From my own experience, paper wallets, or exporting the private key to a text file that is not stored anywhere online are my two favorite ways of storing bitcoin long term.  As others have already said, Exchanges come and go and you also have to rely on the good nature of others guarding those sites.  Hardware can become faulty in rare occasions.  Hopefully, you'll find a solution that's fit for your purposes.

My thanks to one and all who have contributed - it would seem I am quite able to leave my paper and text file private keys as they are for the time being.


Got it.  The private keys are safe for now (anything could happen in the future).

I only put away a few hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin aside a few years ago in various places  (Sorry for the vague nature of the amount or the locations).  The price has been good to me, not enough to retire on, not yet at least.  But, I know now there's not much likelihood the paper wallets will become incompatible before I might need to dip into those funds.

It wouldn't hurt to get some paper wallets for a few alts coins and bitcoin and drop $100 on each then put them away for a couple of years then see how they are going.  (You can always top up with $100 at a time into each of them in turn).

If I were choosing three or four assets, then I'd go along the lines of:

Bitcoin 50% - ( ETH / XRP / LTC ) 40% - DOGE 10%

If I had to choose ten cryptos, then:

BTC 1/3rd - ( ETH / XRP / LTC / DOGE ) 2nd third - (( ( newer coins with promise ) + ( some other well establised coin/tokens ) about 50/50 split )) last third

So I have these paper wallets (a couple are actually printed on paper while a couple of others are saved to text files) and I was wondering will there always be backward compatibility for Bitcoin Wallet Addresses?  All of the wallet addresses on my paper wallets start with the number 1 so they are quite old now.  From what I can tell, there are balances for some of the forked coins, but I'm not ready to shift the bitcoins or get the funds from their forked counterparts (I'd have to have even more paper wallets to accommodate the forked coins compounding the problem).

From what I've seen wallet addresses have started with 1, then 3, now they are bc1q ... I guess I'm wondering do I need to shift the funds to new paper wallets?  Or, keep them as is and hope a future bitcoin wallet can still accept them?

I'm always amazed at the number of coin launches that don't have discord at launch.

Sounds interesting - will follow to check on the progress.  How do you tie the five currencies together?  Will you post cross rates, or just a summary?

What volumes are you expecting, and, are you planning on an IPO, or a free for all?

Is there a list of pools that do that?  I found a list of nodes that have high volume and added them to my list, should I aim for lower volume nodes instead?  The transaction is now showing as 5 confirmations, so it's on its way to where-ever.

too high a fee - i.e. I want a BTC 1,000 transaction to go through straight away, so I slap a BTC 1.0 transaction fee payment to hurry things up?  (this is an extreme example, but I hope you understand what I am asking?)

BitCoin's lost $ 250 since it's high around $ 1,100 only a few weeks ago.  If the price gains over the year then it's possible to see it reach $ 2,000. However, that's the high price, what's it's low price - $ 500 ?  and what's it's midpoint going to be?  It's nice to hope that BitCoin will reach $ 2,000 but if everyone then jumps ship there'll be a crash and the cycle will start allover.  People new to BitCoin aren't going to want to invest at $ 2,000 only to find the carpet pulled out from under them.

It would depend where you are getting your power (and your cooling for that matter) - solar power to generate the funds and underground for insulation with venting to cool perhaps?  (You wouldn't necessarily have solar power in colder climates, but then again perhaps you could have hydro power from the snow thawing into nearby lakes)

Not all BitCoin wallet's can alter the transaction fee - can they?  How low a fee can be set?  Is there a too high for that matter?

I was surprised to find that BitCoin has climbed to just over $ 1,100 since about mid November, now it's slowly deflating again.  It'd be a hard sell to push the price up to $ 2,000 unless there was some serious money behind the scenes bankrolling any such climb.

I think the price needs to survive dropping to $ 750 in the short term and then build up in stages $ 250 at a time, otherwise sudden shocks in the system will drive the price back down.

It might be a quarterly thing to get to $ 2,000 by the end of the year, the bigger question is when will people stop trading BitCoin for fiat and use BitCoin in its place?

Are these pre-printed with a generic Wallet Address and or pre-loaded with funds, or would the purchaser have to print and or load with funds themselves?

What would stop someone loading up a 1/10th BTC wallet address with more than the amount stated?

Also, how unique are the tamper-proof stickers?  Why I ask someone could purchase their own tamper-proof stickers and reapply over the secret key part of the note.

BitCoin ATM's are a great way to introduce Newbies to the Crypto-currencies that will slowly takeover online / digital transactions.

Is there any word on whether or not these BTC ATM's will be rolled out across other service stations under the companies corporate flag or is this a one off in the local market?

The SMS verification takes a little bit of the shine off of the anonymous allure that brings people to BitCoins, however, as time goes on people will either shrug and provide the information, or it will become so routine that it'll be dropped entirely.

Most gold sits in bank vaults to make governments feel good about themselves.  While it's true that India's use of the metal is on the increase for jewelry and decorative (temples etc) the tech side is also eyeing off gold for commercial applications in electronics due to its conductive properties.

People keep hording gold (and other base metals such as silver and platinum etc) for the inevitable Zombie Apocalypse, to trade but in the mean time, gold and BitCoins are very exclusively separate from each other and always will be.

Some people will buy Gold with BitCoins or the other way around, but they are too far apart from each other to be able to compare them except to compare their dollar value people are prepared to pay for them.

Just have a Tap and Go system with pre-loaded BitCoins and use it like any other tap and go device such as for transport trains and buses.

I'm just following the thread and thought I'd tally up the actual bids:

Michail1 2400 @ 14.50 = $34,800

LegendsofTomorrow "make me an offer i cannot refuse and ill take the whole lot."

geoffreyqp "i live near you, and if you do this i will take 100(5 tubes) of the coins at that price."

Liad.Services "If you are willing to sell 10-15 units of this, let me know,"

buckrogers "I am also interested in buying a few tubes possibly"

chronicsky 3

Mitchell 1
cryptoheadd 1
monbux 1

minerjones PM offer

You would be better to target vending machine manufacturers who supply to major soft drink and confectionery products that are placed in very visible areas such as rail and bus interchanges as well as airports and stadiums.

Other types of vending machines include power recharge and even water (cold and frozen) vending machines.  The number of these types of vending machines is increasing all the time, schools, colleges and universities have them also.

Ride sharing companies such as Uber or their competitors that are springing up should also be approached - the advantage is a cashless ride which gives the driver greater safety as they are less likely to be robbed.

It definitely wouldn't hurt to put some BitCoins away for a future day when they improve in price against the Dollar.  You have to ask yourself if you want to trade them back to fiat, or, to actually use them for what they are intended - to make payments with.

Only put away what you can afford and make it a regular (ie pay day) top up of the Wallet it's going into.  I say Wallet, because you can't just make it a Wallet Address that your other BitCoins are going into, you have to make it a dedicated Wallet just for savings.