Topic: Why aren't more people buying bitcoins? - page 3. (Read 6709 times)

It could still be decentralized, even if it's run by google, just pegged against their services.
Or do you mean decentralized development? Project management?

no one is buying cause btc are finished as a speculative investment... its in its death throws

Decentralization?
If it were run by one company then it would by definition not be decentralized.

Of course, Google can just take the Bitcoin source, strap their name and logo onto it and release it as Googlecoin on github, but what would be the point of that?

Ok, what's the quality that googlecoin can't have that bitcoin has today?

There is a large amount of bitcoin volume not associated with MtGox/TH/etc trade traffic, but how much of that is from mining pools doling out rewards and people moving coins between PCs they own?  Does anyone have reliable statistics on what proportion of transfers are used to buy goods or services?

Bitcoin seems to be sustaining itself right now without invested capital. If you look at the hourly and 24h "sent" volumes, people ARE using it. The issue of value (specifically on the exchanges) is actually around people putting more capital in the market.

No one company could ever run a cryptocurrency that would have the same qualities as Bitcoin.  That would defeat the purpose.

You want to know why I don't buy bitcoins?

I have zero interest in rewarding miners or early adopters. If I mine myself I get a few coins and the house gets a bit warmer. If bitcoin takes off I'll make some money, perhaps, and if it doesn't then no harm done. Buying is just rewarding the early adopters, and I don't think they deserve that reward. If the early adopters wants bitcoin to take off then they should start buying stuff, anything, with it. Preferably from stores that doesn't immediately exchange btc to dollars but instead buys something else with btc.
People with thousands, or tens of thousands of btc needs to make sure there's an economy here, or btc will continue down the drain and fade into history as a nice experiment.

Then googlecoin will show up with the same properties but guaranteed to be able to buy google services and you'll have a working cryptocurrency.  I think it's make or break time for bitcoin around now, and break looks more likely.
IMHO.

Edit: Reworded for clarity.

It is very difficult for most people to acquire bitcoins. Using exchanges is very slow. Even if average joes manage to get bitcoins, security is difficult for them for things like backups and lack of encrypted wallets. What it will take is well developed smartphone and pc clients that allow geeks to sell bitcoins to the masses safely and securely. I still don't trust the exchanges, I prefer a decentralized approach, but the bitcoin smartphone apps are still too primitive to be very useful. I'm glad to see vendor tools being developed, but they won't be much good until there are people with bitcoins out there to use them.

Right, once one adds in the cost of air conditioning by itself, then even where I'm at in the U.S., at $0.13 per kWh, it's pretty close to breaking even. I've turned my rig off until it get's cold enough outside to need heating. I may decide to buy coins as it dips, but that's it for me in terms of mining until the profitability goes up again.  I guess one could argue that I could still continue to mine, sort of like dollar cost averaging the dip, but at this point, I'd rather see some positive momentum before I go any further.

Silk road will never catch on because college students already have a place where it is extremely easy and safe to buy drugs, it's called college.

The mining forums have extensive discussions of this. The consensus seems to be that running already-purchased GPU-based mining rigs is still profitable, but it's no longer profitable to buy more hardware. Most of the calculations assume that floor space and operator time have zero value, and that air conditioning has zero cost. No way would data center sized mining operations pay.

Regardless of the level of mining activity, about 7200 new Bitcoins are created every day. The difficulty of mining self-adjusts to maintain that number. So it's inherent in the system that, from now on, mining is just barely profitable.

It's fallen below $8



Freefall inevitable!

I think more people should move over to the GLBSE and trade there.  I think its gonna be huge, but there is just a small percentage of the bitcoin community that even knows about it or understands what it is.   Trading shares of companies is much more fun than watching the price of bitcoin I think.

There... this. It is simple greed that lets people equate these two, when really they are more like opposites.

Calculations please.  Include hardware costs, electricity, cooling, etc.  That "ton" of cash existed when bitcoins were worth in the mid teens.  That was a very long time ago in Internet time terms.


You may just get your wish.  That would mean bitcoins are almost 90% off their highs.  Try finding another investment 90% off and recommending it as a hot buy.

I (almost) never convert BTC to USD, whether I mine or buy. I have the habit of spending them.

More to the point, I think there are a lot of potential buyers out there, waiting to see where Bitcoin phenomenon will move. We experienced a lot of bad events last few months, but the price hasn't decisively reflected the outcomes and there is no absolute sign otherwise that the structure surrounding Bitcoin got over these issues. I'm confident that new enterprises are a lot sounder than the old ones but we need a more organic structure that will hold even though one node collapses. I'm talking about things like MtGox acquiring Bitomat. If we could have also saved MyBitcoin that way, it would be a great indicator of strength.

Alternative Bitcoin forks are also a question; will they be able to compete with Bitcoin without introducing new functionality? If an incarnation like IxCoin can survive for instance, it will really be a bad indicator in people's minds about Bitcoin being a sound idea (i.e. if anyone can come and print currency that can compete with Bitcoin, it's not really like gold, is it?). I'm not talking about all possible alternative crypto-currencies though, if it has different functions that creates value of its own, then why not? So I'm pretty sure at least some people are waiting to see how this situation will turn out as well.

Why would anyone want gold?

The point of mining is to get dollars, not gold.

your dollars will be taxed either through inflation or income taxes, bitcoins cannot be taxed and eventually they will only increase in value in the long term. when people catch on to this and start using and accepting bitcoin for goods and service , recieving full value and not being raped by the feds, they won't be changed for fiat money much at all.

Now you know that is not true for everyone who is mining. I pretty much figure when I am almost done mining
I will stash away 100+ BTC for the long term. Just hold it for a couple of years to see what happens.