scrubbedexpat141

So you can pay school fees in some institutions in New York with bitcoins now.

Anyone ever invested in them?
Anyone think that something like it will just be the future?
Or will cash just disappear and currency remain, but purely electronic?

jam25mack

I seem to remember buying a few (literally less than 10) a year or two ago. There was also a.n.other virtual coin which was kicking off. Bought a shed load of those (couple of 10 K, maybe even 100K) as a gamble. They were very cheap at the time and only cost a few hundred dollars. Haven't checked on the price in ages.

Think if you are looking now you may have missed the boat with regards to big profits. Probably still going to increase in value though.

scrubbedexpat141

I'm not thinking so much of just looking at Bitcoins as you may well be right but the technology around them. That must be a wise investment.

Anyway. Go check what yours are worth and if you can retire. QUICK

jam25mack

You may well be right. I'm still not convinced (despite the huge increase in value) that they have a place in the 'normal' world. Why would you use bitcoins or whatever when you can just transfer 'real' cash from your bank. As far as I worked out bitcoins value was due to their use in the less legal areas areas of the web, essentially the dark web where you can buy petty much anything from drugs, to arms to people..... Obviously you wouldn't want a twenty bag, a tank and 5 lebo hookers linked to your HSBC account. It would make tax returns tricky.

Will have a check on my coins, if I can remember how and where the details are.

Irishbeekeeper

A gentelman of worthy repute told me last month that Emirates NBD in Dubai will give you cash 1200 AED for 1 bitcoin if you want to sell. True or not I am not sure as I didnt bother checking as I dont think physical currency will ever be replaced or outdated.
But having said that I have been riding the financial wave of bitcoin and have sold a large number of VGA cards and made fairly decent profits off of them. Have another batch of VGA cards coming which have already been pre-sold and people are asking for more. Utter madness if you ask me because everytime there is a such a peak, there has to be a fall in my experience.

scrubbedexpat141

Selling VGA cards? As in graphics cards? For Bitcoins?
Or VGA Cards meaning something else?

martinbkk

Hehe, VGA cards. These are for ISA slots I presume.

Irishbeekeeper

ha! I wish it meant something else. VGA card trading has been likened to stock trading in the stock market in the past 2 months. If I had a million dollars worth of VGA cards with me, they would be sold out in 2 weeks. There are some seriously lazy people out there trying to make money off of this bitcoin thing. 6 VGA cards in a purpose built PC to crunch out numbers (the processors on the cards do the processing) 24 hours a day, and in a months time you might have 1 or 2 bitcoins.
But again, there is no such thing as free money and since everyone is doing it now, I see another fall coming. Jamie you better cash out now before the wave dips again mate.

man you old as dirt if you remember what an ISA slot is and hence so am I from that argument
no, everything is PCI Express these days now....till they come up with something faster I guess

scrubbedexpat141

Ah of course. They're generated by doing calculations / work. Sorry. I'm with you, just didn't get the link.
Used to get excited by VGA cards and the like when Dad has his computer firm. Built my first computer with a Pentium 2 (233 I believe). Those were the days.

jam25mack

What kind of calculations are they actually doing?? I.e who do the calcs benefit? Essentially how does this all work?

Irishbeekeeper

My first one was a Commodore 64 with the tape drives (actual cassettes) to load a program
Then Amiga 128 I think
Had an Atari for games
Did the whole DX2 / DX4 thing when was young
Pentium 1, 2, 3, 4, etc etc

Irishbeekeeper

There are literally thousands of sources out there

start from here :

jam25mack

Giving me a youtube link is cheating! I could have found that myself!

martinbkk

Almost, dirt has the drop on me, just. First computers were NASCOM's then ZX's, Dragon, Vic20's, BBC-B, ATARI XT then PC's. A PDP-8 in there as well. First serious hard drive was an 80GB SCSI on the ATARI then a 1GB, yup 1 whole gigabyte full height 5-1/4 SCSI drive on a PC-AT with 640KB of RAM, nobody would ever need more than that right. Drive was partitioned halfway up the alphabet.

I'm with you now though I would have called them XGA or just plain video cards. They sure have some HD crunching capability. I've heard of similar being used for the folding at home project. Guys building HD PC's for distributed computers doing disease research. Using them to spew bitcoins would seem the more capitalist friendly end of that scheme.