First, I would read the news. I've already accepted my original buy-in as a sunk cost, so there's no reason to panic before understanding the situation.

Depending on what sort of news it is, I'd do one of the following:
1) If holding bitcoins is going to be criminalized in a way that has actual teeth, I may delete my wallet, or else give the coins to someone who lives in another country.
2) If it's a catastrophic protocol failure which will make Bitcoin unusable starting immediately, I probably can't get my coins onto an exchange anyway, so I'll just keep them around as a keepsake.
3) In basically any other scenario, I'd buy like mad.

Where are you in California?

How heavy is the equipment?

The offer ITT is the best thing price/performance-wise on the open market right now, but 200 coins is a lotta dough.

Edit: Would you accept in-person pickup? Depending on a couple factors it might be easier than traditional shipping.

One more bump.

That's meaningless from a security mindset. If it's open source, people can change the client software, heck, even if it's closed source, people can change the client software with enough effort.

So now we're back to "what magical algorithm are you using to stop Sybil attacks?"

How do you force people to choose their hatchery randomly? Is there anything to be gained from choosing a hatchery on purpose instead of randomly?

Three thoughts:

1) "Low volatility" compared to historical USD/BTC fluctuations isn't necessarily low compared to other markets.
2) "Invest your bitcoins in something more volatile" is only an argument for BTC if those more volatile assets can't be easily traded directly for national currency.
3) Being less attractive to speculators isn't necessarily a bad thing if it means you'll be more attractive to businesses.

There's no such algorithm.

The best hash-breaking QC algorithm halves the effective number of bits. For most uses of SHA-256 that's a big deal, but for suitability as proof-of-work it's basically irrelevant. There'll be a huge difficulty adjustment and we'll get on with our lives.

The scary thing in QC for Bitcoin is being able to break peoples' private keys.

Multiple proof-of-work algorithms.

SHA-256, mergeable with Bitcoin.
Scrypt, mergeable with Litecoin.
And N additional algorithms at your option.

Give each a separate difficulty, adjusted to make it constitute 1/(N+2) of the blocks mined.

That way, if one of the PoW algorithms gets broken by an attacker, it's not enough, in and of itself, for them to successfully double-spend.

Okay, so in principle I think I agree that "Satoshi client with the constants/PoW function changed" altcoins are completely useless money grabs, and we've had way too many lately.

But......if this is true - if every altcoin, no matter what new features it has, is marketless - well, that's a real shame.

It means we'll never see a blockchain that supports the Zerocoin anonymization protocol. It means we'll never see a blockchain with asset minting support, or any of the other incredibly cool new functionality that requires new opcodes which the Satoshi client devs consider bug risks.

That'd be a real shame.

What advantages are those?

I seriously want to know.

Let me see if I understand.

Litecoin is valuable because it's something you can buy/sell for bitcoins that has all the same properties as bitcoins?

And it's the same with Litecoin!

Frank and Helen want to break the chain of ownership. Frank controls address A with money and a new address C. Helen controls address B with money and a new address D.
Whether they're trading bitcoins for bitcoins, litecoins, BBQCoins, colored coins on the Bitcoin network, whatever, as long as they're both objects on a public blockchain, the information possessed by an attacker is:
A transferred coins to D.
B transferred coins to C.

Unless there's some other use for litecoin here, it has added nothing in terms of security or safety.

Then trade for gold rounds. Trade for literally anything physical. None of that stuff is on a blockchain. That still gives data miners less information than trading LTC for BTC.

Then in-person mixing - A sending coins to a fresh address owned by B, B sending coins to a fresh address owned by A.

Or in-person trades of BTC for gold rounds.

The point is that there are a lot of ways to break the transaction chain that are just as good as BTC/LTC trading, and that don't have any requirement of a whole separate superfluous currency with identical properties and features to BTC.

If the LTC developers were to implement some more interesting features (the zerocoin protocol, for example), that'd be enough to get my attention. But as it is now? Nah.

If two people, offline, agree to trade Bitcoin wallets, it does the same thing.

Heck, you can do the same thing by trading national currency for BTC on localbitcoins.

Don't get me wrong, I think altcoins are super-important for a few different reasons. But I don't think Litecoin, specifically, is really that useful when its feature set is basically identical to that of Bitcoin.

I deposit some BTC at Mt. Gox, do some trading, withdraw some BTC from Mt. Gox. To trace whose coins those are, you need Mt. Gox's records, plus the Bitcoin blockchain (trivial to obtain).

All that you add by involving Litecoin is the requirement of a second blockchain (equally trivial to obtain).

The Litecoin blockchain is just as public as the Bitcoin blockchain.

If you mean that I can exchange my BTC for LTC, and then my LTC for BTC, well... that's no different than manually mixing with someone else's BTC.

What advantage would that be?

Bump from the second page. Current price of a $50 giftcard is only 349 minicoins (0.349 BTC).

My intellectual side has thought the same thing since about March 2012: long-term confidence in the technology, short-term the only sure thing is massive volatility. That's not much of a contention, but it's proven fairly accurate

My gut has been on a roller-coaster, especially since January. During the run-up, there were times when I said to myself, "you'd better buy in, 'it' is finally happening!" There were other times that I said to myself "it's gotta crash soon, cash out while you can!" In the end, aside from one impulse buy around $120, I silenced these instincts - in any case they failed to call the top and seriously misread the crash several times - and stuck to the plan, which has been slowly but surely making me money since I bought in over a year ago.

(This is not why I don't trust my gut. I don't trust my gut because even in the best case it works without me understanding why, and without any guarantee that it'll work again tomorrow. In a zero-sum game that most people play emotionally, an emotionless, tested strategy is how you win.)

I don't know Gyft's prices. I checked out their website but it seems everything is gated behind either "install our app on your phone" or "connect with a big social networking site". That'd be more reasonable if I was actually wanting to buy something from them, but it's a lot of identification to give out just to satisfy my curiosity.

I'll consider it. 2.5% fees seem like a lot to pay for something with single-digit profit margins, though, especially since it's higher than BitMit (your better-known competitor).