What a grubby little man and an appalling story.

Having said that if I was a proper gizzer I'd be first in line to have myself euthanised. I'm extremely intolerant of my body failing me and if there's the slightest gripe I have to be talked out of slicing off the offending appendage.

However that's going to be my choice, not some puerile madman.

Both Bitfinex and Bitstamp bank in far off lands unless I'm much mistaken, even though they operate in USD. If you're a US resident in the right state you have much faster exchange options with proper regulation and insurance too.

In the UK certain iterations of gold coin are capital gains tax free and there's no value added tax on gold, but there is on silver. Trouble is the OP isn't declaring tax on the Bitcoins earned to buy them.

There's an onion effect in action. People flock to alts to get more Bitcoin because they believe that Bitcoin is The One or (in many a case) because they're chasing more dollars.

As more and more alt/USD channels open then that desire or need for Bitcoin lessens. As alt volumes get ever larger and Bitcoin sits there like a boring old poo then perhaps it's going to fade in more than a few minds.

It could do with some juicy action, be that price or innovation, to remind people why they're here. If I was a trader I would've abandoned it long ago.

Au contraire. It's entirely down to the number of units. Plenty of active and explosive coins are priced sub 100. They might be roaring successes. That price is arrived at because there are billions of them.

Yes. Our German teacher told us some UK coin, can't remember what it was, was accepted as a Deutschmark in German vending machines which saved my little friends rather a lot of money on school trips.

I knew a guy whose full time living was going around vending machines with an official-looking vest and a nefariously obtained copy of a key and emptying them. It looked like extremely lucrative 'work'.

I'm more concerned about someone inventing a vending machine that doesn't use those piece of shit curly things to spit your stuff out. I've been denied my refreshment three times in a row when they jammed. Clearly they have failed to address this problem.

It's all hiding in plain view in altland these days. I know it's always been so, but the volumes these days are humongous. I didn't expect the volatility to make a wholesale transfer but it seems to have effectively done a runner.

I do the same, but instead I buy a new HDD every few years and back it up to the new one. I suppose it works out about $10 per year. I do have some pretty ancient HDDs, one's about 17 years old and it's fine, but I wouldn't be trusting precious stuff to just one especially when storage is so cheap and easily transferred. You can clone the whole thing in less than an hour or two.

You don't seem to see many external SSDs for sale, let alone used ones. I'd say that reliability vs an HDD is moot. And external disks tend to lead easier lives in general than internal ones. When you throw in that fact that a 1tb HDD is about 1/6th of the cost of the equivalent SSD it would sway me towards old school.

Would you be using it for the long term parking of data or would you constantly be writing new data to it? Either way I wouldn't be betting my data on something used.

You're being paid ergo you're liable for income tax. Just because it's magic internet money doesn't mean you're also magically relieved of the necessity to pay tax. The HMRC tries to get a cut of barter, why would Bitcoin be any different?

You can try to hide it and the chances are you'll be fine, but most people pay tax to avoid potential ball ache not because they want to.

I don't think anyone new would be inspired to go all in with BTC if there were a genuine meltdown. It's pure speculation and that is not a time to speculate. People will go with the tried and tested options. And if they were truly squeezed and the kiddies go starving are you going to sell your house or your Bitcoin? That's not a very difficult choice to make.

Is this what modern society has been reduced to? Paying people to rub their winkles and spurt and then complaining when they don't see enough of it? Get a dog instead. And it'll let you wank it off for free.

Is this true? You can't upgrade ram and the drives? I didn't think there was a computer alive that stopped you from doing this. I love a good fiddle but I've never liked anything Apple anyway. This just emphasises why.

Today I failed to wipe my arse properly and a lump of shit landed in my sock. I believe Israel is behind this. When will it stop?

Correct about the exchanges but there are some UK based brokerage services but I know very little about them. Perhaps Coinfloor could hook buyers and sellers up too.

There's also Bittylicious. I've only bought on there but the whole process is very slick. And if you're prepared to string out your sells then Circle is amazing. I used that for the first time last week.

Doesn't anyone here have bank accounts? Or get a Paypal card and withdraw cash. Both options open up far more buying opportunities with vastly lower fees. It's bleedin' obvious that Paypal's going to be a nightmare. It's fundamentally incompatible.

I often hear the penny stock comparison but I'm very unfamiliar with them. What's the deal with them?

A lot of people buy crypto with the far future in mind. Do people buy penny stocks expecting them to become legit successes or are they all aware that they're short term thrills and nothing else?

It's too late for Ethereum in my opinion. I suppose there are two sides to how a bank might view it.

On one side they're going to approve of the ability to mitigate disaster, on the other they're not going to like the uncertainty that precedent sets. What is one person's disaster is another person's boon.

The screamingly obvious answer is to throw away any notions of getting involved in something they don't have total control over. I don't think their shareholders or host governments are going to be sympathetic to their interests being destroyed by 'the community'.

So confirmation time is more important than the stability of a project? I'm not willing to trade a slightly longer wait for something faster, sexier and prone to go up in smoke at any second.