The average person can never own a single Bitcoin

BurtW

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Quote from: Ulysses1994XF04 on December 05, 2013, 01:24:31 AM

I see. Why is mining becoming more difficult and less profitable?

Why are huge, commercial-like facilities needed for mining when it used to be possible to do it on a laptop?

By design the Bitcoin protocol adjusts how difficult it is to find the next block so that one block is found about every ten minutes.

This means that if only a few people/machines are looking for the next block, like in the old days, then the difficulty is very low.

But when more and more people/machines are trying to find the next block then the protocol raises the difficulty so that even with all these machines trying to find the next block it still takes about 10 minutes to find it.

Right now, worldwide, there are about 6,278,525,000,000,000 attempts to find the next block per second.

Hence it has to be very, very difficult to do in order to assure that it takes on average 10 minutes to find it.

BTW you can see some very intereresting graphs showing all about the current difficulty setting, the next difficulty setting and difficulty history here:

http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Ulysses1994XF04

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Quote from: BurtW on December 04, 2013, 04:50:22 PM

Quote from: Ulysses1994XF04 on December 04, 2013, 04:45:30 PM

I'm still trying to understand this concept about "Blocks" and "Blockchains."

Are Blocks just digital records of transactions that need to be processed before they get approved and the Bitcoin changes hands? Is Mining lending your computer power to process these Blocks?

Pretty much, give or take a lot of technical detail.

I see. Why is mining becoming more difficult and less profitable?

Why are huge, commercial-like facilities needed for mining when it used to be possible to do it on a laptop?

Ulysses1994XF04

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Quote from: hilariousandco on December 04, 2013, 04:47:41 PM

Quote from: Ulysses1994XF04 on December 04, 2013, 04:36:10 PM

Quote from: hilariousandco on December 04, 2013, 04:32:06 PM

1 million dollars is out of reach for the average person.

Best buy these whole Bitcoins while you can.

Correct 1 MILLION dollars is out of reach, but the DOLLAR itself is not.

Yeah, but it doesn't matter. Why would you have to own a whole dollar if a single cent became worth $10,000? You're hung up on the concept of comparing it directly to fiat and that people need to hold a whole bitcoin. Just think of 1BTC being equal to 1 million etc.

Until I can pay for food, gas and rent in Bitcoin (or milliBitcoin/mBTC as others here have suggested) then it will ALWAYS be translated into USD in my head; I'm sorry but that's the reality for me and that's going to be the reality for most people until it becomes a widely accepted alternative currency.

uininPeter

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Quote from: BurtW on December 04, 2013, 06:40:17 PM

Quote from: uininPeter on December 04, 2013, 06:32:11 PM

Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on December 04, 2013, 06:09:21 PM

Nobody will every buy gold, because 1 ton of gold is out of reach for 99% of the people on the planet. BTW at last spot 1 ton of gold is worth $36,000,000 or 35,000 BTC.

Hey, I cannot afford to buy even 1 kg of gold, and kg is basic MKS SI (as opposed to CGS) unit of mass ~~weight~~ Newton being the unit of weight/force. In fact I have 0.01 kg of gold, some call it 10 grams of gold Wink

FIFY

Nice, thank you for corrections Wink

BurtW

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Quote from: uininPeter on December 04, 2013, 06:32:11 PM

Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on December 04, 2013, 06:09:21 PM

Nobody will every buy gold, because 1 ton of gold is out of reach for 99% of the people on the planet. BTW at last spot 1 ton of gold is worth $36,000,000 or 35,000 BTC.

Hey, I cannot afford to buy even 1 kg of gold, and kg is basic MKS SI (as opposed to CGS) unit of mass ~~weight~~ Newton being the unit of weight/force. In fact I have 0.01 kg of gold, some call it 10 grams of gold Wink

FIFY

zimmah

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Quote from: Hu4F00d on December 04, 2013, 04:25:34 PM

This is starting te be noticed more and more as the price of bitcoin rises and diferent units like milibitcoins (0,001) or unibitcoins (0,000001) are gaining popularity.

unibitcoins are microbitcoins (µBTC) (AltGr+M) the µ is the greek letter mu, and it's used because 'm' is already used for milli.

Quote from: Ulysses1994XF04 on December 04, 2013, 04:36:10 PM

Quote from: hilariousandco on December 04, 2013, 04:32:06 PM

1 million dollars is out of reach for the average person.

Best buy these whole Bitcoins while you can.

Correct 1 MILLION dollars is out of reach, but the DOLLAR itself is not.

Correction 1 WHOLE BTC is out of reach, but the satoshi itself is not. (unless you mean satoshi nakamoto, he's to the moon)

Quote from: BurtW on December 04, 2013, 04:37:46 PM

The current price on Mt. Gox is only $1.23 per mBTC, surely just about anyone can afford that

wait, mt. gox switched to mBTC?

uininPeter

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Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on December 04, 2013, 06:09:21 PM

Nobody will every buy gold, because 1 ton of gold is out of reach for 99% of the people on the planet. BTW at last spot 1 ton of gold is worth $36,000,000 or 35,000 BTC.

Hey, I cannot afford to buy even 1 kg of gold, and kg is basic SI unit of weight. In fact I have 0.01 kg of gold, some call it 10 gram of gold Wink

zimmah

legendary

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mining creates some (currently 25) freshly generated bitcoins every 10 minutes until a certain limit is reached. Than the amount of bitcoins as a reward goes down.

on top of those fresh bitcoins, they'll also recieve all of the transaction fees of the transactions that were made in those 10 minutes and were processed by the miner.

JuanHungLo

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I don't always drink...

Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on December 04, 2013, 06:09:21 PM

Nobody will every buy gold, because 1 ton of gold is out of reach for 99% of the people on the planet. BTW at last spot 1 ton of gold is worth $36,000,000 or 35,000 BTC.

+1

DeathAndTaxes

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Gerald Davis

Nobody will ever buy gold, because 1 ton of gold is out of reach for 99% of the people on the planet. BTW at last spot 1 ton of gold is worth $36,000,000 or 35,000 BTC.

cryptonic

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This is a good place to start learning about the blockchain concept and Bitcoin in general: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/

BurtW

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Quote from: Ulysses1994XF04 on December 04, 2013, 04:45:30 PM

I'm still trying to understand this concept about "Blocks" and "Blockchains."

Are Blocks just digital records of transactions that need to be processed before they get approved and the Bitcoin changes hands? Is Mining lending your computer power to process these Blocks?

Pretty much, give or take a lot of technical detail.

BurtW

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All paid signature campaigns should be banned.

BTW you can see how many BTC out of the 21 million have been mined so far (12,076,925) and a lot of other information about Bitcion here:

http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/

Sheldor333

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This is what I tell people. We have our whole lives worked with whole number or something very close to that. It is abstract for most people when you tell them 0.0001 or 0.0000001. Yes people say Satoshi, but then if it doesn't change to that soon it will be a problem, because you can't all of sudden say hey it a Satoshi now, a lot of people would be confused, I bet some would even say no I don't want a Satoshi I want a Bitcoin. That is why I think they should have made more, just to make it easier psychologically for people. After all it's price is only based on psychology of people.

hilariousandco

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Quote from: Ulysses1994XF04 on December 04, 2013, 04:36:10 PM

Quote from: hilariousandco on December 04, 2013, 04:32:06 PM

1 million dollars is out of reach for the average person.

Best buy these whole Bitcoins while you can.

Correct 1 MILLION dollars is out of reach, but the DOLLAR itself is not.

Yeah, but it doesn't matter. Why would you have to own a whole dollar if a single cent became worth $10,000? You're hung up on the concept of comparing it directly to fiat and that people need to hold a whole bitcoin. Just think of 1BTC being equal to 1 million etc.

Ulysses1994XF04

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Quote from: tubbyjr on December 04, 2013, 04:28:56 PM

Coins are still being mined, although the block reward keeps decreasing, miners also get transaction fees, so the more transactions with fees there are per block, the more bitcoins have mined/changed hands. At some point, the miners will only be mining for tx fess, however, by the time that comes, they could well be earning more mining tx fess than the block rewards today.

I'm still trying to understand this concept about "Blocks" and "Blockchains."

Are Blocks just digital records of transactions that need to be processed before they get approved and the Bitcoin changes hands? Is Mining lending your computer power to process these Blocks?

BurtW

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All paid signature campaigns should be banned.

Quote from: Hu4F00d on December 04, 2013, 04:25:34 PM

This is starting te be noticed more and more as the price of bitcoin rises and diferent units like milibitcoins (0,001) or unibitcoins (0,000001) are gaining popularity.

Where did you get that term? Most people call it a microbitcoin (using SI units, symbol uBTC). Never heard of a unibitcoin before

PenAndPaper

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Quote from: Ulysses1994XF04 on December 04, 2013, 04:21:51 PM

I think this fact would potentially diminish the appeal and value of the Bitcoin for many people, as no one wants to own ten millionths of something. It's easy for someone to understand $1.25 or $120 or $565,900, but 0.004983 BTC is something else. People tend to struggle with small numbers; it takes a lot of mental energy for the average, not-mathematically-inclined person to count the number of decimal places after the decimal point and figure out "how many thousandths/millionths is this, etc?" Then converting that to dollars is another layer of mathematical effort.

That's why many people suggest that we should start referring to millibitcoins. So 1 mbit = 1 $. Easy to understand and nothing substansial changes.

BurtW

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All paid signature campaigns should be banned.

Here is a handy table for those that need it.

Code:

        BTC     milli BTC      micro BTC      Satoshis
----------   -----------   ------------   -----------
1.00000000   1,000.00000   1,000,000.00   100,000,000
0.10000000     100.00000     100,000.00    10,000,000
0.01000000      10.00000      10,000.00     1,000,000
0.00100000       1.00000       1,000.00       100,000
0.00010000       0.10000         100.00        10,000
0.00001000       0.01000          10.00         1,000
0.00000100       0.00100           1.00           100
0.00000010       0.00010           0.10            10
0.00000001       0.00001           0.01             1

The current price on Mt. Gox is only $1.23 per mBTC, surely just about anyone can afford that

Ulysses1994XF04

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Quote from: hilariousandco on December 04, 2013, 04:32:06 PM

1 million dollars is out of reach for the average person.

Best buy these whole Bitcoins while you can.

Correct 1 MILLION dollars is out of reach, but the DOLLAR itself is not.

Topic: The average person can never own a single Bitcoin (Read 1373 times)