It's pretty easy to believe if you take a look at how much equipment BFL has already sold.
As far as depending on the price going up, think about this. If you'd just spent the USD you had on Bitcoin directly, you'd have a 100% ROI when the price doubled, instead of being back to 0% in 3 months. I hope that wasn't 3 months from today, because if you'll take a look at the difficulty increases we've been having, you'll see that your payback time is getting ~10% longer every ~12 days. You may never break even if the ASICs equipment ships on time, unless you trade them in and double down....even then it may take a long time.

I hear good things about bit stamp. But do your research.

He didn't have them "on a high-profile website." Thanks for proving my point.

Did he make a mistake? Sure. Hindsight is 20/20. Does this mistake equal "gross negligence?" It's possible, but you don't know.

Feel free to keep running your mouth, I'm sure it will help.

Awesome. Thanks for the help Stephen. This is exactly what I wanted.

You are working on very limited information and yet you're speaking in absolutes. Sounds like you're just here to bash him, or you love speaking in unsupported hyperbole.

Bullshit. That's like saying that because a car wreck has happened before, every future car wreck points to "gross negligence or criminal intent."  

How Roman resolves the current situation can certainly lead to further confidence in him.

I am also really impressed with Blockchain.info. They've done an excellent job. I just got their Android app and now I feel like I could go to merchants and demonstrate how they could easily accept bitcoin at POS. Their wallet allows you to import from many different backup formats and sync with the satoshi client. It offers many ways to back up your keys, as you mentioned. I just noticed they have a built-in mixing service for anonymous transactions and the nice big green buttons for depositing cash are awesome for showing ease-of-use (although the fees are too high for me personally.)

I only have one complaint so far, and that is that the Android client doesn't seem to have any security. I just got this phone so I'm still figuring it out....I assume there's a way to lock access to certain apps on it. That may be why they don't have any password on the app itself. But until then I can't leave it paired to my main wallet - anyone with access to my phone could steal all my BTC.

As long as you choose a long, secure passphrase, no one can hack it on their server. It's sent and stored in an encrypted format. They'd have to hack your personal machine and install a keylogger or something along those lines to get your phrase.

Anyone remember the good ole days when it was Deepbit with 49% and people were absolutely losing their shit?

Oh look, the forex scammer! And another lie. How predictable.
Glad to see that so many people have you on ignore, Leo.

I completely agree, and I think you're correct. Of course I'm not a lawyer, and not responsible for all that money...I certainly don't blame him for wanting to check. I can only imagine the stress he's going through right now.

Icebreaker - please don't jump to conclusions just because someone here is being very opinionated. From his behavior, I think Roman must agree with you.

Roman is trying to do the right thing, with all the information he has available. You guys with USD on the site, please be patient. You can see he tried to let you withdraw, but probably thought it better to make sure he wasn't doing anything illegal as Stephen kept reiterating. There's nothing shady about that. Hopefully he will continue with that soon.

Every dealing I've had with Roman has been both pleasant and very professional. His exchange was by far the best Bitcoin exchange we currently have available to us. I never left holdings there, I just bought and withdrew, so I don't have an immediate financial stake in what happens next. But I implore those of you that are owed USD and BTC to give him chance to settle things in such a way that won't destroy his exchange. Selling securities is one option that could solve this. 24k BTC is a lot but it's not an unrecoverable amount.

How poorly things go from here on out will depend on more than just Roman. Please consider your demands and actions carefully.

When two unknown, extremely-low-post count users post about their loan transactions, and go on to talk about "building trust", they are almost always a single scammer attempting to build a fake reputation and transaction history. Maybe your transaction was the excption and you're in the 1% of legitimate transactions. But since this has happened hundreds and hundreds of times here, in no way should you be surprised about being called out.

Also, you may think we're "not involved", but like EVERY bitcoin investor, I'm involved peripherally, and it sickens me to see people getting scammed, no matter how naive they are. If you are indeed legitimate users, you should understand and respect that.

No need to apologize - that's exactly what it looks like.

Not really. Just read it.

I thought the obvious choice would be the blockchain.info wallet. It's easy to back up and access the same wallet from both your phone and computer, and the code runs client side, so you're not really trusting the site, yet they store it encrypted online for you and have many other options for secure backup.

DeathAndTaxes
evoorhees
shytlman

I hear very good things about Bitstamp.net - let me know how it goes if you try them out...

If you're inside the US, the easiest/cheapest way is TangibleCryptography, as linked above, or Bitfloor.com

Both accept cash deposits at various banks (WF, Chase, BOA) that are credited close to instantly.

Tangible uses MtGox's exchange rate at time of deposit, sometimes with a discount. Bitfloor is a full exchange with an order book.

Both have excellent customer service.

Other services may charge exorbitant fees, so read the fine print before buying anywhere else.

I would absolutely not build any GPU-based mining hardware right now. Even if BFL falls through on the ASICs hardware, their FPGA hardware is pushing difficulty through the roof. GPU miners will be pushed out one way or another in the near future.

If you're buying a gaming machine anyway, then it certainly doesn't hurt to get one that can mine for a few weeks. But in that case, build it with gaming in mind and just make sure you get a solid ATI card to use.