Bitcoin/litecoin savvy?

VAHokie56

I am looking to maybe get into mining lite-coins or just playing the market on the exchanges but I do not know a lot about securely creating a wallet and how to send money around smartly. Anyone do this often or have experience in it? please hit me up if you do...perhaps once I get going I will toss some coinage your way for the efforts

antielvis

I can help you a bit.

Wallets: You can get a blockchain wallet (which is essentially online and you log into it) or you can get a paper wallet where you print the account number off. The latter is more secure but requires good record keeping. You can create as many wallets as you want for no cost and move money around.

Mining: Requires some serious processing power which creates heat & uses a ton of power. Depending on the costs of power where you are, you may not even break even.

CBT Nuggets has a video series on bitcoins (LTC is much the same). Subscribe for 1 month for 99 bucks and watch all the videos & take notes. It'll give you enough information to make informed decisions. Bitcoin Basics Video Training Online | CBT Nuggets

The entire concept is quite fascinating & I believe has some real potential. Very few in the media understand BTC & they it out to be the currency of choice for illegal activities. The same could be said about cash too. Most of the interest appears to be in the speculation on the dollar value of BTC.

the_Grinch

I've been using Coinbase for my BTC wallet with a lot of success. Set it up so I have to provide a code generated by my phone in order to login.

lsud00d

BTC/LTC is not like the stocks...you can't be a day trader--that's how people lose their money.

Bitcoin and Litecoin: Open source P2P digital currency are a good source of information.

PurpleIT

Generally speaking cryptocurrencies are best mined with GPUs or specialized devices; CPU mining is all but dead. If you are looking to actually profit from your mining you will probably be disappointed, but you can still mine just for fun. The only coin I am aware of that has any sizable market share and is CPU minable is Primecoins and those have become much more difficult lately.

Playing the markets is a completely different game; it's like the wild west out there, it is not regulated and there are more ways to lose than to win. Pay particular attention to the fees, especially the ones related to cashing-out. You may have a small trading fee which is understandable, but to turn your alt-coins into cash may cost 10% or more and may take many days to process.

I don't normally hang out on Reddit, but there is a lot of good information there; do some searches and you will have more to read than you can imagine.

--chris--

From the link above:

What is putting the hurt on Litecoin today? : litecoin

More specifically:

It is the huge walls that keep appearing and disappearing. One is 2000+ LTC and the other is 4500+ and they keep alternating between bid and sell. This is called spoofing. Usually the goal of a spoofed bid wall is to raise the price by suggesting huge demand and the cancel the wall to sell of a ton of coins at an inflated price. A spoofed sell wall is supposed to do the opposite. But this person seems to be alternating between bid and sell walls with the intention of driving the price down. They might be trying to get more coins at a lower price or simply make it look like the currency isn't stable. This stuff happened all the time in the early days of BTC.

Wild West indeed! Exciting stuff, but scary as well.

antielvis

I think the wild swings in BTC are the result of speculators who view the currency as something meant to be traded. My understanding is that places that accept BTC base the cost of their product on the current price of the BTC. So 10 bucks worth of VPN is whatever amount of BTC (from a tiny fraction on up).

The real blessing of BTC is that it bypasses the banking system entirely. I saw a comparison if you used Paypal versus BTC to pay and the numbers were staggering. No doubt such a currency will not go over well with the banking system.

As for mining, yes, it requires GPU's or other powerful processors. They consume a great deal of electricity and produce a ton of heat. You probably won't do more than break even. But consider this..if you do break even, what if the value of the coin continues to soar? When I first started reading about BTC, they were valued around 10 bucks USD, now they're over $1000. There are a maximum of 21 million coins & as they become more popular their value will increase. So it's a gamble but you're seeing universities and even some internet companies accepting them. Big problem is the mining GPU's cost a lot of money.

The end game is this; it'll either disappear or this is going to be the biggest revolution we've seen in commerce..in the past century. Where I can see them getting traction is with online gambling. It's illegal with "real" money, but is it illegal with BTC? My guess is that it's not. And BTC to gambling in 2014 will be what **** in the 90s was to internet development.

PurpleIT

antielvis wrote: »

The end game is this; it'll either disappear or this is going to be the biggest revolution we've seen in commerce..in the past century. Where I can see them getting traction is with online gambling. It's illegal with "real" money, but is it illegal with BTC? My guess is that it's not. And BTC to gambling in 2014 will be what **** in the 90s was to internet development.

IIRC, the US recently deemed bitcoins to be "currency"; my guess is mostly for taxation and regulatory purposes...

CoolAsAFan

+1 for Coinbase and using multi-factor authentication. The big swings have seem to come when certain governments make public statements about btc. Germany and China have drove the recent big prices with btc. If you want to create your own wallet on your own box, be careful and keep in mind security. Most of the btc stolen by hacking are typically with these type of wallets.

I disagree that you cannot be a day trader with digital currency. It is the same as any Forex (currency) trading, just much more volatile, and of course not regulated.

Interesting sites: bitcoincharts.com cryptocoinsharts.info coindesk.com

the_Grinch

I officially broke even at the end of last month with my mining. Everything else is a bonus now