Bitcoin now accepted by Sota

This is not entirely true. The fee is directly proportional to how much you transfer.
Also there is nothing backing up the funds except a mined algorithm. Lastly you can be locked out of your account at any time and lose access to you "money" with no recourse. There are still folks from the last time this happened that still don't have access to their accounts.

If you want to mine for bitcoins and spend them great. Good use of your time and machine. But DO NOT buy them, you pay a fee to get them and pay a fee to use them and there's no guarantee to their value.

 

Except that some people / merchants do accept Bitcoin as a form of payment. We can keep going at this all day, but it is pointless.

 

Not strictly true.

We've been over this before in previous threads. Management of one's account is one's own responsibility. People are not inclined to act in a way which is secure.

Not quite true either. If anything mining has proven expensive for much of Bitcoin's recent history where you don't come close to breaking even. Folks mined on anticipated future value and things got ahead of themselves. Certainly there is no guarantee of value but the fee is certainly no worse than Paypal's egregious fees (IMHO).

 

I pay zero fee's on my credit card as long as I pay as I go. There is no fee to keep miners going on my credit card.

No, the bitcoin exchange locked everyone who was using the japanes exchange out of their account because the EXCHANGE lost a large amount of bitcoins. They recovered some but there are still people who have not had their accounts restored. Dude hired a lawyer but that's be a colossal waste of money as their is NOTHING behind bitcoins.

It is strictly true. If you'd like I'll go find the formula they use.

And again. If you want to go and mine bitcoins yourself and use them, I applaud that. But buying them is a waste of good money. If you can't get a credit card take some cash to walmart and get a prepaid credit card.

 

Why are you guys arguing over a moot point anyway?
SotA are from now on accepting bitcoin until such a time that they are not.
They get it by using a third party so they don't hold the risks associated with a volatile currency.

So just like when us non-US pay using local currency, it all gets swapped for dollars anyway by the time it reaches Portalarium.

Any further discussion on the validity of any currencies including bitcoin is therefore only leading to unresolved bitterness.
Oh and don't put food on the bridge.

 

You may not pay anything on your credit card, but the person accepting the credit card takes around a 3% charge on the amount in processing fees.

 

Well said @Spoon, I have to agree. Portalarium has already made their mind up that bitcoins are an excepted form of payment - I do not see the point in continuing to debate about the merits of bitcoin. If you are interested in doing so, there are other bitcoin forums for that.

If you are interested in a broad overview of bitcoin, Richard Garriott conveniently retweeted an article that talks a little bit about bitcoin.

I will leave this thread open for now in the event that some users have questions about making payments using bitcoins. If people insist on arguing with each other, then I see no need to leave this discussion open.

 

If it's any consolation, Richard favorited this tweet:

https://twitter.com/loghad/status/518163738726498306

 

And I garuantee you the company that is converting the bitcoins to cash for SOTA will charge them a fee as well.

So, any of you current miners recommend any equipment?

Or, which part (CPU/Graphics card) should I upgrade to get the best gflops.

 

If you want to "mine" you're going to need ASIC hardware. CPU and GPU mining is no longer really worth it, IMO. I've stopped my GPUs a while ago, and just have some small ASICs still going. Even they aren't mining much anymore. But I'll keep them cranking until they die

 

Well that sucks. I just spent a considerable amount of time syncing my wallet and installing the software.

I was going to join a pool, are you speaking solo?

 

"Transaction fees


Transaction fees may be included with any transfer of bitcoins from one address to another. At the moment, many transactions are typically processed in a way where no fee is expected at all, but for transactions which draw coins from many bitcoin addresses and therefore have a large data size, a small transaction fee is usually expected.

The transaction fee is processed by and received by the bitcoin miner. When a new bitcoin block is generated with a successful hash, the information for all of the transactions is included with the block and all transaction fees are collected by that user creating the block, who is free to assign those fees to himself.

Transaction fees are voluntary on the part of the person making the bitcoin transaction, as the person attempting to make a transaction can include any fee or none at all in the transaction. On the other hand, nobody mining new bitcoins necessarily needs to accept the transactions and include them in the new block being created. The transaction fee is therefore an incentive on the part of the bitcoin user to make sure that a particular transaction will get included into the next block which is generated."

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees



You are muddling up a trusted third party such as mt gox with Bitcoin as a whole. They are different things.

 

I wouldn't go solo unless you have an ASIC farm capable of a terabyte hash-rate or more. Join a pool if you're less than that.
you can GPU mine and get bitcoins if you want, but it will be painfully slow. If you're GPUs are idle, and you don't mind the electricity cost (or have free electricity, like using an employer's electricity or rental house or something), you could mine and what you get might become worth more down the road. I'm hanging on to my last few remaining bitcoins pretty hard in hopes they once again get to $1000+ ea.

 

Well to get into the T/hash range looks like it'll cost in the thousands of dollars. So looks like I'll be taking a dip in the pool. Maybe if I make enough I'll buy some real hardware, but not going to drop that kind of cash outright.

 

They do charge a fee its just substantially less than credit card processing is all. It's all due to recourse back to the cardholder (there is none with bitcoins)

 

Maybe SotA can start their own pool. Every client could mine it. Even embed it in the website so as part of the login, you agree to mine while you use the forums or chatting.

How far will Richard take the bitcoin "experience' besides simply taking it as payment?

 

I think connectivity problems are difficult enough without adding "mining bit coins" to the list of reasons someone may have lost a pvp battle. Let's just play the game.

Also, I've read through this thread and what I don't understand is what happens to the bitcoins that Portalarium accepts. Do they immediately sell them to a third party for real cash? Or will I try to log into this game one day and read a message that says "We're sorry, Portalarium no longer has enough money to keep the lights on. We lost it all in the great bitcoin crash of dickety-six! Sign-up for Episode 3, we now accept wooden nickles!"

 

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...tcoin-now-accepted-by-sota.15305/#post-249482
As I stated upthread they are converted to dollars before they reach Portalarium.

 

Well it would likely be an opt-in thing. And we know mining isn't network intensive so it won't introduce lag in that respect. The mining would only be done when you're out of combat and can even be tweaked further to only if you're idle or afk. Let's play and mine for coin

 

Why would anyone opt in unless they were also getting a piece of the action?

I know I wouldn't. So I assume you're saying that if you opted in Portalarium would give you in-game gold? That's not very immerssive.