why do you need to run bitcoind?

run the GUI bitcoin-qt or better yet use http://blockchain.info/'s wallet service

of course you will need to print out paper wallets for your bitcoin savings account

https://www.bitaddress.org/bitaddress.org-v2.0-SHA1-c0300a88d2de421106560185e4916f4eee6ed9df.html

 

oh will you look at that, you can now print the nice bills!

but i will click the Hide art check box not to wast ink...

I ran xubuntu off a usb stick for months for my mining rig, it worked well when it worked, but the file table was too easily corrupted and would require reinstalls. I finally just installed it on an actual HDD and it has been far more reliable and robust. If you're using it on a mining machine, I'd recommend this to save yourself downtime and hassle from having to restore your usb stick from a corrupted state. Yes, you do waste some power with an HDD running (though if you have a SSD this is a moot point), but the tradeoff is worth it in my experience anyway. You're also able to upgrade/install any packages you want instead of being limited like you are with a persistent store usb stick install.

If you want it for secure wallet purposes, a live CD boot is probably the way to go as long as you make sure to backup the wallet on a flash drive or something. There's a nice thread in the newbie forum that explains this process.

People debating this here too:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120711.0

and discovered that almost all
of them are closely related to a single large transaction that took place
in November 2010, even though the associated users apparently tried
to hide this fact with many strange looking long chains and fork-merge
structures in the transaction graph."

"Abstract. The Bitcoin scheme is a rare example of a large scale global
payment system in which all the transactions are publicly accessible (but
in an anonymous way). We downloaded the full history of this scheme,
and analyzed many statistical properties of its associated transaction
graph. In this paper we answer for the rst time a variety of interesting
questions about the typical behavior of account owners, how they acquire
and how they spend their Bitcoins, the balance of Bitcoins they keep
in their accounts, and how they move Bitcoins between their various
accounts in order to better protect their privacy. In addition, we isolated
all the large transactions in the system, and discovered that almost all
of them are closely related to a single large transaction that took place
in November 2010, even though the associated users apparently tried
to hide this fact with many strange looking long chains and fork-merge
structures in the transaction graph."

Can we get numbers on previous spending rates?