The price is way too volatile for some one to make a good prediction about the direction of the price. Currently it's nearly at $430, and we will most likely see some threads pop up today with "Dump is over" bla bla bla.

It's funny to see how some people think the price is going sub $400 today, and the next day they say that the price will go to $500 within this year. They change their predictions every day. They simply don't know what to think anymore.

Buying; I can understand that newbies may have a hard time when it comes to buying Bitcoin, especially when the exchanges in some countries require you to go through a very annoying verification process, which might delay your purchase of Bitcoins significantly. After that it's much easier since you have verified yourself. You just deposit money in your exchange account, and then buy the amount you want.

Spending; I personally can't think of something that is difficult about spending your Bitcoins. You have either a wallet installed on your PC or you have an online wallet at for example, blockchain.info. The steps to send Bitcoins to spend them are self explanatory once you have your wallet open. Very easy.

Trading; Best method for people that don't know much about trading, buy low, sell high. Every one can do this. You can also download an app via your appstore that allows you to trade Bitcoin with in-app (fake) money. That allows you to trade without losing a single penny.

Why so many coins; It's quite simple. Money. The majority of the coins are bought by people that are now calling themself a developer, while they can't code even the most simple thing. They are out to sell their pre/insta-mine and then abandon the coin to start a new "project" to repeat everything. I simply don't look at altcoins anymore. It's not worth it. I only focus on Bitcoin.

Why not fiat currency?; The reason we use Bitcoin as currency is that we now finally OWN our money. No one can tell us what to do or how to spend our Bitcoins. We don't have to deal with a third party anymore. It's pure freedom.

Different wallets; Different people, different wallets. The Bitcoin core wallet requires you to download the full blockchain before you can start to get it working. Some people don't want a wallet that downloads the full blockchain since it is around 55-60GB in size. That's why they choose to go with a so called 'light weight' wallet. This wallet is much faster to use it as newbie since it doesn't require you to download the full blockchain. Some people even choose to use an online wallet such as blockchain.info, but I personally don't like it that much since it stores your coins online.

Why transactions take so long?; They don't. Transactions made via Bitcoin are instantly. The only thing that isn't instantly are the confirmations. Some times it takes 5 minutes to get 1 confirmation, and some times longer than 30 minutes. We can't do anything about this.

Security, ponzi, theft; Your coins are as secure as you are. If you secure your wallet files with a long and strong password, then your coins are more than safe. Just make sure you don't click on links, and you don't download stuff without knowing what it is. If your PC stays safe from virusses, then no hacker can harm/steal your coins. Ponzi's aren't something really Bitcoin related. They also happen in the fiat world. Just don't fall for it. Even not if they promise you crazy high resturns.

Bitcoin is a currency just like fiat. It's not different. You can purchase stuff with Bitcoin exactly like you would do with your fiat currency. Beside that, I'm sorry to say, but you don't really sound like some one that has got to read about Bitcoin back in 2009.

Nope. I don't see why there would be a reason for him to follow this forum? He might have done it in the past, but for such a technical person there is not much interesting stuff here for him to read through, or even participate in. He is either working on something completely different, or is simply enjoying his life. Good luck to him.

Good luck with your journey through infinity. It's basically a waste of time and resources to attempt a brute force attack in this case.

It won't happen, but let's pretend you gained access to an address of some one that has 10BTC in it, what will you then do? Steal the coins?

Some miners will probably stop their operations for a short time, untill the price goes up to such a level where they can make a profit again. That's the worst case scenario. Glad it won't happen. We will definitely see the price go up mich higher than current price level. It's the natural law of supply and demand. It will go up.

No one here can tell you what will happen. It looks like a good opportunity to buy yourself some extra coins before it goes up again. It might go down, yes, but I don't expect a price below $400.

There are enough buyers, see the orderbooks and you'll see what I am talking about. If you think this "shitcoin" is dying, then you are free to leave and never come back.

Last bump.

The high quality posters are the far minority here. They mostly consider 90% of the non-technical posters here to add nothing with value. Their standards are simply too high for the time that we are currently in. Bitcoin attracts people, the majority of them don't know much about the technical aspects of Bitcoin. And the others are looking to make a quick buck and spam the speculation section with unrealitic high predictions, etc. What can you do about this when paid signature campaigns are not allowed anymore? Nothing more than what is currently happening.

Getting rid of signature campaigns will decrease the amount of nonsense posts here, but it won't do much in terms of improving post quality once paid signatures are gone. The majority of the discussions are relatively low of quality, and will stay relatively low of quality.

I don't think $500 will happen anymore this year. We lost precious ground comming today from around $460 to right now $425. It will cost a week to find our way back to $460, if we don't go down a little bit more. January will be the main target for $500. This year not.

I am sure more Bitcoin related companies will help the network with adding full nodes. As you say, it might be a problem if the amount of full nodes are decreasing and only a few entities are left with their nodes, then decentralisation is as good as gone. But I am fairly sure that several parties will prevent that from happening by adding their nodes to the network.

We can also add an extra layer of network protection by letting our Bitcoin Core clients open. I am running a full node for more than a few months, and it feels good. If I am to buy a VPS or dedicated server when I need it, then I will install a full node there as well.

Nah. If that would be the case, then they would have sold before Christmas. This dump was too serious to be considered 'selling due to the holiday spendings'. At first it could be a whale, or a group trying to cause panic, and after that people indeed were selling in panic and causing the price to go down this hard. The weak hands that sold, will buy back at higher levels.

I think it might reach very low $400 range, but now below it. Support seems too strong to let it fall below $400. A lot panic today, which gives people who wanted to buy in a good chance to do it.

Bitfinex's high of the day was $460, and it reached a low of $413.44 some moments ago. $46 drop in less than 12 hours is quite big if you ask me.

Bitstamp and Bitfinex are going down harder than expected due to all the panic sellers. Bitfinex just went below $415. Panic is complete now.

I was introduced to Bitcoin by some nerds that were mining with their home PC at the end of 2012. I didn't spend much attention to Bitcoin because I had other interests back then. They somewhat forced me to look into Bitcoin, and they showed me there is some money to be made via mining. That's when I started to get interested. Once I noticed that my home PC was not capable of mining a worthy amount of coins in a day, I got disappointed and left. For some reason I went back to Bitcoin again in the beginning of 2013, and I bought myself some coins instead of mining them. That's when it all started for me.

I have written all my passwords on several papers and hided them in several places in my house. That's how I will always have my passwords around me.

Well said. For every sell order that is being executed, there is also a buy order that is getting filled. This is something that most people don't think about when there is a dump happening. They simply think there is no demand and no one is willing to buy, while in fact that isn't true. People are happy to buy, especially after a dump.

I wouldn't want to wait till it goes sub $400 as I don't think it will go below that. You are better off buying back some coins at $430 which is a good price. Bitfinex is slightly below $430. Buy while you still can, if you haven't already done it.