experiences, so far

None of the CC recommended sites accept Bitcoin at the moment. The most "popular" site is SWC (Seals With Clubs), and also recently Americas Cardroom begun accepting bitcoin.

The topic of bitcoin is still widely debated as to its longevity and security. You can find a lot of info about it by searching the forum here.

Good luck

The best thing you can do, is avoid bitcoin completely. Here is an eye-opening 6 month chart of the price of bitcoins:

http://www.bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg180ztgWzm1g10zm2g25zv

According to a program I just listened to on NPR, bitcoins are crashing.

There is nothing tangible about bitcoins. Non were minted, and you can not hold them in your hand, or wear them around your wrist. They are a faith based currency of dubious, speculative value. The 'faith' is that they will convert to any profit at some future time.

Just thought I'd share my experience with bitcoins as btc and I go way back. A friend of mine was mining bitcoins back when they first came out. We were getting them for as low as $15 each. I actually have nothing but good things to say about them, as I managed to sell about 40 of them at $250 each back when they first started going up, which certainly didn't make me rich, but I made a nice little profit off of them. All that aside however, the actual mechanics behind bitcoin are nothing short of genius. They represent the computational work of the mining network towards solving a complex factorization algorithm that actually adjusts itself in difficulty to balance the amount of work being done towards solving it. Whenever a predetermined piece of the algorithm is solved by a mining pool a "block" of coins is generated and dispersed. All transactions and bitcoins are recorded and verifiable on a global blockchain. See here: http:\\blockchain.info (I would highly recommend using this site as a wallet if you plan on getting bitcoins and storing them). I know many people are skeptical of them, but as a person who has conducted literally thousands of transactions with them without a single failure, let me tell you, the system works quite well. I will say though, that, as with anything involving computers, there is a lot of room for user error.

I agree that they may not be the best investment right now due to their volatility, and they are getting a bad rap due to people taking advantage of the anonymous nature of the currency to do shady things. Ultimately they represent a really great idea: an algorithm based self-regulating currency that is also decentralized. For example, there is no risk of a local government printing tons of them and devaluing them.

They are actually very, very, complex but also really interesting. The dissertation written by the japanese programmer who created them can be found here: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf (if you want to know why bitcoins themselves are secure, start with reading section 11 of that paper)

Anyway, sorry to ramble. Just my two cents.

guys. i for one am an advocate of bitcoin. Bitcoin isn't created to be an investment, it's created to transfer funds back and forth and with no chargebacks. It is secure and safe. The best option is to have a wallet that is on your harddrive for the safest and also i would suggest blockchain wallet as well. Just my two cents. the investment for bitcoin is a bonus but the intent is to pay and get paid for dispursements of funds.

the "real" banks will put an end to this...for sure

Nah, the internal corruption and lack of external controls will. Mt. Gox, the worlds largest BC exchange just shut down. This is equivalent to you have money in a bank and that bank just closed down because the manager ran away with most of the cash.

BTC seems to be following the same path as e-gold.

Arahel, your gonna make a few casino's in Vegas panic, as they started accepting BC's. I don't know how a "banker" could run off with the "cash", as when you open an account, you are given a long string of an account number, known only by you, and if you lose that number, it is unrecoverable, so one better get it tattooed to the "family jewels" lol. For a "banker" to run off with the cash, would require the banker to physically have the cash at hand, and there is no "cash" at hand.

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/bitcoin-needs-to-grow-up-if-it-wants-to-surivive-mt--gox-collapse-155746312.html

Bitcoin's future was called into question this week due to the collapse of Mt. Gox, which filed for bankruptcy in Japan on Friday. Once one of the largest exchanges for the virtual currency, Mt. Gox was the victim of either a security flaw or an inside job -- or a combination of both.

Whatever the cause, nearly $500 million worth of bitcoins have disappeared into the virtual ether, leaving clients of Mt. Gox with little or no recourse to recoup their losses. That's because bitcoin, by design, is beyond any government control or regulatory oversight.

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Are they worth the money now???

The closure of MtGox will just open up the opportunity for a legitimate exchange to take its place. I find it funny that the Magic card game ended up being a major exchange for bitcoin. The value for bitcoin has held steady the last couple days. I don't know if it will be bitcoin or not, but some form of digital currency will become a major player.

SANDYHOOKER KY said:

Arahel, your gonna make a few casino's in Vegas panic, as they started accepting BC's. I don't know how a "banker" could run off with the "cash", as when you open an account, you are given a long string of an account number, known only by you, and if you lose that number, it is unrecoverable, so one better get it tattooed to the "family jewels" lol. For a "banker" to run off with the cash, would require the banker to physically have the cash at hand, and there is no "cash" at hand.

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Granted, Mt. Gox was an exchange, but also a depository. They "lost" over 750,000 of their customer's BC's, *and* over 1,000,000 of their own. (think of it as cash on hand for exchange). They have filed for bankruptcy protection with debt listed as over $65M. The folks that had BC's in Mt. Gox have essentially lost their money.

Yes, other trading entities will step up to fill the void. That is only natural. According to Bitcoin Exchange Rate, the current exchange is 1BC = $573.67

The other problem with BC is that hackers are starting to realize the miserably poor security associated with it and have started extensive malware attacks against personal BC storage locations (i.e. YOUR computer). There have been well over 100 new malware attacks identified "in the wild" over the last 6 months that are directly targeted at user's bitcoin storage. There are also attacks out there that compromise a user's machine and have it mine bitcoins and ship them off to the bad guys. Don't get me started on the guy in the UK that threw away his hard drive with about $3M in bitcoins in the digital wallet.

The basis of any currency is trust. Do you trust the entity that controls the currency? Since BC is a decentralized electronic currency, it is going to be hit hard by swings in value based upon FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that the mainstream media will jump upon like sharks to blood in the water. Bitcoin is going through an evolution in the trust model and may very well survive these bumps in the road. It will definitely not be the same going forward.

I don't have a problem with casinos accepting bitcoins. It is a business decision that I hope was based with full knowledge of the volatility of the currency. It would be like a casino taking Rubles or Yen... same thing. The key would be - how long do they hold that currency to pay off the customer? They may accept it - but only pay out in US Dollars to limit their exposure to holding requirements by the Gaming Commission.

Sorry for the long-winded reply...

In my view BC should be avoided in poker because it wll be like double gambling so even if your game is good you may end up in loss due bitcons unstability

Stakes rise for bitcoin backers as hackers attack

All of this occurred electronically as hackers are probing for vulnerabilities, discovering them and going in for the kill.

These events have a number of implications for bitcoin as a technology, a currency and an industry, some of which might seem counterintuitive.

First, seeing the price of bitcoin remain buoyant in the wake of such events, speaks to its resilience. There is still demand for the currency despite the wounds.

Second, these thefts raise the stakes for the largest and most established bitcoin-focused companies. For example, Coinbase, a bitcoin exchange and provider of merchant tools, is backed by elite venture firms including Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. The San Francisco-based company faces greater risk but also greater reward.

Given that Coinbase stores a large amount of bitcoin, hackers stand to gain more if they are able to compromise the site's infrastructure and so they are undoubtedly making all types of attempts to steal from it. In addition, financial backers including Marc Andreessen are publicly praising its relative safety and reliability. So, if Coinbase is compromised, it might well have a much larger negative impact on the currency than we saw with Mt. Gox.

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Another bitcoin exchange bites the dust.

And I just stumbled across this:

Warren Buffet on bitcoin

Suicide or staged assassination?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/06/us-bitcoin-death-idUSBREA250HH20140306

arahel_jazz said:

Suicide or staged assassination?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/06/us-bitcoin-death-idUSBREA250HH20140306

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read this article a couple days ago and i suspected foul play also. but who knows really, even rich people with good jobs commit suicide sometimes but when you add all that coin in there it does get a bit fishy. while i'm no expert on bitcoin i've definitely been interested in it for the past several months buying and selling it for a profit so far. my opinion to people is this. do your research and work your way up in amount if your interested in gettin coin. it has been gaining stability over the past couple months (aside from companies getting themselves hacked because of poor security) but the currency is in it's infancy. it has a long way to go but it also has alot of potential. my celium is a trustworthy wallet App. it's what i use, download it and check it out on your android.

some of the things we can learn from bitcoin:

1) selling is important

2) prices can be rigged up and down, ready for the ride?

3) price is what you pay, value is what you get

4) dividend yields and return on capital employed in relation to price earnings ratio are helpful in stocks

5) good luck

when i was young i put 100% of my money in stocks, in todays dynamic world a little bit of balance helps, dont put all your money into speculative assets, unless your as smart as warren and you know what your doing.

Seems like there are still loads of different views and opinions on this subject. Really need to allocate some time to researching this a bit more.

Need to use bankroll management principles, don't put too much of your bankroll in any one spot, in case that spot collapses.

As some have said in this thread, just best to avoid bitcoin sites. It is hard enough to make money playing poker, but to introduce wild fluctuations in the underlying foundation of your poker account (in this case bitcoins), you not only have to worry about making money playing the game of poker, you have to worry that the market for bitcoin is on the upswing and not on the collapse.

I was all set to invest in a very expensive bitcoin mining machine back in September of 2013 until i found out there was a back order on those machines which would mean I wouldn't get the rig for like four months.

Because of the volatile nature of Bitcoin, I could not take that kind of risk; as each day passes, the difficultly level of finding a bitcoin grows and over a four month period, who knows how difficult it will be to find one not to mention what the market price versus USD would be.

So in the end I look at the whole bitcoin phenomenon as a missed business opportunity. If I had been just a year earlier in my introduction to the coins, I could have made a great deal of money mining them. In fact, just 6 months earlier than september 2013 and I would have still had a shot at making a very handsome profit on my investment.

At the moment, the coins are very speculative but if you can get them really cheap, you may still be able to make a nice profit.

I think BITCOIN may have come a little too early in human history. I do believe, however, that the future of currency is in a concept like the BitCoin. Just think about WHERE our civilization is going and you will easily consider the possibility that we are entering an era of human history where physical currency is becoming obsolete. People use checks and credit cards more often than they use cash these days.

So the future of currency may not be the Bitcoin, per say. But a non-physical commodity similar to the BITCOIN is very likely, in my opinion, to replace the US Dollar as the "World's Currency" in the not too distant future.

i will stay with good old fashion greenbacks especially with the volitilaty of the bitcoin

If you think about it....."greenbacks", when you get right down to it, aren't backed by anything either....they're both capable of being fiat currencies (one currently is) should say a country that has a struggling economy decide to just up and accept bitcoins as their lawful currency.....just food for thought. Remember when the US dollar was actually backed by something?!?!