I originally voted no, but seeing as it is now nearly 2/3rds of the way there I am now leaning more toward yes. Coinmarketcap is currently showing $ 651,547,448 which is pretty good at this stage of Ethereum's life.

Any exchange is risky. It is only a matter of time before someone eyes all the millions of dollars in their possession (either internal or external) and comes up with a way to take off with it all. Just buy and get you coins out of there asap and you minimize this risk. As soon as the first sign of trouble appears, stop doing business with the exchange.

Cryptsy showed signs for quite some time something was amiss which many (myself included) choose to ignore. Fortunately I only lost a small amount, which I consider payment for an important lesson. Unless the funds are in your possession, you can never be sure they won't disappear.

Microsoft Azure, which I think is over-rated but still. The other, I think bigger, reason is the announcement of the Homestead release set to go live on Pi day (March 14th). This shows that development is continuing and milestones are being met by the developers.

The bolded part make no sense. Shutting miners down is a known expense and any profit/losses at that point in time are locked in. Goodwill mining after it becomes profitable means incurring additional losses, or giving up existing profit. Good luck in getting people to do that. A more realistic goal would be to get the pools/miners to fill the current blocks, quite a few are still being mined with minimal transactions included. So I am to keep mining to reward these types, yeah right...

The rise today is more likely the result of the homestead release date being posted, which happens with block 1,150,000 calculated to be mined mid-day on "Pi day" (March 14, 2016).

From blog post:

Yes, I also think the Homestead release news has been "priced in" to some extent. I still think we may see some slight upwards movement and stabilization though as a result. This news shows milestones are being met and development continues, so that helps to dispense with some of the FUD and instills a bit more confidence into the investors minds.

Spot on man, even if the block-size was 2 MB if pools aren't filling them with transactions it won't matter.

Just a few examples from today:

• AntPool - Block 400682  Size 0.2 kb
• AntPool - Block 400657  Size 0.21 kb
• BTTC Pool - Block 400627  Size 2.1 kb
• BTTC Pool - Block 400624  Size 2.63 kb
• BW.COM - Block 400610  Size 0.22 kb

I don't think it is necessarily unhealthy as all cryptocurrencies are mostly speculative investments at this point in time. Not much different than the stock market really, expect a bit of turbulence every now and then and with trading in crypto's you can multiply that by 10.

Lot of people on here beating drums and/or screaming, either for or against, but watching the charts and picking good entry and exit points, I have probably tripled my initial investment in ETH already. So I don't know what its future is, but for right now it is a means to make money.

As far as if it survives long-term or not, that has more to do with the developers and if they can deliver what they have laid out. I do not think the pumps/dumps will have an impact long-term, with the exception that the overall rise in price the past few months has secured Ethereum's development for the next 5 years, so I think that is a plus.

Thanks for this, that is the information I was looking for. I had missed the part before where you mentioned you used a meter, too many posts on here quote the cards factory rated spec so that why I wasn't sure which it was until now.

I was looking into buying a GTX970, is the 90W figure for power draw something you actually measured (i.e with a Kill-a-watt) or just the stated power draw from the manufacturer?

Exactly. Any endeavor with on-going expenses like mining will require converting some of the product (in this case BTC) into cash to pay for those expenses. You might be able to hold out a month or two if the price goes down. but then even this can be a risky strategy. If the price would continue to move down, when you are finally forced to convert some BTC into fiat, you might have to sell more than if you just did it at regular intervals.

Also as a side note, I believe I read somewhere that the biggest miners have actually negotiated with large buyers private sales of the generated BTC, so for this group of people the daily price changes are not as big of a concern. I am sure any such agreements would have the BTC halving taken into consideration and payments adjusted accordingly when the time comes.

Don't forget the "extra's" you might not be aware of before making that decision. A decent job, at least in the US, also pays your health insurance, short-term/long-term disability, perhaps a pension, or kicks in to 401k, etc., and pays the other half of your social security tax (7.5%). This combined with what is taken out with your Federal and State (if applicable) income taxes, paid holidays, vacation, etc. can easily add up to twice your take-home pay. So say you take home a hypothetical $8,000/mo after all those deductions, you would need to be earning close to $16,000 or about 40 BTC/month to compare.

This isn't limited to just Bitcoin, the general rule of thumb for those wishing to be self-employed and maintaining the same standard of living is to figure on earning at least 2x your net income. For now, I think even if you are earning a decent amount of BTC a month, you would be better off maintaining your job as it will most likely be a more stable and reliable source of income not subject to the wild price swings of BTC.

I think we can see a good shot at reaching $600 yet this year. There will be a lot of wild price fluctuations around the block halving, up and down, but I think once the dust settles we could be going into 2017 looking at a comfortable $500+ range.

Don't be such a pessimist, a guy needs to have some kind of hope there is still a smidgen of justice left in the world.

I need to give Mist a try, too much of my Eth is starting to pile on the exchange. What is the current space requirements for the blockchain download?

Is there any benefit to using fewer addresses for receiving, or conversely to using more?

Since bitcoin tracks all coins individually anyway, except for maybe a cluttered wallet with a lot of address, what is the main advantage of using a new address for each transaction? Privacy, security?  This is something I have often read about, but never fully understood.

I have given up hope on any return of significant value from what was left in my Cryptsy account, but it would be nice to see a few former Cryptsy executives and employees wearing bright orange jumpsuits for the next 20-30 years.

You should read up on Civil Asset Forfeitures laws. In the US police can seize cash or property even with no proof of a crime, simply guilt by association. If you have $10,000 cash you "must have done something wrong as normal people do not carry that kind of money". You can read a good overview at: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-17/police-civil-asset-forfeitures-exceed-value-all-burglaries-2014  or simply google it, tons of examples of this activity.

The halving will definitely have an effect on BTC's price as it is a significant development in its life-cycle. With that said, it will probably be a bigger effect than some give it credit for as well as a smaller effect than others are anticipating. It also does not necessarily need to happen at the same time.

I am sure some of the recent price rise has been priced in due to the upcoming halving already, but once it hits there will be an immediate decrease in daily supply hitting the market. I think the bigger impact will be after a lot of the hype settles down and the reduced supply slowly works its way through the market. This will probably take a year or so, as its initial impact will be more than offset by people selling to take advantage of the temporary price rise because of it.  

In the end all you need to do is zoom out to the 7 year chart and look at the steady rise BTC has had. Ignoring the many (sometimes spectacular) peaks and valleys, you can see a steady growth over the years. Going from a few cents to over $400 in 7 years is quite the achievement, and if this were a company stock I do think anyone could claim is has been anything but a success.

I store most of mine on dedicated rigs setup to host a wallet. Stripped down to only the essential OS (linux) and the bitcoin client with a strong passphrase (different) setup on all of them. I only log in and connect to the internet, through a heavily configured firewall, when I need to transact. I currently have two of these setup with most of my holdings spread across them equally.

I have been considering a paper wallet, I do have one I made that has a tiny amount of BTC on it, but still think log-term storage to be an issue along with what can happen to it. Even laminated it could get destroyed.

I also have a wallet on my main machine as well as a lite smartphone version that I keep real small amounts of BTC on for more periodic transactions.  I also keep some coins on Coinbase in their Mulisig Vault, but do not have 100% trust there in the event they would go under, so it is a small portion as well. Mainly enough if I would want to sell quickly.

I have been looking into a hardware wallet, but still have yet to take that plunge.