Advice I would give to myself if I were a Bitcoin newbie today

[dha]

...However, if everyone stops mining, bitcoin is instantly dead anyway.

dont say that. it would just be "sleeping"

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[humblemotive]

Just wondering if i would be able to Exchange my RSGP for bitcoins?

[Mattheww]

all bank system is a scam in some way.
2009 crisis prove it.

[Simon-v]

3) If you want to get your hands on as many bitcoins as you can you should...

Not visit faucets, not look for giveaways, not beg, not mine, but...

Get a regular job, don't buy unnecessary shit and save in bitcoins. Sorry, but the "easy solutions" lead nowhere like always in life. Register on an exchange and buy BTC for fiat. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

I can certainly support that one. I've been playing with bitcoins since when they were 10$ each, and the only time i got anything worth mentioning from faucets was the time i reported a serious bug found in one of them.

Faucets only exist because it's obvious anyone can afford giving away a tenth of a cent without thinking too much, even if they don't get five to ten times as much via advertising.

You want to get paid? Go and do something useful for others. That's how the economy works, after all.

[Goldshredder]

As they say there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Faucets do, however, offer a free ten-thousandth of a lunch.

So if you're quick and you can do a faucet in 10 seconds, your free lunch costs you the measly sum of approximately 6 days of clicking. With no sleep.

What a bargain! :p

[dha]

...You want to get paid? Go and do something useful for others. That's how the economy works, after all.

fully agreed on that.
there are still lots of opportunities* in the btc world to make a good profit.

*:
-think like an entrepreneur, not like a crook.
-make something that you are missing (others might be missing it aswell and might be willing to pay for it).
-use btc in the old-fashioned buy-and-sell-stuff way.
-earn in fiat (as op said), invest a third of your savings (really just the savings part of your income!) in btc.
-diversify. do all of the above.
-do not get greedy. you will then cause miscomfort to others (karma goes to hell) and very likely be put out of business by someone even more greedy than you.

but that´s just my 0.005 btc
 

[markn]

We will see, but I don't think that people coming today are still early adopters.

I agree. Bitcoin is totally mainstream now. Bitcoin has been around so long that even my grandmother has a wallet. Bitcoin is so last decade.

Yes Bitcoin rules

[PassTheAmmo]

If everyone gives up mining bitcoin will end up centralized.

If you hold a sizable amount of coin I think it's only wise to invest in network diversity a little bit. You will not get rich though, that's for sure.

I'm just talking to newbies here.

I don't invest in mining cos because I think there is too much people throwing around money cause it's the hot thing now. In general I am amazed at the willingness to take risks without compensation. I don't follow it very closely now, maybe it has gotten better last few months. I'll wait until the dust settles and invest then, mining cos are almost the only companies that you can invest in if you believe in a significantly higher bitcoin price in the future.

(For those that haven't thought about the consequences of having shared denominated in BTC: If you buy shares in bitcoins in a cheese-company and they have income in $/€  then their income seen in BTC will halve if the bitcoin price doubles, and the shares will go down. Mining companies have their income in BTC and some expenses in fiat, so they will only benefit from higher btc-price)

[pontiacg5]

Yeah, see that's what I disagree with. If those "handful" of mining companies everyone invests in end up with 75% of the bitcoin network they could do practically anything they wanted making bitcoin centralized. They could block certain transactions, refuse transactions without fees that meet their demands, and at the worst fork the chain. All could be done with profit driven greed, or political pressure, anything you could think of really.

That is how bitcoin will end up centralized. Because although a few hundred thousand people with USB block erupors mine in pools they can easily move to another pool when theirs decides to try any funny stuff. So while some people might think that means it's already centralized (or not, I can't quite figure it out   ) it is easily broken up and moved to greener pools when the need arises.

But if everyone happily buys into mining contracts there won't be any mining hardware to compete with.

So, like I said before, if you believe in bitcoin and aren't in it expecting anything more than break even mine away. It's never been easier to start mining.

[PassTheAmmo]

I think you're gonna have to be a big player that can order large quantities from TSMC / GlobalFoundries / etc real soon. But I'm not worried for mining, in company-terms it is low entry, designs are very simple compared to gpus/cpus. I just hope that economy of scale doesn't somehow give too big of an advantage and we end up with three-four mining cos, that would be a disaster for bitcoin to the point a protocol change might be necessary.

As for concentration right now, imagine what a high rank Chinese politician could do to bitcoin. Is it possible to see how much mining there is within China's borders somewhere?

[PassTheAmmo]

BOOM! Extremely sound advice! Great post! Thank you!!

This is a marathon, not a sprint.

Following on that: learn how to secure your money. That can't hurt and will pay off. Get comfortable with the security measures you have.

Brain wallets, paper wallets - extremely valuable tools you have, but know their weaknesses (insecure computers, insecure code, weak passwords). Learn how to use a linux live CD. How to create and manage cold storage wallets.

Even if bitcoin dies, same principles will apply to all cryptographically protected currencies.

Yep, good one as well. Also, understand how change is sent back to you on a new address and when that makes your old backups obsolete (and when it doesn't).

[karmazynt]

PassTheAmmo, thank you for the post. You have written some ideas which came to my head after quite long 'test ride' in bitcoin world.

And once again for all newbies: do not use faucets. It's waste of time. I remember myself quite long time ago, every month I was learning something new about bitcoin economy and had few moments to say: I was stupid, today I earned more bitcoins than in all days before.