Based on the viability of BTC at the time, he was essentially buying a lottery ticket. He may have been able to see the fundamental value in the blockchain concept and made a good bet.

Best news: Expedia has started to accept bitcoin for hotel rooms.

This is only the best news because it is the most recent example of a big company starting to accept bitcon.

That would be true today but that is only because people are so accustomed to paying the hidden "tax" of using payment processors that process paypal, credit/debit card transactions and the like in the form of higher prices.

Any contract that you enter into is something that may need to be enforced in the future and you would need to use the state to enforce such contract.

The best way to setup smart contracts on the blockchain would be to set up a trust that holds a particular asset then have the trustee direct the "benefit" of the trust to the holders of the BTC address that contains the outputs linked to the contract.

It would likely not be worth less then silver if silver was also valued at it's "tangible worth" as gold is more efficient and has more uses then silver.

Investments like gold and silver will never will never be valued at their "tangible worth" because there are other legitimate uses for them (store of value, hedge against inflation).

I hope that you get your coins back, but I believe that it is a long shot that your bounty will help.

The reason for this is that you are asking for the wrong outcome. By offering 400 BTC to get your ~1.1k BTC back you are essentially saying that you will give someone money if they give (get) you more money. Due to the fact that whoever holds the keys to the address that contains the unspent outputs of BTC owns the coins there would be little incentive for someone who was able to somehow get your coins in their possession to return them to you.

A "better" bounty would be one that offers 400 (or other amount) BTC for the arrest (or indictment, or conviction - it is up to you) of the person/persons that stole the BTC. This would give people an incentive to spend time and resources investigating who stole the coins and would also give an incentive to return all/some of the stolen coins.

It looks like they were just transferred to another wallet. When you transfer to an exchange the exchange will usually sweep the coins from the "deposit" address. The price drop is probably due to anticipation of a large amount of coins being brought to the market in the near future.

In the US after bank accounts (or other assets at a financial institution) have been dormant for a certain amount of time the assets are sent to "unclaimed funds" so the bank no longer controls the assets, but the assets are still property of the owner, the owner just needs to claim them.

There are several large addresses that have begging spam on them. I have never sent begging spam nor have I sent funds to an address asking for a donation but the public notes are very entertaining to read.

As a rule the link on address tags must contain the BTC address on the page. Also as a rule in order to create a "tag" someone with access to the private keys must sign a message allowing the tag to be changed.

There are several exceptions to this rule when blockchian.info will just create a tag on it's own. These tags are very similar to media reporting as the tag would serve some kind of legitimate public interest to know the significance of a particular address.

Not offering to buy someone a pizza in exchange for 10,000 BTC.

You are comparing apples vs oranges.

Urber is a company with revenue and (hopefully profits in the future).

Bitcoin is a "currency" and a method of transmitting money.

Over time as more of the public adapts bitcoin the price and market cap will increase. 

The cost of labor in the US is not as much of an issue for people who have advanced degrees (like the OP). If the OP's degree is something math, science or business related then the job market in the US is not horrible, although he may have difficulty getting a work visa.

It has been said before but this is not the 1st bitcoin ATM in China.

With that being acknowledged, bitcoin ATMs help get the public aware and interested in Bitcoin. They also are very effective in getting the local public to use bitcon. Just look at Vancouver.

It is not just the fees, it is that the price that most cloud mining companies sell their contracts are at a level where the rate of difficulty increases would need to slow substantially.

I disagree with this statement. The OP will likely see some kind of recovery as GOX does have some assets.

The fact that Bitcoin is involved will likely complicate things as there is no precedent for how distribution should be handled, plus the fact that GOX has creditors from around the world and are relatively small as a percentage of total claims.

IMO it will take several years to resolve GOX and the OP will see some kind of recovery.

We tried that in WW2 and as a result the Nazi's (and axis) were able to easily defeat most of Europe and was able to control most of the pacific. We got attacked even though we tried to stay neutral. 

Your statement is probably correct, however in the context of it being correct the term "really long term" would probably be longer then the OP's time frame that he is looking to invest.

Real estate has traditionally gone up over time (when looked at nationally) although our most recent recession proved that to not always be the case. Prices in some of the hardest hit "bubble" areas (Much of FL and NV) will probably not recover to their pre-recession highs for many decades. If you were investing in a pension fund for example (whose time horizon is essentially "forever") then real estate is probably a good investment as long as it is not too concentrated. The OPs time frame is probably not more then 50 years (assuming the OP is 20 years old and wishes to retire at age 70) and real estate may or may not be higher then.

Starting posts: 122
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Username: Shakyhands
THANKS!