All sorts of great... hm... advice, guys
Honestly I expected to be hit with more scams than that!
Buy bitcoins, and invest half of them in
ASICMINER.
Only problem is that currently ASICMINER shares are quite expensive, so you may want to wait 1 or 2 weeks to see if they go down.
Of course, they might go up instead.
ASICMINER shares (or similar) look like the best bet so far, I will be on the lookout for those. I really appreciate the 'compound interest' possible in reinvesting, probably the only way to offset difficulty increases in most mining operations.
2 chicks at the same time, wait thats 1 mil
Dude, it's much cheaper if you get them from a BTC p2pool! Also you get some free time while they wait for confirmation....
I'd invest half directly into Bitcoin. The other half I'd put in slightly riskier Bitcoin investments. Maybe some ASIC miner shares, Bitcoin Global shares, or some Bitcoin mining equipment. Your return probably won't be as good as if you just invested directly into Bitcoin but you would be helping to support the network and the larger Bitcoin economy.
Also, I would suggest against investing into 'alt' coins. With the state of things right now groups are hyping up new coins, then selling once they hit a desired price leaving newcomers holding then worthless coins. If you really want to invest into one of these coins, do your research. Find one that has particularly favorable and inventive attributes. Most importantly, it needs a good development community supporting it. Without that it's probably just a pump and dump coin.
I've been purposely avoiding buying BTC directly. Not that it's a bad investment, just that I'm a bad investor - I'm just not comfortable risking that kind of sum on trading yet. That's why I prefer bonds or mining, returns are much easier to compute. Spending 'real' money to buy entirely virtual
BTC bumbs into my natural risk aversion! But I can see the point, if I'd bought 1000$ of BTC yesterday morning, I'd have 1016$ worth today, the same return I'd have in a day from 2000$ worth of mining gear...
So alt coins are right out. Only BTC & LTC for me, till somebody hits the right algorithm (or I code my own)!
I actually mined some TRC and WDC, I think TRC was a fluke (leftover ripples after the adjustment) and I'll probably never sell the WDC at the price it cost to mine it. Live and learn - in small incremental amounts!
Buy two ipad 2s, write an istore mining app, start mining at 2 x .08 Mh/s, spend the rest on beer.
Why TWO ipads?! Although... You just gave me a brilliant idea!
Thanks for the advice people, good to know I'm on track!