There's probably a growing supply for anyone willing to buy GPUs that are in need of repairs.  Sometimes miners have just removed or disabled the bad ones (e.g., running just one of the two GPUs on the board) and can't justify doing a repair but would be willing to sell the board for cheap.

If you could fix them and then resell them you might be able to do OK with that.

There's also a wiki article on the topic:

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

The site is now offline.

Hopefully nobody got scammed.

The site is now offline.  Hope nobody got scammed.

Well now, ... the forum user hasn't logged in since November 1st (two days after posting) and the site is now offline.

There aren't any reports of anyone claiming to have been scammed but there are no reports of anyone having tried them either.

You are not using WoT correctly then.  Firstly, as MPOE-PR states:


Additionally, you should look at the dates and types of transactions in the WoT trust history.

When pirate was buying bitcoins and paying with PayPal, he wasn't scamming those sellers.  Therefore if you were looking to the WoT to determine if trading your coins to pirate where he would pay using PayPal, then you would find that others were able to do so without any problem.  You would probably be safe in completing a similar trade and also end up with positive results.

Nowhere from the WoT should anyone have gotten the impression that participation in a high yield investment program (HYIP, ... or more commonly known as a "Ponzi") would be a good idea.

The WoT doesn't require that people review their previous ratings.   Therefore, more recent ratings should be given a greater weight than older ratings.  As pirate's dealings raised more and more questions, there were more recent ratings that should have given anyone reason to pause.

The WoT isn't a credit ratings service.  It is instead a good method to identify those whose trading history means you should not do a trade with.  If you are looking to trade your $50 Dwolla for 5 BTC, then if someone has a history going back six months, has done a dozen trades using Dwolla, and not a single negative mark -- well, you have no reason to distrust the person and can likely conclude that your $50 trade will complete just fine.

It doesn't tell you if that person would be a good party to lend money to.

If you used it for that purpose, you are doing it wrong.

Here's the wiki article on them:

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

Simply, the private key (the "Spend" QR Code on the wallet above) is created using computer code .. javascript, in the case of BitAddress.org:
 - http://BitAddress.org

That private key is needed to spend any coins sent to that Bitcoin address (the Load & Verify QR Code on the wallet above) that is derived from that private key.

The computer code that will use that private key to spend needs to do a few things like determine the unspent transactions and choose one or more of them to include in a spend transaction.  Blockchain.info will do this with an API call.  

Or you can import the private key into the Bitcoin.org client (or into your Blockchain.info/wallet, or any other client like Multibit, Electrum, etc.) and it will be treated just like any other private key in the wallet.   Also you can import it into Mt. Gox and they will sweep any unspent funds for that Bitcoin address to your Mt. Gox account.

The difference is each time bitcoins circulate, the Goldman Sack doesn't get a cut.  Right now, when you swipe a credit or debit card, that generates revenues for banking related entities (many of which The Goldman Sack owns or owns shares in) up and down the chain.



Even when you pay with cash the retailer is depositing that cash in a bank account (oftentimes incurring a fee for each deposit), and then the bank makes money lending out 10X the amount on deposit (or leaving their excess reserves with the Fed while earning interest).   At a minimum, The Goldman Sack, as a primary dealer of the NY Fed, benefits from these reserves:
 - http://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/pridealers_current.html

So if they were to own half of all of the bitcoins, that would be nice of them as that helps increase the exchange rate, which speculators (and Bitcoin entrepreneurs using their bitcoins as seed capital) would be grateful to The Goldman Sach for helping with that.

And then in the future if The Goldman Sack were to then sell those coins when the exchange rate is higher, there will at that time be other speculators thankful that a new supply of coins has arrived so that the price paid wasn't as high as it would have been if The Goldman Sack wasn't selling.

I just realized that my suggested approach above is not secure.  Revealing the locations in the message is not ideal.  In my example, should a hacker gain access to the message I used as an example, I think I would simply end up with two break-ins, or broken windows on my vehicles.  Or if someone were to discover half a paper bitcoin in one glove compartment, that person might just go check the other vehicle for the other half.    That just wasn't a very good suggestion.

After reading their FAQ, I can now see there are better ways:
- http://www.deadmansswitch.net/help/

Instead encryption is probably the best.  

And GPG works well for that.

So to spend the funds there are three components,

 1.) An encrypted file containing the wallet's private key for the Bitcoin address holding the funds.  This can be ASCII (armored), and will be about 600 characters long.
 2.) An export of the GPG secret key as ASCII (armored)
 3.) The GPG passphrase for decrypting

So to the executor I give #3 (paper/text) and #1 (paper/ASCII - armored).

For the message on DeadMansSwitch.net I have #2 (file/ASCII - armored) and #1 (file/ASCII - armored), and that goes to both the executor and the reporter.

To a trusted party / family member, I give a thumb drive with #2 (file/ASCII - armored) and #3 (paper/text) with instruction to store securely and give to executor after I pass.

Default condition: The executor already has #1 (file/ASCII - armored) and #3 (paper/text).  Trusted party / family member hands over to executor #2 (file/ASCII - armored).
If trusted family member fails: The executor already has #1 (file/ASCII - armored) and #3 (paper/text) and after 60 days of my last checkin gets from DeadMansSwitch.net #2 (file/ascii - armored).
If Executor fails: The reporter gets from DeadMansSwitch.net #1 (file/ASCII - armored) and #2 (file/ASCII - armored) and trusted party/family member hands over to reporter #3 (paper/text).

This pretty much eliminates the risk from a hacker as the executor only has paper copies of #1 and #2, and hacker doesn't know there is a trusted family member with #3 (and even if somehow did discover this, the thumb drive would be stored securely, offline.)

Getting closer here I think.

Oh, that's much easier. 

Perhaps you currently purchase one or more of the following:


 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

There will be a change to whom the coins are distributed, however.  During this year, GPU mining saw a pretty big shift.  GPU mining occurs much less today in regions where the cost of electricity is prohibitive for GPU mining (e.g., much of Europe, and California .. thanks to tiered consumption pricing).  Those in these regions have mostly sold their GPUs and purchased in their place were FPGAs (e.g., BFL singles).  But $600 of FPGA hardware yields many fewer hashes (and thus fewer BTCs) than $600 of GPU hardware, so there is proportionally fewer bitcoins returned per dollar of investment in those regions.   Of course those who have free electricity (e..g, utilities included in rent, or are mining at a workplace, etc.) are the exception here.

But these GPUs that have dropped in price are still being snapped up by those in other regions which have inexpensive electricity (e.g,  Russia, and Venezuela even whose governments subsidize their utilities, and parts of Canada and U.S., particularly near hydro generation).  Miners in these areas are still quite profitable when mining using GPUs.

But their advantage will, for a period of time, disappear with ASIC as the power consumption drops to being just a relatively tiny part of the cost of mining.  So ASICs are the great geographic equalizer as far as removing the prevalence for mining to occur where the cost of electricity is low.

But because ASICs are so costly yet, we still won't see them being operated except mostly by those with excess capital (or access to investment capital that would be willing to go for the purchase of ASIC mining hardware).  e.g., the kid who could  rationalize the purchase of a nice GPU because it could also be used for gaming will have a much harder time pullling the trigger to spend a thousand dollars for an ASIC.

Now whether the ASIC miners will be more likely to accumulate bitcoins versus today's GPU miners, that's something we just don't know yet.  People with GPUs might have been cashing in many of the bitcoins as they earn them to pay for the electric bill whereas now with ASICs, there is hardly any monthly recurring expenses ... so why wouldn't they just accumulate their coins then?    

There were a number of miners who took loans to buy ASIC hardware (in the more recent months by charging on their credit cards) so those miners will probably be selling everything they earn for the first year, but the others who purchased ASICs earlier paid using bitcoins so there is little reason to think they'll be pressured into cashing out their bitcoins.

I was previously leaning towards there being not really much further upside pressure on the exchange rate as a result of both the block reward subsidy halving (to 25 BTC per block) coming later this month and ASIC coming soon after, but now I'm getting the sense that a lot of people have many fewer bitcoins than they wanted to have by this point in time.

This comes partly from those who spent their coins on ASIC hardware and now realize that with four or so ASIC manufacturers, their investment in ASIC hardware might not be the magic bullet that would cause them to end up with coins coming out the wazoo.   So if they want a guarantee that they'll end up with a decent share of coins, they might start thinking of buying some just in case their ASIC doesn't end up being the lucrative deal it once seemed to be.

And so many others lost significant amounts of coins to pirate, bitfloor, glbse, hacked accounts, and whatever other reasons that if the exchange rate starts to head north -- there could end up being some significant panic buying.

That's not happening at this moment because a lot of people have analysis paralysis (as evidenced by these types of threads).   When it becomes clear to these people that they had better act now or forever be resigned to holding a smaller wallet than they had hoped, I have this feeling we're going to see some of the old bitcoin volatility (to the upside) return.

There are some fantastic points made in this post.  I wish I had more time to read it in full when I first saw it posted last week.


And regulation of bitcoin would be just as effective as regulation on e-mail.

Oh, that's what was reiterated just a couple sentences later.

This post just nails it!

Well, it depends.  Are you using the Bitcoin.org client without encryption?  You mentioned encryption with a third party tool, I presume that was just an encrypted copy of the wallet.dat so that you can store a backup securely elsewhere.

If you use the Bitcoin.org passphrase encryption, that will encrypt the private keys with AES.   That alone is secure enough to protect your keys from theft -- you do not need to use any third party encryption for the wallet.dat after that, though the transaction data is not encrypted so to keep your transaction history private, you might also want to use a third-party encryption tool like you mentioned you had.

Know that if you already have bitcoins received and then encrypt, after encryption you'll want to do a spend transaction and spend the entire amount of funds to a new address post-encryption so that there are no funds sitting on bitcoin addresses which existed prior to having passphrase encryption.

As far as using many addresses, you can increase the size of your keypool so that you won't need to backup as often.    Note that a new address is consumed only with each change transaction when you spend or when you click "New Address".  Simply receiving multiple times to an existing address (which is possibly the method you are following with those "free bitcoin" services) doesn't consume any new addresses from the keypool.

 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Key_pool

Are you close enough to the border?
 - https://www.kinek.com

blockload?   the syntax for loading from a download of the blockchain datafiles is -loadblock

 -loadblock=<file1>   -loadblock=<file2> 


Are you possible in a disk full condition?

The debug.log will give a more specific clue for troubleshooting.


The wallet.dat is a completely separate file from the blockchain.  It sounds like there's no problem with that.

So check the syntax on -loadblock and if you had it wrong, try it again using the proper syntax.

Your options include:

Blockchain.info has added the ability to use Barclay's Pingit to buy bitcoins using GBP:
 - https://blockchain.info/wallet/deposit-pingit

And they now also provide Instant online bank transfer in the UK (and Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland):
 - https://blockchain.info/wallet/deposit-bank-transfer

Bitcoin-Central has launched its BTC/GBP market, where you can trade after transferring pounds sterling to their bank in France.  The order book is pretty thin yet but they did just launch:
 - https://bitcoin-central.net/order_book?currency=GBP

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

And, or course, there may be a chance for a local trade:
 - http://www.LocalBitcoins.com
or
 - http://www.Bitcoin-otc.com

As far as PayPal, about the only option through an exchange would be VirWoX.  With VirWoX you purchase Second Life Lindens (SLL) using PayPal, then trade those SLLs for BTCs.  It isn't the cheapest method, but PayPal beggars can't be choosers.
 - http://www.VirWoX.com

One of the benefits of doing cash-out to a PayPal account is that with my PayPal debit card I can spend the funds at a retailer or withdraw the funds at an ATM the very same day.

If I were to receive a paper check from FastCash4Bitcoins, I can deposit that and (depending on my bank's funds availability policy) have that cash available for spending with my bank debit card, or withdrawal at either an ATM or from the teller at the time I deposit the check.

But the paper check first needs to be sent via the mail, so that causes an unfortunate delay.

Might there be a way that I can print the paper check myself?    I can buy a MICR inkjet cartridge (or MICR toner, available for some laser printers) and blank check stock:
 - http://www.amazon.com/500-Blank-Check-Stock-Green/dp/B0018OZEHG

So if I were to receive a PDF from FastCash4Bitcoins.com (with signature on the check) then I could print it and head on over to my bank (or any other place that will cash it) and have the funds tout de suite.

Thoughts?

You must be doing your calculation incorrectly.

When buying 0.189 BTC you will end up with 0.187866 BTC or more (maximum fee is 0.6%, so 0.189 BTC X 0.994 yields 0.187866 BTC).

So to break even you need to sell at about 14 cents more than you bought (at this $11 price range).  So if you paid $10.70 you should be able to sell above $10.84 and begin to make a profit from trading.  

The spreads are narrower than that so if there isn't price volatility there is little opportunity to profit from the exchange rate moving in your favor.

There are, however, differences in price between exchanges.   The last BTC/USD trade at BitMe was $11 and the last BTC/USD trade at Camp BX was for $10.69.  There's a little opportunity if you could be the party that does both of those trades.  The problem is that you don't want to expose yourself to risk of the exchange rate moving against you after trading at one exchange -- so generally you only do the trade if you can make profit doing both trades at the same time. That's a harder opportunity to find.  Then another problem is the delay and cost in moving the USD proceeds to "restock" then.  (You can do this with BitMe by withdrawing to ACH, and then when those USDs hit your bank you can use Dwolla to pull the funds and send them to Camp BX ... it can be over a week round trip.)

That buying at one exchange and selling at another is called market arbitrage.  And it is relatively free from risk of the exchange rate being volatile because you execute trades at both exchanges at the same time.  Right now when there's relative exchange rate stability there's not much opportunity in arbitrage.   But after a bit of volatility, there can be moves where a 5% gain, or 10% or greater gain even can be obtained.  The trick is in having funds at the ready to take advantage of the opportunity when one exists.    And with Bitcoin exchanges, that's actually harder than it would seem to be.

So, there's no magic source of free money from trading.  It takes capital (oftentimes, like today, left idle ... just sitting there waiting for a better opportunity) and patience (knowing when to take an opportunity versus the likelihood of there being an even greater one coming), and effort, risk, and perseverance  (yes, oftentimes you keep $400 USD sitting at a third tier exchange for a couple weeks just for the opportunity to earn a $10 profit when that's the only opportunity that presented itself.)

Can you provide the URL or other context where that exists?  I don't know, offhand, where that would say that.

Yes, don't forget the encryption part.   Or if not encryption, a method that remains secure assuming these messages (on DeadMansSwitch.net) will end up in the hands of a hacker.

What would be a strategy that is still safe with this assumption?

I can envision an approach like this:

I printed two copies of the same paper bitcoin wallet, and then cut each paper in half -- Part A and Part B.

One copy of Part A is in my drawer at work in an envelope labeled "Personal receipts 2012".
The other copy of Part A is in the inside cover of my End The Fed book on my bookshelf at home.

One copy of Part B was handed to [friend / family member / attorney / etc.]
The other copy of Part B was handed to [other friend / different family member / etc. ]


This way there is nobody that has both Part A and Part B, and there is redundancy if one copy is destroyed or otherwise unavailable.

[Edit: See below.  This approach is not a very good one.]

Thoughts?