Posted on 12/28/2013 8:16:01 AM PST by Errant
It’s the festive season, and if there is a bitcoin fan among your friends and family, then they may have given you some of the virtual currency in your Christmas stocking. If so, what should you do with it?
There are several options for you as a new bitcoin owner. We’ll tell you about them here, but before you start, please don’t do what Bloomberg TV anchor Adam Johnson did. Fellow anchor Matt Miller gave bitcoins to Johnson as a Christmas gift on air. They came in the form of a paper wallet (see below), which Johnson showed to the camera, displaying his private key in the process. Whoops. A reddit user scanned the QR code and beamed the bitcoins to his own address, bragging about it later online. There’s one person who made it onto the naughty list this year.
(Excerpt) Read more at coindesk.com ...
For myself, yeah. Split some of that BTC off into LTC and NVC.
Have a few LTC myself.
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Make sure you write down the keycode before you eat ‘em Joe! :)
How hard would it be to counterfeit these? Would it be illegal since they are not legal tender by US standards. I guess copy right infringement would apply.
You could bury them....Wait...
I’m holding LTC for the long haul. I think it has potential. 2014 is going to be pretty wild when the ASIC miners start hitting the ledgers.
You actually could bury a print out of the keys and then delete the wallet info.
Difficulty levels are going out of sight, especially for Bitcoin. Will be interesting to see how this affects its growth/usage/security. It’s a good idea to split any you have between several types, IMO.
Yep.
Tru Dat...
Please explain how bitcoins work - thanks.
Did you mine yours? I was just wondering if anybody on here had actually mined any of them.
“Which brings us to the first thing that you’re going to want to do with your new bitcoins: keep them safe. If you’ve never received bitcoins before, the chances are that you’ve been given them by someone who created a bitcoin address for you, sent some coins to it, and then gave you the address somehow. It may have come as a long number pasted into an email, or potentially on a piece of paper.
How you store the bitcoins will depend on what you want to do with them. If you’re going to spend them immediately, then you’ll want to put them into what’s called a ‘hot wallet’. This is a wallet either on your smartphone, your desktop computer, or a website, and it allows you to spend your coins straight away.
But you may also be planning on keeping the bitcoins for longer. The currency’s price is pretty volatile, and some analysts think that it will bounce far higher than it has already. If you want to keep your bitcoins for a while, then consider putting them in cold storage. This is a bitcoin wallet that doesn’t connect to the Internet. No one on the Internet can steal it because it isn’t stored on your computer, or on a remote website. The easiest way to do this is with a paper wallet.
If the bitcoin address isn’t on a piece of paper, or the gift giver has promised you some coins but hasn’t sent them yet, then you can create a paper wallet at various websites. One site that you can use to produce excellent paper wallets is Bitcoin Paper Wallet. Another example is BitAddress.org.
Sites like these will generate a bitcoin address for you. The address has two components: a public key (which you show to everyone else when you want to receive bitcoins to that address), and a private key (which you use to send the coins). The bitcoin address will be printed out onto a paper wallet for you to keep. Show the public key to the person sending the bitcoins. They will scan the address and send the coins along using their own wallet. It is important that you then keep that piece of paper safe – because if you lose it or show it to someone malicious (like Johnson did), then your bitcoins will be gone.
When you wish to spend these bitcoins, you can import your private key to a hot wallet of your choice. There are many to choose from, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Some, like blockchain.info, store your bitcoin private keys both online, and on a mobile app. Others, like Kryptokit, restrict storage to your desktop computer only. The wallet will have a way for you to input or scan your paper wallet’s private key, transferring it into hot storage so that it is ready to spend. At this point, it effectively has an Internet-connected copy of that paper wallet, meaning that the paper wallet can’t be considered as cold storage anymore.”
Wow. Way more complicated than sticking some money under your mattress or burying some money in your backyard.
There are also a number of good videos about Bitcoin available on Youtube.
Hope that helps. If you have a specific question about a certain aspect, I might be able to answer that.
Yes, I have mined both.
Those are bytecoins, not bitcoins.
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