Quote from: rta on March 02, 2013, 04:02:35 PM

Know anywhere to buy silver with prices close to spot? Buying with BTC's are great and all, but if the margin is much higher than when buying with dollars, it doesn't really make sense.

There are plenty of situations where this may or may not make sense.

In most cases it absolutely does not make sense to trade USD -> BTC -> SILVER for an example.

In my specific case, I had been mining BTC for a few months prior to 2013, and all of 2013. I also put a few paychecks directly into BTC just to hold. In this time BTC had soared. Rather than converting my BTC to USD and waiting a few days to receive my money, also paying the transfer fees and commissions to trade on Mt. Gox, I decided to directly trade BTC for silver. The mark up isn't as drastic as you say, and there are many sites which will mark up physical silver less than $2. Although silver eagles are relatively expensive, silver buffalo's can trade within this range I mention (currently sub $30 if buying more than a particular amount, only a $1.30 premium to spot). At the time of this posting, 1 oz silver eagles can be bought for ~ $32 . . . $33, while BTC is trading at BTC1 > $34.

So in short, I've never owned more physical silver in my life. I'll plan to make a seperate post about this later. This is one of the best opportunities anyone who holds BTC to get into silver.