It is a loss.  It's not a loss if you stay in the same ecosystem.  Once you move the coins from Coinbase to an exchange you are taking a loss (since Coinbase is higher than almost every indexed exchange).  Coinbase is not exchange really, more of a brokerage since you cannot set buy/sell orders.  I was not referring to the bid/ask spread, I was referring to the premium cost that Coinbase always charges due to its convenience.  They're typically 2-3% higher than BTCe but if you sit long enough you can catch a 1% difference.  Essentially arbitrage.

Well you know how forums are - everybody is going to promote the stuff they have a vested interest in.  So I would not trust anything you hear from anybody, myself included, as advice.  I have mined BTC, LTC, XPM, DOGE, PPC, tons of other coins on multipools and now Monero.

I think the only real contenders are BTC due to inertia, LTC due to inertia with BTC and it kind of established itself as the backup when BTC forked, and maybe one of the new anonymous coins - you pick DRK, XMR, BCN or whatever.  BCN was essentially 82% premined so I avoided it.  I am mining a little XMR (Monero) right now.

The thing is BTC is still in its infancy but it has the lead.  It's like Myspace but it was able to succeed and not get dethroned by Facebook. Nothing is keeping Facebook from getting killed other than inertia and some business support.  So I wouldn't put my life savings into BTC yet.

I have had almost 0.2% of the network before, but that was back in the early days long before ASICs.

You realistically need to earn on average a block a day or more to consider solo mining.  Look at the largest pool behind Ghash and DiscusFish - BTCGuild.  They have had 8 hour spans with no blocks found.  That's with 11 PH at one point.  Even if you had 150TH/s you could easily go an entire difficulty and not get a block - you would want to shoot yourself.  Then the difficulty would go up and it would be even harder for the next 2016 blocks.

Today, only people with large private farms consider solo mining unless you seriously love gambling.

Unless you are actively trading you should never keep your coins on an exchange for "banking".  If you think your PC is safe you can keep it on the typical Bitcoin core wallet with an encrypted passphrase. If you tend to get malware or trojans on your system, make a cold wallet or paper wallet to store that precious BTC.

It is slow, unfortunately, because the number of people running nodes has decreased.  I used to run a node but now my ISP caps me at 250GB a month so I can no longer run a node.

Try clearing your peer list and it will get new peers - perhaps the ones you're connected to are slow.

I agree.  Best advice would be to buy and hold (especially since the recent price drop gives you an extra discount).  Go on an exchange like BTCe or Poloniex and just listen and watch for 2 months.  Don't do any trades.  Assume everybody is lying about positions or speculations - but listen to the stuff that comes out of the trollboxes (chatboxes).  Then after 2 months you'll be able to see the truths.

Yes it is better than nothing if you live in a 3rd world country where the economy is weaker.  If you live in a place with a decent western wage faucets are a horrible waste of time.  You can make more money by begging or recycling cans or mowing lawns.

Faucets are incentives to teach new people how to use a wallet, not to earn income.

Cloud mining will only result in a profit for the mining company who will in turn use those profits to compete with you.  It's like giving your gun to a robber who then shoots you.

Trading can be profitable - it can also result in a loss. Trading BTC/fiat is safe but you risk losing out on profit if BTC goes up and you're in fiat.  Trading crypto pairs is very risky - should only be done after some good experience.

Since BTC is more or less money - you're asking what's the best way to earn money.... work!  Either earn in fiat or do online work for BTC.  If you earn fiat buy BTC directly - safer and more profitable than mining (for almost all people).

Well in the past we have seen cases where there has been clear destruction of evidence by companies and as a result the people who committed crimes were not able to be prosecuted - Enron and Solyndra for example.

The problem with the IRS scandal is that the absolute KNOWN highest part of government in this country, essentially what would amount to the Hand of the King if you're a Game of Thrones person, is the Attorney General. The last time I saw a decent AG was Janet Reno.  She was one of the few people in government who actually apologized for making a mistake (in the Waco, TX incident).  When was the last time you saw an official admit they made a mistake - not admit they were sorry they got caught doing something stupid like Anthony Weiner.

If Eric Holder is not willing to clear the IRS and settle the matter it will linger like a dormant cancer.  The only person who can show the light on government malfeasance would be government workers (doesn't seem to be any whistleblowers here) or the DOJ itself - and Eric Holder has already show himself to be Obama's lapdog. He's no Janet Reno.

As noted above you have a 1/300 chance of finding a block today, but as each difficulty period goes by that number will decrease.  If you happen to get lucky and find a block in 4 months you will come out ahead and get 25.xx BTC solo mining. The more likely scenario is that difficulty will multiply by another 5-8x by the time the 300 days has arrived, at that point in time you'll have a 1/1500 chance of finding a block at best.

Solo mining would be like gambling.  As a rule you would want about 1 block a day on average to seriously consider solo mining.

Have you seen the difficulty graph for the past 1 year?  If you start mining now with some miniscule hashrate you will eek out a small amount on a pool and you will continue to get less and less each month.  You will also have a less and less chance of finding a block as each difficulty period passes by.   So last December your chance of finding a block with a given amount of hashrate was 20X as high (since difficulty is 20x as high).  In an additional 2 years figure difficulty goes up maybe 20x more making it even more unlikely you wil find a block.

The pool fees are at most 5% and miniscule compared to a 20x increase in difficulty.  Also in 2 years the block halving will occur and then you will only get 12.5BTC.

A long time before we reach that point humans and machines will probably have melded and we could upload our digital signature to the cloud - that would be our own biometric key.

Statistically the solar system is more likely to get destroyed than the chance of grabbing somebody's stash.

Please.  NY is so anti BTC that now BTC Guild may shut down due to the possibility of their overreaching regulation getting passed.  After all can't have capital fleeing from Wall Street crooks 

By his last year in office Obama will probably have QE712 and will have the mint pumping out the trillion dollar coin.

Then he can tell China "debt repaid, shove it" - of course we'll all be dead in WW3.

But she is also not stupid when it comes to politics.  She may say stupid things like the Bosnian sniper fire and being broke after leaving WH, but she knows Bill is the only reason she got to where she is today.  And he is happy to be a mouthpiece for her now because he still gets to keep his celebrity status.  Bush 1 and Carter stay low key - Bill, not so much - he's a ham.

Agreed.  As long as you can get fiat out of BTCe and into your bank this would be the best choice.

You would lose about 1% in overhead from Coinbase (over spot and fee but they don't charge tx fee), 0.2% from BTCe fee and then any bank deposit fees.

The only major issue is BTCe is usually a significant amount under Coinbase's exchange rate.  Maybe stamp might be better.

The sellers are waiting to dump at $720, $840, $945 - those numbers seem familiar?  We spent almost a month jumping each of those levels - they've almost become little orbital path like electron energy states 

I think the people who needed the cash have dumped and took their losses.  Those who got in higher are sitting and may or may not dump on the way up.  Buyers are definitely lacking.

I wonder if the Chinese who were throwing money at BTC and LTC last year were looking at the graphs or if they were just doing something their friend told them to do.  How many people on this forum do you think are trying to get family and friends to invest without looking at graphs.

Some traders may trade on graphs but MtGox, Pirate, forks and SR don't follow fractal patterns.

Back in the old days it took 4k-10K BTC to be considered a dump.  Now it's a panic sell if somebody unloads even 500?

I wonder what the OP would have done when it went from 135 to 78 in 1 afternoon - probably passed out cold on the floor.

Wow we're back with this argument again.  Every time the price drops 5% we get these threads.  I guess for Bitcoin's price to rise we need to have nobody use it for merchant transactions and hence nobody will be dumping it for fiat - then it will shoot to the moon!  That's the ticket!