Is anyone here who has mined, earned or even bought Bitcoin?

I'm surprised Bitcoin has not come up as a discussion in any major gaming forums... given that gamers have high-powered GPUs. GPUs were the most suitable for mining Bitcoin when the machines are idle (i.e., when gamers were not using the GPUs to play and process games.) So the GPUs would be making money for their owners when the owners are not playing games.

Dogecoin for life!

How is Dogecoin better than Bitcoin?

I expect that, in the end, only two or three cryotocurrencies will dominate and become the "Big Three". Bitcoin, being the first/prime mover, has already taken the top of the three spots. Two more spots remain open.

But it's getting harder and harder to mine Bitcoin.

GOG should start its own cryptocurrency ^^

edit: as for the OP, I haven't had any dealings with bitcoin, so can't say.

You're missing out a coming boom that's gonna make a lot of people very rich. It'll likely crash in the end, but then you will already have cashed out.

As it is now, seems like most people are still unfamiliar with Bitcoin.

Cryptocurrency is a joke... Cryptocurrency has no intrinsic value. Want to invest in my imaginary monkeycoins?

Neither does the US dollar or any fiat currency. It has value because people believe that it has values.

Some of the values of a cryptocurrency are:

1. It provides a way for very safe and secured transactions -- and that has tremendous value in itself.

2. Its decentralized nature makes it impossible for any government to freeze or seize someone's assets or money that are stored in a cryptocurrency. So it provides a safe haven from governments who love to control and sanction countries and people who do not play by their unfair rules (like those set up by the US government.) A cryptocurrency allows rich people to secure their money and assets from government seizures, and that is a value in itself.

3. Every Bitcoin takes computation = computing power = electricity = energy to generate. Bitcoin does not just appear out of thin air or paper printing (like the US dollars do.) Also, there will be a limited amount of a cryptocurrency available. For example, there will be, in the end, a total of 21 million Bitcoins available and no more. Every additional Bitcoin becomes harder and harder to mine, (i.e., requires more and more energy to generate.) The last Bitcoin will be mined in 2136. So the scarcity creates values.

I know crypto currency has benefits but still it has no intrinsic value. The U.S. dollar does have intrinsic value...

Read this text copy and pasted from an article about crypto currency.

"Now this idea of "intrinsic value" when it comes to currency bothers people, and Bitcoin Bugs will immediately ask why the U.S. dollar has intrinsic value. There's an answer to that. The U.S. Dollar has intrinsic value because the U.S. government which sets the laws of doing business in the United States says it has intrinsic value. If you want to conduct commerce in the United States you have to pay taxes, and there's only one currency you're allowed to pay taxes in: U.S. dollars. There's no getting around this fact. Furthermore, if you want to use the banking system at all, there's no choice but to use U.S. dollars, because that's the currency of the Fed which is behind the whole thing.

On top of all these laws requiring the U.S. dollar to be used, the United States has a gigantic military that can force people around the world to use dollars (if it came to that) so yes, there's a lot of real-world value behind greenbacks."

Yeah unless you get caught using their electricity for something other than work so in your shoes, I wouldn't tell co workers about it. Co workers like to snitch.

How many coins have you mined so far?

So... am I the only one who's mining Bitcoin here? I know I'm the only one who's mining it in my company (which has few hundred people in a building.)
Not enough :-(

Can you be more specific? I'm just curious. Are you mining in a pool?

These days unless you're using some kind of ASIC mining rig you're paying more for electricity than you're going to be making from the bitcoins generated (and stealing electricity from your employer isn't a solution to this problem- it just makes you a common thief using a very convoluted method to launder what you've stolen).

The biggest problem with bitcoin at the moment is the lack of liquidity. With exchange after exchange running into problems there's a limited number of people looking to buy bitcoins, such that not only is it non-trivial to get rid of any substantial quantity, but that because it's so thinly traded just one person looking to drop a bunch of bitcoins at once could easily tank the exchange rate. Just to see a simple illustration of this lack of liquidity, look at the different exchange rates between exchanges. For most currencies you'd see people looking to make as much as they can off arbitrage with those kinds of spreads (which would result in decreasing the spreads); the fact that that isn't happening with bitcoin shows the tremendous amount of uncertainly in actually being able to unload bitcoins once they're purchased.

And there are serious consequences for people caught stealing electricity at work so I don't know why someone would do such a thing...to mine worthless currency.