I keep wondering whether I should be buying bitcoins now, but I have mixed feelings about it. I'm pretty sure its value will continue going up for a while, but I guess I'm still skeptical.
If you want to buy because you think the value will go up for no other reason than that the value has been going up then you're just participating in a speculative bubble. You might as well be gambling.
If stock markets and currency markets have taught us everything, to some degree, human behavior is slightly less random than a shuffled deck or rolled set of dice.
Like any investment it requires careful analysis, personally I prefer to pay attention only to the 200-day simple-moving average. Granted in the past 200 days it has changed a lot, however recent interest in it indicates that it may continue going up. Past performance isn't an indicator of future performance but it's a decent gauge of trends.
Most news articles call it speculative because the people using it can afford to lose the USD value of the coins and there simply isn't enough mass adoption behind it to maintain its value (which would be true), so trade cautiously and ignore news about it.
If you must then re-allocate your investment in or out on a monthly basis.
If you just want to dip your toes in the water, you could always start mining. Doesn't take any initial investment or bank information or anything like that, just processing power.
Aren't the odds of making a single bitcoin as a lone miner, with an ordinary computer, over any sane period of time pretty microscopic at this point? To make any money that way, you'd need to join a mining pool, and at that point you're not really just dipping your toes in the water anymore.
First question, yes, I think you'd be talking about a timespan of months before seeing a reward as a lone miner.
Joining a pool is pretty painless though. You just create an account, and probably give them an email address, and then start running GUIMiner or something. You also give them a Bitcoin address to send the rewards. That's it, no other personal information needed.
That's right. There are a variety of different schemes that have been devised by the pool operators to enact fair compensation for the pool workers. Most pools pay proportional to the amount of work that the worker accomplishes with a fee for the operator. But there are many of tweaks and variations, some of which are to deal with bad actors (pool skipping) or to allow for a steady pay out to the workers in the face of the unpredictable variability in time between coins that the pool successfully mines.
I just read about that and joined one yesterday, though. I ran it for an hour or so and made a ten-thousandth of a bitcoin or so, at which point I calculated that it's probably not worth the electricity and shut it down.
You are probably not an owner of a recent ATI video card, then. Or you joined a pool that showed you how to CPU mine, that's not the right way at all.
If you go with today's exchange rate, the Bitcoins I've collected mining since January are worth between 3 and 5 dollars (US) a day. I only recently shut down my BTC mining to try Litecoin, which is reported to be about 4x more profitable to mine.
The profitability of mining has gone down sharply in this time, if you ignore the fact that the exchange rate over time has made up for this fact. The coins I mined in January were worth more because there were more of them (and I didn't cash them in.) Last clean 11 day sprint of mining before the LTC experiment resulted in 0.2652BTC, same as the 8 day sprints in January.
EDIT: I forgot to mention I have a video card that I bought from Best Buy about a year ago for $160. Not exactly top of the line.
฿0.10 is currently USD$13.47, that's almost double minimum-wage. I'm having a _really_ hard time believing your computer uses USD$13.47 of electricity an hour.
