Bitcoin Forum

Hello fellow members,

Just wanted to introduce myself to the Indian bitcoin community. I am from Chennai. I came across bitcoin in early 2010 but did not pay any attention to it as I confused it with something to do with Bittorent and ignored it. So I did not collect even a single coin till today. The recent news about Silkroad takedown refreshed my memory about bitcoin and I decided to see what it is really about. I just spent 30 min to research about it and the magnitude of chance I missed dawned on me. Boy! was I frustrated?

There would be plenty of experienced members here, I want to ask them is it viable to do bitcoin mining in India? Do we have ASIC mining machines in India? Is anybody doing it in India already? Is it worth to buy bitcoins now? I see that the price has gone upto $300 or so, is it likely to go high?

Thank you for any comments you may have.

Jinson

Welcome to the forums jinson!

Frankly speaking it is always good time to buy Bitcoin below 500$ level as every one expects it to do good in next 1 year. But you should never ask if investing Bitcoin is good idea on Bitcoin forum as everyone here will always be bullish about Bitcoin :)

In a simple few advises :
1. Invest only what you can afford to loose
2. Diversify your portfolio, do not invest more than 40% in any sector, even if it is Bitcoin
3. Invest in steps that will even out your buy prices ( Read more about it, search Dollar cost averaging )
4. Make sure you follow best practices to secure your bitcoins
5. And the best one, do not day trade any thing before investing at least 6 months in it :)

And yep welcome to forums :)

Regards

Thank you Benson and BSB,

I just purchased my first ( fraction of)  bitcoin from BSB . Quick transaction, but I guess it will take few hours to get it confirmed.

Congrats on buying yourself a piece of the future :)

Thanks Benson,

What are best methods to keep my wallet safe from being stolen or hacked. Though there is only little in it, I want to make sure it is safe.

Get Armory, make paper wallet out of it :)
bitcoinarmory.com

Regards

Thanks for your business and always welcome to buy or sell on our platform.

We are noticing huge delays in Bitcoin transaction confirmation from yesterday. We are working on to resolve this issue.

Regards

If that seems to painful, get a Coinbase or blockchain account and get a paper wallet from them.

Yes i agree. Blockchain.info wallet with the browser plugin is pretty secure as it has features like

1) Encrypted backups of the wallet sent to your email. Even if they go out of business tomorrow, you can import them on some other software.
2) The address you get is yours as you get access to the private key as well.
3) Lastly, they have client side encryption of your private if you are using their browser extension.

Unless you need a merchant account or you live in USA, i don't see any other benefits of having a coinbase account over blockchain.info.

Thanks ADesi, You are right. Blockchain seems to be an ideal solution for me.

I have MultiBit client and will be getting few coins in next few days. I have password protected it.
What else can I do to avoid hacking?
I dont have a spare computer to make an offline wallet.
Can anyone guide me on this.

The best way is to make the paper wallet and keep it safe - If you intend to hold them for long period.
Else make sure you have password protected your PC, have AV and Firewall enabled.

Those are somethings that i can think of.

If I do make a paper wallet, will the incoming transcations in Multibit carry on as they do or for that I'll have to make a second wallet.
 The wallet will remain in paper like a bank locker with no access to anyone ?

A paper wallet is simply a print out of a private and public key. Hopefully not generated on the internet.

Once you get a paper wallet, you send coins to its public key and that is all.

You can also delete the wallet.dat after making a paper wallet and sending your coins there.

Multibit should generate a new wallet.dat post that and use it for future transactions.

And keep your paper really secure.

Okay got it, some more questions -

1) Public key is the Wallet Address right ?

2) The paper wallet need not be connected to Blockchain to get the verification done ? Or its done automatically when someone sends you bitcoin.

Let me make it a bit simple :

transactions are not stored in wallet. They are stored in blockchain. Wallet is collection of your public key and private key. You can share your public key with any one ( Bitcoin address is hash of your public key ). You will need private key to address if you want to spend coins on that address ( More technically if you want to spend any unspent outputs attached with that public key, you will need private key to claim it ). That is why we say, bitcoin does not have concept of ownership. It is more about authorization. If you can authorize a transaction with private key, you can claim coins there and can send it to some other address.

One other thing that people forget is keypool and change address. I will explain it a bit later :)

Regards

Okay thanks for that, Im a noob when it comes to BTC

1) How do I confirm the Bitcoins have been transferred to my public key without connecting it to the internet ?

2) What's the process when I want to sell them? I import the key manually by typing into Multibit, is that so, but there is only an option of Importing a file.

1) You can check balance of address with any system who has downloaded full blockchain. Simply check it on blockchain.info
If you have wallet in blockchain.info ( not your original wallet you want to protect, but just spare one without any balance ) you can add watch only address in that wallet and you will receive notification of balance change via email from blockchain.info, cool isnt it ?

2) Import depends on your export. If you have exported wallet file from Multibit, you can import wallet file to it. If you have just your private key, you can import it to bitcoinQt, blockchain.info any where. It will simply add that private key to current wallet.
You will always need private key of address if you want to spend balance from that address. If you are paranoid, you can use Armory and create offline wallet. You can create a transaction from your offline Armory, copy it and broadcast it with online Armory :P

Regards