And what about trading in the BTC/USD pair? doing buy low sell high many times for cents profit may be a quite safe to go and raise that BTC a bit. I.E: Selling 0.1 at a price and buying it a little lower, in small chunks.

As other have said, it is the slowlyness /difficulty to move money between those exchanges. The slower and harder it is, the higher the gap.

It is just as profit you can get buying something in place A and selling it in place B. More profit tends to mean that A and B are far away / takes a long of time to go form one to the other.

With alts is a different strategy I think. It is more like getting some coins when it is new and cheap, then selling when the altcoin is pumped.

Yo can also have luck on some alts in so they go up after going down (new team takes over the coin or something like that) but it is not likely.

As you say, with Bitcoin there is more movement.

I did not know there were still so many months to go. I understood it is a thing that you cannot tell precisely, so I did not care very much.

Thanks to all you guys for instructing us.

I expect the effects to happen 3-4 months away from the halving.

Yes, I got caught (again) with some more expensive Bitcoins in my hand. I notice the price raise too late.

But let's wait for the next up, which will likely happen, in order to cash out. That is the fun with Bitcoin, you never know when it will go up again.

Here are my predictions

Will grow a little in value due to halving and slowly increasing interest on it.

Some revolutionary app comes and makes the user base increase because of it.

Mining disminishes due to the halving, which makes more miners go into alts.

Some governments begin to instruct people about it and more regulations come.

Sounds like a scam in which he is just pretending he does not know about Bitcoin. But who knows perhaps it is worth a second check.

Anyway (and this will sound a cliche, I know you already are) be careful.

It is good for the industry for scammers to be caught. They increase the sense of security and make other scammers think it twice before going into a scam scheme.

Hope the days are even clearer as times goes by.

I use multibit HD and do not download the blockchain. Really I would like to, but it is too storage consuming for my "old" dual core pc with only about 250 GB HD. A lighter wallet has some risks but I cannot really afford to have that blockchain in my HD doing virtually nothing.

Blockchain downloads should come in milestones: 1 year back, 2 years back and so on, in order for people not to have to download the full blockchain to really own their coins.

I think Banks have the power to do much. For example, buying large amounts of Bitcoin with their clients' deposits and then selling to create volatility and lack of trust in BTC while getting some profit all the while. They can join also and complaint to governments. They can scare their clients of Bitcoin being not trustworthy...

To sum up. I think that they can do a lot to harm Bitcoin, and perhaps they are not harming it yet because they do not consider it a real threat.

Well, Buffet is known to be a value investor. He invest in things that have value per se, companies that sell good or services that backup the value invested. Bitcoin value is only in that people agree it has value. There are no physical things behind it. It is not strange that his opinion is this.

I agree that mass adoption has not come because there is not enough incentives for regular people to use Bitcoin. There are few stores, and the ones there are offer their goods/services for the same price in Bitcoin than in Fiat. Why would a regular person go through the hassle of getting educated about Bitcoin, then using fiat to buy some, then buying with Bitcoin? It has no inmediate reward for that person.

People using Bitcoin are mainly those who expect to get a profit from it, so it is more of an investment. But paradoxically, it is an investment that would not work very well if people do not adopt it.

Everything can be broken! SHA256, your credit card credentials, and even the safe in our banks. Economy even gets broken every now and then.

Question would be if SHA256 is relatively safer than most means that store value, and comparing to that I'd say it is still pretty safe.

Perhaps you could check which alts lower their BTC value when BTC goes up. If they are POS coins, they will also get some interest when you buy them.

However, as other say it is difficult, and I would prefer to hold the BTC too.

well I guess you can also use coinbase, although you have to provide personal info.

It is fast and quite secure for me.

It is difficult to say, but I do not see enough enthusiasm to get past the 400$ it is slowly going up, then down again... does not seem such a strong raise as before.

It does not seem to me like the last one. Last one was much faster going to 500, but now it does not seem to get past the 400. I am talking in Eur a bit, since I trade the Btc/Eur pair.

I think it will go down from here, raises tend to be more sharp.

As probably much of other posted have said (I had not read all post) if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

You can get away with risking some money in this shady investments for some time, but if you keep on it, you end losing always.

Well perhaps they are buying it with Bitcoin. And perhaps they bought litecoin first, then dogecoin, then Bitcoin to keep off further traces.

Perhaps they used an apple computer to do the buying too. My point is, lots and lots of means can be used to finally get the guns. Does that say something about those means being evil or good? I think not. But press keeps pushing it like that it seems.

Exactly this. It is too few. Perhaps you could expect that satoshi to have the equivalent value of a dollar of today (which would be a wild raise). But not much more than that.