re: How high do you see Bitcoin going?

Wiki posted in one of his threads on bitcoins that if you buy something using bitcoins as payment and you don't receive what you buy or it is defective you have no recourse to get your money back.

To gain widespread applicability in person-to-person commerce, the emergence of 3rd parties seems inevitable.

For instance, ebay use

ETA: thanks for the links, BTW. I'll probably stay up way too late tonight pouring over them

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And since the mining constantly becomes harder and harder, it requires the continued purchasing of newer and faster hardware to do it.

At the beginning, anyone could do it. Nowadays, you need to invest a few grand to get started. $20,000 rigs aren't unheard of. And that's just the hardware. These things take up a LOT of electricity too, so you gotta keep that bill in mind.

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What the hell is the going on here? Man, I feel really old all of a sudden.

Time for me to get back to working for good old fashion dollars and focusing on "rigs" that drill for oil and gas.

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I've got a pretty decent CPU/GPU, any recs on getting started with mining, Wiki?

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join a mining pool. that's probably the only way you'll make some coin. and it won't be much anyway.

50btc.com is the largest mining pool, I think. They will have instructions on how to get started.

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I don't get the whiskey stones joke

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I thought the same thing

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I thought the same thing

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I got whiskey stones one year as a Christmas gift. They don't work well at all. Why not? Because the whiskey stones don't melt.

For the same weight of ice and whiskey stones (soapstone) to go from 32 degrees F to 70 degrees F, water can absorb over 4 times as much heat as the soapstone before getting to room temperature.

However, the latent heat of melting the ice is what really keeps your whiskey cold. It just takes a lot of energy to melt ice. When you factor that in, the ice can absorb over 20 times as much heat as the whiskey stones before coming to room temperature (melting of the ice accounts for ~80% of the ice cubes' cooling power).

That's it - no hilarious punchline. I just found the concept of it ludicrous, but people will continue to buy them anyway. Better buy a bunch of them to use at once...

Reference info
Specific heat of soapstone = 0.98 kJ/kg.K
Specific heat of water = 4.187 kJ/kg.K
Latent heat of melting water = 334 kJ/kg
Degrees K = 5/9 Degrees F

My brain just

you should keep in mind that your ROI in such an activity is entirely dependent on the exchange rate for bitcoin, which is inherently volatile, as there are no currency speculators that are able to accurately price it, and has already proven to be susceptible to flash crashes

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For the same weight of ice and whiskey stones (soapstone) to go from 32 degrees F to 70 degrees F, water can absorb over 4 times as much heat as the soapstone before getting to room temperature.

However, the latent heat of melting the ice is what really keeps your whiskey cold. It just takes a lot of energy to melt ice. When you factor that in, the ice can absorb over 20 times as much heat as the whiskey stones before coming to room temperature (melting of the ice accounts for ~80% of the ice cubes' cooling power).

That's it - no hilarious punchline. I just found the concept of it ludicrous, but people will continue to buy them anyway. Better buy a bunch of them to use at once...

Reference info
Specific heat of soapstone = 0.98 kJ/kg.K
Specific heat of water = 4.187 kJ/kg.K
Latent heat of melting water = 334 kJ/kg
Degrees K = 5/9 Degrees F

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Thanks for the explanation.
And to think that I once thought all the thermodynamics in Chem 2 I suffered through would never prove useful.