This type of thing happens with penny stocks all the time - it's called a "pump and dump". The concept is you inject some capital to start driving the price up, then the sheep come in and think it's an easy get rich scheme. Once everyone is convinced it can do nothing but go up, and every plebe owns some, the original capital gets pulled out and the original buyers cash a massive profit. Wait a bit, then rinse and repeat. Ditto for premine except they don't even have to buy anything just wait until the coin becomes popular than dump the whole premine -- we may be seeing that with Etherium.

Reader exercise - who do you think is paying for his all expense paid travels around the world? If you're buying BTC, you are!

The gold/silver analogy for BTC and LTC was always pretty stupid. Since Bitcoin can be bought fractionally you can acquire as much or as little as you want no need for a "cheaper" alternative.

Etherium, by contrast, is based on a completely different technology stack and can do smart programmable contracts that BTC and LTC can't. That makes it potentially more useful which has so far resulted in a stunning appreciation in value - it's now far and away the #2 coin in market capitalization. That's not to say we won't see periods of price depreciation, same has happened to BTC, but overall Etherium will have far more staying power than LTC since it solves a real problem that BTC can't.

Was a good site but lately plagued by latency issues and I've had something like 20 Craps session losses in a row so not sure what's going on with the random seeds - that shouldn't be possible.

I'm going to move on past this one and find another site but good luck out there.

no

Depend on whether Trump owns any BTC - all the guy cares about is himself so if something benefits him or his businesses he's all for it.

$2M worth is probably enough for just about everyone. That provides $80k a year of basic income at a 4% draw rate. You won't live like a king but it's quite comfortable.

The guys saying "I'll start a shop with $25k and get $2500 a month of income" are just dreaming. First off, a successful business requires a full time commitment so it's really no better and in many ways worse than a day job. Add to that the fact that 95% of small businesses fail and many of those that succeed have terribly small ROI's and often experience annual losses.

Rental properties are easier but similar problem - the type of property one can buy for $25k is going to require massive amounts of maintenance and will attract tenants who dislike paying rent and excel at trashing the place. Very often wildly unprofitable.

That question is easy to answer: China.

It's been said a lot but probably not enough -

NEVER KEEP ANY SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF BTC AT AN EXCHANGE

I think any respectable person would return it. This type of thing can happen when, for example, someone copy/pastes an address from the wrong profile.

As a general rule, the way to succeed in life is to invest and enjoy money YOU have earned but return anything that doesn't rightfully belong to you.

Bitcoin is more like a speculative stock than a real currency. While a few people use it to conduct transactions for goods and services, the majority buy it for speculative price appreciation. That causes wild swings up and down.

At these levels, no more than 10%. VERY speculative investment. Case in point - folks who bought in at $1150 aren't too happy and many got wiped out on the Alt coins.

1. The blockchain is cool for large transactions but it is a clunky, slow, and likely unscaleable solution for the type of micro transactions that would actually make Bitcoin popular. Off blockchain transaction providers are the solution but, to date, they are few and far between.

2. Too easy to steal coins. Hardware wallets are a move in the right direction but they are not widely adopted so, at present, we have rampant hacking and theft of coins which has been a disaster for widespread adoption.

3. Too easy to lose coins. Again, prudent users should make backups but many don't and end up losing all their coins when a hard drive or other storage medium fails. Not sure what the solution is but one option would be for all the popular wallets to prompt users more often to make backups or offer automatic cloud backup of encrypted wallets.

4. Too hard to convert to the more practical and useful fiat. Really need Bitcoin debit cards, backed by a major bank, that are fully interoperable with current ATM system and which guarantee any deposits. Would be nice for example to deposit 100 BTC with Citi and then have instant access to them at any ATM machine in the US with automatic currency conversion. Some small players are working this but the solutions have been spotty and hard to trust.

It has been in the $400-$500 type range for ages. Any stock trader will tell you a move -20% to +20% off a moving average is utterly meaningless so don't pay much attention to it.

If it reaches $750, that's something to chat about.

Never just trust a "provably fair" statement - any provably fair casino should provide you a link to each and every recent bet that lets you verify that the random number was generated using a combination of your presumably private client key and their server-side key. It's not that hard to wade through the javascript to verify that they aren't sending along your private key -- any popular site has likely been verified many times by programmers who would be screaming bloody murder on this forum, and posting code examples, if they were cheating.

One thing to note - consider a 1 year sabbatical once you reach 1000 or so BTC. It will be a real grind to reach 4000 and the year off will give you energy to keep charging forward.

4500 BTC, give or take, at the current exchange rate. Ideally, would also want a home fully paid off so no mortgage or rent.

Flash ROM will eventually lose its data at room temperature but it will take an exceedingly long period of time for a new drive.

For a very heavily used drive or one that is stored at very high temperature, the data loss is a real issue but for a new drive that is rated for 1000 hours at 120 degrees C I suspect the other components will degrade before the ROM stops retaining its data.

Only use ones that have "provably fair" links for each play. That allows you to cryptographically verify that you aren't being cheated.

The only concern there is that they might have some obfuscated/hidden javascript that sends them your part of the key. That would be risky, however, since some programmer would almost surely call them out on it and destroy the reputation of the casino. Given they have all but guaranteed statistical profit due to the house edge, not worth risking their reputation.

I have never had a problem with Coinbase - very fast and always accurate. Most of the complaints are probably due to the archaic ACH system not Coinbase specific issues.