All this effort is no longer necessary.  Just buy GBTC in your brokerage IRA, or maybe COIN next month, if we are lucky.

Ok, so let's review what you've revealed about your trading strategy so far.  You bought near the all time high, and you're planning to sell at the bottom of the crash.  So basically your strategy is: buy high, sell low.  You're not a really great investor, are you?

It depends on how his house is heated.  If he has electric heat, then his electricity costs are effectively zero.  All the energy used to run the miner is subtracted from the energy needed to heat the house.  He just has to turn it off when the weather gets warm!

First there was the era where anyone could get lots of bitcoins by CPU or GPU mining, but they were worth almost nothing.  Then the era where anyone could mine them through ASICs, and they were worth quite a bit.

Last year there was a massive buildup of mining power, which caused difficulty to go up so far that, unless you have free electricity, it's cheaper to purchase bitcoins than mine them.  Today, big mining operations are shutting down because their electricity costs exceed their income.

My BFL miner cost $1,400 and does 60 GH/s.  It was bringing in about $20 per day when I first got it, but it's down to about $0.20 per day now due to the difficulty increases.  Today it's essentially just a space heater.  I have an oversized solar array on my roof, so it's cheaper to heat the house with electricity than natural gas.

If you have free electricity, you can pick up great mining hardware very cheap these days, but unless the difficulty drops or the price increases substantially, you're not going to make much.

Isn't that pretty much what the naysayers said about the Internet in the early days?  And the automobile?  And the telephone?  And the computer?

Can you not see that Bitcoin is steadily evolving into something more useful than when it was first released?  They're making progress on scalability.  Computer power is increasing much faster than the economy.  We're getting better hardware wallets all the time.  And multi-signature.  Is there some fatal flaw that I'm missing?

Altcoins are useful for testing new ideas.  The best ideas will be adapted into Bitcoin, right?

Serious discussion please.

Perhaps part of the issue is that we are so used to inflationary currencies, like dollars and euros, where your money loses value as you hold on to it.  That gets us used to the idea that we must do something to counteract that loss in value.

Maybe you would be better off thinking of Bitcoin as similar to shares of Google stock 10 years ago.  What would have been the wisest thing to do with those shares back then?  Gamble them away?  Loan them to strangers on the Internet?  Trade them for lower quality stocks?  No, you would be best off just holding on to them and letting them appreciate in value.  Or accumulating more and holding on to those shares, as well.

Bitcoin IS the investment.  You don't need to further invest the investment!  Jous HODL (hold on for dear life, no matter what happens to the price).

If I was interested in altcoins, I would hang out in some kind of altcoin forum.

I think you mean, "herd," as in "a large group of animals that live, feed, or migrate together," not "heard," as in "I heard what you were saying, and I disagree."

But it's a serious question.  Let's say that I don't like Bob Dylan, for instance.  What would motivate me to join a forum of Bob Dylan fans and spend hours and hours telling everyone that Bob Dylan has a whiny, nasal voice, and that he sings off key?  Clearly true, but still, why devote big sections of your life to seeking out disagreement?

You're suggesting that choosing to hang out with like-minded people makes me a herd animal, but I'm wondering if devoting ones life to going to Yankees ball games just to tell the Yankees fans how terrible the Yankees are isn't a terrible waste of time and energy.

My brother-in-law likes old cars, and he goes to "Cars and Coffee" every Saturday morning.  Imagine that some person started showing up every week to tell everyone there that old cars are stupid and worthless.  I would wonder if that person had some kind of mental illness that made him go out of his way to be so disagreeable!

Just curious, not trying to start a war or anything, but if you think Bitcoin is a failure, why are you posting on the bitcointalk forum?  If it were me, and I had decided something was useless, I would just move on and find a new interest.  It's more fun to hang out with like-minded people!

Today, it is too hard to store and use.  Hardware wallets will change that.  Today, it is too hard to obtain.  That's gradually changing, too.  But if you wait until the infrastructure is fully in place, you miss the run up.

Who struck it rich by investing in Google?  Those who saw the promise from the beginning, or those who waited until it was fully functioning?  The rewards go to those who can see the potential of great new ideas early on!

COIN will solve three major problems that are stopping most people from investing:

1.  It's hard to buy bitcoins.  You have to find an exchange, open an account, go through the verification nightmare, get money there, and then (depending on the exchange) buy a little bit at a time until the exchange decides to trust you.  It's 100 times harder than going online and buying any stock or mutual fund in your existing brokerage account.

2.  It's hard to store bitcoins.  You either have to trust it with an online exchange, which everyone says is unwise, or you practically need a computer science degree to figure out how to keep it some kind of cold storage.  The average Joe would be unwise to try this at home.

3.  It's extremely hard to invest retirement funds in it, which is the only investment funds many people have.  (You can do it by setting up an IRA LLC, but that's expensive in terms of money, effort, and time.  See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=396783.0 for details.)

Once COIN is approved, the average Joe can login to his retirement account and buy bitcoins with practically no effort.

I don't think that the approval of COIN will necessarily immediately launch Bitcoin to the moon, but it will make it much more likely to happen once some triggering event gets the ball rolling.

Of course, it's possible that the price will rise dramatically after the SEC announces that COIN is approved, but before anyone has a chance to actually buy it.  It might be worth setting up the IRA LLC and investing Roth IRA funds in bitcoins, where they can grow tax free, before that happens!

Gambling is a terrible idea, no matter what currency you use.  Lending to strangers on the Internet is a bad idea.  If you wouldn't do it with dollars, don't do it with bitcoins!  Beware of advice received on bitcointalk.org, as 90% of the participants here seem to act like children.

Day trading is a slightly less bad idea.  The idea is to sell some after it goes up, then buy some after it goes down.  However, you should first examine the past history of Bitcoin and remember that relevant past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.  Bitcoin has historically been subject to occasional major rises, followed by fast crashes.  Day traders often sell near the bottom and miss most of the major rises, and they sometimes buy as it starts crashing, thinking it's probably going to resume the rapid climb.  For that reason, the boring strategy of "buy and hold" usually yields better results than day trading.

Also, day trading requires you to keep balances at exchanges, which exposes you to the risk of theft.  By contrast, with buy and hold, you can keep your coins in cold storage and be much safer.  Investigate cold storage options (like TREZOR), and store your coins securely.

I recommend a combination of "buy and hold" for long-term appreciation, and "spend and replenish" to support the merchants who are already accepting bitcoins and encourage others to do so.

$50 worth is a tiny investment.  I suggest investing 1-5% of your net worth in bitcoins.  That's a small enough investment that you don't suffer much if it fails, but enough to make you much richer if it really takes off.  Think about how rich you want to be,  and imagine how many bitcoins you would need to own to be that rich if the price went to, say, $10,000 each.

However, if your net worth is close to zero, then consider buying $20 or $50 worth every week, whatever you can afford, until you reach your investment goal.

The difference between rich people and poor people is that rich people tend to hang on their money, while poor people fritter it away.  Which do you want to be?

The problem with "buy low sell high" is that after you sell high, Bitcoin often keeps going up and up and up, while you're stuck in fiat.  And sometimes after you buy low, it keeps crashing.

I made some money day trading back in 2013.  However, when I analyzed my results, I realized thet I would have made more just by buying and holding.  The trouble with day trading is that you are likely to be out of the market during the largest run ups.

Now my strategy is to hold until after global Bitcoin adoption.  Ironically, that strategy helps the price increase.  It's the buy-and-holders who create the scarcity that keeps the price going up.

The challenge will be how to let the masses know that it's a good idea for Average Joe to hold some bitcoins in an IRA, and (once the EFT exists) that it's easy to do.  I don't expect to see the mainstream media tripping over themselves giving this kind of investment advice!

The thing that's great about the SecondMarket BIT is that there's a sales force actually talking to rich people, convincing them to invest in Bitcoin.  Will the ETF have a sales force?  I expect the Winklevi will get some media splash if and when COIN goes live, but that will only last for a few weeks.  Once the price falls from the next peak, who's going to be pushing Bitcoin then?  Hopefully, SecondMarket BIT will still be doing that!

A great sales tactic might be to say, remember when I suggested last year that you buy our Bitcoin fund, and you weren't interested?  Well it's 10 times the price now, and I expect it to continue to do extremely well.  You should listen to me this time!

Of course, for that to work, they have to be pushing it now!  And the numbers suggest that they haven't been selling much lately.

We have lots more lawyers here.

Never listen to liars.  It just muddies your view of reality.

I like the features of Armory.  I'm not too happy with this latest release, 0.92.1-beta, running on Windows 7 64-bit.  I bring it up, and it immediately crashes and exits.  Very disappointing.

The question isn't why the fund stopped buying.  The fund buys and sells bitcoins in direct response to people buying and selling shares of the fund.

The relevant question, which Silbert probably has insight into, is is why people aren't buying into the fund as vigorously these days.  Perhaps they have exhausted their list of people likely to buy, and they have scaled back their cold call operation.  Perhaps the months of price stability has made it a hard sell.  I'm guessing that once we get back over $1000, fund sales will pick up again.