A New ANTI-Bank Digital Currency - BITCOIN - Must Watch for any Pakistani in Pakistan

[AsifAmeer]

The biggest exchange, MtGox, the current rate for Bitcoin is $46.4 which at Rs98 rate comes to about Rs4547 per bitcoin.

You absolutely have to go thru Banks to convert your "bank-issued" money to Bitcoin. Once you have Bitcoin, no bank or Govt is involved.

OK, I was just Googling around when i came by this thread.

http://coinmill.com/BTC_PKR.html#BTC=1

This above give link is of a BitCoin to PKR Currency Rate conversion website.

And it shows 1 BITCOIN = 4273.36

Whereas if you still do a bit research on the Bitcoin.com website you,ll find a link https://localbitcoins.com/ , Where you,ll see Paki Guys selling and Buying Bitcoins. The rate at which they Exchange 1 BITCOIN is just 3558.70 PKR. So you basically get FUC--D out by almost 715 Rupees PER BITCOIN.

And if you use the other websites stated on the BitCoin Getting Started Page Like https://coinbase.com/ , https://www.instawallet.org/ , https://blockchain.info/wallet , Then you,ll see that they only allow US Banks to get linked to these online bitcoin accounts. So basically BANKS are involved, And This service is a whole lot of Crap for Pakistani's because you don't get the same conversion rate here. We know in Pakistan if we receive amounts through Western Union or Money Gram we pay 2 Rupees per Dollar which is somehow affordable. But paying 715 Rupees Difference per BitCoin doesn't make sense.

 

[uetian]

Last month, I had to buy bitcoins, to pay for some ebooks, at ebookoid.info , and that was a terrible experience.
I had to go through a lengthy procedure for this purpose:
1- transfer money from bank to paypal
2- from paypal transfer money to virwox (Virtual World Exchange)
3- in virwox, I had to convert Euros into SLL (SLL is the default currency of virwox)
4- from these SLL I bought bitcoins
5- I transferred these bitcoins to my blockchain account.
For the last 4 steps, a huge commission amount was deducted (at the end I got bitcoins worth 75% of my original euros).

Furthermore, I was trying to mine bitcoins, spent some days on background reaerch for this purpose, and found that my PC hardware was simply not suitable for this purpose. Although I have 6 core AMD elephant, overcloked to 4.3GHz, plus additional NVIDIA GT430 (with CUDA), so I installed cgminer, joined Slush's pool for this purpose and observed that maximum Hash power was not more than 18MH/s.
After running my computer for many days (burnt alot of electricity: 200Watts all the time) my share was only 0.0001 !!
then I thought of better hardware, and saw that in my neighbourhood, there is ZTEX (in Dresden), and their FPGA was able to reach a peak of 900MH/s (using only 30Watts), and its price was 1100€. I talked to some persons for investment, they agreed.
But then there was another problem, some companies in USA (BFL and Avalon) are about to launch ASIC for mining rigs, and for this same price i.e. 1100€ their ASIC will reach 60 GH/s (i.e. 70 times more efficient and powerful). Avalon has already started shipping these ASICs, while BFL ASIC are in production stage.
So I paused my plans, and told the investors that this time is transition time, and investing in FPGA is not the right decision, they will be phased out in a couple of months.
Avalon has lost its senses due to huge success of its ASIC, people have gone mad for their ASIC, so now they have put a price tag of 75 (=7500$ = 750,000Rs.) on their mining rig.
Now the situation is that furture of bitcoin mining is associate with ASIC Only !!
I am waiting for the time, when this rush will be over, and like Greece and Cyprus ,, Italy and Spain will also be in queue for the loan from EU :P, and that will be time when Euros will get the biggesst shock, that time people will switch to bitcoins, as there will be no immediate safe heaven for thesir assests. During the tranaction peak load, the miners will earn from transaction fees. ;)

 

[uetian]

Usage of bitcoins is only possible in an internet-literate society.
Unfortunately in our Pakistan, hardly 50% population can read/write, and only 5% population is computer/internet literate, so using bitcoins as alternate currency is out of question there.

 

[lurker]

I remember bitcoins caught my interest when they were $30 = 1 Bitcoin. So I started mining for bitcoin. I think all I ever mined was just 1.xx Bitcoins after spending weeks. But by then Bitcoins had dropped dramatically in value to $1 = 4 Bitcoins. So I gave up on it. It just fluctuates too much and is unpredictable. It seemed to me the entire currency is built on nothing but pure hype and rumor.

 

[uetian]

@lurker: yes, this hype and rumour helps bitcoin community to earn something, as I did with my 0.5 bitcoin, I bought it when it was 40$/btc and sold it on Tuesday when it was 90$/btc .. net 25$ profit ;)

 

[lurker]

@lurker: yes, this hype and rumour helps bitcoin community to earn something, as I did with my 0.5 bitcoin, I bought it when it was 40$/btc and sold it on Tuesday when it was 90$/btc .. net 25$ profit ;)

I never bought Bitcoins. I "mined" them. But I dunno what I did with my wallet file.

 

[uetian]

When I started mining using cgminer, I also installed bitcoin client: bitcoind (gui: bitcoin-qt). But then it wasn't convenient, so I moved to online wallet at BlockChain.Info , I can access my wallet anywhere I need, plus it is more secure because blockchain.info sends regular backups of my wallet to my email addresses.
Bitcoin mining is no more feasible with normal hardware. Now-a-days since the awards are already reduced to half (25 blocks instead of 50 blocks), and the interest in bitcoins is growing exponentially, so there is more competition, and people have come up with the state of the art ASIC rigs (1300$ cost) for this purpose with mining rate of upto 60GH/s (I have Nvidia's GT430 which mines at 18MH/s). So I gave up mining, and instead thought of trading.

 

[AsifAmeer]

Hey dude.. virtual world is looking alot more promising than the reality altered Bernanke Paradox.

You have started living in virtual world

 

[lurker]

When I started mining using cgminer, I also installed bitcoin client: bitcoind (gui: bitcoin-qt). But then it wasn't convenient, so I moved to online wallet at BlockChain.Info , I can access my wallet anywhere I need, plus it is more secure because blockchain.info sends regular backups of my wallet to my email addresses.
Bitcoin mining is no more feasible with normal hardware. Now-a-days since the awards are already reduced to half (25 blocks instead of 50 blocks), and the interest in bitcoins is growing exponentially, so there is more competition, and people have come up with the state of the art ASIC rigs (1300$ cost) for this purpose with mining rate of upto 60GH/s (I have Nvidia's GT430 which mines at 18MH/s). So I gave up mining, and instead thought of trading.

You are right. Mining is no more fun. I will try my hand at trading once Bitcoin crashes again. lol. Will buy it cheap. hehe. I have Nvidia GTX 560ti. I was mining at 80MH/s. But the card used to heat up like anything. Anyway, I figured ATI/AMD cards are cheaper and mine much faster than nvidia cards.

 

[lurker]

LoL. After mining for half an hour on Nvidia GTX560ti @76MH/s on Slush's pool all I made was 0.00000075 BTC. :P Not worth it in my opinion.

 

[uetian]

Check these monster machines (ASIC):
1- http://launch.avalon-asics.com/
2- http://www.butterflylabs.com/
These machines will definitely phase out the GPU based mining.