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I'm pretty excited about Bitcoin myself. It's the future. Now it's catching on in China and the feds have recognized it's legitimate value and don't appear to be an obstacle. I just saw a story a few hours ago that BTC had over a billion dollars (in USD value) being transferred in the last 24 hours
I actually sold my first couple coins yesterday. I hated doing it, but had to get some bills paid before xmas.
Daven -
Silk Road was shut down a month or so ago (it was a pretty big story when they caught the guy), but the value of BTC has gone up incredibly since then. I think this actually was the cause for more confidence in BTC. Part of that is that DPRs (the guy who ran Silk Road) money could not be seized, and also that when it was shut down, and there was still demand and usage of BTC, it did away with your thought, which was common, that the currency was kept afloat by the site.
As far as mining (the algorithms) is concerned, yes, we are well past being able to mine with a CPU. We are also well past being able to mine with GPUs. Now people are using ASICs, chips designed with the one purpose of working on this problem. The system is designed to increase the difficulty of solving the "mining problem" as the total computing power on the network increases. With all the ASICs out there, the mining difficulty has gone way up and if you buy a mining rig now, you probably won't profit. For most people that want to get involved in BTC, it's best to buy or trade for some.
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