Bitcoin Trading In Ba - How To Get Started

[scotttswan]

For the power part, it should be considered also how much power is consumed by paper bills & coins: taking them in/out from a bank, powering ATMs, printing them, duration before they must be destroyed, etc.

Not really, that provides a purpose. Bitcoin mining is a zero sum game in a flawed prototype for a decentralised crypto currency.

When bitcoins started it was a few techie guys who thought it was interesting, so mined thousands and thousands of bitcoins using their cpu's. Then magic the gathering online exchange came along and illegally started trading bitcoins for us dollars.
This is when some people decided to do some parallel programming with their gpu's (graphics cards) to mine even more bitcoins. (as more people join the network, the bitcoin protocol makes the pointless calculations harder so that the "blocks" well be calculated in roughly the same time.)

When the price skyrocketed the first time a year or two ago, more and more people started building stupid computers with multiple gpu's.

http://www.bitcoinminingrigs.com/

 

[scotttswan]

Then FPGA's came about and could be made to do the pointless calculations even faster at a lower electrical cost, but at least those can be reprogrammed to do something useful.

ASIC's cannot do anything but what they are programmed to do, that huge spike in the difficulty level is due to idiots spending thousands and thousands of REAL money on stupid pointless hardware that does nothing but has some numbers.

All this electrical usage is a complete waste as apart from the fact that you need around 10-11 gigabytes to store the "blockchain" at the moment, the entire system could easily be ran by one ancient pc!

The OP wanted to get a better rate than xoom, he's taking a huge risk using bitcoins for this as they could easily crash by over half its amount as it has done many many times before.

He'd be a fool to use them!

 

[scotttswan]

Like many I'm curious about this exotic currency. On the other hand, quite many big names have invested in BC.

Who? The major holders of bitcoin are the people who ran it at the very start. (if they haven't deleted their old private keys.)

Apart from them there are quite a few scammers who ran ponzi schemes, the Winklevoss twins and the FBI who have seized quite a few coins now.

 

[Sleuth]

Who? The major holders of bitcoin are the people who ran it at the very start. (if they haven't deleted their old private keys.)

Union Square Ventures has invested in Coinbase (run by a former BA expat). http://www.usv.com/2013/05/coinbase.php

Andressen-Horowitz are looking very closely at the market as well - http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/03/andreessen-bitcoin-is-like-the-early-internet/

To do what the original poster described - buy some bitcoins with US funds and sell here for pesos, there is little risk with buying and selling the same day. The volatility really affects those who hold Bitcoins, and even then, it is much more normalized than it was before.

 

[Sleuth]

... There is an extremely limited number of things you can spend bitcoins on without first converting them to dollars (or whatever), and many of those are done through third-party bitcoin-to-dollars systems where the merchant never sees any bitcoins...

You can buy your vegetables with Bitcoin in Argentina - http://www.tierrabuenadelivery.com/

 

[scotttswan]

Union Square Ventures has invested in Coinbase (run by a former BA expat). http://www.usv.com/2...05/coinbase.php

Andressen-Horowitz are looking very closely at the market as well - http://pandodaily.co...early-internet/

They should have read more about the actual bitcoin protocol before throwing their millions away!

To do what the original poster described - buy some bitcoins with US funds and sell here for pesos, there is little risk with buying and selling the same day. The volatility really affects those who hold Bitcoins, and even then, it is much more normalized than it was before.

unless there is an FBI drugs bust on the largest use of bitcoin then it might drop 50% or even more!

 

[scotttswan]

You can buy your vegetables with Bitcoin in Argentina - http://www.tierrabuenadelivery.com/

I notice they also use "litecoin" which is basically bitcoin (it is open sourced, i could launch my own one tomorrow if i wished! Want to buy ejcotcoins?!?!?!?) only it originally tried to stop the stupid arms race bitcoin had by using a different calculation that used more memory and couldn't easily be done on specialised equipment. Problem is they messed up, there's a new arms race there and now unless you are using a GPU to do your calculations CPU mining is pointless.

Why has it become valuable? illegal exchanges started letting you exchange real money / bitcoins for them and all the GPU miners needed somewhere to point their pointless stupid bitcoin mining rigs.

They never solved any of the fundamental problems with a peer to peer currency.


*edit* either bitcoin has crashed again or you're paying a hefty premium to buy your veggies at their site. :lol:

 

[ghost]

Ejcot
Thanks for the masters degree in Bitcoin. After your outline and reading the news this week re the FBI busts I'm staying out of bitcoin. Maybe it's just me, but bitcoin has never fit with any comfort.

 

[Caliexpat]

Fellow Expats,

I recently became interested in trading Bitcoins here in BA as a way to (1) get a better exchange rate than Xoom and (2) exchange easier than Xoom.

OBviously, when I am in Argentina for a long period of time, I do not have access to cash in the form of dollars to hit up the black market shops. So I was imagining that this would be perfect for me. I can buy them online with my US banking information and then sell them for pesos here in BA.

Any one else doing the same? Any thoughts?

Yes, I have done this and it works perfectly for me. I've made contacts using the Local Bitcoins website, Mercado Libre as well as in person at the Bitcoin Meet Ups: http://www.meetup.com/Bitcoin-Argentina/ As Dave said, stick to same day exchanges in order to mitigate volatility.

As with anything in life, you need to know what you're doing before putting yourself at risk. That being said, if you do your homework, Bitcoin is an extremely useful and efficient monetary instrument that bypasses greedy middlemen banks.

If you're feeling bold enough, you can take a stab and trading and making some money on the volatility. As with anything, there are two sides. Do your own research and make up your own mind.

 

[Sleuth]

Coinbase enacts pretty strong security; to log in, they send a text to your mobile phone with a passcode. So in order to use coinbase in Argentina I'll need to receive texts from the U.S. I'll work out a way to do that with Google Voice or something.

You can use Authy or Google Authenticator on your smartphone to login as well and do not have to worry about text messaging.