Yes, only home hobbyist miners who spend less than a few hundred dollars a month on the mining electricity and other costs will be able to adopt a mine and hold strategy for very long. Once you scale past a certain size, especially if you need to rent out a place coupled with higher electrical bills (thousands a month), you begin have too many monthly expenses to pay for to not sell at least enough BTC to cover those expenses. Unless of course you are really rich, at which point it may be better to just buy and sell and not worry about all the mining hassle to begin with.

I try to keep no more than 10% on an exchange while actively trading. Like others, I try not to keep coins I am not planning to trade in the next day or so on a exchange and will withdrawal them to a wallet for slow periods or if I will not be trading for awhile.

As Cryptsy has shown, even this strategy is not fool-proof, as I did have some BTC and DOGE get stuck on their exchange while trading and now it looks like they are gone. Fortunately, my doge holdings were fairly small on there, so I only lost maybe 1-2% of my total crypto holdings. If nothing else, the loss will re-emphasize the importance of the fact that no exchanges can be trusted and the coins are only safe once they are back in your possession. This "lesson" will perhaps keep me from encounter bigger losses in the future.

Reading the comments on Zerohedge it does not look a lot different that reading comments here on Bitcointalk. A few BTC defenders, others are not against BTC per se but do bring up some good points on its weaknesses, and then we get the ETH champions who for some reason think that Bitcoin and ETH cannot co-exist, i.e. for one to succeed the other must die. Yep, must be same pool of readers.

I don't get why everyone is always worked up about this either. Comparing Bitcoin at its current size and and stage of development to VISA is like comparing a mom and pop burger shop to a chain like Mc Donalds.

The owners worrying about how they will scale to open 1000's of locations and serve billions of burgers is not likely going to help them in the short term. Instead, by concentrating on what they do well, serving superior food, (not hard considering the competition), a friendly atmosphere and great customer service will allow them to grow at a healthy rate and keep everyone happy.

The same is true with Bitcoin. No need to wonder how they will compete with Visa when they are only the size of a small bank. What they need to do is keep offering benefits the banks or VISA network don't offer and continue to refine those. The growth will come on its own and the scaling can be implemented incrementally as it does.

Whose to say BTC won't hit $800-$1,000 this year? There is a lot of 2016 left, and with big events like the halving, possible block size resolution, and more interest in general, anything could happen. Also, with LTC it doesn't always stay in lock-step with BTC, there was a pump last year that hit $8 so $10 is not out of the realm of possibilities.

Seems mini pumps happen almost daily anymore. Just look at the chart for the past few weeks and pick out the pattern, it looks basically like a roller coaster. Just buy in a trough (valley) and sell at a peak (hill). Don't try to pick the perfect bottoms or tops and don't be greedy, once your position has made a tidy little profit, cash out and wait for the next ride.

No, I think the rapid rise to $7 would be better, as then it will dump back down to under $6, perhaps $5 again. This way you can sell off at $7 and buy it all back with profit at $5-6. Much more profitable and exciting than to watch it gain slowly.

I am not a true believer in anything except the fact that many true believers end up getting burned. Yes, I do plan to keep a fiat retirement account as one component of retirement planning. I also try to accumulate various PMs and other collectibles, I have some real estate besides my main home, have a separate pension on top of 401k's, hold Bitcoin and other alts, as well as stocks and bonds. Heck I even have some US savings bonds. But the main takeaway is any or all of these could be worthless one day, but the chances of them all failing are less than putting all of your money into any one of them exclusively.

Yeah, I don't know either I suspect Cryptsy (Big Vern) ran off with the vast majority of funds myself. In any event, I think any chance that the users will get any significant return of their coins is slim to none at this point.

I didn't have enough there to warrant pursuing legal action, thus my desire to simply move on (live and learn). I just hope the law catches up with Big Vern, as it would be a shame for him to walk away without any consequences. Even if his story was 100% legit, which again I doubt, there has to be something illegal about the fact he did not tell users about the theft while continuing to accept deposits as if nothing happened.

Seeing as the last update was on February 1st, with only a few more wallets opened on that date, I think it is pretty much over by now. I had some hope they would open up Doge withdrawals, as I had quite a few left on Cryptsy, but now I think it is gone too. I know they won't be opening up any BTC or LTC as that is what they claim was stolen, but I think they had already drained any substantial funds out of the alt wallets and all that were left were the scraps.

At this point I would say to consider it all gone and move on with life. Getting worked up over it will do not good and just hold you back from doing more productive things with your time.

Most places will consider the transaction valid once it is seen on the network, even if it isn't confirmed. This mainly applies to the purchasing a coffee arguments, Bitpay will give the all clear as soon as the transaction appears even with 0 confirms.

As far as medium or large transactions, I do not think waiting for 10 minutes, or even an hour is too long. If you are buying a $1,000 - $2,000 TV or appliance, I don't think waiting 10 minutes for 1 confirm is too much to ask. It would probably take that long to have someone get it from stock, get it out to your car and have it loaded up. or if you are having it delivered, the store will have plenty of time to ensure there is 6 or more confirms before heading out with it.

If you buy an average car, say $35,000 or roughly 80 BTC, in the time needed to finish the paperwork would be plenty of time for 6 confirms. So this all pretty much takes care of itself, as the less risky small transactions can be trusted they will clear, with only small $$ at risk if they didn't, whereas medium and large transactions the nature of these require more time.

My view is that there is no problem currently. While it is true it will be come a problem in the future, I believe the core developers are quite aware of this and have an adequate road-map in place. SegWit, while not directly addressing the growth problem still indirectly offers a bit of breathing space, so the immediate concerns are taken care of.

As far as comments about scaling to Visa, wow. I believe Bitcoin still has a lot of growing to do before even beginning to worry about that. I am sure even Visa when it was at Bitcoin's stage, if it was even ever that small, was not ready to scale to its modern day equivalent. The scaling will take care of itself with time and growth.

I don't think it would be much of an issues from fumes, as these are designed to be put in PCs that are in homes already. Granted, you might end up running them a bit hotter than usual, but still should be no concerns there.

I believe the biggest issue would be that of a fire hazard. Are you using extension cords at all? Are you overloading a circuit, should probably only put one rig per individual circuit, especially if the circuit is being shared with other appliances. If dedicated 20 Amp circuits, you could probably get a way with two rigs each.

Then how about the immediate surroundings? Are you setting these rigs up on or nearby anything flammable? Even a quick spark shooting out and landing on some clothing could set your house ablaze. This is especially a concern if you are running open air rigs, which it sounds like you may be with 3 GPUs each. With a regular computer, the case acts as a barrier between a short and any sparking and the surrounding environment, open air the spark could travel some distance. With rigs running hot 24/7, sometimes weak components can give out.

When I ran a lot of scrypt mining rigs, I had them on metal wire racks from Home Depot with each 4 GPU rig fed from a Tripp-lite surge suppressor (the metal cased ones) which in turn has as separate 12 amp breaker. These were plugged into (2) per 20 amp circuit. I had to have extra circuits installed to keep everything legit. The racks were on concrete in the unfinished part of my basement, with the backs about 2 feet away from a bare sheet-rocked wall (it had paint but nothing else, i.e. no posters, curtains,etc.). I also made sure to keep anything combustible, like cardboard, papers, clothes, etc. at least 6 feet away from the sides and fronts of the rack area. This way if a component failed and a few sparks shot out, they would not land on anything that would easily catch fire.

I bring all this up, as again during my scrypt mining days, I probably had 5-6 instances where components went bad and the few times I was actually in the room, a bunch of sparks shot out before the equipment could shut down. Fortunately it was usually just a video card voltage regulator going out, so I could send them in for RMA. One time a PSU went out when I was away. When I came home and noticed, because of the burnt smell in the air, the tripp-lite surge suppressor breaker had tripped. The connected PSU had brunt out and I could see a lot of charring around the vent holes, what looked like it may have put on quite a show when it went out.

So after experiencing some of these events first-hand, i can only imagine images of people placing a bunch of rigs in bedrooms, on carpeted floors, near beds, curtains, etc., and overloading outlets where if something would happen, it would likely cause a fire.

This is not meant to discourage you or anyone from mining, only to think about what they are actually doing and some of the risks they are introducing into their household. At minimum put a smoke detector in every room you have rigs going.

I also remember the tremendous heat this used to put out. I live in a colder climate, and even when the temperature was below 0 outside, we still had to have several windows cracked open at all times. In spring, even as it approached 20-30 degrees F outside, the house would need to be opened up like it was summer outside, with windows wide open as well as the doors. Once real warm weather arrived, I had to relocate some rigs to the garage and ended up shutting many of them down.

Exactly, this may be common knowledge for people who were around for this type of thing with scrypt coins, but for people new to this you really need to look closely at the numbers. A couple of days ago when ETH was peaking you could punch in the numbers on a profitability calculator and it indicated you could ROI on a efficient card in a month. Now those same figures indicate it will take 2-3 months.

Now, not only has the price fallen, but also the number of new miners has increased and will not drop off proportionally. This Red Queen's Race always happens and you need to really sit down and figure out your profitability before going out and investing.

As some have stated, at least by investing in your own equipment, in the worse case you can at least sell your equipment off. By investing in cloud hashing, once you send in your money you are committed, if the price bottoms you will be lucky to get 40-50% of your money back.

Yes, the thing with most miners is you need to stay on top of which coin/algorithm is the most profitable at any given moment, as most pure profit miners simply mien and dump at current market prices, this the network hash-rate will somewhat follow the general price trend of a coin.
 
For the true believers mining and holding this isn't as much a factor, so their hash-rate contributions will remain constant, but then they are also playing the speculation game in that the value of the coin they are mining, in this case ETH, will go up and provide more profits in the future.

While I can see how some would think this way, it still may be better to always mine the most profitable coin any given day, sell at current prices to lock in the profit. Then if you want to speculate you can use your earnings to buy the coin you wish to speculate with. You will end up with more coins in the long run.

I voted full. I recently upgraded two nodes I have been using with 2 TB hard drives for this very purpose. They originally were using 160 GB SDD's, which was able to handle the OS, clients, and block-chain folder, but  was starting to fill up. Being proactive, I decided to transfer just the data folder to the 2 TB spinners and keep the Wallet.dat on the SSD (as well as backed up of course). I figure 2 TB is overkill for now, but I didn't want to have to deal with them again for awhile, and the driver were cheap <$100 each.

I might try out a lite node as well, but don't really like to keep my wallet on any devices I use a lot and it seems a lot of work to setup a dedicated device just to run a lite node.

Maybe, I have been buying small amounts here and there to try and re-establish my position, but I am still waiting for the big buy under .007, probably closer to .006.

I have been trying to play the waves today, but the oscillations between peak and trough are getting to small to reliably trade against. This may be a sign of getting close to bottom for now.

Just saying.....

My outlook has changed since my last post, lol. Now I am thinking we might even go under .007 and see some of his fellow agents, perhaps .006 or even .005. If this happens I can get into my 1500 position from my earlier sale, which I would be happy with at this point. Then it is simply a matter of waiting until the PoS phase to see if Eth ever amounts to anything.

Good time to look at some of these alts and place some strategic buy orders, especially the consistently high volumes ones.

"The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets." - Baron Rothschild