Help with Cryptocurrency

I don't have too many tech savvy friends and I am a simple drywall taper but when I first heard about Bitcoin I was greatly intrigued and was considering buying some back in 2010 and man do I kick myself in the arse daily for not listening to myself. Partly I lack a lot of confidence when dealing in tech stuff and was intimidated as much as I was intrigued.
Fast forward to now and there is an emergence of other currencies like Litecoin and Ethereum which is where I need some advice and help getting started.
What's the easiest wallets to use Eth and Lit ? Whats the most secure wallet? do I need to make an offline account?
I have an decent gaming pc collecting dust and should I get that mining eth and how difficult is that? I looked at some stuff online and I was a little confused at some of the procedures like making an offline account and getting started mining on windows.
I appreciate any advice or help ty.

a reply to: Slickinfinity

I'm glad you posted about this. I've also been considering this and want to know more about how to go about securing such a purchase - especially after learning about Ethereu m

a reply to: Slickinfinity

The money from mining on cheap rigs dried up a few years ago, unless you're planning building a mining farm you'll end up spending more in electricity and parts than the amount you'd make from mining.

I used to mine and play the coin markets but after problems with various exchanges either declaring bankruptcy or flat out fraud with the owners stealing millions of coins I decided to liquidate everything into solely bitcoin and keep the coins I have for a rainy day and it'll be a very nice rainy day considering I was buying bitcoins back before they were even $10 a coin.

To put things in perspective with a single R9 390 you're looking at 122 days before you mine 1 bitcoin worth of Ethereum at an average of around 30 Mh/s, with litecoin and any scrypt based coin you're looking at over 10,000 days to make 1 single bitcoin at 1,000 kh/s and that's providing current prices hold, in the crypto world 122 days is a lifetime for a coin and it could crash as quickly as it appears meaning you don't make any money at all and you're stuck with worthless coins.

If you have any questions though just ask I'll be happy to help

a reply to: Discotech

OP isn't referring to precious metals or coins - Bitcoin and Ethereum are 'cryptocurrencies', which are "a medium of exchange using cryptography to secure the transactions and to control the creation of new units. Cryptocurrencies are a subset of alternative currencies, or specifically of digital currencies.", according to a Google search. If you have a "bitcoin", it is a digital form of money that you possess and can barter with - because it is digital it also possesses a number of advantages.

a reply to: FamCore

Did you even read what I wrote ?

a reply to: Discotech

I didn't know you could "mine" bit coins, or what that even means.

I did read your post but your wording made me think you were talking about precious/collectible coins and not bitcoins (even though I realize after re-reading you did even say "bitcoins" at one point in your post).

The language you used has me lost, I'm not "savvy" with this type of thing either - sorry I mis-read your post

a reply to: Slickinfinity

You'd need 10K worth of hardware just to get started in today's bitcoin market.

Early adopters were able to get alot of them cheap with not much processing power, but as the data was mined and bitcoins released, the difficulty increases, meaning more power is required.

And most of the bitcoin fortunes are held by a very very small number of people. I'd say about 60% + of the entire market is probably held by less than 20 people.

As Discotech advised, it's just simply not worth it at this point unless you have a lot of capital to just throw away on a bitcoin mining farm.

~Tenth

a reply to: FamCore

profit.ndtv.com...

Here's an article that describes bitcoins and the general function without getting too techy.

~Tenth

a reply to: tothetenthpower

Thank you Tenth, you rock! Before I felt pretty oblivious about bitcoins and how they work but now feel like I at least have a decent understanding.

Great article.

My advice....

Run away. Run so very far away!

I've been dealing with Crypto Currencies for the last 5 years. If you got into the game early, you could have made tons of money, considering you held on to your coins, and unlike many people... Kept them OUT OF exchanges and in an offline wallet.

The problems today are a plenty:

- Many exchanges and online wallets are stealing bitcoins from it's users. (Mt Gox - Cryptsy - Gatecoin - etc)

Some are even claiming they were hacked but either way, any coins you had stored on these sites were withheld and are now no longer available to it's user base. You're never supposed to store your coins on such sites. You're supposed to put them in an offline wallet and hope your system never gets hacked in the process by someone looking for bitcoins and other currencies. This does happen!

The problem is... To play the market by trading coins (it's a lot like the stock market) for other coins or simply exchanging for real money, you will often need to transfer these coins to an online exchange (think Bank!). As mentioned above... there are serious potential problems with this. Even if you keep your coins in an offline wallet, to trade or cash in your coins, you have to use an exchange so you're taking a risk in hopes that the exchange is secure and or legit. Even if they've been legit for so long, they can often turn bad! Mt Gox - Cryptsy - Gatecoin - and others, were legit exchanges at one time. Then suddenly it was all... "Sorry guys... we got hacked so all of your coins are POOF". Meanwhile, the owners walk away with millions worth of your money. Since it's not a legit form of currency, there isn't much the courts will do to help you. When they can, you still have to prove that someone stole your fake money and that they weren't hacked, even if they hacked themselves. It's a big steaming pile of MESS.

Another problem. Even if you don't play the market, you're likely going to have to upgrade your offline wallet, which as it's happened before, you have a chance of downloading a version that has been infiltrated by Trojans built to steal your coins. Wallets must be updated now and then to keep up with coin exchanges, changes to the coins and other reasons.

And yet another problem... Your currencies can = nothing. Sure, one day you can have X amount of coins that are worth .10 cents each, or 1$ each and a couple hours later it can be worth 0.00000010 cents. Oh yeah... Currencies crash too, meaning one day they might be worth farming/buying/trading and then all of a sudden, they crash to equal nothing at all and people stop farming and trading. ...as in, they just vanish from the market and never to be revived again.


In my last 5 years, I've experienced many of these issues. I've traded and stored coins that were going up, up, up... then failed and dropped off the exchanges I was on. I've traded into coins that were so low in cost one day and shot up to wonderful amounts the next... then a week later dropped down to less than what I had bought them for and never revived. Though, it's possible that in a year they might shoot back up, considering the currency is still around.

Worst of all.... and sadly.... I've had every coin I've accumulated over the years stolen from me, thanks to Cryptsy. Cryptsy was supposed to be a real stand up exchange. "Supposedly" they were hacked while upgrading a particular coin one day and suddenly months later, all of their bitcoins were gone. Now.... The owner of the exchange came out of it with a beautiful built nice home and all kinds of other goodies, while he had zero means to pay back the people who lost ALL of their coins on his exchange.

Again... people say... Keep your coins offline, but many like me play with the coin market and our coins HAVE to be on an exchange to do this. So the risk I took was an ultimate fail because of a very well established and known trustworthy exchange gone bad.

All of my Bitcoins, my Dodge coins, my Moon coins, and many others vanished into thin air. It's a risky market! It's not worth the investment.

Like someone already mentioned here... Why bother? Most of the coins are horded by only a few people, most of which got into the game at the start. It's like investing into Big Banks. You're just feeding the monster.

Farming is pointless less you have thousands of dollars to invest in multi rack processors/servers. Even then, you only get fractions unless you farm coins that no one's heard of or no one cares about. It's like playing the stock market by buying penny stocks. They may or may not make it, and most of the time, they simply wont make it. It's a pure gamble. In the end, you'll end up spending more money on electricity than you will making money by farming/mining currencies.

You're simply better off playing blackjack for $$. Besides... with all of the stealing and hacking going on, I'm thinking it's only a matter of time before this wave of currency is either shut down permanently by the government (it is in some counties) or some new form takes place that completely makes this current line of currencies obsolete. Think Big Banks....

Good luck though....!

a reply to: StallionDuck

When you say lost bitcoins as in plural I can feel your anger on that happening and I am still thinking of investing just a tiny amount into ethereum as my gut just tells me it going to hit a good number but the risk is extremely high and as someone who does like to frequent the casinos I'll treat the altcoin situation the same but like any gambler I want to know how to make the odds work for me as best as I can.
I wonder if a solar powered bitfarm would be profitable lol?
In all seriousness I plan on making a secure offline wallet and looking into making sure my programs used are not infiltrated and just not risking anymore than I'm willing to lose.
If Eth drops to 9$ or 7$ again I think that's when I'll have a chance at a decent short term gain on a few hun. In dec it was at 2$ and hit almost 15 a few weeks ago. 7-1 on a few months long investment just looks too damn juicy lol.
Mining I think I've been scared away from.

a reply to: Discotech

Do you think Ethereum is going to or could replace bitcoin?

a reply to: Slickinfinity

No, nothing will replace Bitcoin, just like Bitcoin won't ever replace FIAT currency

I've literally seen about 4,000 different coins come & go since Bitcoin was first released, 90% of those coins are now dead. Ethereum will probably hold on the markets but like all the other coins that have come before it, it will eventually start losing value and fade into insignificance will only the dedicated few keeping it "alive", it's only worth a decent amount now because it's new and it's hyped up and every coin I've seen hyped up has been profitable for a while until the next hyped up coin comes along and people jump ship.

You're better off learning the math and statistics behind poker and making money that way than trying to make money in the crypto world because the easy money ship sailed a long time ago, you'd have to be either incredibly skilled with trading or just pure lucky to make money in crypto these days

Not to take the discussion back a notch, but I'm not even sure I understand what you are all talking about in regards to "mining" these digital currencies? Do you all have any good (straight to the point) references that can educate me on this stuff (as I am extremely interested), or can you all can enlighten me as well!

I'm curious what (if anything) the "crypto-currency" is backed by...traditionally currencies are a convenience for bartering and exchange and only yield a representative value while the actual thing the currency represents is held away for safe keeping (ie: gold, silver, platinum, diamonds, etc).

My assumption (which might no be correct but makes sense to me) is that crypt-currencies will be using "DATA" as real object of value, as it seems that DATA is the standard digital resource (think of data=oil)...but since exchanging and bartering with data could be as cumbersome as bartering and exchanging with bars of gold..the cyber world will be using a crypto-currency of some type...and if the real world is any indication there will be a standard currency for crypto-currency (most likely bitcoin) that functions as the US dollar in international markets.

So not to drag this on further than it needs to be I'll clarify some of my questions:

What is crypto-currency backed by?
How many crypto-currencies are there?
Which of those currencies exchange with the most value?
What are the various methods for obtaining each currency?

I understand thats a load of questions, so links to resources that can answer them would be awesome!

Thanks

a reply to: Sly1one

Mining is just a term people use because it was the modern day "gold rush" and to a certain degree the crypto world is still like the wild west with all the unregulated crap that goes on in terms of scams and fraud where there aren't really any laws to protect you because it's not a recognised currency. To put it into simple terms, you have as much protection from somebody stealing monopoly money from you as you do for crypto currency because it's not a recognised currency and it's incredibly difficult to track everything due to the anonymity of cryptocurrency so even if you could report it, chances are officials would hit a brick wall with trying to trace the funds back to a specific person.

In mining terms, either your graphics card or processor depending on the coin script hashes out (computes) algorithms to verify transactions over the blockchain (the entire list of transactions), when you hit a verified transaction you get a share of some coins as payment for verifying.

It's all backed against FIAT currency, some coins however are only back against bitcoin or litecoin but ultimately if you want to "buy" into crypto currency you'll have to use real money, unless you sell something you own or make for bitcoin, but ultimately the "value" in bitcoin is based against FIAT currency which is why it will unfortunately never replace FIAT

If you want to buy some coins you'll first have to get some Bitcoin either through buying on exchanges, there's some sites where people will sell bitcoin directly like bittylicious and localbitcoins, or you could list an item on ebay and sell it for bitcoin, just have a wallet and get somebody to pay you that way.

Then once you have your bitcoin you go to a coin exchange and basically play a monopoly stock market of hundreds of coins all trading for various prices, most are worth less than a penny, if you want to see values Poloniex is one of the last few trust worthy exchanges that I'd ever consider using, not sure about the rest as I got out a few years ago after Mintpal scammed everyone when they sold to someone who basically stole all the coins from everyone, that's how bad it is out there

If you're new to it all but still want to get into it, I'd say stay clear of any coin apart from bitcoin and litecoin and unless you've had experience with day trading don't waste your money trying to play the market

Sorry if this is a little incoherent it's almost 3am and I'm tired

why not instead just hire a few bums under the table who will work for say 4 bucks an hr. Then try drum up ur own drywall jobs n make extra money that way. Trying to make money at things ur not good at generally doesn't work out. Gatherers don't hunt n hunters don't gather.

a reply to: Discotech

Thanks for the detailed response.