To be absolutely safest, just sell through an exchange. Unfortunately, Bitcoin is just one big grey area in the law right now. Most LBC transactions go smoothly, but there was that guy in Miami who was arrested simply for selling coins to an undercover cop (who mentioned during the transaction that he wanted to use the coins for something illegal)

I think merchants are happy to accept any currency, so long as there is a suitable number of customers offering to pay with it. Most will just see the dollars being deposited to their accounts though, and they won't stop to ask "what makes money money?".

Really, until their suppliers also accept bitcoin, there isn't any incentive or reason for companies to hold Bitcoin, unless they really believe in its promise. Most just see it as a means to transact though, nothing more, nothing less.

Reminds me of 2008.  With the Dow approaching 14000, a lot of our clients felt like they missed the boat with the cash they kept on the sidelines. Our outside manager said "don't worry, we're due for a little correction", so everyone waited for it, saying they'ed invest some if the market fell to 13000 and would be buying up a storm if it went to 12000 or below.

Then it happened. The crash. And no one pulled the trigger on the way down, but they did pat themselves on the back for not buying when they saw the Dow fall to 8k, 7k and into the 6's. By that point I was basically pleading for them to get in the market, but alas, the Dow at 7k was "too risky"

Many of those people continued to stay on the sidelines all the way back to to Dow 15k.

Point being that people can say they're waiting for lower prices to get in, but the events that bring about those lower prices are disruptive and many people abandon the "plans" and "strategies" they said they had when confronted with reality. Part of me is also glad to not be with that firm anymore.... Just so frustrating to see the lack of action during what turned out to be one of the greatest buying opportunities of our lives.

Everyone is giving advice without asking the most basic question of risk tolerance and time horizon.

Yes, sticks have historically returned an average of 10% per year. But not at a predictable rate in the short term. You might be up 5% one year, flat another, down 15% the next and then up 40% the year following. Long term, equities have been a great investment, but the shorter your time horizon the less "safe" they become. Just as with Bitcoin, you can't buy 10 shares of an ETF and have any assurance that you'll recurve the same value for it in 10 days time.

Forget GPU's, even for Scrypt coins... There's ASIC for scrypt now, has been for a long time. Far better price/performance ratio. If your electricity is truly free, then eventually you'll break even... But if it's not really free, only free til someone notices, you might need to rethink that.

someone selling LtC can fetch .0067 for them on BTC-E or Cryptsy... Why they'ed want to take a 30%+ haircut is beyond me.

Supposing the blockchain is 30-ish GB; how many copies of the blockchain are in existence, and need to be in existance, in order to make sure the transactions in the block chain are secure? Is this the most redundant system ever built?

20 dollar drop in the last two weeks...

How many dollar drop since new years...

How many more dollars dropped since the previous new year...

It'd be great to see it make a sustained move in the other direction, or even just staying flat for a few months, rather than this continual downward grind...

$230 is only $13 dollars away... Where is the buy support?

Unless a new gang of buyers appears on the horizon, the continuous trickle of coins hitting market from miners needing to pay expenses will easily knock through that floor $13 below us...

I understand how mining supports the network. Each device hashing away incrementally adds to the total number of hashes executed per second.

But how does a node such as this support the network. Especially when it runs on such underpowered hardware?

You're looking for rationality in a market driven by speculation. There is nothing fundamental underpinning bitcoins value, and the market just isn't very deep. A small change in sentiment by just a few people can end up adding or removing a lot of buyers from the market, and that drives prices far more than it does in, say, most equities...

Likewise for most equities, buyers and sellers cluster their bids and asks right near the current value. With bitcoin, not so much the case, causing huge moves on a daily basis.

Wheres the bottom?

That's anyones guess.

I doubt that Overstock received a huge increase in sales due to BTC acceptance.

IT doesn't matter when Bitpay and Coinbase were founded, BTC wasn't seeming like it was reaching a critical mass until 2014. In other words, if you brought up Bitcoin to overstock in 2011, they likely would have expressed zero interest.

I think many companies moved to start accepting Bitcoin in 2014 because there they saw it in the news, they saw legitimate finance people talking about it, AND they probably discounted the number of "hodlers" that were out there... They probably moved to accept Bitpay thinking that people with Bitcoins were eager to spend them, much generally doesn't seem to be the case. Not even to spend them if only to re-up a few minutes later.

I wonder how much longer many of those companies will continue accepting bitcoin for, actually.

I'm not saying TXWA isn't above board. Just the idea of an exchange selling Bitcoin for credit card funds in general sounds like a horrible idea. But TXWA could be 110% legit, it's the small percent of scammers in the btc community they have to watch out for.

How do you expect anyone to give you an answer? A month before it hit $1k, no one here would have bet any substantial amount of bitcoins that Btc/usd rates would hit $1000 in 30 days time.

That doesnt sound like it'll wnd well for you.

Do you care about your anonymity? If yes, then using unique addresses is an essential step; however, if the site you're recording from already has your details, splitting the transactions in two addresses does very little.

Why do you need all your coins in a single address? Do you need to sign a message to establish you have control of x number of bitcoins? Or do you just want your wallet to look neater?

Sounds like you're investing with your heart and not your brain. Never a good thing. Not even "just this one time".

Says the person publishing the personal data of people not involved in the scam, seeking put personal data about the friends and family of the scammers who in all likelihood know nothing...

Being scammed sucks.
Losing money sucks.

But there comes a point where you have to say, ok, I lost. Time to move on. Report fried cat and co to the authorities. But stop dragging innocent people into the sphere of your investigation, coupled with implied threats of bodily harm. And next time, take the standard investment advice of "don't invest more than you can afford to lose"

It's ironic (is that the right word, I'm not sure...?) that people who jumped on board knowing full well that they were purchasing unregistered securities then turn around and want to use that Asa means to attack havelock. You knew full well that you were buying unregistered securities in the first place, seems disingenuous to then raise that as an issue; there's got to be some level of personal responsibility at hand.

Yes, am & amhash perpetuated a fraud, that's definitely grounds to complain. But no one forced you US citizens ti go buy what you knew then and know now we're unregistered securities. Looking at the investment performance of the other securities listed on their site is also meaningless; treading prices are outside of their control. They manage the registration and sale of shares, the transfer of proceeds from those sales to the seller (whether the issuer or a secondary seller), the distribution of dividends that are recieved. They don't evaluate the fitness of each security, just as etrade wasn't liable for the Enron fraud.

I'm not defending FC, AM, or AMhash. I get the anger about the loss. But casting this met wider and wider and threatening people who are, in all likelihood, completely unrelated to those who perpetuated the fraud is not appropriate. And running off to complain about unregistered sales of securities, again, you knew full well of that fact before hand. people who want the protections afforded to people who deposit into fdic insured institutions or want the protections offered by the SEC simply shouldn't be investing in Bitcoin at this point. It's in its Wild West phase. Regulations will likely come, but until that day arrives, you might be better off avoiding Bitcoins and Bitcoin related  investments as being too high of risk.

How is running away idiotic, exactly?

He's got a fortune. He's got the know how to create a new asic.

All he really loses is the goodwill of his fried cat name, which was valuable but not millions of dollars valuable.

Dark coins been out for months now. Why is everyone upset about an instamine now?