No, you would know that gold will always be the number one *storage of value method* in the world.  Currencies have always been backed up by gold in some way, until recently... and in the very distant past, yes, they did pay with gold; but there was an issue of being able to divide it.  So it's like going in with a $100 bill to buy a pack of bubble gum and the store doesn't have any change.

Now and days it would be dumb to go and try to pay someone in gold because of that problem, but if you wanted to store your value over a long period of time and not succumb to fiats devaluing nature over time, then gold would definitely be your best bet.  Like if you saved up enough money to buy an Oz. of gold every year for 30 years, you will be looking a lot better than people who put the amount of money you purchased gold with into banks.

What good does buying litecoin do?  It's essentially just a direct replica of bitcoin that sorta acts as a sidechain that tries to be quicker in tx speed.  It's stagnant as of right now because bitcoin development has been stagnant in the limits with the size of the blocks.  If you are suggesting buying litecoin, I would just go ahead and tell OP just to hold bitcoin because they are in complete correlation with each other.

Other coins you might be wanting to look into are the ones that are obviously trying to do something different than what bitcoin is doing right now.  Eth is obviously a good one, cryptonite/privacy centric coins are another good one (Monero, Dash, etc.).. Just make sure to try and do research your self before buying into some hyped coin.  Go into the community, ask questions, and if you don't understand why the coin is good yourself, then I would advise not to buy it. 

While a very large majority of altcoins are mainly for the P&D's, I wouldn't classify altcoins as being used just for the game of profit margins... Altcoin usage and developments keeps bitcoin in general more honest by testing out new code for the purpose of trying to fix a "flaw" in Bitcoin. 

With ETH, they are trying to do something completely different, and whether you think it's for a good purpose or not... they aren't just simply copying a line of code and trying to get people into it and pump it to the moon.  Other coins do this as well that deal with cryptonite algorithms.

I hope that you form of making a living isn't sitting on this forum and posting on some accounts for signature payments.  I mean it's a nice way to earn a little bit while passing time, but no means of earning a decent living. 

But, if you are a developer of some kind or own a nice looking website that runs as a business of some sort, then yeah, you have the ability to earn some big time money.

But I do like the analogy of having your own separate "savings account", because essentially that's what I use it for.  I like to keep a little bit of wealth in bitcoin and a little bit in other promising looking alts, rather than P&D's, and continually just keep putting a bit of money I earn IRL into cryptos, no matter what the price is.

Even tor is known to be a little "iffy" when it comes to the level of anonymity it provides... So going on those forums may be a little sketchy; not to mention if you are running an exit node you can really hinder your since of security.

I2P markets and forums might be a little bit better... I've read it provides a way different service which can be deemed as better than tor because it is it's own internet, rather than masking your ip with tor.

What I have done is printed out a couple of the same wallet and have them in secure "hiding spots" in the house... I mean you could open up a deposit box at a bank, but you would have to put trust in the bank...

In the end you will have to trust that someone will never find it or that you won't lose it... whether that's trusting your self, your hiding place, or another person/device.

Real estate?? Dude, have you not watched the Big Short?!? 

Lol, but really, I understand what you are saying here... but I don't really trust the real estate market that much, and will only invest in assets that provide some utility and serves as a store of value, such as silver and gold, along with crypto currencies.  Real estate works if you get lucky with a piece of land that is very unknown and you know of something that is going to cause more people to travel and want to move to that place...

I mainly buy bitcoins through localbitcoins and mainly use cash deposit for my transactions... this is generally one of the more "safer" and "cheap" routes of buying bitcoins through there.  It's really simple to buy with cash... here's what you do.

1) After you have signed up and everything; go and find a ad with a cheap rate on local bitcoins.
2) When you find what bank is the most convenient to do business with the other person (sometimes, people will have the option of multiple banks)... go to that bank (you don't need an account there).  You can even just drive through the drive thru and ask for a couple deposit slips.
3) After you get them, you can go ahead and request a transaction for whatever amount (usually has to be an odd number like $257.52) and he will give you info like what account name/number he/she/they want you to send the cash too.  Once you make the request, it automatically takes that amount of bitcoins they have on their localbitcoins wallet into an escrow account to hold until you make the payment and mark it "complete".  MAKE SURE YOU ONLY DEPOSIT CASH. Don't try checks.
4) Different people have different request that you have to do before they release the escrow.  Usually you have to take some type of picture of the receipt the cashier will give back to you, with some sentence you have to write on it saying you purchased bitcoins from that specific person.

Usually after that, they will verify that you made the payment and will release the bitcoins to you!  Usually the whole process takes no longer than 10-15 minutes.  It's way more convenient and safer (in my mind) than any other way to purchase bitcoins.

Hope that works out for you!

Absolutely... and if you think about it, it's kind of easy to see this connection and that bitcoin could easily be loaned out to people, from people; rather than people going to the bank. 

Bitcoin is meant to be a Peer to Peer cash system.  To do business, whether accepting payments, paying your employees, or whatever; bitcoin enables and kind of nudges you to do that sort of business with other peers that would like to provide that certain service.  Now, if bitcoin becomes more popular... then loaning services might become more centralized... but that's another story, I guess.

Well there is going to be a big problem for people that can't adjust miners fees with their current wallet setup when the halving comes, because since the fees will increase then I feel that a lot of peoples transactions won't ever confirm with where their fees are set at as of right now...

But I mean, it's already slow-ish as of right now and every block are always pretty much filled... so the more people that come in, the harder it is to get any transaction confirmed.

I mean, I understand that... but I guess I'm just thinking in the "two wrongs don't make a right" type of way.

It just seems that this is just another step for Bitcoin to all governments/corporations/banks to regulate and control bitcoin... idk, I mean different people seem to have different feelings than me in that I think that Bitcoin should be as private as possible rather than as adopted as possible... People only like this news because of the fact that it means that more people might end up buying/selling bitcoins which means more money liquidity; but I for one think that there has to be a better way for getting people to adopt cryptos/Bitcoin.

Yeah, but at the expense of privacy and everything that Bitcoin stands for. 

Look, I know that people want Bitcoin to become mainstream and want everyone in the world to be exposed to Bitcoins; but at what cost?  If Bitcoin is going in on a "partnership" with paypal, how does Bitcoin differ from any other fiat money transfer if it is willing to become somewhat reliant on what paypal has to say?

It just seems stupid to make this once P2P "digital cash" system we once had reliant on the most dictatorship of a money transfer service there ever was.

Yep, pretty much this... I understand why people are so worked up to receive bitcoins "for free", but it's like a majority of new people on this forum are pretty dead set on "working" for campaign signatures all day and so on.  This isn't the point of signature campaigns... like you said, it's just an added bonus for coming on here every now and then with occasionally getting enveloped in a topic you would like to discuss with other like-minded people; not get so wrapped up in posting as much "quality material" as you can for the sake of getting your post count/quality up.

I like signature campaigns, just probably not as much as other people on here like them... Sometimes it seems like they are dependent on them.

Really? I wouldn't go as far to say that there a NO coins out there that don't have a hard working team of devs that believe and support whatever coin they are working on.  Bitcoin is known to have certain problems which are: fungibility, block size, and tx speeds being the highest on the list; and there are people out there trying to solve those problems...

Now when you automatically get into talking about Eth, that's a whole different story and you are talking about a totally different breed of crypto... I wouldn't even call it a cryptocurrency per se, more like a cryptocontract... so it's not really fair to compare the two like that.  That's not to say that I believe in Eth to "make it big" in the real world type of thing, but just for the sake of argument...

Or it could just be that the "anarchist" type doesn't frequent these boards anymore like they used too... But yeah, I definitely agree that there is generally a different "vibe" from people that flock to cryptocurrencies. 

Before it was more of the dream of achieving financial freedom from banks and governments... now it's the dream of having banks and governments accept and use bitcoin and to have it as "mainstream" as possible.  That, and people here are more the wall street/day trader type of people.

It's funny, you know... everyone thinks that it will automatically go up in price because of the halving, which isn't the case...

You still have coins being mined and being put on the markets for sell... I understand having a lower amount of coins on the market, but if you have people that have bought all the coins they want before the halving and then afterward people don't have any more cash they are willing to convert to bitcoins, then you have a problem. 

Simply put, if you don't have people continually putting in money AFTER the halving... then the price isn't going to do anything, and actually will probably go down since people will lose faith in the "rocket 2 da moon" promise people have given them in the past.

Idk, I've checked my wallet and I still haven't gotten anything from the campaign or been able to log into the tracker... and it's been about a week now for my payment being postponed... so I'm not sure what is going on.

I requested a payment about 2 or 3 days ago and still haven't received mine yet... but I would imagine it was the payment for the week before hand, or I missed the deadline to process the payment.  Not so sure when the processing deadline is, but just wanted to state that for the record. Other than that the website still is working on my end.

Not to mention that with investing on dice sites, you are playing the LONG game, and should not expect to see any substantial ROI within a couple of days or so.  Dice with house odds are of course supposed to win, but they are supposed to win in the long term after hundreds on top of thousands of rolls... then you will have made your profit, as long as they haven't ran off.

To me personally, I don't really feel comfortable leaving money in a site like that and always thinking about it in the back of my mind... I like to know that my money is secure.

It's not like there has to be one crypto that "defeats them all" type of deal going on.  Ethereum is a completely different animal, and to say that "you will regret not getting in right now" is kind of silly... if you need to do this "smart contract" stuff, cool... by all means... but people are probably not using this stuff for more than just mere speculation and that's it.  So I think that to compare Bitcoin and Ethereum together is like comparing a carrot to soda.