pity donations accepted here:

DDgBkR4TYhdtFTg9Y64Ak8ARimDYh6Hxom

http://doge.ufeff.pw/?n=240

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ponzi

Charles Ponzi promised clients a 50% profit within 45 days, or 100% profit within 90 days, by buying discounted postal reply coupons in other countries and redeeming them at face value in the United States as a form of arbitrage.[2][3] In reality, Ponzi was paying early investors using the investments of later investors. This type of scheme is now known as a "Ponzi scheme". His scheme ran for over a year before it collapsed, costing his "investors" $20 million.

it's fun to pretend it's real, loosen up

Coinbase gets their bitcoins from bitcoin merchants who want an instant cash-out to USD. In this way, it's an exchange where exchanging from USD to BTC is public and BTC to USD is reserved for bitcoin merchants only. Merchants may have a locked in BTC->USD exchange rate, which is why coinbase's btc selling price is higher than its buying price.

pool numbers aren't that accurate. They only measure your hash speed by measuring the rate at which you're turning in computing shares.

If you happened to mine two shares in a shorter than average amount of time, then the hash rate on the site would appear higher than it really is. Vice versa for if you happened to mine two shares in a longer amount of time.

Over a long period of time, this averages out to the hash rate cgminer says.

OP, the first decision you need to make is whether you want to try to make more money in the bitcoin world, or cash out into the real world. If I was you, I would do a mix of both. I would cash out a certain number of bitcoins, maybe 100 or so, just enough to live comfortably for awhile. Don't use mtgox to cash out, use coinbase or absolutely anything else. Once you cash out, BE ABSOLUTELY SURE to declare the profits as income to your country's tax revenue service.
If you decide to do a 100% cash out, perform the cashout over a time period rather than selling all at once. This will make a better price for you and prevent any big market movements from being triggered by your cashout. In addition, if you decide to do a complete cashout, consider doing it over several years to prevent your tax bracket from going up. It would suck complete ass to pay 50% tax on your bitcoin cash.

If you want to make more money in bitcoin, the rest of the coins should be used as "capital". Since you have access to quite a lot of instantly transferrable money, your options are directly dependent on how you can spend that money. With bitcoin in its infancy merchant-wise, there's really not too much you can buy, which means the business venture you choose has to be based on the coin itself. A lottery would probably be the best option considering the amount of money you have, and it's almost guaranteed returns because you only choose winners once you have enough tickets sold to cover the prizes. To draw attention to your lotteries, run the first few at a loss; since most lotteries run at a loss for the ticket buyer, it would draw many eyes on bitcointalk/wherever if you ran the lotteries at a profit to the ticket holder.

If you take any one thing from this post, I highly recommend _against_ day-trading or any kind of altcoin investing. Bitcoin/altcoin investment is known as "speculation" in the finance world, and it is literally the riskiest kind of investment you can make. There are financial analysts much smarter than you or me who struggle to make a profit in speculation when using advanced prediction algorithms and analysis methods. Day trading is the same story - virtually nobody who takes part in day trading makes any money. When you hear success stories from people who worked the stock market, what you fail to hear is the equal number of massive stock failures. My dad is probably one of the the best examples of this - he invested 100k in the stock market and did day trading using one of those candlestick prediction methods, he got out by the skin of his teeth with only 60k remaining.

So there's really only two options I can recommend here - either you cash out of bitcoin over some period of time, or use the capital you have to start some kind of business. I recommend against trying to start a business if you know that you aren't business savvy.

Stay safe op

1JfXkhN1K6Y4fLg7NWiz2rWgjRQJEkZwVP

I guess we just have to post an address to enter?

1DLLqvDQMKmukywXCtGPhLMod4Akad6Lpv

Coinbase acts as an exchange. People who have bitcoins and want USD, along with people who have USD and want bitcoins use coinbase to facilitate their transactions.

Lets say I want to buy bitcoins for 600/coin, so I post an "bid order", that tells people I'm willing to give them 600usd for a bitcoin.

A merchant has a bitcoin that he wants to turn into USD. He goes on coinbase, sees that I'm looking to buy a bitcoin for 600usd. He decides that he can do better, so he creates an "ask order", that tells people that he is willing to sell a bitcoin for $650usd.

On coinbase, thousands of these bid and ask orders are on the same exchange. When you see a buy price of $809.58, that means the absolute lowest ask order is selling some amount of bitcoins for $809.58 each. When you see a sell price of $786.10, that means that the absolute highest bid order is buying some amount of bitcoins for $786.10 each.

If you were to go on coinbase right then and buy a bitcoin for $809.58, the absolute best price you could sell it at is $786.10 because that's what the highest bid order is offering. If you're wondering where the extra $30 went, it goes to the guy who you originally bought the bitcoin from.

mtgox, btce, vircurex, and every other exchange I know of exposes their market data through an API, and allows bots to trade through that API

you can always mine a scrypt altcoin and just swap it out for bitcoins