I think the best solution is to withdraw your funds and if you can't claim the "I'm paying for college" exemption on the penalty--just pay the penalty (and taxes)! If you're looking at holding your BTC for 10 years, you'll either have zero left in your account (If BTC fails), or you will have well exceeded the performance of the "market". I don't think there is really any middle ground here. My money is on bitcoin surviving and doing very well.....
Also, by just withdrawing money from your IRA and dealing with the penalty you won't have to comply with any self-directed IRA silliness and you gain the benefit of complete control of your wallet's security.

It's very easy to spoof the "from:" address of an email.

Just received a very well done spoof email asking me to "re-verify my account" at Mt Gox because I used a VPN to access it. Don't fall for it! It sends you to a non-mtgox IP address that is a very well done copy of the real one. To test it I entered bogus account info and would you believe it! I got confirmed! I'm sure they'll get access to some accounts with this...It looks very authentic.

Here's the text of the spoof...


From: "Mt.Gox"<info@mtgox.com>
Date: March 30, 2013, 1:39:08 PM EDT
Subject: [Mt.Gox] Account Verification.
Reply-To: <info@mtgox.com>

Dear User,

We stated when you registered an account with us that accessing your
account via the Tor network and/or public proxies can lead to a temporary
suspension of your account, and having to submit AML documents to us.

You are recieving this e-mail because we suspect you of accessing
your account via the Tor network and/or public proxies.

To prevent your account from being suspended you are now required to
verify your account you must do this from your home network, without the
use of the Tor network and/or public proxies.

Click here to begin the verification process.
http://188.190.99.224/user-panel/

Best regards,
Mt.Gox team
info@mtgox.com

I did discover this company which looks like one of the bigger players regarding self-directed IRAs...
www.pensco.com
But it is expensive to have them "manage" your self-directed IRA. Managing it on their end is simply generating annual paperwork that meets IRA regulations. I didn't think this was worth the cost.

So, I ended up withdrawing some IRA funds early and avoiding the penalty because I also paid college bills this year. See IRS publication 590 for details on that method. (still had to pay income tax on the IRA withdrawal)

So, I've now got a retirement wallet funded with bitcoins.

I'm interested in investing a portion of my IRA in bitcoin. The only way to do that would be to put the bitcoin investment into a Self-Directed IRA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_directed_ira

It seems that an investment in bitcoin should be seen as an appropriate alternative, or non-traditional IRA investment. You could make a good argument that it should be a permitted investment, but I'm concerned that it would really take some convincing to get the IRA trustee to consider hosting the account.

Since investing in bitcoin doesn't fall in the category of "self-dealing", the trustee would probably question whether bitcoin is a "prohibited asset".

Regulations aren't clear on a virtual commodity that has real-world value but I couldn't find anything specific that would prohibit investing in something like bitcoin.

IRS regulations prohibit; Collectibles such as gems, stamps, baseball cards, coins--except coins minted by the US Treasury, life insurance, sub-chapter S corporation stock, you can't invest in family members....

IRS regulation permit; foreign currency, some collectibles such as artwork, antiques, some metals, real estate, foreign stock, cattle, commodities, royalty rights.

I think bitcoin is similar to a foreign currency for this purpose.

I would only consider using an offline wallet such as Armory for an investment like this which the trustee could use to verify the balance.

Anyone have any experience with this--or thoughts--ideas?

Also, make sure you are not running EasyMiner at the same time. Only 1 application at a time can "see" the BFL on the USB port.

Got it Thanks!


I've been over that readme.txt many times getting things going and I've really appreciated all your work that went into it--so thanks much for that--it's all working very smoothly.

Leakage question...

I'm mining with cgminer with 2 workers one on ubuntu 12 and the other on windows 7 and I see the same odd behavior on both...

I've got 2 pools configured as failover (I did not choose load balance or rotate or anything like that), and about 80% of the time I see "leakage" over to my secondary pool! Weird.

I'm mining at 4500Mh/s at bitminter (2 workers) with no overt pool switching--either automatically or by my choice. I keep it steadily pointed at bitminter....But most of the time I'm seeing about 14Mh/s coming from my 2 workers to Mtred--my secondary pool!

I see no indication of this in either worker's console--they both look solidly connected to bitminter. I don't have any connection errors or slow communication or anything. Everything looks great except there's 14Mh/s leakage to Mtred from both workers.

What gives?? Any ideas?

Still waiting and lurking... would like to be whitelisted.
currently mining on cgminer.

thanks.

good point!

Thanks

Thanks

Thanks.

One other consideration is that p2pool pays off better when you are not pool-hoping. It favors steady mining. Stay on for 24 hours and your payout will be better.

Yes, thanks.