those blocks aren't generated by you. if they were, you would have gotten 50 btc.

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

Then bit coins is not for me I shall not be wasting any more time on it.

I feel like you came to bitcoins with the wrong idea. Bitcoins are a decentralized digital currency, not a way to make money. Sure, if you're willing to put down a couple thousand dollars to build a mining box you could end up making some money. But the best way to make money with bitcoins these days is to sell goods and services, same as making money with dollars. The difference is that the bitcoins you receive aren't tied into an unsustainable economic model like dollars are.

Ha-ha-ha. You should be named "Fed", not "Dai" =)))

Honestly I could see a lot of people having the same result because they don't know the ins and outs yet and they quit.
At this stage anyone that's willing to go to the extent of running BitCoins at all is 99.999% ahead of the world population and I'd prefer to embrace them and explain why it doesn't work than cause them to run off because "bitcoin sucks".  Day to day use of bitcoin isn't complicated. The internals can be complicated even for us that enjoy it.

Most people (myself included) didn't realize how inefficient the CPU miner is. I figure I have a top end CPU I'm good.
I'm guessing he thought the same. I think mining brings a lot of people in that would hopefully become interested after they learn more.

To be honest I expected it to do what it said on the tin. Give up some computer power and get rewarded for it. Well after doing this for 3 months and I'm on my computer a lot 8/10 hours a day but, after 3 months nothing. Now my computer is not a low powered computer nor is it a high powered one about middle so after doing this for a quarter of a year that's the time scale we are talking, nothing. So bitcoin seems to be having a hard time living up to it's basic premise. Now there are other ways of generating bitcoins but, I've not looked into them but, here is the rub it would seem you have to use real money to buy bit coins to start trading in them, sort of defeats the object of  bitcoins as an alternative currency (bit like buying shopping vouchers). This is what the FAQ states would take a year on average to generate 50 coins with a typical PC well after 3 months not a sausage and I have a typical pc. So this rings us back to trading. It would seem you (or a group of people) have to buy the bitcoins with real money to generate enough of them for the community to be able to trade as a community. We are back to the shopping voucher principal.

Question for you guys where do the bitcoins exchanges get there bitcoins from?
If it is from a computer my friend stonetz reckons he has a high powered computer that does little in the way of mining them so I'm just wondering what sort of computers the exchanges have to generate such large numbers of bitcoins.

Do you remember where you read that? If so, we can make sure it's properly worded so it doesn't set false expectations. For each person like you who takes the time and effort to write, there are probably dozens of people who just get frustrated and write off Bitcoin as a waste of time. Or worse, as a scam.

Ah, there's a point that should be clarified. The 50BTC isn't spread out through the year. Each time you generate a block, you earn 50BTC. A typical computer can generate one block per year. And that's an average - some people will be lucky and generate 2 or 3 coins right off the bat, others can run for a couple of years and not generate anything. And that average, by the way, assumes you're running a mining computer 24/7.

Side note - is the FAQ still accurate? It seems to me that, with the current level of difficulty, the average should be around one block every 3 years.

As you mentioned, 114569 blocks have been generated. Each block is worth 50BTC, so that's somewhere in the neighbourhood of five and a half million bitcoins in circulation right now. It is possible that someone (most likely an early adopter) who has a lot of Bitcoins set up an exchange, but the exchange probably doesn't generate the bitcoins itself.


By the way, if you do decide to abandon Bitcoin, please consider returning your coins to the Bitcoin faucet. The address is on the web page.

It's true all bitcoins were generated at some point, but this is just the way they are initially introduced into circulation, like when dollar bills are printed.  After that they are bought and sold many many times.  So the exchanges, like many of us, have bitcoins because they bought them from people who bought them from people who.....and so on.  It's like the paper money in your pocket--do you know exactly where it came from?  You know it was printed by the government at some point, but since then it's most likely been passed around quite a bit.

I am very confused by what you mean with the phrase "the basic premise of bitcoins being generated by computer power".  The generating being done on computers is essentially the generation of security for the bitcoin network, which works precisely as designed.  In order to reward miners for their contribution to creating this security, the set number of bitcoins are being distributed in a way that rewards them.  Since mining is a task many different people can freely invest in around the world, this is much fairer than the method of most governments or banks where they simply own all the initial coins and get to spend them however they wish.  Everything in bitcoin is working precisely the way it's designed to, because competition keeps the level of security appropriate for the value of the coins.  This would be like if one dollar's worth of security measures went into each one dollar bill--it would be way more secure and difficult to counterfeit than it is currently.

Bitcoin security is created by the free and open competition of miners around the world.  For this work, they are rewarded with small portions of the pre-defined quantity of bitcoins, according to a decreasing schedule enforced from the very beginning.  This is the premise of bitcoin, and it works beautifully!

Correct, mining with a CPU (as opposed to a GPU) is worthless, and solo mining on a CPU with the client (as opposed to with a pool on a dedicated mining program) is even more worthless.
We don't. We mention it as a technical implementation detail. If you tell us where you got the impression from, we can try to rephrase it in a less misleading way.
The exchanges are just matchmakers, you trade with other people. Those people either mined when the network was small, mined them recently with a GPU, received them for goods and services or exchanged other currencies for them.