Not just juvenile delinquents. I am well into my 40s, and I am not sure I am going to be able to resist take a shot at them.

What stops another crypto currency from replacing bit coin?

I am trying the free tier right now. I installed https://github.com/cbuchner1/cpuminer. I have got it running, but I don't think its doing much of anything.

Here's a tail of the log:

[2013-11-29 08:15:37] Stratum detected new block [2013-11-29 08:15:37] thread 0: 83388 hashes, 0.73 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:16:32] thread 0: 44064 hashes, 0.79 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:17:55] thread 0: 47700 hashes, 0.58 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:18:14] thread 0: 34596 hashes, 1.79 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:19:38] Stratum detected new block [2013-11-29 08:19:38] thread 0: 65016 hashes, 0.78 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:20:38] Stratum detected new block [2013-11-29 08:20:38] thread 0: 26352 hashes, 0.44 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:20:50] thread 0: 26364 hashes, 2.24 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:23:40] thread 0: 134484 hashes, 0.79 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:23:51] thread 0: 47280 hashes, 4.48 khash/s

That's for litecoin and bitcoin. I would assume primecoin would be better for cpu mining because it hasn't been optimized for gpus yet.

May be so. I have very little understanding of any of this. What I am doing right now certainly isn't worth even this tiny bit of effort that I have put into so far. My Account Balance is 0.00016236 LTC after 9 hours.

So the max out of pocket is $2 an hour if I bid $0.20?

I am seeing:

Current price us-west-1a 0.101 us-west-1c 0.75

Ha. No, we don't, but I guess we should.

How could anyone actually use bitcoins to buy anything? With this volatility, how can you settle on a price for actual merchandise or services?

> The assumption is that bitcoins must be sold immediately to cover operating expenses. If the shopkeeper's back-end expenses were transacted in bitcoins as well, then the exchange rate would be irrelevant. Larger adoption of Bitcoin would make prices sticky. Future volatility is expected to decrease, as the size and depth of the market grows.

> In the meantime, many merchants simply regularly pull the latest market rates from the exchanges and automatically update the prices on their websites. Also you might be able to buy a put option in order to sell at a fixed rate for a given amount of time. This would protect you from drops in price and simplify your operations for that time period.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Shopkeepers_can.27t_serious...

Couldn't agree more. Mass adoption would absolutely stabilize prices. Even without mass adoption merchants can exchange similar to foreign atm transactions.

It's not going to be useful as a currency for a while. Nor would it be if its market cap was only $10 billion. For it to be a currency it has to stabilize sufficiently. In that case the boom-bust cycles will have to stop, which means speculation will have to slow down. As soon as BitCoin becomes old news - that's when the rate of appreciation will slow down. But since in the long run, potential growth is the market cap of all the existing currency in the world - meaning, (unlikely) we could potentially get to the point where all currency is replaced by BitCoin - then who knows? We might have to wait until BitCoin units have saturated every corner of the Earth before it becomes rational to spend even a little BitCoin. In which case a satoshi will be worth a dollar and those of us with one or more BitCoins will be multi-millionaires.

If only...

I don't ever see bitcoin replacing first world currencies. In places like Sudan and Iran however it presents a seemingly more viable alternative.

Real time exchangers [sic: merchants] will settle on slightly less than normal exchange rates. This will ultimately help to close spreads and decrease volatility.

what is this use of sic, i thought sic was for when you are knowingly mispelling / misusing something?

"Sic" generally means thus or therefore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic

If wikipedia is wrong here please correct me!

As maxerickson said, the common English use is not the literal Latin translation. "The man came crauling [sic] down the hallway." The [sic] means that the misspelling or error has been left in for some reason. Other ways to express what you intended:

Original: Real time exchangers [sic: merchants] will settle on slightly less than normal exchange rates.

Alternative: Real time exchangers (e.g., merchants) will settle on slightly less than normal exchange rates.

Alternative: Real time exchangers, such as merchants, will settle on slightly less than normal exchange rates.

This was bugging me too, so now it's fixed. Thanks!

The meaning in modern English is not the same as the Latin. It is well explained at your link!

To be clear, it does not simply mean 'thus' when it is used in English text.

It's fixed, thanks for pointing this out.