"them" is the computers he used in his tech company.
There are looney toons on every forum, this one is a good example of that.
As far as price goes and the "bubble burst." Someone like me doesn't want the price being too high. The super groups can basically print cash when it is. Once it lowers the cost to mine it keeps them from cranking out too much because they keep lowering the value of the coin.
I can go into more detail but doubt it would matter if you really don't know much about it. You can get into it for relatively cheap.(2k) The problem in the future will be keeping up with technology.
For those that have really looked at it you know that it's nothing short of brilliant and mind blowing.
Tfresh, I've been trading Forex for years and made enough money to live comfortably off of for years to come. I've never once worried about it being unregulated. I can remember when everyone I spoke to told me I was an idiot for trading on the forex market. I started out doing it as a hobby because it was fun and challenging. That's pretty much what I'm doing here. I'll throw 5-10k at it and have fun. If it doesn't work then I have great stories for years to come. If it works out like Forex did then I'm just adding to my net worth.
I wouldn't invest more than you are comfortable losing, that is for sure.
The people who created this and were the first to do it as it was semi private for a while, own a tremendous amount of the coins and can control things.
Also, if this was such a brilliant idea, more companies would jump on board with accepting bitcoins as payment. There are very few places you can buy things with bitcoin. In fact, the major place you can buy things with bitcoins is a place that lets you purchase illegal things, like drugs.
Why would a company accept bitcoins as a payment when their value is so unstable and changes in literally minutes? You'd have to update your prices CONSTANTLY to not get burned.
Also some food for thought, the "trading" platform, which is unregulated and could realistically take all of your money and just close up shop, well they aren't very secure it would seem. They have no federal backing or guarantee your money is safe for one, and they are constantly under attack from hackers and others, who have been successful. I've also read quite a bit about the less major bitcoin trading platforms where you can actually trade bitcoins for real money being hacked and accounts compromised.
Bitcoins might be popular to some because its "futuristic" but this is really nothing more than a group of friends deciding they will take monopoly money and use it as face value. It will have no value to anyone other than the people using it.
Also, if I'm not mistaken, everytime you make a transaction it takes around 10 minutes, or much longer to complete it. Mainly because it has to be sent to all these mining programs so it can be verified. Each transaction will be longer than the next because everything is based on computer coding. The more coding the longer it takes to process, yes?
The electricity to mine these things will end up costing more than the value you are going to get in the coins. The loons heavily invested into this have rooms in their house full of bitcoin mining servers which are running non stop and costing them like a thousand bucks a month in utilities.
And finally, think about what this is. This is simply a way to make money by doing absolutely nothing, or very little at all. That is the idea anyway. You set your computer on auto-pilot and hopefully watch the bitcoins come in. Do you really think there is something out there that you can just turn on and let you earn money? Do you not think everybody in the world would do this if that were the case?
I hope your brother in law has some super computer because I read a post last night about a guy with a high end graphics card who joined a pool (a group of people who all mine together and share the profits because it is a much easier way to actually earn anything) and mined for a week, non stop, on his computer.
He earned 2% of ONE bit coin after a week. So, in about 2 years at that rate, he may have earned 1 bit coin.
