HN Explorer

Poll: How many Bitcoins do you have?

59 points by LVB ↗ HN
Given the steady stream of Bitcoin stories being posted here (guilty!), I'm interested to know whether the HN crowd has literally bought in or if it's just a technically interesting topic.

What's your involvement, in order of decreasing BTC support?

99 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 80.4 ms ] thread
vittore
Yeah, I'm really interested if anyone who used to have like 10k bitcoins actually managed to sell it with rate more than 100$/btc
ashray
10k bitcoins would be a very large amount at the current price of bitcoins. However, today someone sold around $100k worth of bitcoins and the price stayed steady.. of course 100k isn't much but right now it's a significant portion of the bitcoin economy.
gst
The #bitcoin IRC channel on freenode has a bot command/script that tells you how you will influence the total price if you sell a given amount of coins.
subway
I've been kicking myself lately. I toyed with Bitcoin pretty early on and had a wallet containing roughly 200 BTC. I'm pretty sure that wallet was wiped just before turning in the work owned machine it sat on.
mrweasel
Interesting, does that mean that those Bitcoins are lost forever? Regular currency, coin and bills, are replaced at a steady pace. If Bitcoins are not replaced when lost, then it would be possible to lose all Bitcoins a some point, or am I wrong?

The idea is that there can only be 21 million Bitcoins, or something like that, but in the end there could be a lot less because they are lost.

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chm
Yes, they are lost. There are thus less bitcoins in circulation, and so their value goes up (it's deflationary).
sschueller
So eventually we will see someone try the 'Goldfinger' plot to wipe a large chunk of coins in order to increase the value of their holdings.
mrweasel
But you could then, worst case scenario, lose all Bitcoins in existence. Seems like an unfortunate feature in currency.
anu_gupta
Over a sufficiently large timescale, I think is an inevitable scenario. However, I have no idea whether that large timescale is measured in decades, centuries or millennia. If it's the latter, then it's probably not a huge problem.
Shish2k
As long as a single bitcoin exists, there'll still be more fractional bitcoins available to divide among people than there are US cents*

* may not be precisely true, but it's something along those lines.

fr0sty
This is off by at least three orders of magnitude.

1BTC = 10M satoshi.

2012 US Penny Production = ~6B

6bn/10M = 600

Total number of us pennies made in the last 10 years tops 43B which pushes the difference from 600x to 4300x

mike-cardwell
1 satoshi is classified as "the smallest denomination currently possible".

The important part of that is "currently possible". The protocol allows for us to divide down as far as we want. All we need is a software update.

Even if there were an upper limit of 21 trillion bitcoins, people would still be worring about them being lost, even though it makes no difference.

mrb
1 BTC = 100M satoshi, not 10M

Shish2k's point stands, only with "430 BTC is as many satoshis as there are US pennies".

But this is irrelevant anyway. If 1 satoshi ever becomes too coarse-grained, the whole Bitcoin community would obviously agree to revise the protocol to further subdivide satoshis...

Sprint
If you took another turn on the 14th June of 1996 you might have found a briefcase full of money. ;)

Bitcoin is gambling to me, it is pure speculation. Don't drop a tear for that. In general society would be better without such schemes.

ramblerman
> society would be better without such schemes.

This is still Hacker news right?

crypto currency could be one of the most exciting things to come out of this decade.

Sprint
Technically absolutely yes, but morally and ethically I find the bitcoin scheme utterly disgusting.
Eleopteryx
Life is a gamble. Hide in the house or accept that you might fall off the bike and scrape your knees once in a while.
VMG
Said the guy on the venture capitalist's news site.
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base698
At my peak I had 150. I'd gotten rid of 90% before it hit $40.
verroq
Before everyone gets too excited about trading bitcoins. This quote from my father always had an impact on me - "Don't ever think making money is easy". Trading now is about as high risk as it gets.
freework
> Trading now is about as high risk as it gets

That exactly what I would have said back in January 2013 when it was at around $34.

verroq
Just because it's going up doesn't make it any less risky.
chatmasta
Just because we haven't realized that risk yet doesn't mean it didn't exist at the time.
[dead] chatmasta
Just because we haven't realized that risk yet doesn't mean it didn't exist at the time.
rm999
I don't understand the point of the '0-1' option because it completely overlaps with other options. But it's one of the most popular choices so far with 17 votes.
jspiros
You can own partial BTC, so 0-1 really means >0 && <1.
jeffplang
Think of it like: 0 < your bitcoins <= 1
samworm
I currently hold 0.02429599. Does that answer your question?
rm999
Yep, thanks. I clearly don't know much about bitcoins :|

In retrospect that makes a lot of sense with bitcoins going for ~200 USD each.

fr0sty
It is the non-committal answer. the other '0' options have an attached attitude (interested, not interested, scam) and I people are choosing "other".

Also, you can own a fraction of a coin so 0-1 does not overlap completely with 1-9.

crayola
0-1 is probably rightly interpreted as 0 < x <= 1. No overlap.
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jordan_clark
We're going to have to change the name of this site to Bitcoin News. Sick of it.
verroq
Hey how else are we going to make money with pump-and-dump-coins.
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asc123
0.97104476 BTC right now don't know if i should round it up to one.
alexgaribay
There should be another option for mining other types of cryptocurrencies. I'm mining ppcoins and litecoins instead of bitcoins.
ashray
Not nearly enough. I decided that it's important to let people actually spend their bitcoins. That's why I started http://bitcoinsaresexy.com - Basically selling amazon gift cards and Paypal USD transfer in exchange for bitcoin. Response has been good so far :)

The really important thing right now is widespread bitcoin acceptance. Until that comes around.. sigh we're in the wild west of bubble territory.

sp332
But how do you buy bitcoins? So far i haven't found a single website that actually worked for me.
endriju
If you are from Europe then https://bitcoin-24.com Make a SEPA transfer, it costs 1.24 euro, then you can trade and withdraw any time. Beware, withdraws usually take couple of days.
ashray
It's very hard to buy bitcoins - unless you're in the US or a tier 1 european city. You need a verified account at an exchange (mtgox is the biggest one) and then need to wire them money, etc. It's complicated.

The easier ways to get bitcoins are to sell something on bitmit or something like that. Or, you could try localbitcoins and try to buy from someone in your city.

In the US it's fairly easy..

corywright
With MtGox you can also make cash deposits at any local Chase Bank branch. MtGox has extremely easy to follow instructions for this on the 'funding' page in your account. This may only be available to verified users, I am not sure.
mrb
Try http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com they have guides for many countries. In the US I would personally go with coinbase.com (I have used them).

Or post to your local craigslist and ask to pay cash for bitcoins. If you are in a big city, anywhere in the world, chances are you will find a Bitcoin seller.

jabbadabba
SO 74 Bitcoins are worth 75$ value Amazon giftcard? How is this not ripoff? I mean 1 Bitcoin is like 140$ and if you buy Amazon giftcards in bulk I assume one can get some sort of price reduction.
ashray
Thanks for pointing out that UI confusion. I will fix it :)

You pay the equivalent of $74 in BTC according to the live exchange rate. So you pay USD 1 less.

It's not a ripoff, it's a discount. example: Right now, you'd pay 0.3333 BTC.

Again, I see that the UI isn't 100% obvious, I will make sure that it is updated shortly.

ashray
I've added live rates to the site now so that there's no confusion. You'll see exactly what you'll be paying in BTC :)
dougp
He is charging .3333 of a bitcoin for a $75 gift card. Which is fair since a bitcoin is $223
rthomas6
I'm interested in mining. Buying feels too risky. What are the downsides of mining if I already own a decent GPU? Is it as easy as just joining a "pool" and leave my computer on overnight, and basically get paid to do it?
rodly
The cost of leaving your computer on all day would exceed the value of mining with your setup.

see : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4120271

tych0
Well, no. Mining is as profitable now as it's ever been, since the price is so high. Sure, you won't be mining 1 BTC a day any more, but when 1 BTC is $200 it doesn't matter.

Further, the announcement you linked to (by Butterfly Labs) isn't really all that accurate. They originally promised a ship date of early October. No products have shipped to date, and they've changed the specs and pricing on what they're going to offer a number of times. Some people think they'll never ship anything.

There are, however, other companies who have shipped ASIC mining chips recently, hence the skyrocketing difficulty. At this rate within 6 months it will no longer be profitable to mine bitcoin on GPUs.

teraflop
Are you just assuming that, or have you actually measured it? With my modest setup (a single Radeon HD 7850, mining only when I'm at work or asleep) I'm currently earning about 0.3 BTC/month, and the electricity only costs me about $5-$10.
sp332
In solo mining, chances are that the difficulty will increase faster than your GPU can increase the odds of solving a block. Statistically, it would already take years to find a block and collect just 25 BTC (and by that time the reward may be halved again to just 12.5). But right now, you can join a pool and still get some fractions of a bitcoin over time, and get some profit. It costs me $2.70 to run my GPU for a week and collect 0.05 BTC, or ~$10 at today's rates.
IgorPartola
Electricity is expensive. There is a cost calculator that will show you whether you will break even or not.

I actually wonder if it's better to mine BTC, or buy some solar panels or wind turbines and sell electricity back into the grid instead.

to3m
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/ is an example.

Note that the initial values (60,000MHash/sec, and a very tidy profit in 3 months) are appropriate only for one of the specialised hardware options. If you start filling it in with realistic values for a PC with a graphics card (see, e.g., https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison) you'll likely find the calculations running rather less in your favour.

Profiting is also much easier when bitcoins are $188 each than it is when they are $10 each.

VLM
Electricity is pretty cheap. The kind of gear required to make the electric bill a significant problem would be a bankrupting level of capital expense. I would estimate it would take a pretty large rack and tens of thousands of dollars to consume several kilowatts at which time hundreds of dollar energy bills would be a rounding error.

Also you need to correct for HVAC.

If its winter a KWh of BTC is the same heat as a KWh equiv of natgas, although the natgas is a little cheaper than electrical, by about a factor of 2. So spend $10 on a absolutely roaring system (About a KW continuously 24x7 which you're not going to be doing on non-dedicated hardware) and save about $4 on my gas bill so the NET is an expense of $6.

In the summer you have to correct for the overall system coefficient of performance, and people who have no idea what a COP is usually assume its "1" (legally mandated by local building code to be a minimum of 10 where I live, your experience may vary). So spend $10 on electricity and add an extra buck or so for HVAC cooling capacity.

IgorPartola
What it comes down to is whether you will ever break even with what you put into your rig + all the ongoing expenses for what you get out.

> Electricity is pretty cheap. The kind of gear required to make the electric bill a significant problem would be a bankrupting level of capital expense.

The problem is that often Bitcoins are cheaper.

kayoone
At the current difficulty its hardly worth it. For example i had a Rig with 3x ATI 6870 running 24/7 in 2011 when Bitcons were around 25$. I think it made about 20-30 USD a day in profit. The same Rig would make $12 today by running 24/7 even at the current BC price of 218$. Subtracting electricity (expensive in europe) profit is fairly minimal and you have to keep the beast somewhere which is very noisy and pumping out hot air.
lrem
The risk is that you'll pay more in the electricity bill than you'd get for what you mined. You'd be competing against a crowd that is a step ahead (FPGA) and a few early birds two steps ahead (ASIC). So better first check the current calculations.

I checked a few days ago and it seemed that my 2011 MBP would earn me a few cents per day...

thechut
Don't listen to these people. If you already have one or multiple decent GPUs you can make money by mining right now. You wont generate many coins (between 0.01 an 0.05 a day) but the price is so high that this is still profitable. Do the calculations though and see how much your electricity costs.

DO NOT buy into the ASIC market right now though. The preorder waits are too long to accurately make ROI calculations, regardless of price. As more ASICs come online the difficulty will rise significantly making it hard to make back the money you spent on your ASIC.

VLM
Mining means using electricity today and buying hardware yesterday, which will be paid tomorrow to get coins today. If you're trying to "invest" (probably a bad idea) and anticipate a rise then mine. Otherwise its less risky to buy.

If you're interested in it as a transfer technology (A very wise idea, especially for small-ish international xfers) then just buy/transfer/sell, mining is ridiculous.

For a long time coins were being mined and sold at about the cost of electricity for the most efficient miner. It would be interesting today to see what the premium looks like, probably a pretty scary number. Back when the difficulty factor was a large two digit number I mined a hundred or so BTC in software (not GPU). It's a bit harder now.

LCoder
It you are truly interested in mining with your GPU try litecoin instead. There isn't currently an FPGA or ASIC solution so GPUs are still the most efficient mining hardware. At the time of this post they are trading at ~$4.40 a coin.
alexgaribay
It wouldn't be profitable for you mine bitcoins. It's too late in the game to do so. You could look into other kinds of crypotocurrencies out there.
Eleopteryx
Mining isn't free. You will need to purchase hardware if you want to mine in a capacity that's actually profitable. If those coins depreciate, then all that mining is for naught, same as if you had bought them with cash.

If you want to get by with the hardware you already own, look into Litecoin mining, then sell those Litecoins for cash or Bitcoin. Mt.Gox will support Litecoin transactions (indeterminate ETA).

Honestly I think the easiest path is to just buy coins and hope they continue to appreciate. I remember not too long ago buying a few when they were in their ~$90s USD, and then regretting buying them at that "high" price. Now it's more than doubled.

mrb
I have been mining since Dec 2010. I know what I am talking about, and let me tell you that at this very moment an AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card ($400) would mine the equivalent of $400 in 50 days:

600e6 (hash/sec) * 3600 (sec/hour) * 24 (hour/day) * 50 (days) / (2^32 * 7.7e6 (number of hashes to solve a block)) * 25 (bitcoins/block) * 200 (usd/btc) = $392

So it is very profitable to GPU mine right now. In fact, it has never been so profitable since June 2011 (previous Bitcoin bubble). However keep in mind a few caveats: (a) this assumes an exchange rate of 1 BTC = 200 USD which may or may not crash in the near future, and (b) this assumes a difficulty factor of 7.7e6 which is rising quite quickly (see the charts at http://bitcoin.sipa.be/, it rises by about 10-50% every 2 weeks or so, mostly due to ASICs).

dcminter
I looked into purchasing some bitcoins and found the barriers to entry significant.

I find it hard to believe, at the moment, that bitcoins are generally acquired for non-speculative legal reasons.

Illegal usage seems unlikely to bootstrap the bitcoin economy, speculative usage seems certain to crash unless legitimate usage arrives in tandem to bolster it.

In principle I can see a crypto-currency economy emerging but I can't see how to get there from here without a crash on the way. So I'm not going to take the gamble.

Made the decision at $100, I see it's now at $200, my guess is it will rise considerably further before the crash so good luck to those going into this with their eyes open.

postscapes1
I bought 10 for $10. Sold 5 at $19 and lost the other 5 when upgrading my old system :(
knodi
Crash is coming. In less then 30 days.
shubb
I agree, you just need to look at the graph:

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/130327160138-chart...

That doesn't mean the crash will kill Bitcoin though. In the longer term, government regulation may do that. A lot of fiscal policy, e.g. high taxes when withdrawing investment from china, or more significantly this [1] are very hard to pull off with something like bitcoin around. Thus it must die.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17301032

Fuzzwah
Crashes come when the log scale graph looks like that. At the moment it looks pretty healthy: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?width=940&m=mt...;
zalzane
Based off of what monetary statistics do you make this claim? Who is going to crash the coin - and how?
napolux
0 - not interested (yet)
citricsquid
I think Bitcoin is going to crash at some point and I am not a very good gambler, I don't have the balls to risk everything on trying to get rich so I'm just staying out of it. I should regret not buying back in early 2011 (when I first saw HN submissions about it) but I know if I had I would have sold as soon as it hit anything close to $20. At least that's what I'm telling myself to make it easier to swallow. Therefore I have bought 0, but I do have 0.05 that someone gifted to me on reddit, which is worth $10 I think.
steven2012
As long as people think that bitcoin is going to crash, it will continue going up. In stock parlance, that's called "climbing the Wall of Worry".

It's only after the last cynics have been suckered in, most believe that "you just can't lose" is when it is going to crash.

mcherm
What? That's absurd. A bubble crashes when people LOSE confidence, not when they gain it.
abentspoon
It's not just about confidence.

If the price is being driven by new speculative investment (ie, a bubble), the price should stagnate as fewer speculators join the pool. If the price stagnates, there will be little incentive for purely speculative investors to keep their money in BTC.

The last cynic buying in is just an indicator of late-adopters hitting the market, signaling little gains left to be had.

steven2012
I wonder how many bitcoins are lost, ie someone mines them, and then loses the information, hard drive crashes, etc. Once they are lost, aren't they lost forever?
andyzweb
88.48131 Early adopter, alpaca sock purchaser, conduct all my business pseudo-anonymously over #bitcoin-otc and in forums. No silkroad. I've bought hosting, shell accounts, audio gear, video games, gift cards, etc. I've sold audio restoration services, video games, custom AudioUnit/VST plugins, sound effects, etc. I mined a block back when CPU mining was a thing.
incision
I think it's a technically interesting topic, but I wouldn't say I've bought into it even though I figure into the upper end of this poll.

I just happened to have multiple high-end GPUs and discovered bitcoin about the time GPU miners were coming to the fore.

I expect the stream of stories, particularly those which are little more than price reports have more to do with those who have "bought in" seeking to spread and re-affirm their bullishness than any technical merit or interest.

The type of story and the nature of comments within are virtually identical to what you'll find on traditional trader forums during any strong trend.

nekgrim
Bought 2 coined bits (http://www.coinedbits.com/) when a bitcoin was about $5.

And I also lost 50 bitcoins after a pc cleanup. A block mined solo, with my CPU. A long time ago.

Torgo
0 - Just cashed out over 200 of them for a big pile of money, will buy again when the bubble pops.
mrb
You should have cashed out only half (to bet both that the bubble will crash, and that the price will continue to rise). That would have been obviously the best compromise and less stressful. Now you risk regretting it. Effectively you did the equivalent of picking B out of the following choices, and you are about to flip the coin...:

A. Flip a coin. Head you win $50k, tail you win $50k.

B. Flip a coin. Head you win $5k, tail you win $95k.

Torgo
Yeah, I had done exactly that at 128-134. Then I put the other half in with a sell order if it hit 200, thinking it never would get that high. Imagine my surprise. I already regret it. I still think we're in a giant bubble, we have to be. The rise is crazy. But I am not an investor, I just thought Bitcoin was cool at the time, and got really lucky.
verisimilitude
Sometimes I'll have the "isn't money/currency a weird concept/abstraction" conversation with my dad, so I want to tell him about bitcoin. The Wikipedia article is good, but is there a better article I can have him read?