Imagine if you bought 10000 bitcoins between $0.02 and $0.10... Your <$1000 investement would be worth >$100'000 today :O

I think I'd be perfectly happy knowing I had a $100k wallet.dat and would not be losing any sleep over it at all

Personally, I'd split the coins out over a few dozen wallet.dat files and keep them all on different USB drives in various places to reduce the risk of failure, loss or theft!

If I had $500k in bitcoins (at today's exchange rate), I'd sell maybe half and keep the rest, and buy gold bullion & real estate with the $250k. Diversification is key!

Hundreds of coins per day?

Even if that's only 10% true and you could make 50 coins per day I'm literally foaming with jealousy.

If anyone was clever enough just to keep all their coins, they could be millionaires by now

I get you, but if anything, my bitcoins are far far more secure than my real money is.

My real money sits in a brown piece of leather in my pocket, or more often than not just lying on a table somewhere. Anyone could take it and run off with it and I'd have no hope of getting it back.

The money in my bank is somewhat more secure, although it doesn't take a genius to watch me type in my PIN and steal my ATM card.

I guess I'm a little fast and loose with my coins, storing them here there and everywhere across maybe a dozen or so exchange websites rather than on my own wallet, but I don't really have that many at the moment, probably less than 30 coins all told.

If I were to rack up several hundred I'd probably make a handful of encrypted wallet.dat files and back them up a few times like the OP says. I'm not sure about mailing copies here there and everywhere, that seems a little over the top. It would certainly suck to forget the password to them though!

Just thought I'd start this thread as 99% of the posts on this board seem to be from people asking why they are getting poor hash rates on a Nvidia GPU.

Dear people with Nvidia GPUs. Your hardware sucks at bitcoin mining, period. Yes, it might be a very fast and powerful gaming card, and yes, when it comes to folding, Nvidia GPUs always beat ATI. But for this particular task, ATI cards are far far far superior in every way.

If you really seriously want to try to make some money mining, sell your Nvidia card and get an ATI one.

Put it into context. A Nvidia GTX580, top of the line card that costs $$$, is roughly about as fast as an ATI HD5750, a budget card you can pick up for less than $100.

You could sell a GTX580 and buy 2x HD5850s with the money, put them in crossfire, quadruple your hash rate, lower your energy usage and still have some cash left over.

Something is only "worth" what others are prepared to pay for it.

There is no intrinsic value to a Bitcoin, it is even more imaginary than actual money is.

Sorry but there can be no price floor.

Just tinkered with the overclock a little.

Memory down to 1000 (the lowest ATI Catalyst Control Center will allow  ) and GPU up to 900, any further and it seems to lock up.

I can get a stable 181Mh/s out of it at those settings but the fan is pretty loud.

I shall have a go at taking the memory clock down as low as it can go tomorrow and see if I can lower the temps a little.

171 Mhash/s using GUIMiner v2011-07-01

HD5750 (720 cores) overclocked a little with stock cooling in a small Dell desktop case, so not really a mining "rig" just trying it out

The card is pretty efficient, only uses 90W with my modest overclock applied, so I think I'm getting a decent Mhash per watt?.

Definitely feeling the room a lot warmer though