If you want to mine you need

@keerock: I can guarantee its 100 times more secure than you balance at your local bank.

@Duffin: And why does currency need to be government backed?

A friend and i are building a rep rap and we intend to accept bitcoins as payment for printed items.

@Camwow13: You just need a powerful graphics card to do the math otherwise you have no chance in hell of getting anything.

@hobo_on_the_can: The bitcoin deflationary spiral is supposed to end at some point, once they level off they should not inflate or deflate but remain at a constant value. Its kind of the point of bitcoins.

Ah, there are only 2.1 millon bitcoins in existence now, and there is a lot of discussion as to what needs to be done to the text file as that number goes up. Right now it will start dumping old data when it hits a certain threshold (less than 100mb) its really only made to keep track of the last transaction every…

@XerxesQados: you can mine on a home computer you just need to know how to get your graphics card to do it. Then again not everyone has a super gaming rig like me, so its not piratical for everyone.

@AgentRockstar: Mining is just temporary, just as long as it takes to find all the solutions to the bitcoin equation, once they are all found mining is done.

@mikethrane01: @AgentRockstar: Use a gpu, thats how you make money.

@Zechs: i disagree, lets allow reality to decide if it can work.

@senile groucho marx: The point of the mining is to distribute the currency, its temporary and done only because the formula is very complex and requires a lot of power to solve. They are not paying you, no one has the money until you find the solution and get the bitcoins. Its not transfered from some central…

@River: The reason not to back the euro or the dollar is because they are controlled by a government that deflates their value. Money is supposed to represent work done, if a person saved $1000 in a bank 50 years a go it would be worth $7278.07 in todays dollars. And $1000 in todays dollars is worth $137.40 in 1960's…

@vel0city: I make $8 a day using a hd 5770 (far and away not the best card) you make 1.56 bitcoins a day and each bitcoin is worth $7.50. Now this is with a measly 200mega hashes, you can build a rig (with two $350 cards) that can do 1.4 giga hashes and would make 7 bitcoins a day or $56.

@jiznerdo: If merchants stopped accepting the dollar it would be valueless as well, whats your point there?

@el_vato: every time you use a credit card or debit card the person accepting the payment has to connect to the internet and tell the bank "user x is removing $8 from their account" and the bank changes their records (thats for debit for i know credit works by adding to a balance) the bank's record of your account is…

@Worf: Furthermore, bitcoin is supposed to eventually reach its final value, at which the currency will neither inflate or deflate, the prices of individual goods may change but the currency as a whole will remain at similar value, of course the exchange rate with other currencies may change but that is because the…

yup, every computer running bitcoin has a .txt file of every transaction, its just public keys so you cant know who a transaction was from or to without knowing their public key (and users can have more than one public key, infact you can make as many as you want and you never have to reuse one), thus maintaining…

@Clint Coady: every time you use a credit card or debit card the person accepting the payment has to connect to the internet and tell the bank "user x is removing $8 from their account" and the bank changes their records (thats for debit for i know credit works by adding to a balance) the bank's record of your…

@mrjeremiahross: The difference between Microsoft points and bitcoin is that Microsoft makes those points, they could give anyone as many as they wanted, thats why they have no value except to Microsoft. There will be 21 million bitcoins and you cant just make more, hence there is actual scarcity (even more so than…