Slightly SEB but the older threads discuss mining which is now impractical for the man in the street. Anyone had a dabble? Had a dip last week, now on the up again. Fun fact, if you'd invested £1,000 this time last year you'd now have £10,000.
It’s just a currency. But without a central bank printing money. Anything can be a currency. We could create an SMB currency, I dunno parsnips, as long as we agreed to accept from one another. “Does anyone know a plumber?” “Aye mate, I’ll fix your blocked toilet for 17 parsnips”
bought £400 worth about a month ago. Up to £470 already. Been watching it for a lot longer than that. Wish I'd bought sooner. Probably a bubble but worth a punt if it's not. Mining (computers doing calculations) used to be cost effective for people with powerful computers but since they've drastically improved the quality of processors (graphics cards were found to be even better at it) the efficiency of a home PC would mean you'd be paying more in electricity than you were mining. Therefore large companies with access to renewable or cheap energy sources do it nowadays.
Basically, there's no central server dealing with all the transactions using Bitcoin, it's all done by the community on their own computers. This process is called "mining". Every time your computer computes a transaction before anyone else can, you earn a tiny fraction of a Bitcoin as payment. Managing to do this many times will earn you a lot of Bitcoins but obviously you have to have a stupidly fast system to achieve this. Home computer systems don't come close. These computations can actually be done by a top end graphics card, somewhat bizarrely, because top end graphics cards do all sorts of weird and wonderful types of computation as standard within the hardware that a normal PC CPU would have to use software to emulate and will not be anywhere near as fast. As such, there are ways of networking together banks of hundreds of Playstations to do the mining, and the performance will blow any PC-based mining system out of the water. Basically if you want to do mining nowadays, you'll need to pump in hundreds of thousands of pounds into your mining operation, but then you'll make a fortune back in return.
Remember the man who bought a pizza with 10,000 Bitcoin? He would have has $20,000,000 now. One of the easiest, most convenient ways is signing up for an account with Coinbase. Withdrawals are handled by IBAN, so make sure your bank account has that option (Should do like)
as said above mining bitcoin has got to the point where the payback is less than the energy consumption, so it is not worth it. There are however plenty other currencies that you can mine for a profit. Ethereum being one. That's what I currently mine with a GTX 1070 and 3x GTX1060s, not the fastest solution by any means, and considering a GTX1070 and one of the 1060s is in my home so that stops mining when i use the pc in the house, and the other two 1060s are in my work pc so that stops mining while im at work, means it can be pretty slow going. But I've made about £350 in the last few months doing it. Cashed it out to put into my matched betting accounts when it was pretty stable at $300. It's upto $400 now so i kind wish I'd held on, but I'll have made more than that through the bookies anyway.
Seen a thread about it on a facebook betting group im in, around 2013, when it was around $100-$150 per coin. Now between $7500-$8000 a coin Wish I had invested but at the time, was just starting betting to try earn more money and didnt want to invest in something i knew little about.
