I've always bought the less expensive alternatives, from motorola droid phones to android tablets to sandisk MP3 players with a 64GB microSD card. Everything from apple is 3x the price for the same or even less functionality in some cases (how much does a small 64GB ipod cost?)

Their draconian software including and especially itunes made me want to pull my hair out the brief time I used it. Proprietary cables that change all the time... a closed minded, quazi-hipster elitist attitude with profit margins higher than wal-marts yet they still get tons of praise. I'll take google as a company over Apple.  Not saying they don't put out a good product though just their business practices tend to get ignored when they are just like wal-mart's.

Apple's pretty cocky thinking they can trash the bitcoin crowd and nobody will notice too.

it's not the taxes I have a problem with it's the tax code. Everything should be flat, automatic, with a flat amount taken off at the end of each year, no paperwork, no IRS. No deductions, no writeoffs.. just one flat percentage based on income...  if I'm holding bitcoin that has gone way up and using it as a currency, technically I have to track my cost basis as well as sale price every time I purchase something, to report my 'capital gain' in relation to US dollars, which I find needlessly complex and annoying.  After a while trading alts I'd imagine you don't even have a cost basis to use. It's kind of like trading stuff in the open market.. nobody pays taxes on used goods they trade around... that sort of thing...

I don't have tattoos... but if I was a bitcoin early adopter and had made enough coin to life comfortably off of... yes, yes I would get one.   Just don't get a "tramp stamp" (tattoo on the lower back)

My favorite of my couple of firearms I have is my Ruger LCP. So cute! It fits in an ankle holster or goes on a pocket and is hardly noticed.  Like a cute little kitten.

I have 6 firearms even though I hardly ever use them and am not even really a gun person/user. Why? Because I can. Because they hold their value.. because they are aesthetically pleasing. I collect coins too. And comic books, or at least I did 15 years ago.  And geodes.. very pretty.

I often think I have too many though. I'm a minimalist and don't like to hoard a lot of 'stuff' .. the less 'stuff' is cluttering things up the more free I feel. Plus using a gun is no small matter. There are legal ramifications to think about for sure. Lots of people take a pretty casual attitude towards actually using them on a person, or at least that's the image they like to portray.

I'd say Ripple is the only one so far trying to get cozy with the current system in place rather than compete with it. A lot of people dislike them for this but in the end we need to co-operate with the establishment somewhat in order to get acceptance, so I'm fine with one currency doing this. I think ripple has potential, though not from a pure speculation standpoint with it's relatively high market cap... thinking very long term here.

There is of course NXT and others but no alt coin has stood above the rest in this regard to decentralize exchanges.

having been involved in the stock market for some time, I can say that this is just normal behavior for any stock and people love to speculate that there are 'manipulators orchestrating dumps' when reality is not quite so melodramatic. The bitcoin early adopters are holding a lot of coin and if any one of them decides they want to dump a significant quantity, it will affect the markets. The person who sells first locks in the profit and the rest jump in and chase the price down. Actually I'm surprised how well bitcoin has held up and how few of the early adopters have sold to be honest.

Plus the idea of an exchange going insolvent isn't helpful.... even if I've never really considered it to be a valid exchange... some have.

pretty nifty. Add more coins, and I'll bookmark it and you can get ad revenue and be rich.   Great domain name too.   Maybe make the text a bit larger and check your PM.

bitcoin hasn't been $900 for awhile.. it's been around $800 at most reputable exchanges.

anything that prevents the government from getting their piece of the pie will be targeted once it gets big enough. I'm surprised we went on with no sales tax on internet sales for so long... it only occured because of existing laws in place plus the fact it's a state issue, not a federal issue. That hole is being patched. The annoying part is if they expect people (I've mentioned this before) to log capital gains and losses for every purchase they make on top of paying sales tax. If they start, for example, auditing people for not recording their capital gains when using bitcoin to buy stuff on amazon.com, that will pretty much kill the currency... who's going to do that? A small percentage who use it as a store of wealth, that's about it.  

he might be right but I trust my bank and safe deposit box more than my apartment. Statistically speaking more money is stolen by the average joe being robbed than from a bank or safe deposit box. How many stories have we had about safe deposit boxes being seized for government revenue over the last oh 75 years?  Home robberies are relatively common by comparison. Even when they did do gold confiscation, they didn't go into people's safe deposit boxes unless they asked to be let into them and didn't forcefully remove gold.. people basically volunteered to hand it over, those who did.

Actually more bitcoin has probably been stolen from users ignorant in their security measures than gets stolen and not recovered from a bank or brokerage account. Just saying. I like bitcoin but facts are facts.

With that said... physical palladium in safe deposit box has outperformed fiat earning .005% in a checking account. Savings accounts, CDs, and bonds are worthless for return on investment. I'd say not to give the bank your money so they can lend it out 100x to other people, but really we have zero reserve ratio banking these days with the way the fed has the rules set up.

These are huge banks and if they failed to the point where the FDIC could not pay out deposits, it would be the least of my worries. More likely we'd have some hyper-inflationary explosion before they let that happen.

banning bitcoin would mean that all the sites that may use it suddenly stop offering it. If the intention is to have it become a currency and not just speculate from price explosions, than your idea is most certainly not a good one.

They just want the price to go down so they can get in. They missed the one in a lifetime opportunity and look back with jealousy.

Equally annoying are the anarchists that post that any trust of our financial system shouldn't be made, that we have to be in bitcoins because our fiat currencies will 'collapse at any minute' .. an argument that is just as ignorant in my opinion. Fractional reserve debt based central banking has proven itself to be stable enough... anyone intelligent enough to even understand what the term fractional reserve banking means, or how compound interest factors into the equation, is intelligent enough to protect themselves with a broad array of investments, from stocks, to precious metals, or bitcoin.. whatever happens to be cheap at the time.

However to be some extremist to say bitcoin is worthless, or on the other end of the spectrum, to distrust all fiat, both are ignorant viewpoints. Somewhere in the middle there is a happy medium of logical, distanced planning by a person who has the capacity to put their emotional rhetoric to the side and look at things objectively.

One would would also be foolish to not recognize the fact that a bitcoin 'bank run' is entirely possible in even the largest, most trusted exchanges. If someone sold 10,000 bitcoins to a major exchange like coinbase and demanded payment in fiat, it would be interesting to see what happens. 10,000 bitcoins is just a drop in the bucket, the largest 2% hold much more then that. In essence bitcoin at this point is very much the wild west, and requires internal policing of it's users to prevent a potential catastrophic situation.  Once the kinks are worked out I'm very enthusiastic about it though.

Here's what I just did... set up a lastpass account, bought a 2D barcode scanner... this model to be exact (the ones made before January 2009 are made in the USA)..

http://www.ebay.com/sch/?_nkw=ms1690&clk_rvr_id=583840245540

Then I made a 32 character password and put it into a QR code... in my case for the lastpass program... all my other important accounts now have randomly generated 16 character passwords that I no longer know. I store the QR code in my physical wallet, and another in my safe deposit box. I also back up the account data in another encrypted way with a different random password.

2D barcodes are a digital representation of data and will ensure you don't accidentally forget a password.  Great for a complex wallet password.

Here are some of the barcode formats you could use

http://i74.photobucket.com/albums/i272/aramkolt/CodeTypesFullResMicroandIMB.jpg

what a great scam though... to run off with all those BTC and be essentially untraceable.

I hope they wait until the last second. The stock market has a modest selloff and I'd like to see it go down more for a good entry point, not rally back up to highs right away like it could do. Don't raise the ceiling until the last minute congress!  Then go and buy some stocks right before you do.

yep at just .4 BTC I'd consider it payment for services.

I'm waiting for a good entry point and want to see some of the people holding hoards of coins to sell and when the coins are more distributed I will get in.

reserved. I'm going to make a forum post on a popular forum I've been visiting for years (actually damn near 10 years now)

Here's the post.. let me know if it meets your requirements. I posted it in a larger bitcoin thread that is likely to receive more bumpage.

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message2453843/reply42570254

This is a very active, conspiracy related forum where people are more apt to take a liking towards crypto currencies.

looks interesting.