would you consider doing a group buy for the 5 chip gridseed miner that beastlymac is also selling?

For the vast majority of non-commercial miners solo mining will be the most reliable means of acquiring cryptocurrency. I suggest you plug in your hash rate and coin you are mining into one of the mining calculators. The calculator will tell you the average generation time for a block. If that amount of time is more than you would like to wait for a reward, you would be better using a pool.

This is from a litecoin mining calculator:

Litecoin Mining Calculator
https://www.litecoinpool.org/calc

Hash rate:    25000kH/s       (25 MH/s)
   
Expected Rewards
24 hours   7.17019409 LTC   208.22 USD
7 days   50.19135864 LTC   1457.56 USD
30 days   215.10582275 LTC   6246.67 USD
Solo Mining Stats
Expected Time per Block   6 days 16 hours
Probability of a Block in 1 day   13.88%
Probability of a Block in 2 days   25.83%
Probability of a Block in 3 days   36.12%
Probability of a Block in 7 days   64.86%
Probability of a Block in 14 days   87.65%
Probability of a Block in 30 days   98.87%

As you can see, solo mining would take 6 days on average to find a block at 25 MH/s. That is a reasonable gamble. You could do well either in a pool or solo. At 250 kH/s you would be unlikely to ever find a block solo since average block generation time is almost 2 years and the difficulty constantly increases over time.

Multibit has built in wallet encryption using bip38 from the file menu. This is the obvious choice. Any secure not cloud based encryption program like truecrypt will work fine. Ease of use is an issue and cold storage should be considered using armory.

I think the price is rising a little too fast so there will be some corrections. My prediction is it will briefly go below 900 on bitstamp but will not go back to 800 without some serious negative publicity. Most likely scenario is 1500 within 30 days.

I invested in the top 5 altcoins 1 month ago. They all lost value except for Litecoin. I agree with previous posters that it is just silly the amount of new coins coming out. They just dilute the market and actually make Bitcoin stronger because they have such little value. Right now Litecoin is the only legitimate altcoin.
I think altcoin prices will rise dramatically the next time Bitcoin prices go over $1000. That will make a good selling opportunity.

7DpXtREdp2HdbTw8t52guKurmoGDVmCiLV

I have been observing the market only for the last 1-2 months and I have started to understand the psychology of the price movements. There was a bubble caused by the Chinese where the price hit 1200. It went up too fast so at the first hint of negative news it came down hard. Since the low of 450 a new floor of 600 has been established and we have not seen the price below 700 in a week despite occasional negative news items from China and India. This shows that the market is more resilient and has established a more permanent value.
As far as predictions, a slow steady improvement in price is expected, however, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some bubbles and bursts along the way. I think a 10% per month appreciation is reasonable given the continued influx of capitol worldwide, the continued business investment and innovation, and the new-found attention of wall street. Of course, any improvement in price can be temporarily derailed by negative news items from the major regulatory players.
I may be wrong but this is how I see it.

Thanks, that worked for me too.

7DpXtREdp2HdbTw8t52guKurmoGDVmCiLV

thank you

7DpXtREdp2HdbTw8t52guKurmoGDVmCiLV

thanks

I think they will wait and see how overstock does before accepting Bitcoin. 2016 looks like the most likely answer. the advantage to amazon is lower fees than credit cards and no charge-backs. it is a smart business decision. As long as they convert to US$ at the time of sale there is no risk to them.

It works beautifully. Thank you so much !!!

This information is needed for people to make an informed decision about buying mining contracts. I have no experience mining but am interested in getting started. Here is some current information for 50GH/s 1 year contracts:

Cloudhashing Platinum- 10% management, 30% reinvestment
$3,999

Bitcoin Frenzy - 7.5% management, 25% reinvestment - Located in London
$1,999

E-pickaxe - no overhead fee, no reinvestment - located in Argentina
$1,500

When researching this i noticed many differences between contracts. First, not all companies have contracts for sale immediately, they are often future contracts to start production in next 1-4 months. Second, the fee structure is variable. Many companies charge a 10% administrative fee so that you do not get all of the bitcoins that are mined by your contract. Additionally, some contracts divert a percentage of Bitcoin revenue to reinvestment in new hardware. This allows the hashrate to increase over the term of the contract. Since the difficulty constantly increases this could provide more return.

This site http://bitcoindifficulty.com/ shows the increasing difficulty of mining Bitcoins over time.


This calculator (http://dustcoin.com/mining) gives immediate return as far as how many Bitcoins or other coins per day you can expect to mine with a given hashrate. So for 50Gh/s you can expect to mine 0.0213 Bitcoins per day. At $800 per Bitcoin, that works out to about $120 per week. For a $1500, 50Gh/s contract, the break even point is 83 days.

This calculator http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/takes into account the increasing difficulty when calculating a return on investment. Plug in 0 for the power cost since you don't pay that for a mining contract. You have to deduct the overhead (usually 10%).
If the difficulty does not change, you would make back the contract price in under 15 weeks and the remainder of the year would be profit. The difficulty WILL increase and therefore the contract will be less profitable. According to their projections, the break even point given the same assumptions (50Gh/s for $1,500) is 94 days. So that is an additional 11 days of work to account for the increasing difficulty over that timeframe.

tips - 1KFcnVbomYX5twk4npdPd7WAGAPpVDc2u1

I have experienced this effect at family gatherings. This should account for continued steady increase in Bitcoin value over the next 2 weeks.

You are entitled to your opinion of course as far as what it will be worth next year. How do you arrive at $200? Why not $2 or $2000? There is a lot of speculation in the market which is responsible for price movement, however, bitcoins have value because they are useful. The more useful they become and the more people use them the higher their value will become. My prediction is $2000 in 1st quarter 2014.