Yeah if you're not in the States then localbitcoins would be the way to go. They do have automatic escrow built in last time I checked and generally it's the easiest place to find sellers. The only issue I have would be that pricing wise they are usually a bit worse than the exchanges. I would advise you try and spread your transactions over a few people (all with high feedback) to minimise the effects if you do by scammed (unlikely but it has happened before).

Depends upon which country you are talking about. If it's first world countries like the US or Canada and you can find the work easily enough then it'll probably earn you more than you're going to get via any other means. If you're in a poor nation where wages are really low you might make more from selling online services or creating a blog and earning ad revenue.

What exactly do you mean by a supernode? Never heard of the term...
If you're talking about the banks having a crap ton of nodes I don't really see an issue so long as there are a reasonable number of other nodes so that there is no foul play with transaction exclusion. But really it's unlikely that the banks will bother with large amounts of nodes - they only serve to relay and confirm transactions as legitimate.

An estimation beyond the next couple of months is nearly impossible to make accurately given that hardware coming off or online is hard to predict and efficiency increases over the coming years cannot be predicted. If I were you I'd use the average increase over the last 3 months (percentile) to make an approximation for the net 3 months.

Payment has been received. Thanks for this - will be continuing as per usual.

I wouldn't use exchanges unless they've been fully audited and you know they aren't stealing your funds. Blockchain isn't a bad idea but you must have 2FA enabled - I wouldn't use it without that function. You could alternatively have a copy of an encrypted Electrum wallet that's stored on a cloud storage with 2FA - that's just as safe if not more.

Nothing done by humans is technically random. That is simply a perception we like to have. Security really is all that matters when it comes to storing Bitcoins in the long term and that idea isn't too bad - it should be random enough to avoid bruteforce attacks for a whole to come and that's the main fear for brain wallets.

Confirmed. Thanks for the quick repayment - happy everything worked out. Left you and monbux some feedback.

I'm pretty sure there's going to be a risk unless you patch for confirmations as Stunna has done. Even with a 5BTC initial bet requirement people can easily make that back by simply sending a tx and them gambling it and letting it confirm if it wins or double spend should it not. From there you are effectively gettin 100% odds depending on how much success you have with double spending. Hence why I doubt Stunna will change it back again.

There isn't much that we can do except hope that the devs have some workable solution to the problem in the long term and pray that GHash doesn't do anything illogical that could jeopardise the price. There has been lots of speculation of double spends and the likes but at the moment there hasn't been any concrete evidence of abuse so we haven't had a price crash yet.

IIRC, people were happy to do PayPal trades at the time (the community was less scammy in hindsight at the time) so that's how people managed to 'buy' them. That being said there were far more people (but still nothing in comparison to now) just trading stuff for them. But yeah the volume of trading then was literally nothing - far too new and experimental for all but a few to jump wholeheartedly in.

If you still need more to complete your loan I could probably loan you another 0.4 but it would have to be for a maximum of one month (4 weeks). Obviously it would have to be collateralised (happy to use monbux as escrow if you're amiable) and we'd have to work out how much collateral and interest. Feel free to PM me or post (although I generally prefer posting as public records are good).

Yeah, no. To anyone reading this the primary source of lost coins in the past has been people who have stored them in online sites and services that have subsequently stolen them from users. While Blockchain seems to be a good idea with its released source you have no means of ensuring that the source is the same as that of what they implement or that no one has hijacked the site. Please look at cold storage if you want a safe solution.

The fee is a function of the size of the transaction in kB and not in how much you are spending. So you can't really move the fee below its minimum of 0.0001 per kB unless you are trying for a feeless transaction that will take you a while to get through if at all. Anything lower than the minimum is effectively a feeless transaction.

Should have sold off only a portion rather than the whole sum just in case in the long term we moved upwards. Regardless though I'd say he's just another one of those cases where having some luck and being in the right place at the right time can pay off overall.

Depends on how much they've lost and when they figure it out. The government isn't really stealing, it's just trying to avoid leaving amounts in banks for extended periods of time where bank fees can erode the account without anyone actually making use of it. I don't doubt the government has made some money out of it but I doubt the intention is simply for theft. If they wanted more they could just raise taxes (which coincidentally they are in fact doing).

Well it's hardly surprising. Miners are there for the profit and given that Cex offers the highest return with its 0% fee and reasonably good probability of solving blocks for lower variance they will simply move there because of greed. Nothing is going to happen until we get some form of backlash as people will simply just continuing mining like this thinking that since nothing has happened till now nothing will happen which may not be in fact the case.

Your have to ask doog for graphs regarding the accounts most I. Profit but the main one that comes to mind from last year was Nakowa. I think he managed to get up a couple of thousand at his peak but if I remember properly he left eventually with a couple of hundred if doog's sleuthing is right. Don't quote me though, you'd get more reliable information googling Nakowa.

For mine, I'm not sure I would be willing to sell it. I've received tiny offers before that have been laughable - but really I'm not going to sell an ancient account with a name I've only managed to be fast enough to get once (that's here) except for possibly bonkers offers. But realistically I'd say it would simply be a function of how many accounts those account sellers manage to make each day and post on.

What you are describing is not being 'backed' by gold. Go back and learn your stuff. Backed means you have enough gold in value to equate to the amount of the currency your printing (in this case Bitcoins). Most countries have stopped being entirely backed by gold instead opting for other assets and just printing money because thy can. What you are proposing is the ability to buy gold with BTC - I don't understand why you'd want more gold instead of BTC but it BTC certainly doesn't need any of this gold backing.