I wonder why this is. One of the benefits of bitcoin is that once you send it it's gone so there if you wait for enough confirmations there is no chance of charge back fraud. I'm not sure what they are worried about happening with international orders. Stolen bitcoin?
Except you can use any bitcoin wallet so they accept bitcoin not coinbase. As absurd as it sounds when snapCard (a site that orders from other sites for you) first started they would only work with Coinbase. Enough customers complained that they had to offer a second option to accept bitcoin payments from anywhere.
By the same logic why wouldn't you use all the extra cash you have to buy bitcoins? If you frame it that way then the answer is obvious, there is no guarantee the value will continue to rise so you will use it to purchase when you think it's over priced (I bought a TV and new camera when the price was over 1k).
The volatility actually ends up being a good thing in this regard because sometimes you are better off purchasing other goods with bitcoin, sometimes you are better off holding.
If the value eventually balances out and is truly deflationary against inflation then I don't think people are going to lose sleep over selling bitcoins that are going up 3% each year the same way they don't worry about taking money out of a savings account to buy something they don't really need.
That's easy to answer. You wouldn't convert your dollars to bitcoins because bitcoin will only appreciate in value if it becomes an important instrument of commerce; it has no other value even in theory. If you believe the deflationary attribute of bitcoin will cause it to be hoarded instead of used as a tool of commerce, you also believe that hoarding bitcoin is irrational, because the system is eventually going to collapse.
It doesn't take any insight about bitcoin to arrive at that conclusion ("deflationary currencies are unusable, therefore don't bother hoarding bitcoin"); it's just logic.
For certain transactions you MUST use Bitcoin. Bad currency generally drives out good, but if the good is the only way you can anonymously buy dildos in Saudi Arabia, then it is the only currency. Furthermore, bad currency drives out good generally when they hold the same face value. Otherwise there is a free float of exchange.
Also, for people living in "weird" countries, like Angola, there is often no way for them to buy things online since payment processors flag them as suspicious transactions.
If you've dealt with any of the bitcoin exchanges you'd realize Coinbase is the most reputable and trustworthy. It's either deal with them, trust Magic the Gathering Online Xchange or the Russian mobsters over at btc-e.com. Seriously this is a sector that is in desperate need of more legitimate players but so for this is the best we have.
Makes you wonder why the criminal didn't launch g2.2xlarge instances which would get 185 kH/s per instance. In fact for awhile there litecoin mining was profitable at spot prices.
My guess would be ignorance. I don't think the criminal behind this knows what he is doing.
A smarter criminal would have opted for g2.2xlarge instances as well as mining for a currently more profitable coin. Granted he'd need to be careful not to leave a trail, he could essentially trade these coins for LTC and still obtain more litecoins.
An even smarter criminal would have "mined" the Ripple give away using EC2, there are still people paying for those instances as we speak so surely they would be more profitable than litecoin mining (assuming you sell them right away).
Uh, nope. I "mined" Ripple through that little project for a couple of days (using the g2 instances) and got a couple of dollars worth of Ripple back for over $100 ec2 bill (460 hours of WCG runtime).
I'll boinc on my desktop for science and goodwill but will not waste any more time on Ripple's program or indeed on Ripple itself, as brilliant as the idea is. Ripple's founders are hanging on to their 60%+ outstanding Ripples so tightly that I suspect the project will never truly get off the ground.
As much as people criticize it, I think some variation of Bitcoin's seignorage mining is the only realistic way to bootstrap a successful virtual currency, at least at this point.
I used it to mine dogecoin using those same instructions. I either had to use an older nvidia driver version or an older version of CUDAminer, though. So it wasn't that simple to set up once CUDAminer got the update that broke the newer NVidia software. This happened near the first of the month. http://doges.org/index.php?topic=43.0
My guess: the difficulty is low enough that it's profitable to mine dogecoin and flip it for Bitcoin or Litecoin. I know a lot of altcoin miners do this, and there are some pools (middlecoin) that are geared towards this.
The doge brand is the USP. Most LTC clones are already largely undifferentiated, so this is actually a strong contender given it's technically almost identical to the rest.
One cc2.8xlarge instance will give you 85 kH/s so 20 instances would give 1700 kH/s which only nets about $18 at current market prices / difficulty. So over 2 days he would have made off with a whopping $36.
Writing a script that generated $38 every time somebody accidentally commits a AWS key sounds like an amazing source of extra cash, depending on your current income.
If he would have used an altcoin that is limited by CPU like Primecoin he could have earned around 8000$ in 2days. Not sure if my calculation is legit through. It's based on the chains/day from the list at http://anty.info/primecoin-calculator/
Scary. I'm sure a lot of universities and servers will see an influx of hacks for coin-mining.
http://bitcoinrichlist.com/top100