I've heard quite a bit about this lately. I know what Bitcoins are, but I don't understand mining them or accumulating them. Does anyone know what this means, whether it's legal or not, and any other thoughts on it?
Yes, mining them is legal and it can be done by anyone with powerful enough hardware. The stigma associated with Bitcoins comes from people using them to buy illegal things since using them is untraceable (or hard to trace anyway). Mining them is not something us mere mortals can do right now. You need expensive/powerful hardware to mine them these days since the rate you can acquire them at has dropped. From my limited understanding, there's only a certain amount of bitcoins to be mined and once a threshold is reached the time and CPU power needed to mine more increases. If in the beginning you could mine with a personal PC now you need powerful servers to do so efficiently.
Bitcoins are a form of cryptocurrency which are used to make transactions with other people over the internet. The benefit of using this currency is that the transactions are done anonymously and are not regulated by the government. It is not illegal to accumulate or mine bitcoins. In my opinion, bitcoins do not have much of a future due to the reason that these currencies do not have any sovereign backing and only have value because the people believe in it.
I have done this in the past, I will try and explain it as simply as I can. It is completely legal, Bitcoins are "mined" which makes it sound like they are dug up where they are actually a code that needs to be guessed for a better way of putting it. The codes are so complex that computers need to be used. You can "mine" Bitcoins with a normal run of the mill PC but at this point it's to late because as each "code" is discovered the next one is a little harder and the one after is harder still and on it goes. So many codes have been discovered that it is unbelievably difficult now to solve the codes and you will need top of the range graphics cards ($800+) just to get tiny returns.($0.50 per day if your lucky) then you have electric costs etc and your PC would need to be running 24 hrs a day and you can't do much else with it if its running on full power for mining. It has become so popular now that specialized mining equipment can be bought ($4000+) that increase your chances but not that I would want to put you off, there are other coins around like Bitcoins such as Litecoins that I mine with my run of the mill PC. Like anything else I think it's about getting in early, when you see it on the news, the chance is long gone! There are plenty or beginner guides and videos of YouTube if you want to follow it up.
It definitely doesn't sound worthwhile at all then, not nowadays anyway. But that means that it is a finite resource, right? Does that mean the prices will skyrocket when no new bitcoins are mined?
Bitcoins have faced some major issues in the last few months so I will not take much of my time in them. The only problem is that you can never know what will happen with them after a few days. Their worth might fall or go up. It is more of a gamble to me.
Mining bitcoins is legal. But you shouldn't mine bitcoins as it's no longer profitable anymore. Basically, cryptocurrencies exist in a limited supply but not all of them are available at first. You have to solve certain algorithms which unlock a "block" which contains a bunch of bitcoins that are handed out as a reward for expending the computing resources required to solve the algorithms that encased the block. Bitcoin is encrypted by a sha-256 algorithm and the difficulty of this algorithm has gone up by so much that you'd need to buy really expensive equipment to even have a chance of ever mining one bitcoin.
