I have come to own land though partnerships, and both parcels that I am involved with I came across though personal connections in my life.  I have also seen similar patterns with my friends.  

I am sure there are guides, but I don't know of any myself.  I think it is harder if you spend all of your time in a city.  It really helps to know an area and then you can be attuned to opportunities.  And - have cash ready to go.

I don't know too much though, I'm sure there are experts on here that could give you much better advice.

My rough asset allcation:

20% Land
50% Bitcoin (Started as less than 1%)
5%   Precious metals
10% Index Funds
10% Cash + Bond + Money Market
5%   Other

One thing that differentiates asset classes is the size of the barrier to entry.  Gold is accessible to just about anyone.  $50 would be enough for some gold chain.  Fine art I consider to be on the other end of the spectrum, especially considered you should probably have a few different pieces to be diversified.  If I had the means, I would buy a Stradivarius violin, and then loan it out to a world-class musician.

Bitcoins barrier to entry is mostly the technical know how, although that keeps getting lowered every passing day.

I agree it would be pretty dumb to speculate with money you need.  But did you see the picture of that ugly car?  No one needs such a hideous thing.  The OP said he has a 14 year old VW, which is 6 years newer than the Camry I drive around.

In general, if you can suppress you material desires and live frugally and simply, saving and investing all you can, I think it is a sure path to personal wealth and financial freedom.  Most people would rather have the stuff, and have it now.

OP - good job saving so far.  There are other investments out there beside bitcoin.  A car obviously isn't an appreciating asset, but consider precious metals, saving for a down payment on property, or even just a boring index fund.

Maybe not alone, but when combined with sleek looks, yes, yes it is clearly worth it risking bitcoin over.

I think people are sending a message to the big bitcoin adversaries: Please launch a bitcoin attack pool.  Just payout 10% higher than any other pool, make sure the website is sleek and we will join!

I think your observation is related to the inexperience of the Dogecoin user base.

Current pool rate : 6.437889 GH/s
Pool is overloaded. Its probably calculating a huge PPLNS round. Give the pool 10-20 minutes then start hitting refresh!

Well at least the pool hashrate is updating.  My miners are still mining, but my auto payouts have stopped.  I'll give till morning, then I am pointing them elsewhere.


-----  BACK UP!! ----- 

Just as I finished writing.

All of my wires have gotten through.  It shouldn't take 5 weeks, so go ahead and make some noise to customer service, Mayzus, etc.  Just be polite, I don't think anyone is trying to steal your money.  I have grown to trust BTCe, I am confident you will have this resolved in the end.  Good luck.

Unfortunately for Bitcoin, I am afraid that many people share your priorities.  Bitcoin can tolerate masses of it's users being greedy, but it may have a harder time weathering masses of short-sighted, irrational investors.  Mining bitcoins has been a losing investment in terms of BTC for most smaller players, yet the fact that people still irrationally gravitate towards it as a good investment helps to keep it that way.  Rational investors just need to steer clear of markets at which the uninformed masses are blindly throwing their money.  But that is just the investment side of mining.

People might still be wiling to mine at a loss in BTC terms, (though hopefully still profitable in fiat), for the sake of securing the network, to guard against double spends, empty blocks, and centrailization in general.  To those people we all owe our gratitude.  They are still being greedy though, as they want to protect the value of their bitcoin holdings in the long term.  It is far-sighted, long term greed.

Bitcoin is dependent on people caring about decentralization, especially its investors.  hyphymikey, your priorities did not include supporting well-being of the network.  Would you prefer a pool that returned 100% because of no fees, an extra 5% payout from double-spend proceeds, and 5% on top of that just because the pool wants to encourage you to stay with them?  The ignorance of miners is bitcoins biggest weakness.  Such a pool is a valid attack vector on the protocol, and it is enabled by short-sighted, ill-informed 'hashers'.  It would be the cheapest and easiest way for the government to attack bitcoin.

Start pool and hire the best people to make it slick and easy.  Payout 110% (this is subsidized, remember?  Attract the massive number of people who bought hash power to make a quick buck and don't care about Bitcoin as project.  And boom, your over 50%.  Actually, make that two seemingly different pools at 30% each.

It is working for me.  You do have to wait for confirmations, and some coins can take a while... as in an hour or two.  But sure enough, when I log in later on, there is a small amount of BTC in my account.

Thanks for the feedback.  I do need to find a good accountant.

I am wondering if this would be a viable, legal strategy.  Say you bought 100 coins at $10 per coin over a year ago, then sold 50 coins at $1000 each.  You're capital gains for this year would $49,500.

But then, at 11:55 PM on new years eve, you but 30 coins at $800 each ($24,000), and then just a few minutes later in 2014, you sell them again for the same amount of cash.

Nothing offset 20 of the 50 coins you first sold, so that would be $20,000 profit.

The other 30, I would think you'd have realized $200 of long term gain on each one.  So another $6,000.

$26,000 in long term captial gains for 2013,

30 x $800 = $24,000 in long term capital gains to start off 2014.

I wonder if there will be little spikes and crashes as different time zones approach midnight.

Maybe he meant A year.  He still has a few more months to be right.

SHA-256 based proof of work is a means, not an ends.  We use it to achieve a desired result - that being a decentralized network.  For the time being it is working.  Since production of silicon chips is very centralized, and it is well within the reach of many governments to amass a majority of hashing power.  Of course we have many tricks up our sleeves to counter such a threat, but most of those tricks would entail Dan's prediction coming true.  Well, maybe not the one year part.

If you get a new Mac that comes with a SSD, the decryption is hardware accelerated.  I have filevault enabled on my haswell macbook air and the disk I/O is lightning fast.

+1 to the above.


When you encrypt the boot drive with filevault, you are provided with a recovery key.  I wrote mine down.  As far as other encrypted volumes go, including time machine backups, you are not provided with a recovery key as far as I can tell.


You need to enter you credentials before the key(s) was displayed.

It's a fundamental security weakness that us humans can only read plain text.  I would only be revealing it to myself in a secure environment.  Anyway, I've found some of what I was looking for.

Here is the option, as part of the "fdesetup" command.

 -outputplist
             Outputs the recovery key and additional system information to stdout in a plist dictionary.  If
             the recovery key changes, a Change key will be set and the EnableDate will contain the date of
             the change.   This should not be used when using the deferred mode.

Now my next question: where would that plist directory reside?

I know this is a little bit off topic -

Does anyone know how make os x display the recovery key (really just the direct encryption key) for an encrypted drive?  I've been going though a process of doubling down on all of my security procedures.  One result is going to be a bunch of encrypted drives, and I will be greater risk of data loss if all else stays the same.

First I would like to make os x show me in - plain text - each of the keys.  Then would like to have a way to test out each of those keys and prove to myself they are capable of decrypting the drive.

Does anyone know some terminal commands that would work?  Google is not being my friend.

Thanks

So the company would be able turn the bitcoins into fiat at any time, and in any amount, with no tax liability?  Its a nice thought.  I bet it would be possible with enough legal help.

My point is ASICs are amazing. Duh.

While both of your points are valid, they each represent the perspectives of a well educated bitcoiners, which probably comprise about 0.0001% of the general population.  It think for the average Joe, this kind of comparison is a way to demonstrate the depth and power of the bitcoin system.  Keep in mind, the average Joe had absolutely no concept of how deep and powerful the bitcoin network it.

Bitcoin continually blows my mind.  It looks like a top of the line Retina MacBook Pro can pump out about 20 MH/s, whereas a KNC Nuptune is advertised to hash at 3 TH/s, or 150,000x faster than the macbook.

Can someone double check this calculation.  I find myself in disbelief.