Veteran Bitcoiner here. AMA

Do you use offline wallets or online wallets?

Purely Offline.I don't want to trust any online wallet provider with my (at the time of this writing) $750+ coins. I would rather rely on myself and my own skills to not have my stuff fuck up. My reasons to use offline wallets (Or at least wallets I manage myself)

Paperbackups that aren't stored on any servers that are accessable, that I can rely on no one else being able to get access to.

Knowing where all digital backups are, and how they are stored

The ability to send a transaction even without having downloaded the blockchain fully

If/when a online wallet service is hacked, I don't have to worry about the safety of my funds.

 

Bitcoin has demonstrated that it is too valuable to be left in the hands of someone else. So I must act as my own personal bank.

There are worse things in the world.

 

I'm getting a 100GH/s asic miner in February, and then another one depending on how much bitcoins would be worth then 

I wish you luck. :)
Hopefully you see ROI in a timely fashion.

yep. i intend to use use online wallets to hold altcoins before converting to bitcoins that will be stored in an offline wallet.

 

Hey, I'm paying for half of it ._.

Hopefully after a month, we will have a nice farm. 

I have a friend who started mining about 4 months ago with a 330Mhash ASIC miner. Due to the increase in price, it has already paid itself off.

Is gpu mining still relevant or should we not bother with it anymore?

Not a bad plan. Actually holding alt-coins might not be a bad plan. A few thousand of each would cost a few hundred bucks, but if any of them boom, you'd make some bank.

most alt-coins have a feature to give them  a value of some type. Really cool stuff going on.

As long as you're not concerned with cost of electricity, sure!

But in all honesty, the difficulty has been skyrocketing, and even with a 7GH miner only using 30W (about 10x faster than radeon GPUs, and 1/10th the power usage) You are going to struggle to make back the cost of electricity at the rate of increase in difficulty.
I'm a believer in buying bitcoins at the moment. The mining world is too unpredictable, and as it was for me: a $5000 investment would now net me almost $50000 if I kept the coin instead. It'll take close to a year to earn all 50 coin back most likely. Bad idea on my part, but I decided it might be worth the risk.

But still, having coin is not a  bad investment by any mean. It is also safer than having a machine since you can sell your coin at any time and most likely make your money back.

Each of my 7950s get around 600MH/s I think your "100x" is a bit off. Even with my cards mining at combined 1.2GH/s, I am only estimated to make 0.0008BTC a day. So no, it isn't worth it to use GPU.

Sounds good man. Im thinking about waiting until bitcoin drops back down to $100-200ish and waiting until the next spike.

Just be careful. People waited at 30 bucks earlier this year for it to return back to 20 to buy some. Bitcoin has never hit 20 bucks since, and doesn't look like it will be returning.

I don't want you to buy coin if you think it is too expensive, but keep in mind you don't have to buy a full coin. You can buy all the way down to .00000001 coin if you needed to.

Whoops. hit and extra zero. Good catch. Fixed. :)

the explanation of the increase of the price seems China and their use of bitcoins?

Question: 

- i understand the on/offline saving of the bitcoins. But how to buy them savely? What are some reliable exchanges?

- what software do you use to save them locally ? (offline wallet)

 

'funny' how your account gets blocked from certain exchanges when you login using a Proxy or VPN service. Cause some exchanges have to work with their local IRS/government to exchange financial data about their customers. There goes your anonymity? link to mtgox FAQ on IP-Bans

I have been mining Bitcoin since the start and have invested in 2 Asis miners at 1Ths each that i received last tuesday from a order i made 4 months ago. I have taken my old mining rigs and switched them to Light coin that has jumped up $5.00 in the past 4 days. I also have 10 usb Asics that are still mining Bitcoins. I think that mining any bitcoins at this point at any speed will give you a nice return in the long run. But am also concerned of the recent news of price manipulation from untrusted sites and DDOS attacks that brought trading to a halt so certain people could capitalize on the market is going to make Government oversight a thing of the future which means taxes fees and regulation on Bitcoin. Also you have to watch for the scare of a fall of the market because of large banks investing and selling out at a price high to destabilize the market by creating a panic and mass sell off driving the price down to scare people away from Bitcoin and removing the threat against the dollar. Also Phantom 0.0008BTC will be worth allot if the market keeps climbing the way it is.

0.0008 is about 65 cents a day. Even if bitcoin doubled, it would not be very profitable.

More than just china. America has just given the green light for banks and business to be officially associated with Bitcoin. Also the IRS  is working to get bitcoin tax regulations ready for the next tax season. A lot of stuff has happened recently.

Answerish:

To buy saftely: You can buy on an exchange, but move your bitcoin to your offline wallet as soon as you buy them, safe enough. You can also use localbitcoin to buy it from someone locally. However you still have to be careful that they don't run off with your money/coin during the transaction. I recommend doing it in a bank where you can verify the money as soon as they give it to you.

Armory with Bitcoin-QT, or Electrum.

Electrum doesn't need to download the bitcoin client and is a lot less resource intensive than Armory.

To store saftely: Password the file securely. Store your paper wallet somewhere if you're using Armory. That way if your computer explodes, you can restore your wallet.

Also, storing your stuff on flashdrives and putting that flashdrive somewhere safe is recommended. But it is only a file on a computer. Really small. However you feel you need to store it, do so.

However, I do not recommend you use Windows to store your wallet. A lot of viruses will grab that wallet file. If you don't have a secure password, it will only take a few days for them to get your password.

 

I don't use Mt Gox anymore. They lost me as a customer a long while back.  A lot of other services can be accessed through a VPN, though. Just depends on which one you're using.

Also again, Localbitcoin. you can get your bitcoin from someone in person, and don't have to worry about revealing personal information.

Yup. Litecoin has some good features. Only thing to remember is cost of electricity. If you don't make more coin than electricity, then spend money on coin.

There have been plenty of conversations about market manipulation, but majority of old bitcoiners don't see this as large of an issue.

The destabilizaion of the market: Maket has never been stable really. And I know many people that would go "Oh hai free coinz" and not even care it is crashing. I know I wouldn't. I would buy more coin. Bitcoin has rebounded from major crashes 2 times now, and after each crash,the market was more secure, and bitcoin was more than 5x the value it was before the bubble/crash.

i'm just having problems with the offline wallets... apparently they hate windows....