If I need money...

[mike]

...it would be faster to raise the Titanic--find the Heart of the Ocean and sell it on Ebay, use the money the start an asteroid-mining company, become a billionaire, retire and sell my mining stock--than it takes to sync a Bitcoin wallet.

Srsly, what the fork!

I thought I would mine some coins just to see what all the hubbub is about, but after 8 hours, the wallet is barely halfway done syncing.

I still support anything that competes with government fiat, but Bitcoins are not worth the trouble for me.

 

[pmbug]

The system was designed to reward the early participants (with easy mining). It's a bit like a MLM/Ponzi in that respect.

 

[bushi]

not really, there was little "reward" in mining/supporting BC infrastructure in it's infant years. The algorithm makes it harder to mine coins with time, thats true. But it is like saying that a Yukon gold rush was designed to award "early adopters" back then.

Initial wallet sync takes ages at first run. Be patient

oh, and if you want to mine something - the only viable way today, is make yourself a custom rig, with loads & loads GPUs cracking the ciphers for you. Still, IDK if it is profitable today, taking into account electricity costs and today's algorithm complexity.

I think that there should be custom rigs available now for sale, with dedicated mining hardware, that would allow you to mine something with some better return/chance of success. Google "ASIC bitcoin miner" if you want to learn more. I know these folks were promising dedicated hardware for a while, but IDK if they are selling or still preordering:

https://products.butterflylabs.com/

 

[Unbeatable]

There are some desktop wallets that are much faster, but the first sync can take a while.

Regards mining as Bushi said, these days it will cost you more in electricity to mine the coins than the value of the coins unless you get a specialist rig, which cost a fortune apparently.

Coins were easier initially, but IMO it's not a ponzi structure, just a start-up. They were investing their time, energy and resources in a product that had no/little value. They developed the infrastructure and made it what it is today. They had the initial vision, took the risk, they get the bigger reward. To me that's very fair.

Now once you have coins you can get on a plane, or go place to place with no physical assets, just a memorised key and exchange your coins for local currency or assets in over 200 countries and nearly 2000 cities around the world.

So if you ever need to apply the 30 second rule from 'Heat', Bitcoin could be very useful

 

[mike]

Guys, I'm just talking about the initial wallet sync. I never got to the mining part because it took forever just to sync my wallet, which is apparently the first thing you have to do before you can do anything.