Money can't buy happiness... but it sure can help to fix a lot of problems, problems which otherwise might be tremendous obstacles to happiness. As for how to "attain happiness," well, that whole idea kinda reeks of "happily ever after." Anyone else notice how "happily ever after" is always the end of the story? Almost like nobody really knows how to write about it, because it's a pipe dream to expect to be happy all the time. Sometimes, being alive and not being miserable is about the best we can hope for.

Democracy is the absolute worst system of government... the only worse ones are all the others. It's almost as if human nature is the real problem, rather than the institutional structures themselves?

The day there's no one still sitting on the sidelines, wondering whether they should invest in Bitcoin or hold off for a pullback, is the day we should all sell because there's nowhere left to go but down. Most older people are skeptical of it, and rightly so; they've all seen plenty of asset bubbles before, and seen people try to pick themselves up from the wreckage left behind. We still don't know if this is a bubble or not, really... it's showing all the signs of it, in terms of the speed of growth and the euphoria of some of the participants, but as a currency it could of course be a different story. Gold is also largely held up by psychology rather than any valuable use cases or economic moat, but it's been there for thousands of years and is now considered one of the least risky investments rather than the most. When people first started digging shiny rocks out of the ground and making ornaments from them rather than throwing them at each other, I doubt any of them considered the investment value, and the first ones to start accepting it for food, water and other basic necessities were seen as absolute fools - just like, once upon a time, a pizza shop was seen as foolish for accepting 10,000 bitcoins instead of "real money."

Lesson learned, it's always better to be greedy when others are afraid, but only when others are afraid. The trouble, of course, is telling the difference. Buying on a rush of bullish sentiment on seeing the $5000 mark is an easy mistake to make, you don't want to miss out on all the profits. That makes you become one of the profits, unfortunately, at least in the short-term. If you're confident enough about your trading abilities, you can sell and try to time the market so that you buy back in when it's rebounding; that could work out great, if this bear run reaches its projected low at $3164, or not so great at all if it's nearly done already and you end up buying high after selling low. IMO now that bitcoin has broken out of its recent "coil" formation (several days of higher highs and lower lows) to a more standard bear market formation of lower highs and lower lows, we can be fairly confident that it's going to last at least a little while, but the question is how much further it's going to fall, or for that matter if it's going to fall further at all. The news that North Korea is using bitcoin to avoid UN sanctions could cause more regulatory hammers to fall, in which case it would probably crash pretty hard as people take their money out for fear of having it trapped in exchanges that are shut down - breaking news of China's ban on exchanges being just a rumor after all, on the other hand, might very well restart the bull market. Obviously I'm not confident enough in my trading abilities to time this market.

If you're willing to lose what you've invested, keep holding on. This is not an uncertain market caused by community differences, which can be easily solved just by bitcoiners agreeing; this is the point where bitcoin is drawing lots of notice from the powers that be. If they don't decide that it's too inconvenient and crush the burgeoning enthusiasm with regulatory burdens beyond what's necessary, it has a lot more growth potential. If it's wrapped around with lots of pointless red tape, or just banned entirely from even more major exchange countries, it could end up being worth the paper it's written on. That's a choice only you can make as an investor. Ideally, you already made that choice before investing, but of course it's easier to make that choice when everything's sunny and it looks like you'll end up being another of the overnight millionaires you hear so much about. What you don't hear as much about are the people who supplied those millions of dollars to the market's liquidity and then ended up cutting their losses early, because they were afraid of losing it all. This could be another of those situations very easily - it only takes a little bit of different news to change people's moods about speculative markets, given the herd mentality you tend to see with these things. If you read back in the forums, people had this discussion every time bitcoin hit a new high - is it time to sell now? Is this as far as it'll ever go? It wasn't, obviously. Personally, I'm holding on to what I have, but I'm not quite confident enough that this is the end of the bear run to buy more. Dunno if it helps you at all, hearing about why and how I'm ambivalent. It's not an easy choice, if you care about losing that initial investment.

Yes, I think it will absolutely rise or fall. As for which, that's tougher. I'm not selling my held BTC, but I'm also not buying more yet, personally. I think bitcoin has more potential and will recover from this in the long-term, but short-term the enthusiasm is gone and we're into a bearish/sideways market for a while. We already were a few weeks ago, in fact - there was a short-lived spike up to $5k a few days after the indicators started showing the first signs, but that didn't last long and now we're seeing the correction. Of course, as I said I'm not confident enough of this to sell my held BTC, just not buying any more to hold through the recovery since I think the bear market isn't even through yet. A lot of this probably depends on whether the news of China's crypto exchange ban is real or not; as with any news they don't like, many people think it's fake news and is just a conspiracy to crash the prices so that Chinese bitcoin farms and government-subsidized businesses could sell before the news and buy after the crash. Who knows, maybe this time it actually is fake news, though most of the calls of that I've been hearing lately are coming more from politicians trying desperately to cover their asses by explaining to their idiot followers that everyone else is just lying because they're secretly out to get them.

It's standard for financial advisers to recommend a diverse portfolio; with over 5 million dollars in a portfolio, financial advisers will start recommending alternative investments as well as the normal diversification methods of splitting money between equity, fixed income, bonds and cash/gold with varying ratios based on the client's age and risk tolerance. I'm not sure whether financial advisers with a large investment bank are actually allowed to pitch bitcoin as even an alternative investment yet, in the US - my portfolio doesn't qualify for my advisers to make official recommendations about alternative investments, but I've unofficially discussed them. Bitcoin was one of the investments my advisers were quite excited to find I was investing in, and one actually has called me several times to chat about it after finding out that I was investing. Based on this, I'd say it's very likely that people who are being advised on alternative investments have put some money into bitcoin, although it's more properly called speculation rather than investment imo.

Either way, semantics aside, I think most ultra-high net worth portfolios would include 1-2% in bitcoin or other risky, but possibly very rewarding speculative bets. That's generally the level of exposure that's considered wise; some might be extra cautious and stay away from it entirely, like Howard Marks, some might put more in like John McAfee reportedly has. The most recent I've heard was that Mark Cuban has $20m invested into 1confirmation, a new cryptocurrency-focused hedge fund; he's dismissed the whole thing as a bubble before just like Marks, but he's gradually coming around and at the least is willing to put .6% of his net worth into it. That would be the equivalent of someone with a net worth of $70k, which is the average American's net worth as of the last census in 2011, investing $500. For someone who's living paycheck to paycheck with a rented apartment and leased car, and a total net worth of around $15-20k, that's equivalent to more like $100. Not much, when you look at it in scale, but it's something.

Uh. If bitcoin had a stable price, the benefit of holding it for a long time would be exactly that - the stable price and large-scale acceptance of it as a valuable asset, regardless of what happens to your national currency or anything else. Just like gold bars, except a bit easier to use in actual transactions and perhaps slightly less shiny. Even if it stopped fluctuating several percentage points a day, it could still be bought and sold as a vehicle of speculation, just like gold is now - for example, people who bought gold when it was $1k/oz are now up 30% or so based on the geopolitical instability and fear; when Trump and Kim started comparing penis sizes, the rest of the world started taking their money out of more volatile assets like the stock market and buying gold because of its perceived stability. In this case, as many others, perception is as close to reality as it gets. Another phrase for it, of course, is mass hysteria.

Sometimes buying high and selling low is the best choice you can make. Analysis of signals is all well and good, but no one can 100% reliably predict the future. I use a trading dashboard with 5 EMAs tracking the trends, as well as MACD and parabolic SAR indicators; this morning I set a limit buy for 3% below the current market price, which seemed like a safe target for the bottom of a bear run based on the trends. It turned out not to be; luckily I was around while it was happening and was able to make the judgment call to sell a further 1.5% down. In the hour since this happened, I've traded the swings and turned my 1.5% loss into a 1% profit; had I held on, I would now be down 4% pending further fluctuation. Even if the market recovers, by buying high and selling low I've managed to put myself in a better position to buy in again. Sometimes you just need to recognize that the market has taken you by surprise and cut your losses in order to retain liquidity and take advantage of further price drops. Speaking of which, in the time I was typing this it's down another .5%... it seems like it might well continue. I'll have to see, and regardless I should have the opportunity to buy in again at a lower price than my original sale.

Yes, they're all down. Have you looked at the percentages? Bitcoin is down 10% since its peak a few days ago; Ethereum is down 12% just today, 25% overall in the past few days. Part of that is just a natural correction after a bullish run, and part of it is panic over the ICO ban and the general trend that will follow it. China's ahead of the game on this one, a lot of ICOs are even worse than the Useless Ethereum Token - just as useless, but dressed up enough to sound appealing to the people investing without doing research or seeking professional advice.

Litecoin is also on the way back down, though it seems it might level out at $50-60 which is solidly above where it started this bull run. I was happy enough to ride it up, but when it started getting near $100 it was clearly going to run into a wall. It's down at about the same rate as Ethereum, but for slightly different reasons. I'm still not entirely sure what drove the bull run from $45 to $95 in under a week, but whatever it was the excitement has faded and it's now correcting to a more appropriate price for the network difficulty.

This seems the case to me as well; I've heard a lot about smart contracts with Ethereum, but not a word about any popular uses for smart contracts other than ICOs. The big movements in the Ethereum market always seem to happen coinciding with news about ICOs - before the news of China banning some ICOs, the news that the SEC was planning to consider ICOs for securities status and thus make them available to institutional investors drove Ethereum up at a quicker rate than the general cryptocurrency bull market. Likewise, right now the China news is driving Ethereum down at a quicker rate than the others, which are also in a generally bearish short-term trend after a big spike Friday.

I live between New York and Philadelphia; even in the cities, I haven't come across any places that accept bitcoin. Like you said, bitcoin-linked debit cards are basically the only option right now if you want to actually spend your bitcoin; selling them on an exchange is quick, but then you have to transfer the money out, which takes at least a day. It's not ready to be used for everyday transactions large-scale yet anyway, transactions are far too slow. Nobody wants to wait an hour and a half for 3 confirmations just to pay for their groceries. Running errands would be impossible without planning it all out hours before.

After all 21 million bitcoins are mined - which will take quite a long time with the block reward reductions, about 60 years if I remember right - miners will still receive transaction fees from solving blocks and advancing the blockchain. Assuming bitcoin value increases on a trajectory that tracks with the increasing difficulty of mining, it should still be worth solving blocks just for the transaction fees. If it's not, presumably miners will find other coins until the difficulty decreases enough for it to be worth mining again without block rewards.

I don't think you'd get anything done with a 5kW PV system even if you could underclock the miners, no offense. I don't think it's possible to do so without opening them up and tinkering yourself, though, which is risky. Anyway, yours is not a large system at all, enough to cover the average home's electricity needs perhaps but definitely not enough to handle a miner's power draw. A single S9 under normal operating conditions will draw 12.7 MWh a year, or 12,702 kWh. If you're in an excellent location for solar, your 5 kW system may produce... what, 7,000 kWh a year? If you used no electricity yourself and it all went to the miner, that still would barely cover it running at half-power. I've done the math on it myself, and in my location (which is average, but not exceptional, for solar PV production) I'd need an 11 kW system (with installation costs of $30k+) to cover one single miner costing $1.5k.

1) I've never heard of GUIMiner, can't help you on that one. It seems like people used to mine with the 260 from the brief research I did on benchmarks, so maybe that particular software just isn't configured for it? If there's a way to contact the developers you could try that, or just try other mining software.
2) I haven't personally mined Ethereum, but a quick google search led me to this: https://steemit.com/ethereum/@gobbahfett/easiest-guide-to-mining-ethereum-eth-windows-amd-nvidia-part-1. If it doesn't work, there are Ethereum-specific forums you could check on to get a much more comprehensive answer, I'm sure. For Monero, the most popular software is Xmr-Stak: https://github.com/fireice-uk/xmr-stak-nvidia.
3) ETC is Ethereum Classic, which is not used all that much anymore. It still trades, but for a far lower rate than ETH. Most people are mining ETH over ETC because it's more popular, more expensive and therefore usually more profitable. As far as I know both versions are still using GPU mining, since Ethereum's blockchain is ASIC-resistant. Monero is as well, which is why those are the two coins I recommended. There may be other ASIC-resistant coins that I don't know about, of course, but ETH and XMR (Monero) are trading relatively high recently and should always be profitable with GPUs, though power costs may eat into that depending on your price per kWh and the efficiency of your GPU. If the benchmarks I saw for the GTX 260 are accurate, you shouldn't have to worry, but the best way to actually test your hash rate would be to install a miner and check the rate after a few hours.

It doesn't matter, and yet it really does because it can affect the way the people who haven't drank the Kool-Aid yet view things. Right now, people are either seeing a new technology taking off, or a bubble that's about to pop, and either way they're interested. Some want to get in early and ride it to the top, and some want to get in early and cash out before it blows up, but either way it has a lot of momentum. More forks create more uncertainty. Even if it's not actually a fork but just an alteration of the technology by a consensus, it causes some uncertainty; a real hardfork, where a large portion of the miners go in a different direction, could be far worse. Some people were saying that they recommended not initiating any transactions with Bitcoin for two weeks after the soft fork, but most people ignored that and went on with business as usual after a day or two. If it actually took two weeks or a month for people to start using Bitcoin again, that would slow the momentum down significantly; or worse yet if a hard fork and patchy adoption of technology actually made a lot of people flat-out lose their coins it wouldn't be easy to recover. People got past Mt. Gox, but that was with much lower value in Bitcoin and was also only one bad actor. A slight mistake in a hardfork costing billions with no possibility of reimbursement, since there's no central agency... well, right now we're seeing institutional investors very interested in Bitcoin, but at the first appearance that the technology is flawed a lot of potential investors might be heading for the hills. Of course, it might also just cause another buying frenzy once the sharks see all that red ink in the water. I'm glad that you have faith, but in my experience nothing is certain. You might say I'm absolutely certain that nothing is certain, actually...

I expect there are a few people who are shorting the South Korean won, who would definitely want war to break out. If North Korea makes an outright hostile move against another nation, it will likely be met by disabling strikes from the military of all the nearby nations. Kim Jong Un, in a last-ditch effort to retain power in North Korea even if nowhere else, would respond by doing his best to flatten Seoul. He'd probably manage to destroy a decent portion of the city, which would have disastrous effects on the won - it's already wavered a bit lately with all the tension.

That being said, I also think it's unlikely. Kim Jong Un is no madman, and he'd have to be to actually launch an attack first. Trump is also no madman, despite appearances, and he knows he's close to being impeached already. If he loses the support of the rest of the country by starting WW3 with a pre-emptive strike on North Korea, even after every world government has announced that they will not support the US in that situation, he'd be gone as near instantly as things can ever happen with big government; probably a week or two at most. He's already got a pretty substantial case built against him for obstruction of justice, which will only be averted by the fact that Republicans control the entire government and can ignore anything they find inconvenient - and don't get me wrong, Democrats can, and do, ignore everything they find inconvenient most of the time as well. I'm a moderate myself, and simply expressing frustration with the fact that our government is a loud, partisan nightmare that can't legislate its way out of a paper bag.

Shocking. One of the million ICOs promising unbelievable profits overnight is a scam that looks good but can't deliver on its promises? That undermines my faith in the entire ICO market. It's time to go buy my Useless Ethereum Token shares right now! At least they were honest about it... and hey, their profits have been unbelievable so far, especially compared to the complete lack of profits promised by its creators. If I were going to buy securities (which ICOs will be considered soon, even if they're not now) I'd buy real ones, even in an possibly-overvalued market.

Wow, this is great. Why wouldn't the OP just use an exchange to buy bitcoin? If he's making such huge profits he should have no trouble covering wire transfer fees, and it would even give him the ability to choose his price point for buying. I hope nobody's taken him up on his offer to give him bitcoin for promises. If you have, then I have a few plots of land on Mars I'd like to trade for 10 bitcoins each. I promise, they'll be worth lots of money in a few decades! I even have some certificates I could send you to prove your ownership. You can't lose, friends.

Wow, that's amazing, it sounds almost too good to be true!
Oh, wait.

Not sure it's possible now that people have actually responded; you might talk to a moderator, though it's probably simplest if we just allow it to die peacefully until someone revives it with a necropost a year or two from now saying how it's so behind the times compared to newer technology... 14nm chipset ASICs might very well outperform our current ones by a handy amount, and at the current pace of technology it won't be too long before we're working with 8nm chips. Anyway, not really the point, we're getting into mining speculation. Glad you spotted the scam before sending them any money, and good luck finding a reliable vendor for mining ASICs who isn't constantly sold out.

This is not exactly true; many banks will allow you to bank, and even send money as a very low-priority transaction (ACH), without fees if you have a certain minimum balance. In that case, you aren't directly paying fees; of course, you do agree to allow the bank to use your money in its other lending practices, so that they can make several percentage points a year while paying you under 1% in interest. In that respect, you are paying for being allowed to use their system, but only in opportunity costs. Bitcoin transactions, on the other hand, are entirely safe and secure until the owner of the private key authorizes a transaction; but since no one can profit from it other than when it's part of a transaction, those transaction fees are indeed a necessary evil.