I'm guessing from "GIC" you're Canadian, so it does effect your options. However, I would say, absolutely not to GIC/government bonds. The yield is too low right now and you could lock yourself into a losing investment.

If you want to go low risk secure, then I would say to put it into an RRSP that has something similar to Vangaurd Stable Value Fund. Contrary to the title, there is an interest payment, but there's no risk of loss (aside the basic systemic risk of the whole financial system collapsing). This is very liquid, though, and the interest rates will go up when the economy improves. Right now it's outperforming GICs by almost 3x. I personally keep a large amount of my retirement funds in something similar. The rest is in Bitcoin.

However, I don't think that this is really a good use for this money. There are a few things you can do with it:
- if you have any interest paying debt, pay that down.
- use it for a down payment for a home. Building equity is better than paying rent. Be smart about the purchase and realistic about your income and ability to perform repairs. The past few years have made people wary of buying property, but we have now moved through the worst of the effects of the bad loans, so personally I feel it is an ideal time to buy.
- buy personal supplies while they are on sale. Some famous investor (Warren Buffet? can't find a reference right now) when asked "what's the best investment a poor family can make with $100?" responded "An item they use daily on sale." Grocery stores often will discount common things you use to 50% off. Buy a 6 month supply.

Ok, that's the simple stuff. I would also say take $1000 at least and load an offline bitcoin wallet with that amount in bitcoins. It's a risk, but in all likelihood, that will outperform anything else you do with it.

You could also buy some gold or silver (I think silver is a better deal right now, but market conditions vary), but pay attention to the spot price versus the price you are buying. A lot of sellers on the internet will have you taking a 25% loss or more at the time of sale. You can get junk silver on ebay for pretty close to spot if you don't mind keeping a few bags of mismatched spoons.

If you want to go a little more active, you might try using it to buy items cheap at garage sales and putting them up on BitMit or ebay. Doing this too much on ebay will trigger Paypal requiring a business account and ebay performing Revcan reporting.

Look at the Diablo Mining Thread. Basically, she called out Diablo on diluting share value with a series of questionable asset swaps. This rustled some jimmies.

Yeah, I didn't want to muddy the water with difficulty stuff. Even if all the ASICs don't come out, there are increases in diffuculty coming from minirigs etc coming online, but the reward halving some something that known and I see so many times people say "the effect is priced in," but I don't see that happening here. I like GLBSE because there's some interesting data on investor behavior. I'm looking forward to examining the chart near the reward halving time (although ASICs may also be coming out then too, which will add noise).

I'm looking at my crystal ball, and I see chargebacks in this person's future.

I got my information from the Artic Silver site and the answer is: it depends on the chip:
http://www.arcticsilver.com/intel_application_method.html#

but a lot of chips now do not use a "middle dot" any more but instead use a line or multiple lines.

However, if you don't know a lot of information about the chip, your method (labeled "surface spread") works fine, and is the method I used. One thing is that the application on the heatsink side is really thin, almost too thin to consider to be applied. It just greys the area. For the singles, I actually put dots of the arctic silver on the corners of the chips and dry press on the heat sink and then remove it to get some markings for the tinting. Then I color it in the lines.

As far as I understand for those documents and others, you are right about the air gaps being removed by heat after use. That's why there's a burn in time.

I'm going to try to explain it again because you seem to be missing what other have been saying: your business plan is seriously flawed and you will not be able to use this rig to mine 100 bitcoins. I just plugged your specifications into my personal calculator and (assuming .11c/kwh), it will take you 36 months at the present difficulty to mine your btc value back. Difficulty is certainly going up.

To a lender, the low profitability faced with likely lower profitability represents a large risk. The fact that you weren't able to work out these profitability issues on your own carries a risk.

Ok, so you say you are going to litecoins instead. Can you show any kind of calculations for profitability for this? I don't know a lot about litecoin, but I plugged the value for a 6950 from here into this and got over 22 months to repay at the current litecoin difficulty and ltc/btc trade price. There is generally a feeling that GPU miners will pour over to litecoin once ASICs arrive. And if they don't then it's because the ltc/btc trade has crashed. More risk.

When you add into this the admission that you have no income, it makes this loan impossible to fund because it is impossible for you to repay it.

On a personal note, I understand the desperation that comes from being unemployed, but this is not the right path and if you were to try to do this, in all likelihood you will end up worse off.

This stock is an excellent example of how the market isn't pricing in the reward reduction. It's currently trading at a 125 week ROI assuming no difficulty changes. If I could short it, I would.

Note: this is nothing against your company, just your shareholders are acting very irrationally.

In my case, it was white.

In case people are wondering how to value silver or gold, Wolfram Alpha makes it easy:
Example  See the section "Current commodity price"

I agree with what you're saying theoretically, but the BFL FPGA singles I have all had way too much paste on them. I even had one half it's hashrate because thermal paste dripped onto some transistor knocking out one of the FPGA chips. I wiped all the paste off and applied a very small amount of paste to the chip and it's been running fine for about two months now. Doing the same to my other units has given an overall benefit in throttling reduction (I started doing it because of the prior thread). This stuff is not meant to be slathered on, and doing so hinders the conduction.

I used to have a pic of the thermal paste on the transistor. Not sure where it went.

To be honest with you, I think that BitCoin needs more proposals like the crop sharing which is a real world investment that involves production of goods used by society, and less of the "1.5% weekly, profits from loans" proposals. The only thing I see wrong with it is the third party risk from the property being owned by his wife's family due to legal restrictions. But I feel that we need to get out of this HYIP-denominated-in-bitcoin investment mode because real world investments don't have returns matching just holding bitcoin.

Just so we're clear on this: cablepair and ngzhang should not mine bitcoins at all.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=79637.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110090.0

Something stuck out for me here:


This actually gives a strong motivation for why Sonny would want Bitcoin to succeed. He's already felt the result of the strong ties the current banking system has to the government.



People seem to not understand this section at all. This is referring to Sonny's personal property only. It has nothing to do with units that BFL manufactures and sells as a part of their business.


And the lottery thing is kind of scummy, but I'm guessing people signed up voluntarily so it's really hard to say if people were being scammed or if they were just fooling themselves with a fiat version of SatoshiDice. I tend not to put a lot of stock in the descriptions prosecutors put in their write ups. I have a friend who is on the sex offenders list because she streaked down her block.

^ had a failed startup that tried to be the Netflix of sex toys.

^ understands his point and agrees fully.

To be honest, I don't really care much that they are going to do this, but they could mine against a p2pool that is modified to not submit the winning block, and simply log the success. This would mine on mainnet and still be verifiable.

Alternatively they could mine the coins PPS into individual wallets and sent a printout of the private key import details. I get the feeling that this isn't the same as the cars because those cars weren't driven to the financial benefit of anyone. If you found out that the reason the odometer was 300 was because Ford was renting the cars out on a daily basis and pocketing the money, then you might be less happy about it.

But ultimately I don't really care. I just want my ASIC to arrive working.

I agree with your thesis, but why should we trust your judgement? If you are only going to make 1% on the deal, what guarantees do we have that you won't accept a bribe? Finally, how can we ensure enforceability of your decision.

This isn't something that an individual can solve with a service, it's something we as a community need to solve and then subscribe to the solution. Look up the use of Dispute Resolution Organizations in voluntary societies as an example of a philosophical approach to this problem. The key isn't the organization but the community's respect for the DRO.

This guy overdosed on amplitude modulation, and now goes to high schools to give talks on the dangers thereof.

I really only recommend 5% of your long term savings go into bitcoin. There are still large risks with the system. The other side of that is that there are large potential gains, so just putting 5% in now can easily lead to bitcoin eclipsing your entire portfolio in 10 years.

As a disclaimer, I personally have put in a lot more than 5%. At the time, it was more like 50% and now with the price rise etc it's clearly tilted more (but I haven't done an actual check). But I still recognize that what I did was pretty reckless and it just happened to work out for me at the time. It pissed off my wife to no end.

5% is really pretty sane though. If it all collapses, then that's not really going to change your long term standard of living.

^ launders bitcoins for the mob