Buying bitcoins

AtomicHorror

Agent Smith wrote: »

Whats the minimum amount of Bitcoins someone can buy. Like, Can somone buy one bitcoin?

One bitcoin currently costs close to €300 :P, so it wouldn't want to be the minimum.

Whilst the minimum unit of BTC right now is 1 satoshi, I think the exchanges have their own minimum transactions and most private sellers have too. Depends on the exchange or seller!

zpehtsfd

pH wrote: »

If you honestly believe that your bank has a little box with your name on it and a pile of your cash in it then words fail me.

Stop twisting my words. You know full well what i'm talking about. My cash is in my bank and i can take it out TODAY if i want in CASH. If someone else hacks into my account and takes it then i have FULL RECOURSE.

It's called "theft" there are many ways to relieve someone of their cash, through force, stealth or trickery - the point remains when someone relives you of your €20 note you have absolutely no recourse to go to a central authority and demand they replace that note - bitcoins are exactly the same and in that way are far more like cash than they are like bank accounts.

$20? :rolleyes: I'm talking about $5m so far in stolen Bitcoins with ZERO RECOURSE.

You think it's surprising that those of us who think that bitcoin has a bright future might actually have some of them?

Nothing surprises me about you or the other poster as you both share the typical traits of people with a vested interest in a highly speculative "investment". The price of Bitcoins are determined by supply/demand so keep TALKING IT UP lads.

hullaballoo

Moderator: can we please keep things civil?

AtomicHorror

zpehtsfd wrote: »

Stop twisting my words. You know full well what i'm talking about. My cash is in my bank and i can take it out TODAY if i want in CASH. If someone else hacks into my account and takes it then i have FULL RECOURSE.

Yes, but pH clearly meant cash as in banknotes or coins. They're called bitcoins after all. They're designed to be a digital analogue to banknotes and coins and so they have the same key weakness of banknotes and coins- if someone steals them there is no third party you can appeal to for a reversal. In both cases your only option is to try and identify the thief yourself. Unlikely to go well for banknotes or bitcoins.

It's perfectly possible that bitcoin banks and credit services could be created to allow the same security and comeback as conventional bank accounts, but naturally that's going to come at a cost since it means someone else is taking on your risk and covering your loss in the event of theft or fraud.

scamalert

Happens every day- mugging, pickpocketing, burglary.-it does,but if you lose your wallet,credit cards can be be blocked in minutes,no one carries cash in bulk these days like lets say 2000 in a wallet on a night out :rolleyes: id can be recovered and changed.

On the other topic to start mining BTC you need only 5 min to set up on regular pc and join gtc guild pool.to get wallet its like 7gbs of info that needs downloaded takes forever,or you can use one of simpler wallets.Since ive tried it ive made like 0.00003000 btc in about 3-5h mining,only thing is minimum payout is 0.1 btc on GTC guild. was using 560ti twin frozr,and basically once gpuminer is running pc is useless besides, some browsing or listening to music.and looking at reward running 600-800w psu,one would make more money picking up 10c on the street every day,or into a jar at such pace and bills hardware included.

Only thing i haven't found out is,once you have wallet,and you store it in your pc-if hard drive goes bust if coins are lost.Is only thing needed to have access to them is the 128bit password,that some sites offer to print on paper ?-also can all btc be printed onto paper then coded back in and used with password ?
if its only that password needed and some BTC server has info then its not bad,but if only solution is to have file secured and hope that your hard drive wont go corrupt,or usb key gets lost its quite a $hity alternative.

alb

scamalert wrote: »

Happens every day- mugging, pickpocketing, burglary.-it does,but if you lose your wallet,credit cards can be be blocked in minutes,no one carries cash in bulk these days like lets say 2000 in a wallet on a night out :rolleyes: id can be recovered and changed.

Two assumptions here which might be true for most people, but absolutely are not always true:
1) That people keep any significant wealth they have in the bank, and not in physical cash/gold. There are people that don't trust banks, there are people (often laundering money or working for cash in hand) that don't want a paper trail for their money. There are people that don't trust government fiat money at all and keep precious metals such as gold, maybe in a safe, maybe buried in the ground.

2) That you are always safe if it's in a bank, and that the bank will never close or freeze funds.... ask anyone in Cyprus about that? Many predict that the next bail outs will be bail ins, where the depositors take a haircut.

scamalert wrote: »

On the other topic to start mining BTC you need only 5 min to set up on regular pc and join gtc guild pool.to get wallet its like 7gbs of info that needs downloaded takes forever,or you can use one of simpler wallets.Since ive tried it ive made like 0.00003000 btc in about 3-5h mining,only thing is minimum payout is 0.1 btc on GTC guild. was using 560ti twin frozr,and basically once gpuminer is running pc is useless besides, some browsing or listening to music.and looking at reward running 600-800w psu,one would make more money picking up 10c on the street every day,or into a jar at such pace and bills hardware included.

Yes once you could mine with a regular PC, just like early guys to the goldrush could get their pickaxe and maybe find a nugget, but those days are over. You need dedicated mining hardware to mine Bitcoin and the profits are sketchy even then.

Just like a gold coin collector does not need to mine gold in order to store their wealth in gold, trade it or use it as money, you do not need to mine Bitcoin to store wealth in it, trade it or use it as money.

scamalert wrote: »

Only thing i haven't found out is,once you have wallet,and you store it in your pc-if hard drive goes bust if coins are lost.Is only thing needed to have access to them is the 128bit password,that some sites offer to print on paper ?-also can all btc be printed onto paper then coded back in and used with password ?
if its only that password needed and some BTC server has info then its not bad,but if only solution is to have file secured and hope that your hard drive wont go corrupt,or usb key gets lost its quite a $hity alternative.

Great question. I have to explain what a wallet is first. It's a collection of one or more bitcoin addresses. Each address has a public key (the part you give people so they can send you money) and a private key (the part you need if you want to send coins OUT from an address). Whoever has the private key for an address can send the coins, so the key effectively IS the coins, this is all you need to backup.

You can optionally put a password on your wallet, which effectively encrypts the private key file on your system, so that even if someone stole the file containing the key they couldn't read it.

Private keys can be stored in files on your harddisk and backed up as many places as you like, even on paper, which is arguably ones of the safest ways to store bitcoin - it's called a paper wallet. But like cash in your wallet or gold buried in your back garden - you have no comeback if you screw up. If you lose the private key, the coins in the address it belongs to can never be spent again. If someone steals the private key, they can transfer your coins to some other address, and no one can undo it.

Like with cash, you can be your own bank and take full responsiblity, or you can trust a third party to hold your money (like an online wallet service for bitcoin or bullionvault.com for gold). Neither is 100% risk free and it's a choice everyone needs to make whether it's cash, bitcoin, gold... etc. A combination of both is usually the handiest.

The balance of every Bitcoin address is stored on ALL the bitcoin nodes in the network. When your wallet downloaded 7gbs it was downloading every single transaction that every happened in bitcoin. These are public and these keep track of how many coins are at each address.

Also there are new wallet apps now, such as the one for Android or Multibit that don't require downloading the full transaction history, so you can avoid the multi gigabyte download if you need to.

AtomicHorror

scamalert wrote: »

Happens every day- mugging, pickpocketing, burglary.-it does,but if you lose your wallet,credit cards can be be blocked in minutes,no one carries cash in bulk these days like lets say 2000 in a wallet on a night out :rolleyes: id can be recovered and changed.

Yes and people need to think about bitcoins in a similar way to the cash in their wallet and not their cards or any other form of money they're used to. So just as it's unwise to put 2000 euro in a leather wallet, storing 10BTC in an online wallet is also unwise. The question is whether the risks associated with a given kind of money are justified by the benefits- which I guess is something we each have to weigh ourselves.

srsly78

ald you could have explained it with a lot less effort to the luddites...

Yes you literally can print bitcoins out onto paper, then stuff them into your mattress for safekeeping. The thing is to use the coins you would have to type the cryptographic signature in again, which would be really annoying.

So instead of paper, you would copy the bitcoins onto a usb stick - then stuff that into your mattress. In case your house burned down you might also keep a second copy and hang this around your neck or whatever.

WrigleysExtra

Why didnt I know about this a year ago

fergalr

WrigleysExtra wrote: »

Why didnt I know about this a year ago

A year ago, when fewer people knew about it, its success seemed correspondingly less likely.

pH

WrigleysExtra wrote: »

Why didnt I know about this a year ago

A year ago - they've doubled in the last week! When I posted here on the 12th my 9.5 bitcoins were worth 2,716 - today they're worth 5,396.

I think it's clear bitcoin is in a huge bubble at the moment and a correction is likely - the question as always comes down to whether the rational voice telling you "now would be a good time to get out" can overcome the less rational one saying "just a little bit more ...." in your other ear.

srsly78

Well many of us were having this same conversation last year. It was "obviously" a bubble back then as well.

Prodgey

pH wrote: »

A year ago - they've doubled in the last week! When I posted here on the 12th my 9.5 bitcoins were worth 2,716 - today they're worth 5,396.

I think it's clear bitcoin is in a huge bubble at the moment and a correction is likely - the question as always comes down to whether the rational voice telling you "now would be a good time to get out" can overcome the less rational one saying "just a little bit more ...." in your other ear.

You gonna sell?

Prodgey

Is it worth buying one now to hope for maybe €50 quid turnover in a week or two?

Where do you all buy litecoin?

Thanks

Zascar

scamalert wrote: »

buying now is total waste of money,btc reached new highs,its matter of time before downturn occurs.

People here were saying that at €70 early this year, now look where it is...

pH

Zascar wrote: »

People here were saying that at €70 early this year, now look where it is...

Yep - My €500 "investment" is now worth €7,500 - all in about 7 months -

Probably about time to get out I imagine!

Breaking $1,000 is top 10 news on the beeb also
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25120731

Zascar

pH wrote: »

Yep - My €500 "investment" is now worth €7,500 - all in about 7 months -

Probably about time to get out I imagine!

Fair feckin play to you! There are a bunch of people reading this I'm sure that had been slating bitcoin investors all those months ago and are now gutted they did not have a punt...

AtomicHorror

pH wrote: »

Yep - My €500 "investment" is now worth €7,500 - all in about 7 months -

Probably about time to get out I imagine!

Breaking $1,000 is top 10 news on the beeb also
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25120731

It's a risk either way- your investment could raise to €75,000 or even €750,000. Or it might be worth €7.50 this time next week. Personally, I'd hold, but I got my BTC as a gift!

OriginV

Where exactly can you get your euros exchanged for bitcoin?

srsly78

At one of the various exchanges, the biggest one being www.mtgox.com

Zascar

What I would do, or what I would have liked to have done is invest a small amount - and if it doubles, take the original investment out and then see what happens with the rest. People may scream that it is a bibble, and it may be, but at least this way you've got your original risk covered - anything else is gravy. It may seem sky high at $1,000 but people said that when it was $50.

Mint Aero

pH wrote: »

Yep - My €500 "investment" is now worth €7,500 - all in about 7 months -

Probably about time to get out I imagine!

Breaking $1,000 is top 10 news on the beeb also
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25120731

Well done. I'd get my investment and then some out but $1000 for a bitcoin isn't absurdly high. I see it going to 10k, 100k and beyond.

AugustusMinimus

Can someone explain the various price differences between exchanges ?

MtGox seems to be $50 higher than any other exchange at any given time. Isn't there an arbitrage killing to be made here ?

murrayp4

Anyone know what's the tax liability on bitcoin gains?

jamo2oo9

murrayp4 wrote: »

Anyone know what's the tax liability on bitcoin gains?

I'd doubt there would be any.

srsly78

It's treated the same as other gains made via foreign exchange from my limited research.

So capital gains tax?

srsly78

AugustusMinimus wrote: »

Can someone explain the various price differences between exchanges ?

MtGox seems to be $50 higher than any other exchange at any given time. Isn't there an arbitrage killing to be made here ?

In theory yes, in reality no because it takes so long to take your money out of mtgox. I've been waiting over a month now. The mtgox website says it may take "several months"...

AugustusMinimus

The gain will be chargeable for CGT at 33%.

The first €1,270 gain can be ignored every year. Commissions to buy the bitcoins and commissions on the sale of the bitcoins are allowable expenses against CGT.

AugustusMinimus

srsly78 wrote: »

In theory yes, in reality no because it takes so long to take your money out of mtgox. I've been waiting over a month now. The mtgox website says it may take "several months"...

Talking of which. Which is the fastest exchange to getting bitcoins cashed ? The difficulty in cashing bitcoins could be part of the reason why the price continues to rise.

wandatowell

Is it not a worry that it takes so long to get your money out of mtgox?