I started mining on my macbook pro in March of 2010.  Back then a decent laptop would render 50 btc every few days.

I've worked this board from a few different accounts.

I spent some of my coins the last few days.  I've decided to buy a motorcycle with the USD that I've converted btc into.  Don't worry, I pulled enough out to pay uncle sam at the end of the year for these gains.  Remember we live in a civil society and it requires our respect to function well.  Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.

I think the money to be made in bitcoin involves developing out the infrastructure for the protocol and user interfaces.  Remember, it was the Levi Strauss's (google it and educate yourself) of the gold rush era that turned out to be lasting profit machines.  Data mining operations that can provide value to governments on the movement of btc in the block chain will profit very well, very soon.

Uneducated people with 25k of btc that is stolen, from the same laptop that they surf 4chan with, get exactly what they're asking for.  Take a risk based approach to your btc holdings.  If you're a large fish with a large btc holding then you need to wipe the drive of every disk that saw your accounts private key, but keep a diversity of private key backups on stable hard mediums.  Learn to use the rescan feature of the current bitcoin software, understand what it is doing.  You can always send btc to a well protected account, but when you need to move btc out of a large account make sure you do it from a trusted platform (learn to unix).

I'll cast my eyes again to these markets and bulletin boards in a year from now.  Until then I'm going to focus myself to activities on other pressing matters in my life.  I felt like I needed to say goodbye.  Goodbye then.

Take care.


mcd