Congrats on your son. Being a dad is the best.

A few years ago when my daughter was born I gave her an ounce of gold and a Bitcoin.
Each has a certain merit.
The gold is prettier...

I have used Coinfloor quite a bit and have had no problems.

Be aware that they might ask you to show evidence of the source of funds you send there, eg. if you sell a lot of Bitcoin they might ask you to prove where the Bitcoin came from. In my case, I was able to show the receipts from when I bought GPUs for mining back in 2011 and they were happy with that.

Their OTC market is (despite the wording on their site) available to individuals as well as institutions, should you want to trade significant volumes.

This thread probably belongs somewhere else!

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Hi we are looking for person who will escrow 0.012 bitcoins..

Far back in the mists of ancient time, my good lady wife decided to give herself £5000 to buy some Bitcoins.

I thought she was insane, but... she had the money and it wouldn't hurt us that much if it all went horribly wrong.

She traded back and forth for a while, gained a bit, lost a bit, gained a bit and eventually got bored with it and put her Bitcoins in cold storage, all 641 of them.

I now think she is a genius and wish I had bought £5000 worth of coins at the same time.

Bottom line: If you can afford to hold for a longish time, buy some Bitcoins. Use only money that you can afford to do without forever - it may be your children or grandchildren who take the profit.

Felt very sad for people who still had fiat or BTC on Gox.

I got my BTC out last November, though I had one withdrawal of BTC100 that failed to turn up in my home wallet after being 'sent' by Gox.
It took support a few days to fix, and I was sweating during that time.

I have been mining Bitcoins since November 2010, initially on my PC using the GPU that was there. In January 2011 I asked myself whether larger scale Bitcoin mining would be a good thing to do.

At the time, a Bitcoin was worth about £0.20, power cost about £0.105/kWh by day and half that by night.
The Mining difficulty was rising by about 15% every 12 days.
HD5870 GPU cards could be bought for about £125, used about 230W of power and hashed at about 350Mhash/sec.
I had a 1kW power supply and a mainboard with 3 PCIe*16 slots idle in my attic.

I chewed the numbers, and decided that Bitcoin mining would probably make a moderate profit before the difficulty rose to the point where the mined coins would no longer pay for the power, at which time I intended to get rid of the GPUs on eBay.

GPUs were ordered, installed, Bitcoins were mined.... and the value of the Bitcoin rose so more GPUs, PSUs, mainboards etc. were ordered. By the time I finished mining with GPUs, I was mining at 10Ghash and the mining kit was acting as the central heating for my house. Eventually the difficulty rose to the point where the mined Bitcoins didn't pay for the power used, even allowing for the fact that I didn't need to pay for gas for heating. The GPUs are now idle, and have very little resale value, but I have a reasonable stash of Bitcoins on offline storage and I am not complaining.

The difficulty is now at the point where my current mining rig, an ASIC performing at 70Ghash/sec, barely mines enough Bitcoins to pay for its power use, and will probably never pay for its purchase cost.

The point here is that you have to evaluate:

* The cost of buying mining hardware.
* The cost of running the mining hardware - what does power cost where you are?
* The anticipated return, and how that will change assuming that the mining difficulty continues to rise. See bitcoin.sipa.be
* How much fiat money will the mined Bitcoins be worth - you have to buy equipment and power with fiat currency.

If buying mining hardware will get you more Bitcoins than simply buying the Bitcoins, it could be the right decision.
On the other hand, simply buying some Bitcoins might be easier -- when I started mining, it was *difficult* to buy Bitcoins.
Of course, if you buy Bitcoins, you risk being scammed... maybe the same is true if you place an order for ASICs these days. Back then, Bitcoins were mined on GPUs bought from ordinary computer parts vendors and getting scammed was unlikely.

Nobody can tell you what is the right thing for you to do. You have to evaluate the costs of a proposed course of action, the potential rewards and the degree of risk. If you spend a large amount of money on mining hardware and Bitcoin collapses completely, you will own a pile of expensive junk. The same is true if you simple buy Bitcoins. If you buy mining hardware and the mining difficulty rises too much, or the price of power rises you may make a loss. These days there are several companies producing Bitcoin mining ASICs and bringing out faster, more economical chips from time to time. We might expect the difficulty to continue to rise.

Make you own decision, but make it carefully.

Hope this helps!

I am not trying to believe what we have been told, nor disbelieve it. The objective here is to try to understand what could have happened and what could not have happened so as to be able to start to separate the lies from the half truths from the truths. The reality appears to be that there is a lot of speculation flying around and very little real verifiable information. We do not actually know with any degree of certainty whether Bitcoins were actually stolen, or whether keys were lost, or whether this whole mess is the result of a badly executed attempt at fraud, or something else entirely. Having a feel for what is actually possible might help to enable us to disregard some of the more wild speculation and maybe come to some understanding of what really happened.

And maybe to consider whether or not any exchange should be trusted with more than 1 Bitcoin.

Let's think about this question, because I can't even begin to understand what must have happened.

We assume the MtGox kept an offline wallet with the bulk of Bitcoins in it. If anything else is true, the someone should simply string Karpeles up by the neck.

For 800k or so Bitcoins to vanish from an offline wallet scares me. I have my own (somewhat more modest) stash on Bitcoins in an offline wallet. If Gox can lose offline coins, has someone found a way to raid offline wallets? How? How?

Alternatively, if those Bitcoins were moved into the Gox hot wallet, we must assume that this took a fairly large number of moves. You would think that, for example, after 10k Bitcoins had been moved to the hot wallet a few times somebody would have asked some questions and started investigating. It is hard to see any scenario where 800k Bitcoins are moved from the Gox offline wallet to the hot wallet without Karpeles or someone else at Gox becoming aware that there was a serious Bitcoin leak.

So maybe the hint Karpeles gave in an IRC interview carries some truth. The Bitcoins are still there, but cannot be moved for some reason. For this to be true, the keys for that offline wallet must have become unavailable. Now, I have few Bitcoins compared to MtGox, but there are 3 backups of my offline wallet, one of which is stored in another country - we have to assume that an exchange would have better backups than an individual Bitcoin miner. Is it possible that Karpeles got careless with backups and something silly happened, like a USB stick became corrupt? It seems unlikely.

So... I cannot think of any sensible explanation for the apparent loss of appx. 800k Bitcoins.

In the absence of a credible explanation for the loss of the Bitcoins, my conclusion is that there is more to the story than we have been told, and Karpeles is being, if not downright dishonest, very economical with the truth. Can anybody think of any credible way for Gox to lose appx. 800k Bitcoins or to have had them stolen?

Can anything be learned from the blockchain? If enough people who have, at one time or another, moved Bitcoins to or from Gox were to publish transaction IDs maybe patterns would emerge - maybe we could find some of the Bitcoin addresses for the Gox offline wallet and see whether large numbers of Bitcoins have been moved out of it.

I would say 'Incompetent' with fair certainty.

I have personal experience of Gox f*ckups - fortunately these were resolved and I didn't lose BTC, only some sleep - that strongly suggests gross incompetence.

On the question of deliberate fraud, I would say innocent until proven guilty and, in my opinion, probably innocent.

On a question of criminal negligence - eg. lost the keys for the cold wallet etc. - we simply don't know enough yet.

Perhaps the more serious question, going forward, is how will users of Bitcoin ever come trust any exchange given the apparently continuous string of exchange collapses, closures, hacks etc. that we have seen.

I have no idea what will happen now.

My gut tells me we are in for a slow slide for a period of maybe 4-8 months followed by another surge, but I would be very hesitant to call the bottom.

My brain tells me that 'wait and see' is probably a good plan.

My coins are in offline storage and I have almost no fiat on any exchange.

Maybe. Morning where in the world?

I wish we had been at 500GBP last week

OMG!

My wife bought when the price was £7.80. She spent £5k and bought 641 coins, worth about £130k or so now.
This was probably the 2nd best decision she ever made (after answering "I do")

I have bought a small number of coins from time to time, but my 2nd best decision ever was to buy a bunch of 5870s back in January 2001.

A few days ago I had a 100 BTC withdrawal from Gox delayed by about 40 hours.
I currently have 3 BTC withdrawals in GoxLimbo at the moment, 100, 51 and 49 BTC.
Not that I am particularly bothered by delays as I am in the tedious process of moving all my BTC off Gox to keep in my own cold storage, but it doesn't inspire much confidence.

My Batch #3 machine was delivered this morning and is now hashing at over 80GH in the comms room where I work.

Who knows... if the rate of difficulty rise drops a bit, it might even break even

This charts was from bitcoincharts.com. Try, for example, http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzl
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