Linux is the correct answer!

But if you wanna stay with Windows, I recommend daily passive scans with IMHO the two best currently available scanners, Malwarebytes and Hitman Pro.  On top of that you'll want a decent firewall program, such as Comodo.

I'm wondering: have you calculated the difficulty increases in chart-making over the next few months?

The way I see it, charts will become more difficult to make, and will require more colors, by a factor of 500% every second week from now on until the ASICS come into effect full-force. 

Yeah Gox holds way too much of the market for sure.

It's up to every dude to do their own part.

I sell my BTC on other exchanges, myself.

I recommend you do some forum searching, a lot of threads on this.

The short version is though: the company is great shape, they've put a lot of hashes online, and have ambitious plans to expand that they are achieving at a more reliable rate than BFL or Avalon. In short: good investment.

I believe (watched that before but can not right atm) that this ^^^ is no longer valid as it relied on coupons which made things x10000 easier but have recently been discontinued.

The obvious awesome answer:

gold and silver plated physical BTC

Casascius actually offers 100 BTC/gold bars for sale. Little excessive but certainly has some appeal.

Japan.

Most of the Earth is currently in the year 2013.  Japan I think exists in the year 2015, or 2015 and a half.

I mean they have robot spiders and stuff.

TEchnically yes. And I'm sure some people have. But it's not as straight forward and profitable as you might think. First of all getting money into and out of both exchanges can be a pain, and the delays are hard to rely on. In the time it takes to transfer funds the fast-changing price of BTC can kick you in the butt.

Them cyber-hacker types are really loving this whole bitcoin invention, it seems.

Oh right, the ole Bitcoin loop de loop. I should have seen it !

It's funny, I get more nervous when BTC is climbing than I do when it crashes.  I feel we should be at $110 - $130.

I hope Paypal stays away. Terrible company IMHO.

Ever since about... I dunno, 5 or 6 years ago, when they screwed up a payment which caused me financial penalties and then they had absolutely no phone number at all for any sort of customer service discussion I have been an ardent disliker of these muppets.

Certainly does look like it'll be late. I think CoinHoarder is right though, in his estimate. It'll be a bit late not BFL, see-ya-next-year late. I'll guess 2 weeks late on that start of batch 3 shipping. Which will not be a big deal.

Shipping from China isn't exactly the safest or quickest thing. But I have faith in Avalon that they'll get this done in a reasonably efficient way.

I still see BFL as a ways off of getting things done in volume. Don't think they have finished the design of the Jal'p at any sort of final revision level, and I don't have confidence that they will take any less than a month from now to start making product in the numbers they need to ship any more than 1% of their orders a week or so.

All guesswork though.

I'll take it for....  .25 BTC

Well begrudgingly must say 'good stuff' to BFL for finally [at least start] producing and shipping units.  Still haven't seen much evidence that they'll be able to build any products in bulk yet, but at least now it does look like it will happen.

Once these get out the doors, and just a few months more, maybe just 2, and it's gonna be a radically different ball game for miners now.

I think the real profit making potential is going to shift more towards the hardware makers now, with ASICS.  Not before long it's going to cost a lot of money just to make a meager amount of BTC in mining. Looks like you'll have to pay a couple of grand just to have enough hashes to make a maybe-ROI of what, 3 months or so? before your product is already out of date then, with little resale value. Edit: maybe I'm being a pessimist...

It's possible but I'm not convinced there will be this giant exodus from BTC to LTC . There will be a big one, but I don't think most GPU BTC miners will go to LTC after ASICS roll out en masse.

I mine LTC (albeit only have 5 gpus so I'm just a hobbyist miner guy) currently. The ROI is already not much over BTC returns due to difficulty. Thing is, while BTC will be raising, and float LTC's boat some much, I don't see as much USD/fiat gains rising for LTC to conceive that it will be worthwhile when the difficult goes up by 5000%* in a couple of months time. I don't think the valuation of LTC will increase at the rate needed to match the incredible skyrocket of difficulty that would result if most BTC miners switched over.  

* made this number up obv, but it'll be insanely ridiculously large when the asic wave crests

Guess this is more a speculation-type post so maybe I'll just leave my thoughts on this as that, to not derail the thread...

Damn. That's a whole lot of ASIC going on.

And it actually looks like BFL might be shipping stuff in quantity in another month or two.

The difficulty is going to explode.

Sigh...my batch 3 Avalon order could not arrive soon enough.

I wonder if there will be an unheralded excess of used video cards going up for sale come summertime, or if many will stick around for the razor-thin margins.

Might want to play it safe the first time and just go with a guy that has a lot of customer feedbacks.

It looks like each town has one major seller in it, with over 50 positive feedbacks or so.

Edit: ok just checked it out again now... actually 10 feedback is prob more reasonable.

Holy crap really? Nice work.  I have to get tweaking my own it seems... Have been pretty happy just at around 590 for scrypt...seems I have some work ahead of me tonight...

edit: Please post your cooling used as well when you show the settings tonight. Thanks.

You know I'd almost be more impressed by BFL if they planned to fail as much as they have; or it was an elaborate profit making scam. But I think it has been an accident and they are just borderline incompetent.

Not that they think they are a scam. But even if they started shipping in big volume tomorrow it will still have been a complete disaster for anyone who ordered anything from this company.