I do have bitcoin... about 1.3 bitcoins... all of it donated, won, or from the faucets. The thing that has kept me back from buying is largely the security aspect, also MtGox was really expensive but isn't as much anymore. I still don't trust it very much because of the security issues it has had. What do people say about Intersango or any other exchanges?
Better get them while they are still around $5.
i've always used just mtgox. wire them money, buy Bitcoins, and immediately transfer them to offline wallet. pretty safe. glad to hear the fees are better now.
yes, better get them. I use intersango regularly and am content all-in-all, but the volume there is probably not enough for your purposes.
If you think liquidity is an issue, you could try to find some big fish to sell to you without moving the markets.
Any way you do it, I'd recommend going slow and also distributing amongst different exchange mechanisms. Don't just upload 250K USD to mtgox and hope everything will be fine. Do it in batches and grab the coins to your secure location whenever there are some.
For secure storage a couple of possibilities in order of personal preference (ascending):
* buy a couple of casascius 1 BTC coins and store your coins on them ((+), (-) you trust casascius, requires safekeeping (against theft and loss) of single coin)
* use one of the brainwallet suggestions ((+) it's only in your brain, (-) but to sign you need to import into some client which is attackable)
* use vanity-gen to generate random address, print the private key and put in safe location for later import into a wallet ((+) simple, low dependency impact, (-): requires safekeeping (against theft) of a non-encrypted private key)
* improvement for vanity-gen-approach: encrypt the keys before you copy/store them.
* use separate pc with armory, encrypted wallet (use long pw), make paper-backup of wallet seed, never connnect machine to internet, create watch-only-copy of the wallet and import that into another, this time well-connected instance of armory (allows to generate new addresses without also generating the private key). To transfer money, you'll need to generate a signing request, transfer that to the offline machine, sign it there, transfer the signed transaction back to well-connected armory for publishing.
just my 20 mikes...
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