I still occasionally get emails suggesting that some BCN members are still a little confused about how the income v extra allocation side of the mining pool shares work.

So here's some quick clarification (and I apologise to those of you that have all this comfortably mastered). 

If you set your mining pool shares at 100% re-investment, then you will see no Bitcoin falling into your account daily as income. You will, instead, be re-investing that Bitcoin in additional, partial, mining pool shares. Thus you will have earned no income from your mining shares but you will be growing additional partial shares at a faster rate than you would be with your settings at anything less than 100%.

In short, the size of your mining PIE will grow but you will not be eating any of it!

You will grow, of course, more "share", more quickly this way. And if you take a very long term view of the mining, in the end, this is going to pay off for you. The downside, however, is that you cannot get your "investment" back unless you set it to produce income at some point (ignoring the availability of Clubcoin to cash in of course - if applicable). 

Let's break that down. I get between $10 and $15 of Bitcoin (depending on Bitcoin price) per day from the total of my 3 mining pool shares. For a time (a period of around 9 months in total at a guess) I had all my shares set to 100% re-investment and was then able to accelerate the amount of total share I had. 

During that period I did not see this (image below) 

appearing daily in my account:

It is perfectly understandable if you are feeling a little nervous about Bitcoin prices at the moment. I, and others, had started to think that the price had hit a nice new support level at around $1,200 but, sadly, that has proven to be a little optimistic. We have seen the price fluctuate between $1,300 and $950 on and off over the last few weeks and it is in our nature to worry about the possibility of the price going even lower.

As I write it is around $1,050.

I think it is critical though to put this into perspective. The infrastructure around Bitcoin is now huge with a large number of people and organisations becoming somewhat dependent in its continued growth. That alone makes me a firm believer and member of the Bitcoin will continue to grow in value school. 

Bitcoin attracts bad news like a pile of dung attracts flies and it tends to only (or mainly anyway) be the bad news that gets reported,  Recent examples of bad news include the Winklevoss brothers getting turned down by the SEC in the USA in their attempts to set up a regulated Bitcoin investment fund (that's now getting a legal challenge by the way). Then there's the Chinese Government trying to strangle the cryptocurrency exchanges in their country because they hate that more and more people in China are getting around their tight financial controls by using Bitcoin.

But it isn't all bad news and you have to keep an eye out for the good news too and the fact is, there's plenty of that to go around. A good example is Japan's attitude toward Bitcoin which can be summarised as "sure, it's a currency". 

Given the amount of bad news recently and the real uncertainty behind how Bitcoin deals with its forking debate (see below) it is a wonder the price is holding up as well as it has but that is exactly my point really. Amid all the uncertainty Bitcoin is proving to be very resilient indeed.

What is causing this uncertainty around Bitcoin apart from the bad news flow? Well, there is a heated debate going on around the world at the moment about how to make Bitcoin data blocks bigger. In simple terms, how to increase the number of transactions and the speed at which those transactions are confirmed. 

One side of the argument, in simple terms, favours a patch over the top of the Blockchain that allows for more transactions. Think of that as a smaller A road being built to run alongside the main motorway.

The other side of the argument suggests pretty much a whole new way of making the Blockchain work, a new Blockchain, if you like, with bigger data blocks. This would require what's known as a hard fork. 

There is massive frustration because this debate has been raging for two years but now, these two distinct camps have formed with one camp threatening revolutionary action if the other camp doesn't go along with them.

We could be heading for a Bitcoin war! Or maybe an even more heated debate anyway...

These two distinct camps pushing for their own best solution to this are Bitcoin Core - the guys that, historically, have sort of served as the guardians of the Bitcoin protocol and Bitcoin Unlimited. It would take me an age to cover exactly what the two sides are disagreeing over but I suggest a visit to Coindesk.com and a little research on BITCOIN BLOCK DEBATE if you want to see the details.

Personally, I think we will see this debate rage on a for a wee while and if a split comes and Bitcoin goes in two different directions, one camp or argument will emerge as the stronger. Bitclub have assured its members that they will run with the stronger, whatever that proves to be.

Worst scenario? Bitcoin values fall some, but then re-establishes based on the new REAL and stronger Bitcoin. 

Well the real answer is, I don't know but read this as you will. Yesterday I was told by someone who does know that "it's real close".

Now, that could be a tease of course, a deflection and ruse but I tend to think that we are suddenly going to see the launch news pop up very soon. There have been a few subtle changes to the member area of the site recently if you look closely (for example, the support section has become very specific about the type of issue you have and need help with) and maybe, just maybe we are going to see a Spring launch!