The factors that matter in order to give you the best answer include:

 - Where are you located (country)?
 - How much are you looking to buy?
 - What payment methods do you have available?
 - How soon do you need access to the proceeds?
 - Is privacy important?

A fairly comprehensive list of options is compiled here:

 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Buying_bitcoins

Cash works.  There are methods to buy bitcoins with cash in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Russia, and many other locations.

You might find a local trade as well:

 - http://www.LocalBitcoins.com

There was a feature that was written but never released in which the child could pay for parent.  What this means is that the code that determines if the fee is appropriate will also consider any other transactions that depend on this transaction and what are the fees for those transactions.  That way the miner can receive the fee for processing both the parent and the child. 

 - https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/1647

That would give the recipient of the payment a method to pay an additional fee after the sender has broadcast the transaction.

I'ld read where international wire transfers to Mt. Gox needed to come from your own account, and not from some financial intermediary.  I don't know how closely they monitor and reject transactions when that isn't the case.

Similar to XE.com for this is TransferWise and CurrencyFair. 

With TransferWise, for instance, the TransferWise account can be funded with GBPs and then convert to EUR.  BITSTAMP is an exchange that accepts EUR SEPA transfers.  You can even fund a TransferWise account with a bank debit card,

In the UK there is also
 - http://www.bitbargain.co.uk

You can send cash (GBP) in the mail to www.bitcoinnordic.com in Denmark.
 - http://www.BitcoinNordic.com

You can also go through Blockchain.info using Faster Payments:
 - https://blockchain.info/wallet/deposit-bank-transfer
or Pingit:
 - https://blockchain.info/wallet/deposit-pingit

Bitcoin Fridge is temporarily not selling but said would resume next month:
 - http://www.BitcoinFridge.co.uk

That the MTGUSD and MTGCAD redeemable codes will no longer be issued?

Yes.

From another thread:

Since even blockchain.info no longer shows those it is probably safe to say your spend transaction ended up using funds that had been double spent.  So the transactions disappear and any confirmed funds re-appear in your wallet.

Mt. Gox hasn't "fallen apart", but for amounts you are describing they do require that you verify your identity and stay within daily withdrawal limits.
 - https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20919111-AML-Account-Statuses

At that buying level you might consider a bulk seller, which would include BitcoinsDirect.com -- however they aren't currently accepting more new buyers just now.

BITSTAMP has liquidity at that level, and accepts USD international wire transfers as well.  Others take USD International wire as well, like Bitcoin-24.com (at least not for their BTC/USD market), Bitme, and more but they don't have liquidity anywhere near what you are looking for:
 - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Buying_bitcoins

There are individual traders who either can do this deal or could coordinate with others to do a trade of this size.  Knowing your location (e.g., State or metro area) might incent someone near enough to contact you.

Maybe there's some other method you'ld want to consider as well:
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Buying_bitcoins

WeExchange.co
Has a BTC/CAD marketplace.


Under funding:


 - https://www.WeExchange.co


Currently they have no bids nor any asks.  I'm not sure why that is, they used to at one time have a bid or two and an ask or two.    They have a gateway to Ripple and are the wallet for moving funds to and from BitFunder (same operator) so they will likely see more Canadian users at some point.

Has the payment received six confirmations on the blockchain?

Unfortunately it does not appear that there is a way to see previously generated Bitcoin addresses for receiving deposits.  Some people might save screen shots or paper printouts to have the ability to know without question what Bitcoin address Camp BX provided for deposits.

Have you created a ticket using their support service?

 - https://campbx.kayako.com/Tickets/Submit

What this does for bitcoin is introduce a way for those wishing to hedge or short bitcoin a method to do so.

This will help the Bitcoin exchange rate to be more stable.

With short sellers, the higher the exchange rate, the more speculators who will bet agaist bitcoin..  If (or more likely when) there is a sharp selloff, those who are short (but not those who are crazy calling for $0) will become buyers, and a lowered chance of insolvency is the result.

Using a hosted (shared) wallet helps to increase transaction privacy.    Bitcoin addresses that are used for your withdrawal will not likely ever be ones that you used when receiving a deposit.  So someone attempting to use the information in the blockchain alone to determine your activity when you use a hosted (shared) EWallet is something that is pretty ineffective.  

A competing Exchange+EWallet service, Coinbase, takes a different approach.  With them a user's account has specific Bitcoin addresses assigned only to that user.  So all withdrawals do come from the Bitcoin addresses to which that user received payment.  And that's why Coinbase could be used with SatoshiDICE whereas Mt. Gox should not.

After lamenting that this was yet another instance of someone losing funds due to this "return to sender" approach that SatoshiDICE utilizes I did ask Mt. Gox.   The response:


Which probably means some special case handling might be implemented so that SatoshiDICE wagering from a Mt. Gox EWallet will be possible, someday.

Yes, but those goals are not static.  Here's an anecdote.  A person who had bought near the 2011 high and had held all the way down to $2 was saying that as soon as break-even was reached that person would sell half the coins held.  At last check this person still has not sold. 

But yes, many people have adopted a buy and hold investment approach, some performing dollar cost averaging, and others just sitting on what they already have acquired.   It may be where they are just watching to see where bitcoin goes -- with no burning desire to cash out anytime soon, especially since cashing out may cause a taxable event (i.e., recognition of capital gains).


Those are two really independent statements.

Currently there are 10.8 million BTC issues.   Let's say 10 million are held by investors who do not plan to touch them for five years.   That doesn't mean the BTC economy can't be developed.  The 0.8 million BTC circulating would just be seeing a high velocity (and a might higher valuation) since those two would change as the level of economic activity changes.

The risk to this though is that if the investors holding the 10 million BTCs all start to think that selling a good chunk of coins would be a good idea, that's when you get volatility and selloffs and that is what is harmful to a nascent currency.

It is probably good for Dwolla.

 

 

What is it that you are trying to do?

The wallet.dat is a needed file.  It should be backed up.  The wallet.dat backup will only be useful when it was backed up when the client has shut down properly first before the backup operation occurs.

You generally don't want to be deleting anything.

Go into Account Settings and under Personal enter an e-mail address, and then an Alias,

Then below Personal is General, click on that and mark the checkbox for Automatic Email Backups.

You'll get an email with an encrypted backup of your blockchain.info/wallet.   It will be sent each time it adds a new address so you may get these frequently if you use Custom send and specify that change goes to a New Address each time.  The backup file is an attachment to the message, called wallet.aes.json

You might also want to set a second password if you haven't.  That's under the Passwords link on the left menu panel.    This second password will be asked each time you want to spend from your wallet.

It would be nice if I could specify that I want to use a keypool so that if the most recent backup gets deleted or lost I am not at risk of not having access to every last transaction received for my wallet.

The log files may be needed if the database was not shut down properly, so you probably don't want to delete those.
Peer.dat stores peer nodes, and while you can delete that your node will recreate it by discovering nodes.  There can be instances where not having the old peers.dat could be less secure than letting it access peers it has previously discovered.


 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory#Directory_Contents

Infinity PFM (Personal Finance Manager) can read transactions from the Bitcoin.org client, apparently:

 - http://launchpad.net/infinitypfm

I just got this answered on #mtgox IRC:

No, they will not.

Mt. Gox will no longer be issuing MTGUSD and MTGCAD redeemable codes beginning April 10, 2012.  Other currencies (e.g., MTGEUR, MTGGBP, etc,) will still be issued, though nobody in the U.S. or Canada can have wallets with those currencies so effectively no redeemable codes in any currency are available to those in the U.S. or Canada.

If you were to look at Mt. Gox's cold wallet(s), I would bet that you would be very surprised to learn how many could be found there.

Having a BitcoinFund hedge fund acquiring and holding more will help cause more to be transferred out of Mt. Gox perhaps, but that's still about the same -- large amounts of funds ending up under the physical control of a small number of entities.


Bitcoins held by those running the Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind client are stored locally.  Bitcoins held by those storing them to paper wallets are local as well.

The reason you aren't seeing them traded is because they were acquiring for speculative purposes.  They aren't being traded because the speculators aren't selling.   (Well some are, certainly, but many more are not.)



Well, the market at current levels would probably be decimated if a half million coins were to be dumped over a period of just a couple days.  The carnage would be even worse if let's say a couple million coins of supply were to overrun the demand.


It all depends on why the selling is occurring.  For instance, let's say a rogue programmer somehow slipped in a keylogger+file transfer utility into the most recent Microsoft critical update.  On April 1st, 2013 at 00:00:00 UTC it is set to execute, and will upload to the cloud every wallet.dat and keystroke log it was able to capture.  By 1 am the attacker has started dumping large amounts of coins and the exchange rate drops.  Then users start reporting that their wallets are showing transactions they didn't make.  By 2am it is apparent there is a widespread exploit and possibly millions of coins are now in the hands of thieves, and the selloff accelerates.   

Possible?  You betcha!

Likely?  We'll probably first see something like this from some lesser known third-party software, but since wallet.dat + keystroke log = "free money" (in the eyes of the attacker), it wouldn't surprise me if it were to occur.

Everyone holding bitcoins are vulnerable to the loss in confidence and the resulting selloff following such an event.  Whether that means the exchange rate drops to $2 or $12 or $28 nobody knows.  But absent some armageddon like that, any sharp drop will probably be met with heaving buying from those looking to enter a position (or buy back) by picking up some "cheap" coins.