That Gox two week thing is rubbish - they have major liquidity problems if the rumours are true, that's why their rate is so high, people have no choice but to buy BTC and shift to other places to cash out. I personally know of people with small AUD withdrawals months old and they can't get any assistance. So yeah, good luck getting $ out of GOX using SWIFT. Coinjar.io selling / cashout process is fairly simple and charges very little commission. Just be careful with Coinjar as although its become the "default" for most serious Australian Bitcoiner's - one of the main guys running it has a very shady past (see Bitcoinica saga). I just get in and out as quick as possible with Coinjar, don't trust them much. I've been very busy with various Bitcoin investments the last few months which is why I haven't been posting here. I'm not looking to cash out to AUD this time, so I'll probably just use BTC-E to sell to USD then try and rebuy.
I'm trying for $196 on BTC-E as my sell point, then as soon as the drop begins I'm going in big on LTC as a shorting strategy...
It's the main headache at the moment. I am pretty sure having better exchanges would further boost BTC's price as the entry and exit get easier. Then again, can't complain too much given the returns.
I'm tempted to give Gox another go to be honest. Last time I cashed out, was in my account within 2 days.
Returns mean nothing if you can't actually convert them into something I can pay a mortgage/rent with
On the plus side, Coinjar let you just enter the bank account details to sell BTC, and then send you a 1c deposit with a reference you need to enter to verify. Whilst I wait, I can still sell the BTC on the exchange and then it'll send once verified. Not bad!
Have you used localbitcoins much? How does it work when selling? You send the coins first or dollar payment is upfront? Any issues with the site/scams to be wary of?
RM> Yeah I was kind of wondering what the issue is...it is basic to sell and get AUD through coinjar - very small fee too. They are Australian based and run a NAB account, its all legit (apart from Bitcoinica history). The days of Gox being useful are long gone, BTChina's volume is almost setting the price today. Many easy ways to cash out to AUD today ignoring Gox, I promise you that if you try and get your AUD out there, you're going to have a bad time. Watch for 1000 CNY support, hoping it doesn't break - https://bitcoinaverage.com/#CNY
Just noticed this very long thread and started reading at page 1. Somebody please tell me that 1for1 eventually figured this out. Its painful to read. I've almost never seen such insistence on ignorance without even bothering to do a bit of research. Seriously, page 1 is hilarious. I've been busy with other things in life the last couple years so I only just got clued in on bitcoin a couple days ago. For me, the thing that I feel may be a problem is that the system will only allow about 21 million bitcoins ever to be generated. If this is the case, how can such a system ever be used as a global marketplace? Imagine if for some reason bitcoin became the world's standard currency. Sum up all the world's liquid wealth and stick it into 21 million BTC. Lets just toss a figure of 10 trillion USD which of course is wrong but its an easy number and very conservative. If all the bitcoins were mined, that would mean each BTC would be worth the equivalent of $476,000 USD. Well, you can buy them for a hundred fifty bucks right now, so that's a hell of a ROI if the system goes mainstream and eventually picks up ten trillion USD in value. To me, this seems rather odd and unlikely. I wouldn't mind buying one for $150 as a gamble and see if eventually it takes off. Another issue on the technical side is that every node on the network needs to have the entire transaction history going all the way back to the beginning. Eventually this is going to be a hell of a lot of data. Right now with its status as more or less a hobby-currency, this history data is likely already huge. Imagine it in 50 years if BTC goes mainstream. This may have been thought of, but I haven't read anything yet explaining the solution.
Yeah I've seen the divisibility potential and I'm not suggesting that it would be impossible to make nearly insignificant transactions. I was more thinking about how relatively inexpensive they are now vs the potential if it goes mainstream. With bitcoins as cheap as they are, its a relatively low risk gamble if you believe that it has the potential to one day become widely accepted. Another question I was thinking, is that if the FED doesn't like this, it wouldn't be too hard for them or another central bank to just buy up all the bitcoins at the current market value. They could easily induce a bubble situation by tossing a billion dollars at the project and making a temporary parabolic price gain. Something like that would crash pretty hard and in the end, the FED would be owners of the majority of bitcoins, with no possibility of replacing them if they remained out of circulation. Kind of like central banks hoarding gold. With the low BTC cost, the question is whether the central banks view BTC as enough of a threat to be worth destabilizing by tossing money at it. Wow.
Nah, that's not that "wow" recon. You should see some of my "really wow" posts, then you'll "wow". :|
Investments within Bitcoin have been lucrative too. mcxNOW.com released "fee shares", sort of like a non-ownership dividend paying share. Us initial investors got shares at 0.1 BTC each and they traded as high as 1.15 BTC in volume once released! I sold at 0.5 BTC, still happy - but would have preferred the 10 bagger.
I'm happy enough cashing out around the $180~ mark. Thanks to a lot of the massive movements in those horrible alternative virtual currencies, I've made more than my share of revenue just from leaving a computer (or 3) on for a few weeks. edit: I tell myself I am happy because I don't want to get greedy
I love alts still, I have a 25 BTC fund just for alt trading and spend any profit...usually make 3-5 BTC a week.
