is it risky to turn all my money to bitcoins? anyhow this money sits in the bank and do nothing for!
Last week, I put all my life savings into Bitcoin. I'm only 30 so I know while it is a risk, I still have a chance to recover if it crashes, and I have a full time job anyway. I just thought how the people around me are putting money into their houses, into children and expensive weddings, and they will never get a return on that. It just disappears. I also thought how most people will go their whole life and not take a risk and 'go for it'... and when I'm older, I will not be able to things like this. I will be a lot more conservative. Now is the time for me to take a risk.
So I put a total of about $50,000 USD and bought in. I don't know how long I'll keep it in, but I'm thinking at least 5 to 10 years, maybe longer. I haven't told anyone and I don't plan to, but I feel good about it. Another thing I think about is that there will only be 21 million bitcoins ever released, and that is NOTHING when I stop and think about it. To me it seems like a great opportunity.
Sorry, I would not want this to lead to anyone acting irresponsibly or doing the same, unless they put the time to study the ins and outs and know the real risks. I took a risk because I am in a good place with my job and dont have any other responsibilities with family. Only posted here since I couldnt tell me friends or family, without them killing me. Since it flies in the face of a lot of common wisdom.
I hope when you say 'life savings' you are not including your emergency fund. An emergency fund of around 6 months of expenses should be kept in as liquid a state as possible, so that it can be used right away to deal with the unexpected. Not having a proper emergency fund can do major damage to you financially if you lose your job or have an accident. Just imagine how much it would suck to be forced to sell some of your coins during a temporary low in the market, only to watch the price go back up. In short, if you don't have an emergency fund, then you have an emergency.
How do you store your loot?
For this quantity of money there is only one valid choice: buy a secondary laptop, install Ubuntu in it, install Bitcoin-Qt in it, print the private keys (or better yet, write them down manually) and store several copies in a safe, encrypt the wallet with a secure passphrase (try this), make a few more backups, then transfer most of your funds there and don't touch it until you need them.
I'd say most of the risk comes from bugs in software (look what happened to Android users), so try sticking to old and proven software whenever you can. That's why you shouldn't use Electrum (or other things like fancy hardware wallets) until it's been working for more years.
Also good on you for making a new reddit account. Someone could try to target you with social engineering or computer malware.
Thanks for the link to the Entima.net pasphrase generator.
It does not seem to work for me ( Win xp, old dell laptop, firefox 23.0.1)
I followed this direction on the webpage:
Please move your mouse around in the window to generate enough random data to construct a secure passphrase.
I did that untill the green bar went across and now it says "waiting" and the generate passphrase button seems to be not clickable. Does it just take a long while?
Thanks
