It's very amusing to see all the people with a rather inflated sense of what is going to happen in the future. An increase in price in the comings years? Yes, I can agree with that. But an increase to half a million dollars per BTC in the near future? I'd really like to know what you've been smoking. I personally think we're going to have an exponential decay in growth as time passes, none of this linear increase bull.

Assuming your security information is true (which I doubt it would be), the issue with having a massive singular web wallet holding your coins is that it presents a bigger target for hackers to come after. If I'm running an encrypted cold storage system I'm really only going to have problems if my house burns down/my offline laptop is stolen. Given that there is a minimal chance that they'll be physically stolen I'd personally prefer to have control over MY coins by having the private key. Not by having it with some random company which states that they have insurance. This is, after all, the internet where lies are more common than ants.

Yes, Ubuntu 14.04 x64 should be fine, just make sure it is x64.

Technically speaking, a hostname is:


But for your purposes it will probably be an IP address.

PuTTY will be fine. Just follow the instructions from here:
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-your-first-digitalocean-droplet-virtual-server

You might want to take a look at the Electrum server guide here:

https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum-server/blob/master/HOWTO.md

Should be easy enough to follow, if you don't get it just post.

Only conceivable problem I see is when you actually want to spend your hyper-secured coins. You don't have Qt + Armory/Electrum to sign transactions offline (in this scenario) so you have to import the private key onto an online computer at some point which may be dangerous unless you spend the outputs instantly (although this is quite unlikely).

Given this, I'd probably still say that you'd be better off just downloading Qt and Armory and making sure they've been GPG signed and match both sha1 and md5 checksums. Then copy them to a formatted USB and onto an offline computer.

It's not not allowed if you get what I mean. While the mods don't necessarily condone users using multiple accounts there isn't really much they can do about it (aside from having theymos ban IPs - which doesn't really work anyway) so they just let them go. Not to mention, unless someone is completely stupid it's hard to prove that two accounts are the same person.

Aside from what I removed, this should be the best option if you don't want your coins to be compromised. Keep the wallet offline and decrypt it and extract the private keys from there. You could possibly just use Bitcoin Core to extract the keys if you're not familiar with pywallet, as you should be able to use command lines without having it synced. From there I'd suggest you import it into Electrum/Multibit and send them from there to your main wallet that you want them in.

If you are going to keep the computer offline it doesn't really matter that much, although some will tell you that Linux is generally more secure (which isn't exactly true). The key point of cold storage is keeping the coins offline such that they cannot be compromised by a keylogger/malware on your computer or stolen from the exchange your storing it on.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and pretend your actually new and don't have a clue - few people will accept Paypal as a payment method due to its extremely reversible nature (see link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=14632.0). Those that do will not deal with newbies, but rather established traders who have built up a reputation over time. In light of this, you're really unlikely to get anybody willing to take you up, so I would suggest if you do want to trade that you try something like localbitcoins and deal in bank transfers/moneypaks etc.

Aren't there thousands of creditors with the bankruptcy of Gox? If so you'll likely get a very small slice of what you've lost - doesn't make a big difference really aside from just looking a little better for Karpeles tattered reputation.

Just updated the OP. With everyone offering non-collateralised loans I doubt I'll be getting much business, but no big deal to bump this.

And if anyone is interested, I did actually get scammed on my first non-collateralised loan. Who would've thought that someone would scam for $12USD with a full member account - still doesn't make any sense. Anyway that's that.

Received my last payment. Thanks for running this campaign FXO, good luck with your ventures.

I'm assuming your running windows right?

Anyway, after you've finished syncing the blockchain you can copy your wallet.dat over to your new machine and replace the one Qt generated on your new machine. If you've somehow used the new wallet for spending/transactions then you'll need to backup the private keys and reimport them later.

You can find you wallet.dat on your old machine here:

I doubt we'll have as significant losses as we have had in the past considering that people are more aware of the value of Bitcoin rather than it being a worthless piece of data on your drives. It's the same with wallets, you would check the contents before you chucked it out to make sure you don't have any cash in there. Aside from claims, there is no verifiable means of proving that the coins are in an address where the private key is unknown.

Well, simply that they aren't deemed of enough importance to actually merit discussion by the developers. I doubt that they aren't aware of what altcoins offer, but instead they do not consider it useful enough to have to ask for a consensus from the miners and nodes in order to prevent problems associated with forking. The first and foremost purpose of BTC is to act as a decentralized currency that can be used as a semi-anonymous means of conducting transactions in a (mostly) irreversible manner. Any other concern is really just secondary.

Eh, don't worry about things you should've done - there's no way you would have seen I turn out as well as it did. You learn to get over your mistakes, the key thing is just to learn from it and not let it pull you down. I personally wish I bought more back when they were like 2c each, did not sell them off later on and did not be so careless with my hard drives. I've learnt my lesson so while I might have a tinge of regret I'm not necessarily overly upset anymore.

It's not so much about the activity as trust (although obviously most people won't trust a newbie - even with some trust). Posting has no relevance to the trustworthiness of an escrow, it only indicates that an escrow is active and hence able to communicate with clients regularly, which reassures people. You really need a high level of trust and good communication if you wish to be an escrow, and preferably sign your official escrow messages with either a Bitcoin address or a PGP key (which you have posted previously to say it is in fact you). This will help deal with the possible scenario your account gets hacked while you are undertaking escrow.

The difficulty generally rises, but you'd need a working crystal ball to actually figure out by how much. The rule of thumb that is constantly suggested is that there is a ~20% increase every time, however this isn't exactly true given the amount of variance and the fact that technology will have decreased gains as time passes. We recently had a tiny difficult increase (roughly like 4% IIRC, google it for the exact) but you can't really predict off these numbers as they can change quite rapidly. The biggest difficulty changes will probably occur when mining companies ship out the next generation of ASICs as miners move away to more efficient miners.

Just to clarify on this, Electrum offers you the choice of whether you want to make use of a change address or not. I personally do not, but it is enabled by default for those who want it.

@OP: Personally, I fail to understand why you would want to use Qt, it's somewhat annoying to have to let it update the blockchain before you can send out a tx. But if you have the internet speed to not have to wait hours for your blockchain to update, and you don't mind backing up your wallet every 100 txs then it's fine to use. I don't like having to continually update my backups so I don't use Qt anymore.

Just out of curiosity, but if you're a registered company (and assuming you don't give them fake details for registration) won't it make it easy for the government of whatever country your operating out of to come after you should they want more details on the transactions that are occurring on your site? Not to be rude, but am I right in assuming that like every other VPN and mixing service I've seen you cannot actually prove that you don't keep logs, only state it as so and have your customers believe it?