What sucks is not knowing where your wallet is.

I have .9 of a bitcoin somewhere transferred between a Linux PC and three different phones over two or three years.

I have about $28 US somewhere.

I had this sort of issue. Back in 2010 I had mined a hundred coins (CPU mined, back in those days, lol). A month ago I decided to find the wallet file, took me 2 hours to search 5 HDDs with multiple partitions each from my old computers...

I fixed this problem now by printing the keys out, storing them securely in a safe and deleting the wallet files.

Better luck than me. I've 500BTC that I mined and gave up on. They'd be worth $26k if I hadn't decided to clean out my backup RAID.

How bitcoin is worse than cash in this regard?

I can search my apartment and find the cash fairly reliably :)

Just make a free Coinbase (YC S12) account and click the buy button. Couldn't be easier.

http://i.imgur.com/Yym66Gv.png

Coinbase was a giant waste of time for me. I signed up a week ago and its been a mostly crap experience. Would not recommend. Im using mtgox now and its a much more streamlined experience.

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Here was my coinbase timeline- Keep in mind I verified my account, did 2 step auth, everything. About as normal a user as possible. They make buying bitcoins near impossible.

1: Create a account and link it with a US bank. I am located in the US myself.

2: Wait 3 days to verify

3: Put in a order for a max of 10 bitcoins.

4: Wait 5 days for order to complete. You cannot order more than 10 bitcoins during this process.

5: Be told they are over capacity and have your order cancelled.

6: Go to 3

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Coinbase is only a option if you want to buy under 10 bitcoins and dont mind waiting. I wanted to buy much more than that. I wish they put up on the homepage that they only allow you to buy 10 bitcoins a day.

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Also, they say "once you are verified you can do 100 bitcoins a day" but the truth is, they do not have the supply and cannot fulfill those orders (gathered this from searching on twitter and my own experience). Also, you will need to wait a month to get this level of verification.

Once you complete all the verification steps you can buy 100 BTC per day, or almost $100,000 USD per month worth. It's a high-risk business they're entering, and they're seemingly targeting the commerce use case -- they want to be BitCoin's PayPal, not its forex brokerage account. Having new account limits seems reasonable to me.

My experience with Coinbase has been amazing. I tried to buy Bitcoins around a year ago and it seemed nearly impossible to do with USD.

Here's how buying them through Coinbase went...

  1. Signed up and linked my bank account
  2. Bought bitcoins the same day (at their price on that day)
  3. 5 days later they were available for me to use

I've bought more coins 3 additional times. Each time they were available in under 5 days and everything went smoothly.

Admittedly, these were smaller purchases. I'm not quite ready to start buying bitcoins by the hundreds.

How is it amazing when you had to wait multiple days for them to available? That seems completely backwards to me. Why aren't they available immediately once the block is confirmed, ie. within less than half an hour?

Fraud. If the transaction is too fast for new users, there's no time to identify and stop fraud before the money's left their control. Once you have the BC and can transfer it out, if you used stolen funds to pay for it, CoinBase loses twice the value transferred.

Confirmed. Coinbase was great about a month ago, but now they appear to be dying under load.

There's nothing like waiting 6 days for your order to complete, only to find it's been canceled.

my experience with coinbase has been better than any other service so far.

The real question is, what will happen to Tinychat after Google hangouts?

Only if you are in the US, though.

Register on mtgox and buy them with okpay currency. It's realtime as opposed to having to wait N days. Okpay currency is also obtainable in the realtime.

There are free guides on http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/

depending on what you have and where you are - try this website I knocked together to answer the eternal question "how do I get bitcoins" : http://bcfxer.appspot.com/