Hello, I'm offering 0.001 BTC to first 40 people to complete the following steps:

Sign up to play goldentowns game as my referal

1. Click on  www.goldentowns.com/?i=48150 and sign up
2. Go thru tutorial
3. Reach level 5
4. Have at least 20% happiness when you reach level 5.

If you decide to keep playing the game after this point I will refund half the gold i get from you.

After completing these 4 steps you can post here and claim your 0.001BTC

Here are some tips to help you:
1. Upgrade your roads, production buildings and houses.
2. don't build new houses, keep upgrading existing ones.
3. don't run production until you upgraded it to at least level 3.
4. upgrade order for production, wood factory, stone factory, veggie farm, meat farm

If you have any questions post here or write to me and I will answer them all.

Poster is correct, the rules have changed in the game, hiring and firing workers takes energy and gives experience. this caught me by surprise and drained good amount of energy before I noticed this. OP, you might get some people doing this

any U.S player lvl 10+ please PM me for political alliance. Let's make our country work for us.

username: shutik
claim: Special bonus 1: reach 30 happieness
1M5xKgWqNzMmGmAkZ6Hrhs6RU1DhridneT

few more stars to lvl 5. You can pay it ahead, will be there tomorrow.

Picking good players out of the bunch is investment for the long haul and is more of an art than a skill.
I look on accounting tab to gouge level of production, happiness and activity. Investment choices might play part in it as well.

Another way to approach this, is to scan activity tab for newly reached lvl 5 and buy few shares of best 1 out of 20.

Minor correction on starting price, 0.0001 for first share and 0.1 for last share, total shares 1000. In addition there is a tax to the game for each share traded in the amount of 0.0001
This is arithmetic progression. First 100 shares, which represent 10% stake of town taxes is only 0.515 gold
Last 100 shares will cost 9.515 for the same 10% stake.

If you have what it takes to pick out guys whose shares will be sold out, this is tremendous opportunity.

But it's possible to buy each other shares, right?

I figured out how to search for town shares if  you know user name of player. It's under inventory, financial news, town shares there is search box.

OP, what is your user name in the game?

Most people that reach lvl 5 are not worth investing in. My question is, once I've identified the user that I'm interested to invest into, how do I find the place to do so?

I want to find towns of good starting players so I can buy their town shares first when they reach lvl 5. Like some of you guys 
How do I do that?

How do you find someone's town in the game?

to hedge means to remove the risk of financial losses in the event of decline in value. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_%28finance%29

By definition hedging protects from loss at the expense of limiting gain.

I suspect author means delta hedge, one that protects from decline in direction of the price.

Forward of future contract with another party accomplishes it, but introduces counter-party risk.

Clearing house mitigates this risk, but there isn't one that I know of as of this moment.

We just have to wait until bitcoin gets bigger and more secure to store.

Until than limiting yourself to the % of exposure of your total investable assets is a good way to proceed.

I like this approach as exposure hedge. Re-balance your investment periodically to achieve risk exposure to bitcoin  with desired percentage level.
Good idea to also diversify your investment among different asset classes.

I believe you have to post only a fraction of the cost of the contact in the range of 15%
This serves as margin. In the event of the move of the spot price above margin threshold you would get margin call and if you don't post more you position gets liquidated

see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=164255.0 for unofficial FAQ

And please do your own research before investing.

I would advise to open account on https://icbit.se
They operate derivatives market in bitcoins

Good hedge would be to sell future contract(s). It will lock you rate of exchange in some point in time in the future for agreed Notional amount of BTC.
In the case bitcoin crashes you will be able to sell it at current market price.
In the case bitcoin will go up, you will lose out the difference between current market price and future rice.

Energy is precious resource and we all get only one an hour. Without much delay I will lay down the idea on how to use less of it in the beginning and still develop in the normal pace.

Don't produce cheapest items, trade for them on the market for more expensive items. As of this writing vegetables are so cheap in relation to other items that it does not make economical sense to produce them, because market gives us such a good trading prices. So, in respect to the energy per produce it makes sense to produce items with have high(est) trading value and trade them for vegetables.

It also makes sense to build second production facility for item of highest market demand and keep producing those items and trade them for the ones you need.

to finalize, I would not produce veggies iron and clay at current market condition, but I would double produce meat.

This strategy saves me energy on production of cheap goods.

User: shutik
claim: reached lvl 2
1M5xKgWqNzMmGmAkZ6Hrhs6RU1DhridneT

Seems to be a few bugs in the game. Like workers were not visible. Clicking on inventory and than home gets around the issue.

I am willing to sell it to you at the terms you offer. PM me.

created account shutik, went thru tutorial, reached lvl 1.

1M5xKgWqNzMmGmAkZ6Hrhs6RU1DhridneT

I never intend to run this thing. There is market demand for it outside these forums and I intend to resell this item as soon as I get it.

to O.P.

In my understanding spot price doesn't have to be the same. Usually there is a spread between what buyers want to pay and what sellers want to sell for. Spot price is theoretical number which could be used in calculating price of something else that depends on the price of bitcoin.