It pays a dividend too! I make 0.125 BTC a day off of it!

Why would the block reward have anything to do with it?

Not safe at all. You are putting all your faith in a third party not to run away with your bitcoins.

If Mt.Gox goes bankrupt and sells your coins to pay their debts you will NOT get your coins back. Mt.Gox is not a bank. Your bitcoin deposit is not FDIC insured.

I personally don't leave any coin in Mt.Gox unless I am planning on selling.

I'm not saying that Mt.Gox is going to go out of business or steal your money, but if they do, you have very little legal recourse to use to get your money back.

I used to do this. It was only really worthwhile when the spread was 5% or more. There were a lot of issues:

- International wire transfers take time and with Bitstamp -> Mt.Gox arbitrage you have international transfers on both ends. It can take up to 2 weeks to do a round. Thus, you need a large bankroll. The more money you have the more you can arbitrage. But too much money and you risk moving the market. If you have enough you can send a little more up everyday and have the money pipelined so you are sending transfers, receiving transfers and arbitraging everyday. I did $5k a day at it was barely worth my time. International bank transfers can also take up to 30 min to perform at your bank since they require a lot of paperwork and then a phone call and they typicall can't be done by an ordinary teller. Some banks let you automate this a little bit and let you do it over the phone but it requires even more paperwork up front.

- You get hit with fees everywhere. Exchange fees on Bitstamp and Mt.Gox and wire transfer fees from you bank. And possible currency exchange fees too. They also can be expensive depending on your bank. At one bank I use it was about $40 or $50 but at my other bank it was only $18 but only if I sent the money in Euros (even with the exchange it was cheaper).

- To properly arbitrage you need to buy and sell at the same time. Since it can take an hour or more for the coins you buy on Bitstamp to arrive at Mt.Gox, you need to have an extra stash of coins already up on Mt.Gox ready to sell. This means you actually need twice the bankroll for risk-free aribtrage.

Finally, you can't do this anymore!

Mt.Gox is not processing bank withdrawals in USD anymore. I mean, maybe they are, but it is so slow as to make arbitrage impossible. I had $20k stuck up there for nearly 6 weeks until I gave up and canceled my withdrawals and rebought BTC (thus negating any money I could have made from arbitrage).

Don't mine.


Use it all to buy BTC.

Invest those btc in bonds with a guaranteed yield like Xbond, ukyo.loan, and great.loan all of which pay 18.5% APY. Invest in coinlenders too although I consider that more risky.

http://bitcoinmotor.com/ is selling a delorean for 300btc.

I almost bought it when btc was down at around 60.

While I am on the issue, what is the preferred way for using a single wallet across multiple machines?

It seems there is no easy way to avoid problems like this were coins end up in limbo unless you are very careful to backup every time you make a transaction and copy your wallet over each time.

At first I believed I was safe as long as my wallet didn't need to generate new addresses, but not I realize thats not good enough unless each machine is completely up to date with the blockchain.

I wish Bitcoin-Qt had a way where you could specify a different location for your wallet. Putting the whole directory on a USB drive isn't possibly because of the huge blockchain data files. There has got to be an easier way.

I'll try this. I suppose there is the possibility it is from double spent coins. I very rarely use another machine to send transactions but keep my wallets in sync using a USB drive. If one of the machines was not up to date with the blockchain and didn't have the newest wallet (even though they were essentially the same) I could see how it could try to double spend the same coins if it didn't realize they were already spent. It makes sense that that is the issue I've seen as I think I used a different machine for my last transaction and this one wasn't completely up to date. It would be nice if the client would cancel transactions that contained double spent coins instead of letting them sit there with all of the coins in the transaction unusable. Or at least there should be some way to manually cancel the transaction. Or at the very least, some indication of what is going on.

In the meantime I will look at the debug log and see what I can learn. Thanks.

Every once in a while I send a transaction on my Mac with Bitcoin-Qt and the transaction just sits there and never gets broadcast out to the network. I'm not sure why this happens but it seems to happen more often if I send the transaction right away without letting the client sit for a little while first.

What happens is the transaction gets stuck in limbo. It never gets broadcast so it never gets confirmed. But my wallet thinks those coins have already been sent so the money is unspendable. It doesn't matter how many times I restart bitcoin-qt or wait (I've waited hours if not days), the transaction will sit there and never get broadcast.

The only solution I've found has been to delete my wallet and restore from a backup of the wallet that was made before the transaction. This is not an acceptable solution though as it is possible the old wallet may not include all the addresses the new wallet has and I could lose coins.

I suppose I could only try using pywallet although I haven't tried that yet.

In my opinion, this is a very serious bug and I don't understand why it has not been fixed yet. I've had this happen to me three times in the past couple of months and I've written posts here and on the technical discussion forum before.

Have others had this bug happen to them? I imagine it must be fairly common. Finally, how can I report this bug more directly to the developers so that it can get fixed.

In my opinion, any bug that causes you to lose coins without resorting to complicated wallet hacks (like pywallet) should be considered a very critical bug.

Put all your bitcoin in a single address.

Sign a document with your name, SS, address, whatever with the private key of that address.

Now you've proven you own that address and thus those bitcoins.

Give us some idea what you will be doing with the money before we spend time PMing you.

Cash is not simpler. In order for me to use cash I have to go to an ATM. I don't like to carry around a lot of cash due to the risk of me losing it or it getting stolen. Therefore I find myself at the ATM at least a couple times a week. In general, it is easier to use a credit or debit card for most transactions. I only use cash at bars and places that don't take credit cards and for very small transactions.

To spend bitcoins I only need my phone. I always have my phone and using blockchains wallet the transaction is faster than using my credit card or debit card. There are a couple of restaurants near me that accept bitcoins and I try to eat their as much as possible.

Street stalls are taking credit cards now if they buy something like this for their phones: https://squareup.com/
It's still much cheaper and easier to take bitcoins, though. Still cash will always be preferred for transactions like those. Maybe bitcoins will never dominate the street vendor market, lol. Oh well, no big loss. It is still better for the other 99% of transactions out there.

I love the pre-order model. It is the ONLY way to make money unless you are in the business of designing or building ASIC machines yourself.

No company is going to sell hardware for less they can mine with it, unless they have already sold it via pre-order.

It is a risky, but it is only with risk that you will get any reward.

I would never buy a miner UNLESS it was a pre-order. Any miner that is in stock and available and cheap would be sold so quickly that the difficult would rise to the point until the miner was no longer profitable. Or, more likely, the price on the miner would increase to that point (like ASIC Miner did). There is no such thing as a free lunch. No risk, no return.

It's like say, I'm going to wait until that promising startup is successful before I invest. Well if you wait, you are too late. You need to be an early adopter to make money in bitcoin.

In theory it sounds nice except remember this:

BFL has never made a deadline or kept any of their promises ever. EVER.

Don't forget that BFL said they would start shipping late October 2012. And then in November, and December, and January, etc. They were 10 months late.

Don't forget that BFL said they would ship all of their backlog within 90 days. Its been over 90 days and they have only shipped maybe 15% of their orders? They are still in July 2012 for minirigs and singles.

My honest opinion is that you will never receive your Monarch. BFL will go out of business before then due to all the incoming refund requests.

If somehow they survive I predict you'll receive it sometime Dec 2014.

There are two issues here. First, if your bank is hacked and they lose money, do you lose anything? No, you don't. The bank is FDIC insured. You can not lose the deposits in your checking or savings account. Bitcoins can be insured too (though not necessarily FDIC). It will be the banks responsibility to hold on to your coins, likely in offline cold storage. If they get stolen, it is their insurance that will have to cover the theft. What am I saying is that there are secure ways for the common man to store his bitcoins. Most people do not store large amounts of gold or cash or whatever in their homes for fear of theft. They use banks. The same will be true for bitcoin.


Online wallets will be come more secure, especially as they begin to be run by larger and more reputable companies. I wouldn't trust my savings account to some company on the internet I've never heard although people are forced to do just that with their bitcoin online wallets. This won't necessarily be true in the future, though.



You should care because those credit card fees get passed on to you. Every merchant I've known who previously was cash only and then began accepting credit cards raised their prices to compensate. The majority of gas stations (at least in the US) have lower prices for those people who pay cash instead of credit. Regular merchants are not allowed to due to credit card rules. Their is an exception for gas stations.

The blockchain can accept far more transactions than are currently processed.
My no-fee transactions can sometimes take an hour or two. I've never had a transaction with a fee included take more than a single block. I haven't noticed transactions taking longer. The current fee is only 0.0005, not 0.005, and that is only 6 cents. You are off by an order of magnitude.


Double spending will only become harder as difficulty goes up and the size of the bitcoin network inceases. It's near impossible already and is it definitely worth the risk for small merchants like grocery stores that prefer instant transactions.

Here is why you are wrong:
1) Scams. The Internet is full of scams. Most of them existed before bitcoin and will continue to exist if bitcoin went away. Bitcoin puts more risk to the buyer while PayPal transfers the risk (of charge backs) to the seller. sellers love bitcoins while buyers love PayPal. One is not better than the other. They are just different. Right now bitcoin is used mainly for transactions with individuals and small companies. Imagine if amazon.com accepted bitcoin. Would you hesitate to buy merchandise from them with bitcoin? I'm guessing you wouldn't have an issue with because they are large, trusted company. Bitcoin is like cash and cash has existed for a long time without reversible transactions.

In the future there will be online wallets that insured by the companies holding them so that your coins are safe even it their site is hacked. There is nothing to prevent this from happening once banks get in on the bitcoin game. Only libertarians -- the kind that keeps gold bars in a safe and cash under their mattress will bother keeping their savings in a local wallet,

2) Bitcoin is inconvenient. Yes, bitcoin isn't convenient to use now but there is nothing that says it must always be this way. New software will be developed that will make bitcoin easier to use. New exchanges will be started that will make it easier to buy and sell bitcoins (I personally think that coinbase is pretty darn simple). And in the future no one will ever be downloading the whole blockchain. People will use online wallets, or they will use local wallets that don't require the whole blockchain. Bitcoin ATMs will be out there and there will be plenty of easy to use mobile bitcoin apps and wallets. If you can use online banking, you'll be able to use bitcoin. Bitcoin is still new there ans we have a ways to go but there is no reason we can't get there.

3) Fees are too high. This is not true at all. Fees are very low right now. In fact, you can still send bitcoins for free and have your transaction accepted into the blockchain. Worst case scenario, you have to add 5 or 10 cents to the transaction.

Fees do not need to go up once the block reward goes away!! Why not? Well, the fees can stay low because by then we expect the NUMBER of transactions per block to greatly increase as bitcoin becomes more widespread. Fees can still be 5 cents per transaction. The difference is we will have 1000 times more transactions.

Furthermore, credit cards are NOT free. Credit card companies charge merchants 2-3% to process transactions. Who ends up paying that? Well, you do in the form of higher prices. Merchants would love to charge you less if you use cash (and many gas stations do) but in general the credit card industry imposes strict rules to prevent merchants from doing that if they want to be able to accept credit cards at all.

Exchanges currently are a pain to use and can be expensive. But as Bitcoin gains acceptance and there are more exchanges, increased competition will bring lower fees and easier to use exchanges. In the future, exchanging fiat for bitcoin will be done for such a small fee it will be essentially free.

4) Confirmations are too slow. No, they are virtually instantaneous. There is no reason for most ,enchants to even wait for a block confirmation. Double spending is almost impossible to perform in practice and I've yet to hear of anyone successfully double spending in the real world ever. And the risk can be reduced if the merchant uses a payment processor that watches the network for double spend attempts. Already merchants such as Foodler will credit your bitcoin deposit immediately without waiting for confirmation. The only time a merchant might want to wait for confirmation would be for an expensive item like a car and those purchases usually take much longer today anyways. Finally, if you are using bitcoins on the Internet instead of POS, confirmation time doesn't really matter.

Merchants love bitcoin because they get their money right away too. Credit card companies take a long time to actually send money to the merchants (as you pointed out).

I do this in elephantnote too! I just wish it could do real spreadsheets. I hate have to do all the math myself.

Completely meaningless statistic.

Bitcoin ASIC miners can't even compute a floating point operation so they are not at all comparable to a supercomputer that can be used for many things.

Comparing specialized bitcoin hardware to supercomputers simply can't be done. The bitcoin network is faster at performing SHA256 hashes, but thats it.

It's all the same for the consumer but the merchants LOVE bitcoins more because they don't have to pay the 2-3% the credit card companies charge them!

That savings should and ultimately will be passed down to the customer in the forms of lower prices.

Rewards programs are always a scam. You never get out of it what you put in.

Most of the credit cards with really useful rewards charge an annual fee.

I've been saying this for months:

It's never going to happen. Litecoin will never be trading on Mt Gox.

Unfortunately, it is much harder being right when you are predicting something will never happen. But so far, I am right, and I will continue to be right.