I agree with this as well that part of the attraction of Bitcoin was its mysterious inventor. Hard to say if this is just another attempt by Craig to cash in on some publicity, but you would think if he really wanted to put this to rest he would sign a public message with early block keys as suggested.

From what I understand, if none of the proposals suit your needs, you can always vote no and get your eth back. It only becomes committed once you vote for a proposal.

I have stumbled upon a few old wallets I forgot I had, BTC and otherwise, but when I opened them I was not as fortunate as you for they were either empty or contained dust. It is still exciting though, kind of like opening a present to see if there is any decent amount left.

I have heard the pizza story before, but didn't know the exact date, so yes I will order a pizza that day in observance of such a special occasion.

Yes, it would benefit those with deep pockets more now to have a lower ETH price while the DAO offer is going on than it would have a month or so ago when ETH was peaking.

Yeah, price is falling but I wonder if it isn't a fake out before pumping again. Though it seems tied to the BTC price decline as well, so we will see what happens in the upcoming days/weeks with price as we approach the halving.

I use it as both a currency and investment. The currency is rather limited to online purchases, mainly at sites such as NewEgg, but when the BTC price is up I often think about making some purchases I have been holding off on.

Yes, this is a very important point. With cloud mining or investing in ASICs, you are on a one way ride and sink or swim with the algo or coin you are mining. With GPUs you can mine any coin and switch algos as needed. Plus your GPU will retain value as it is also useful for its original purpose, as a video or gaming card. So with an ASIC or cloud mining, you  need to achieve 100% ROI, with a GPU you could get away with 50% ROI and resell it for half what you paid for it if things don't work out well.

Please update my rank to Sr. Member. Thanks.

I like the fact that is is fairly basic. Think about what it does, it is simply an interface for you to send and receive coins from your private keys. The more features the wallet has the more it deviates from this basic function and the more things that can go wrong.

Halving won't affect the large operation miners as much as you think. It will be the smaller operators that will be hurting. The large miners are setup in places with very low cost electricity (< $0.03 KWh) rates and can ride out the halving quite nicely. It will be the medium/small operators that will eventually be forced out, thus consolidating the mining even further into the hands of those big  miners you are worried about.

You can purchase DAO tokens directly from the Ethereum Mist wallet by sending ETH to the DAO contract address: 0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d3bb8c189413

There is no need to use a third party, but I suppose that option may be more convenient if you already have ETH on the exchange.

I also do not understand why this attitude of "either/or" all the time when it comes to comparing BTC with alts, whether its ETH or another alt. I think there is room for both, as well as a few of the other more robust alts out there.  There are many successful stocks, bonds, commodities and other investments as well as currencies themselves throughout the World, not just ONE thing to hold value. So why would it be any different with cryptocurrencies?

Keep in mind that the value of all cryptocurrencies combined is but a tiny sliver of the available monetary supply in existence. I think as time goes on and cryptocurrencies get past their growing pains and become more mature we will begin to see more interest and investment. Once this happens and we start seeing real investments enter into the ecosystem, the thought of having just one currency will be as silly as expecting the whole world to use only one fiat currency. (No comments please from the NWO types. )

Possibly, but for those people looking to buy any significant amount of tokens in the DAO I am sure they are hoping for a drop in ETH price over the next few days. Plus, up until now there haven't been a lot of ways to spend ETH in any significant fashion, so the DAO will also act as a sort of "Ethereum Sink" to drain off some of the available supply. Depending on how many DAO tokens get sold, it may have the effect of also pushing prices up some as available supply declines.

The last I checked http://etherscan.io/address/0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d3bb8c189413 625,000 ETH had been exchanged for tokens. Just speculating, but if 5-10% of ETH ends up being transferred for DAO tokens, I would think that would effect the price of ETH to some degree.

Yes, this will indeed be interesting times. I purchased a 1,000 tokens to get started, and I am currently deciding if I want to send the next 9 days of mining proceeds to the contract address to accumulate more.

I think the consensus is we will be seeing $500 BTC before the halving event, but the $10,000 prediction is a bit much. I think it will have a hard time getting to $1,000 this year, even with the halving as there are a lot of people expecting the pump due to the halving and will want to cash out once we start seeing anything higher than $600. If it gets near $800 we will probably be seeing huge volumes of selling to the point it will probably drop back down to the $400 or lower before the slow rise begins again.

Looking at how long it has taken since the ATH on 2013 to now for prices to somewhat recover, I would guess we won't see any meaningful stability near $1,000 until at least 2020.

Well I can tell you 0 confirms means just that, that there have been zero confirmations of the transaction and it hasn't been included in any mined blocks.

I would wait until you have at least 1 confirmation before sending anything, even with low amounts.

If the transaction amount is significant, I would wait for the number of confirms in proportion to the amount of funds involved.

Personally, I would do something like:

> 1 BTC - 1 confirm is probably plenty
1 - 2 BTC - 2 confirmations
2 - 5 BTC - 3 confirmations
5 - 10 BTC - 4 confirmations
10- 20 BTC - 5 confirmations
20+ BTC - 6 confirmations

Adjust this scale to your level of tolerance for loss and the transaction's sensitivity to time, but again at least wait for 1 confirmation. It is generally accepted that 6 confirmations is pretty secure, but this level can take well over an hour at times.

I should also add that if the person sending you the Bitcoin added a low or no fee when sending, the first confirmation could take quite some time. I have had a few low fee transactions take up to 6 hours to get their first confirmation in recent months due to the amount of transaction backlog and miners starting to refuse to include low or no fee transactions in their blocks.

If the person who sent you the BTC is complaining or rushing you and you haven't seen 1 confirm yet, verify with them if they included a proper fee. You can also look up the transaction details as odolvlobo suggested using a block explorer, such as Blockchain.info, and it will show you the fee that was included, if any.

You (and everyone posting since) do realized you necro'ed a nearly 1 year old thread to offer advice on?

Plus by reading even a few of the posts you would see the commenters from a year ago recommend that he send his money to Cryptsy to learn how to trade. I wonder how that worked out considering they are now closed due to all the finds being stolen by the exchange operators.

The OP is probably long gone and if he did use Cryptsy he's probably never coming back.

Well your suspicions are warranted, as it is most certainly a 100% scam attempt, but if you send them anything it is more like 100% profit on their part and 100% loss on yours.

The only other plausible scenario I would be able to come up with is a money laundering operation of some sort, but in any event this offer meets the criteria of "if it sounds too good to be true..."

Stay away, far away from this and keep your money.

BTW, I did not click the link and I suggest others stay away too, links like these can lead to bad stuff.

Or the most obvious thing happens which you even said in the OP, they learn to live with a lower profit margin.

Profit is profit, sure they might like to see $900 BTC to keep the same margin, but even if their profit after all expenses stays positive why would they quit mining. They might drop from making $200 to $100 a day profit, but again profit is profit.

So I would add option I., which should be A. They keep mining and learn to live with less profit.