Selling my silver for bitcoins

[brian0918]

You do realize that Gold has a ton of non monetary uses right? That's a big difference from bitcoins which can be used to buy stuff from a handful of people only.

Yes, but those non-monetary uses are not reasons gold is useful as money. Those reasons have to do with its finiteness, malleability, resistance to corrosion, and other factors.

You are correct that the limit on the supply does provide a type of a "floor", but the value of those coins is still completely arbitrary and therefore the technical floor is still zero

It is incoherent to talk about the "value of things" apart from the people who value them. There is no such thing as "intrinsic value" - only value with respect to individuals. I value X higher than Y, and you value Y higher than X, so we trade X and Y, to mutual benefit. It is not a zero sum game. Bitcoins will be valuable to people with the internet, and be worthless to people without it. Gold as money is valuable to certain people, and worthless to others.

[barrytrot]

You are correct that the limit on the supply does provide a type of a "floor", but the value of those coins is still completely arbitrary and therefore the technical floor is still zero

It is incoherent to talk about the "value of things" apart from the people who value them. There is no such thing as "intrinsic value" - only value with respect to individuals. I value X higher than Y, and you value Y higher than X, so we trade X and Y, to mutual benefit. It is not a zero sum game. Bitcoins will be valuable to people with the internet, and be worthless to people without it. Gold as money is valuable to certain people, and worthless to others.

There is actual "intrinsic value" in a number of things. Food and shelter and water being the most obvious. Quite a few other things including most metals also have intrinsic value as they are used in manufacturing. In other words they will always be desired. Perhaps less so than now, for example if everyone in the United States decided to go on a diet, they would have to discount McDonald's fries

Bitcoins will be valuable to people with the Internet that choose to use them. I.e. 0.1% of the Internet or so.

[brian0918]

It is incoherent to talk about the "value of things" apart from the people who value them. There is no such thing as "intrinsic value" - only value with respect to individuals. I value X higher than Y, and you value Y higher than X, so we trade X and Y, to mutual benefit. It is not a zero sum game. Bitcoins will be valuable to people with the internet, and be worthless to people without it. Gold as money is valuable to certain people, and worthless to others.

There is actual "intrinsic value" in a number of things. Food and shelter and water being the most obvious.

How valuable are food and water on Mars? How valuable were they before there was life on Earth? How valuable would they be without life? Life *gives* things value, because life needs things to maintain its existence. There are indeed certain things that life on Earth requires - water being the common denominator, but even water is not necessarily required for all conceptions of "life" in the universe. There is no value in anything apart from the living things that value it.

In other words they will always be desired.

They will always be desired by someone, maybe, but not necessarily by everyone, and certainly not equally by anyone. That is the point - there is no underlying pre-defined "intrinsic" value apart from the individuals who value it.

Bitcoins will be valuable to people with the Internet that choose to use them. I.e. 0.1% of the Internet or so.

Yes, it is currently used by very few. The same was the case for gold when it was first discovered. However gold's properties made it great to use for money, and so its use caught on and spread. Bitcoins have similar properties, and so may or may not catch on. You may say "but bitcoins are not physical" - but they are dependent on the existence of a physical hard drive, which can be stolen. Likewise for gold: gold money is dependent on the existence of physical gold (as contrasted with the "paper gold" that may pass for gold).

[barrytrot]

I think that the existence of life is generally a starting point for most discussions. Eliminating that definitely shakes up the value system

If you like Bitcoins generate them for free. That is a wonderful proposition! Something for free (although some electricity cost) is better than sliced bread!

Don't buy them other than inter-transaction and hold only a small amount compared to your overall net worth.

[brian0918]

I think that the existence of life is generally a starting point for most discussions. Eliminating that definitely shakes up the value system

Exactly!

If you like Bitcoins generate them for free. That is a wonderful proposition! Something for free (although some electricity cost) is better than sliced bread!

Don't buy them other than inter-transaction and hold only a small amount compared to your overall net worth.

I agree at this point, that it is probably smarter to generate them rather than buy them. When they were extremely cheap, it made much more sense to just buy them. Check out this video on Youtube from a bitcoin miner (part 1, 2). He bought $20,000 worth in January, and could now sell them for $420,000.

[brian0918]

Bitcoin prices shot up about 30% today, to $24 each. It's up almost 150% just in the last week.

[Neckro]

that just validated my 400 Bitcoin hoard. LOL

[John_doe]

that just validated my 400 Bitcoin hoard. LOL

digital hoard.

[psi]

So, for anyone "mining" these things, what hardware are you running? Thinking of buying a $100 video card (Radeon 5830) and seeing if it will pay for itself. Based on http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php it looks like it would take under 2 weeks including tax but not power. The idle power draw of my computer is pretty low already. I figure the worst case is that I bought a toy I didn't really need, for a price that's not especially high.

[Kurr]

I have a radeo 9600 somewhere, how do find the hash rate?

[psi]

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison has quite a few cards but I don't see the 9600, some 9800 cards on there though. What I discovered was that with pooled mining you can get kicked off for not having high enough efficiency, which can happen from having a card that's not fast enough apparently. My onboard video was doing around 10 Mhash/sec and I got temp banned for low efficiency. The card I want to get is supposed to do 244 Mhash/sec.

[brian0918]

There's a better calculator here that factors in power, cost of hardware, etc:

http://bitcoinx.com/profit/

Right now I am just using the card that I already own, 8800GT, which with some overclocking gets about 31 Mhash/s. I recently bought a Radeon 5870 on ebay that should get at least ten times that, and with some overclocking could get up to 400+ Mhash/s. It should make about 17 BTC per month at the current difficulty level (I'm in a pool), which is $500 at the current exchange rate. If that works out, I'll get another Radeon 5870 and make twice the amount.

[psi]

Are some pools better if you don't have a lot of GPU power?

[brian0918]

I'm not sure, I've only been involved in this for a little while now. Each pool is different though, so some may allow smaller users.

[Neckro]

Some pools require you to have a certain share ratio before they ban you for being a leach. The larger faster ones tend to do that, but your payout is roughly the same if you do a fast pool, or a slower pool.

[psi]

Decided to take the plunge and get the 5830. The Sapphire version was cheaper and the Sapphire motherboard I already have have seems to work well and consumes little power. Hopefully the video card is not too much for the power supply though, will see in a minute.

[Neckro]

What is the PSU? For 1 GPU should be roughly 600 to be safe.

[psi]

It's just a generic/stock PSU that came with the case so I may be taking a risk, aside from the GPU though the rest of the computer only uses 40 watts as measured by a kiil-a-watt style meter. The hardware guide claims 179 watts for the 5830 at 800 MHz which is the one I got. Computer is up and running with the new card but I haven't tried running the miner with it yet, idle is about 65 watts.

[psi]

Got it running now with phoenix miner on bitcoinpool as they suggested there, getting about 210 Mhash rather that the predicted 244 so there's probably room for improvement by changing settings. Total power consumption is right around 200 watts.

[Treetop]

Got it running now with phoenix miner on bitcoinpool as they suggested there, getting about 210 Mhash rather that the predicted 244 so there's probably room for improvement by changing settings. Total power consumption is right around 200 watts.

how many bitcoins will you be mining like this? Im not technie enough to get any of this, but still curious.

[psi]

One of the calculators above predicts 2.59 coins per week at 200 Mhash/sec and the current difficulty. The difficulty increases over time though and apparently you get less with a given setup as that happens.

[psi]

Managed to get 290-300 MHash by overclocking and using settings from the hardware guide. Apparently a lot of Radeon 5XXX cards are getting very difficult to find, just over the last few days pretty much. After reading some threads on that on the bitcoin forums I checked the site of the store I went to and they now have 2 Sapphire 5830 cards left across the whole chain of 22 stores, and the Asus version is completely sold out. Going by what people say on the forums the same thing is happening everywhere.