BTC exchange nowadays even makes greater sense. Wish all negativity/ issues about bitcoins are sorted out soon.

Bitcoins can be exchanged for cash @Ripple.

I am not sure if this can be done directly but I am sure that BTC can be exchanged to XNF or XRP and then can be sold for USD.

There are some websites which are buying BTC but they are offering lower rates than ongoing BTC rates.

Hold on investing in decentralized currencies until some solid announcements from the US government.

Focus more on not losing money than profit. Profit will come if capital will be intact.

As of now my two choices:

1. XRP (ripple)
2. XNF (NoFiatCoin)

Starting January 28, 2014, everyone can now exchange BTC for XNF, even without an active ripple wallet, through direct payment to NoFiatCoin's Bitcoin wallet.

http://www.nofiatcoin.com/announcements.html

I feel this currency is more like eGold.

e-gold (deliberately spelled with a lower-case ‘e’) was a digital gold currency operated by Gold & Silver Reserve Inc. under e-gold Ltd. that allowed users to open an account on their web site denominated in grams of gold (or other precious metals) and the ability to make instant transfers of value to other e-gold accounts. The company was founded in 1996 and had grown to five million users by 2009, when transfers were suspended due to legal issues. At its peak in 2008 e-gold was processing more than USD 2 billion worth of precious metals transactions per year [1], on a monetary base of only USD 20 million worth of gold (~2.54 metric tonnes) [2], indicating an extremely high monetary turnover (velocity) of about 100 times per year (similar to M-PESA). e-gold Ltd. was incorporated in Nevis, Saint Kitts and Nevis with operations conducted out of Florida, USA.

http://www.dgcmagazine.com/the-e-gold-story/

Yes for altcoins

No for Bitcoin

I would love to see some effective cheap ASICs coming up in the market so that break even time (5-6 months) is reduced

Its always better to make sure the safety of the returns. Bitcoins have a bright future but sometimes it gets shaky so backing it up somewhere is not a bad idea.