Cerebral palsy can't stop Gregori runner - Featured Stories - Modbee.com

Cerebral palsy can't stop Gregori runner - Featured Stories - Modbee.com



I challenge anyone with any disabilities to overcome them now. If this article motivated you and or made you cry....let us know

Why Shop With Bitcoin? Why should you shop online with Bitcoin.

Why Shop With Bitcoin?

Why should you shop online with Bitcoin instead of just using your bank card or online payment account?  The main reasons include:

1. Security

Millions of consumers are subjected to identity theft every year because their payment information falls into the hands of thieves.  With Bitcoin this is not possible because each payment is a one-time transaction and Bitcoin doesn't require any of your personal information for transactions to be approved.

2. Privacy

When you pay with traditional payment methods, there is a long chain of businesses that see your transaction and in some cases record it.  There is no central authority that sees this kind of information when paying with Bitcoin.

3. Speed

Most ecommerce checkout processes involve multiple steps that involve entering all of your billing information, your payment information, and shipping information.  Since billing and payment information is completely unnecessary when paying with Bitcoin the checkout process can be streamlined.

4. Lower Prices

Fraud is a huge problem in the ecommerce world that increases prices for everyone.  Since fraud is almost completely removed from the equation when paying with Bitcoin, the cost savings can be passed onto consumers.

An Illustrated History Of Bitcoin Crashes

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Wednesday saw one of the largest declines in Bitcoin prices in the cryptocurrency’s lifetime. Many commentators declared the fall the beginning of the end for Bitcoin. I’m not sure if that’s correct or not, but in any event a sense of perspective is always helpful. So here are the biggest Bitcoin crashes since I started paying attention to the currency in early 2011.

June 8-12, 2011

Peak price: $32

Price decline: 68 percent

This was the peak of the great Bitcoin bubble of 2011. Prices rebounded somewhat after this initial plunge, but there followed a long bear market that bottomed out at $2 in November 2011, a total decline of 94 percent. Prices wouldn’t return to this peak again until 2013.

January 17, 2012

Peak price: $7.20

Price decline: 36 percent

After prices fell to $2 in the fall of 2011, Bitcoin prices began to recover. They ended the year at $4.50, and rose to $7.20 in early January. Then on January 16 and 17 prices plunged, briefly falling to $4.60 before settling around $6.25. Bitcoin prices would not regain their previous highs for another six months.

August 17-19, 2012

Peak price: $15.25

Price decline: 51 percent

Bitcoin prices more than doubled between July 1 and August 18, 2012. Then in a matter of minutes, the price of Bitcoins fell from $15.25 to $10.50. The decline continued over the next two days, reaching a low of about $7.50. The price didn’t rise above $15 again until the new year.

An Illustrated History Of Bitcoin Crashes

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March 6 and 11, 2013

Peak price: $49

Price decline: 33 percent

Early 2013 saw an extraordinary Bitcoin boom. By the beginning of March, Bitcoin prices were already double the 2012 high, and they rose another 50 percent over the next week. Then on March 6, the price collapsed, briefly falling to $34 before rising again to $45.

A few days later, it happened again. A bug in the Bitcoin software on March 11 caused the price to fall from $48 to $36.50 in a matter of minutes. Once it became clear that the situation was under control, the currency rebounded to near its previous highs.

These two crashes didn’t have any noticeable impact on Bitcoin’s upward price trajectory. Bitcoin prices would reach $60 on March 19 and end the month above $90.

April 10, 2013

Peak price: $266

Price decline: 61 percent

Like last month’s crash, Wednesday’s decline left the currency’s value where it started out the month. Obviously, it was a very painful experience if you bought bitcoins in the last couple of days, but anyone who bought bitcoins at last week’s price of $140 is still significantly ahead. And people who bought at any time before this month have made a significant profit.

Of course, that assumes that prices don’t decline further in the coming days. It’s possible that today’s crash will inaugurate a bear market like the one that occurred in late 2011. It took almost 2 years for Bitcoin prices to recover from those declines. Perhaps we won’t see Bitcoins worth $260 again until 2015. Or ever.

But ultimately I think that underscores the point I made on Wednesday morning around the time the crash was beginning. The claim that Wednesday morning’s prices were a bubble is ultimately a prediction about the long-term value of the currency. If bitcoins are worth $500 in 2018, we’ll look back at Wednesday’s sell-off as a freak event that (like the other crashes that came before it) temporarily halted the rise toward the currency’s real value. Conversely, if a bitcoin has fallen to $5 five years from now, we’ll shake our heads at the irrational exuberance that once valued a bitcoin at $260 (or $32, for that matter). But right now, it’s simply too early to tell.

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Multibit - Multi BIT

You spend money online every month. You probably have a payment card that is linked to accounts with online merchants. This causes some problems for you without you being directly aware of them.

• First, you must ensure that you don't miss paying off your payment card in full at the end of each month or you will incur an interest fee. Some payment cards will charge you a monthly fee just for using them.
• Second, the details of all your purchases on those credit cards are shared back to the credit card companies. They carefully track every purchase you make. Over time your spending habits allow these companies to profile you and sell your profile to other companies. That is more junk mail for you.
• Third, your merchant is forced to pay the payment card companies a significant amount of their profit in transaction fees and equipment rental fees. You may not think this is your problem, but the merchant must pass on those additional costs to you in order for them to stay in business. You pay more because you must use a payment card online.
• Fourth, let us hope that scammers do not steal your credit card details from the merchants and payment processors. If they do, that is more headaches for you.

Bitcoin is different. It is money, reinvented.

You purchase bitcoins on an exchange (more about that later) and then spend them online using your smartphone, tablet or computer. A Bitcoin transaction is private between you and the merchant. No-one else knows what you purchased, or where. The merchant will typically provide you with a Bitcoin link or QR code which looks like this

Please donate to Bitcoin

All you need to do is click on the link or image and MultiBit starts up and fills out the details. You then click send and confirm that you are happy with the purchase. Start using Bitcoin and you will want to throw away your clumsy credit cards.

More things you can do with Bitcoin and MultiBit:

• Install a bitcoin wallet on your smartphone - you can scan the QR code and it will fill out the purchase details on your phone.
• If you are a blogger, why not accept Bitcoin donations with a single click ?
  
  WE CAN HELP YOU!
  
  

Bitcoin Butcher - Quality Meat - BTC Spokane Washington

Now one local butcher will also accept bitcoins !  BTC Butcher is a trial project as two fellow bitcoin members met with the idea.  If you want more information let us know!

Limited to $500 order max!  $5000 per day!
This offer is self funded by the two members so offer only valid as long as we can fund!

More updates will be posted soon!


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Bitcoin Shipping Supplies

Gold Kraft Bubble Mailers
ITEM #	USABLE SIZE	PCS/CTN	Price
#000	4 x 7 +1.57''	500	$    33.60
#00	5 x 9 +1.57''	250	$    24.64
#0	6.5 x 9 +1.57''	250	$    30.52

Poly Bubble Mailers
ITEM #	USABLE SIZE	PCS/CTN	Price
#000	4 x 7 +1.57''	500	$    35.84
#00	5 x 9 +1.57''	250	$    26.88
#0	6.5 x 9 +1.57''	250	$    32.20

Please let us know what other shipping supplies you may need!

Thanks,

Bitcoin Blogger

Avalon ASIC Batch #3

The no bullshit, no fine print terms of sale

We Accept Bitcoin Only – Bitcoin allow us to collect large sum of assets in a short period of time, and due their nature the bitcoins can also be move to where they are suppose to go in a similar time frame. It also make sense as the Avalon units mine bitcoins so they should be priced as such accordingly.
No Refunds - The Avalon units are made on a built-to-order basis. This means when you place an order, your bitcoins are used to order parts to construct your Avalon Unit. Refunds therefore are impossible. Utilizing a short time frame, batch based, and built-to-order method allows to manage finances properly and reduce risk for all parties. e.g. Avalon ASIC, the re-sellers and the buyers.
No Address Change - Unless it is a special case no address change will be allowed, please allocate time correctly to handle the delivery of these units, There has been too many people attempting to sell these units and changing their shipping address. You can choose what to do with them after you receive them, but whilst they are still in our hands they will go to the address the order was originally intended for.
Limited Customer Support - The Avalon team is comprised of a small group of capable people; however, we are also extremely limited in manpower. Every one of us handles multitude of tasks, and for this reason we will have very limited customer support. No news is good news. We apologize for this, but we do not expect this situation to change.
Not Newbie Friendly - The Avalon units are designed much like a hardware development board, while it works out of the box with very little configuration it is ultimately geared towards developers and experienced miners, please do your research before purchasing. A good place to start is the Bitcoin Wiki page on Avalon.
Please read this carefully, as with all things Bitcoin one should treat this as an investment and make the decision best for you based on the liquid-able funds available at the moment when placing an order.

Why VCs Love The Bitcoin Market

JEREMY LIEW

posted yesterday

101 Comments

Editor’s note: Jeremy Liew is a managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Follow him on Twitter @jeremysliew.

As a VC, my interest in the Bitcoin ecosystem is not ideological but mercenary. I see the opportunity for Bitcoin to disrupt multi-billion-dollar markets, but in doing so also create new big markets. There are three key markets in Bitcoin:

Wallet. Holding your Bitcoins for you, serving some of the checking account functions of a bank.

Exchange. Converting from USD to Bitcoins and back.

Payments. Helping merchants accept Bitcoins for their transactions.

As a rule of thumb, VCs like to see billion-dollar markets to get excited. How can each of these markets get to be a billion dollars in size?

WALLET

It is free to get your own Bitcoin wallet, a piece of software on your computer that you can use to send or receive Bitcoins. However, this entails storing your Bitcoin private key on your computer, which risks loss or theft. Increasingly many Bitcoin users are turning to hosted wallets, which hold the money for you, and are accessed over the web. But you have to trust that your hosted wallet will not run off with your money (which has happened before). Because client wallets are free, hosted wallets have typically been free, as well.

Let’s assume that one day in the future, hosted wallets will be able to charge 0.5 percent of funds in the account as an annual fee. This is likely a high estimate, but not impossible if the wallet offers enhanced security, insurance against loss, and perhaps some kind of escrow or other fraud purchase protection. For the wallet market to be worth $1 billion, this would imply that $1 billion/0.5% = $200 billion in Bitcoins would need to be held in hosted wallets. This means that the market cap of Bitcoin would need to be at least $200 billion, relative to $1.5 billion today. Bitcoin would need to appreciate by almost 150x to reach this level. Bitcoin has gone up by 30x in the last year, so that isn’t impossible to believe. Two more years like that would get you there.

EXCHANGE

It will be a long time, and probably never, that Bitcoin becomes the default world currency. As a result, there will be demand for exchanging between Bitcoin and fiat currency for a very long time.

Consumer level exchanges charge between 50 to 100 basis points on each trade. Bigger trades currently pay closer to 10 basis points. Let’s assume that in the future trading commissions run around 25 basis points. To get to $1 billion in market size we would need to see $1 billion/0.25% = $400 billion in annual trading volume. Last month, exchange volume was around $60 million, this month it looks like it may get to $200 million. Annualizing this gets you to between $720 million – $2.4 billion in annual trading volume. Assuming the top end of the estimates, trading volume would need to go up by 200x current levels to hit this market size.

Transaction volume, i.e. transfers of Bitcoin within the real economy, has historically floated within a constant multiple of trading volume of between 2 and 20. If the relationship between transaction volume and trading volume remains roughly linear, transaction volume would need to rise by 200x current levels to hit our target $1 billion market size. This is believable given that transaction volume has gone up 30x in the last year.

PAYMENTS

Ultimately, the key driver of both Bitcoin price appreciation and exchange volume has to be payments volume. If people aren’t using Bitcoin to pay merchants for transactions, then there is no real economic driver for either price or exchange volume to rise. It would be driven purely by speculation.

One of the key advantages of Bitcoin is that it nominally has zero transaction costs. That being said, there are a number of additional merchant services that could be added on top of transaction processing that could justify 25 basis points or more in merchant fees. Bitpay today charges 1% or more. To get to $1 billion in market size, we would need to see $1 billion/0.25% = $400 billion in annual transaction volume.

Last month, transaction volume was around $250 million, and this month it looks like it is on track for $750 million. Annualizing this gets you to between $3 billion and $9 billion in annual transaction volume. Again, taking the top end of estimates, this would require an increase in transaction volume of around 50x current levels. In the last year, transaction volumes have gone up by 30x. As a comparison point, world GDP is around $82 trillion, so this would represent about 0.5 percent of all world transactions using Bitcoin. As a comparison point, $2.5 trillion is spent on credit cards per year in the U.S. alone out of $15 trillion in GDP, so about 16 percent.

HOW DO WE GET THERE?

All of these market-sizing analyses require a 2 to 2.5 order of magnitude increase over current levels. Those same metrics have shown a 1 to 1.5x order of magnitude increase in the last year, so it doesn’t stretch the imagination to think that it might be possible. But the question is how? It would be impossible to get to those sizes on illicit usage only and you can’t get there just on speculation. Bitcoin usage would have to become mainstream. The only way to get there is through merchant preference because of the lower transaction costs. This could be appealing to industries with low net margins (e.g. grocery, Amazon.com), or with high transaction costs (e.g. cross border trade, micro transactions), and these may be the industries that pioneer Bitcoin acceptance.

But merchants won’t switch to Bitcoin for lower transaction costs if the tradeoff is volatility of exchange rates. As long as their costs are in fiat currency, they will want to switch out of Bitcoin and into fiat immediately when they take payment since they won’t want to bear currency risk. That requires deep liquidity in the exchanges, and this is where the professional traders come in. They have already started to enter the market.

If the current volatility in the Bitcoin exchange rate is reduced in the future, merchants may be willing to hold Bitcoins for longer periods of time, and even make payments in Bitcoins.

The other way that Bitcoin may become mainstream is in countries where the currency or financial system is already more volatile than Bitcoin.

Mainstream adoption will require bright line regulatory compliance by all elements of the Bitcoin ecosystem. That is why last month’s guidance on virtual currencies from FinCEN (part of the U.S. Treasury) caused Bitcoin prices to go up. As Bitcoin gets closer to the U.S. regulatory umbrella, it moves closer to legitimacy. These rules and the ones that will follow will increase the overhead costs of all players in the space, but that is a small price to pay for legitimacy.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR STARTUPS?

Not all big markets are opportunities for startups. Bitcoin has some attractive characteristics because it is so disruptive to the current system. The innovator’s dilemma may keep the big players in payments out of the market for a long time, as they may fear cannibalizing their current very attractive margins. But one day that competition will come.

The key questions for any startup are: What is your competitive advantage and how do you defend against a large late entrant? For exchanges, liquidity is the barrier to entry. Although there have been examples where new entrants have cracked open marketplace businesses, it is hard. For wallet and merchant services, it is less clear what the barriers to entry will be.

The risks associated with Bitcoin are worth mentioning as well. The six biggest hacking, theft andfraud incidents involving Bitcoin exchanges, wallets, or investment vehicles have resulted in a total 1.2 million Bitcoins being stolen, out of a total of 11 million Bitcoins in existence. This means that more than 10 percent of all Bitcoin has been stolen, and this does not include many smaller thefts and losses from individual wallets. Just this week, another wallet service was shut down after suffering an attack. Given this environment, Bitcoin startups cannot remain bootstrapped for long and will need to raise more substantial capital from VCs to mitigate these risks with better security and proactive regulatory functions.

In all the scenarios that I’ve painted above, Bitcoin prices need to go up by 100x or more. If that were the case, then maybe just buying Bitcoin is a better investment than putting money into a Bitcoin startup. You get plenty of upside and no execution risk, but it won’t be anywhere near as much fun.

Tags: Bitcoin, Column

Porsche Sells For 300 Bitcoins In Latest Sign The Virtual Currency Is Going Kablooey

Posted: 04/03/2013 5:40 pm EDT  |  Updated: 04/03/2013 5:40 pm EDT

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Somebody in Texas claims they just sold a Porsche for 300 bitcoins, the latest sign of a bitcoin bubble. Or the rise of our new bitcoin overlords.

An Austin family bragged Tuesday night that it had sold a 2007 Porsche Cayman Sfor 300 bitcoins, a virtual currency that has long been little more than a curiosity for financial reporters but is suddenly breaking into the broader consciousness, maybe just in time for the whole thing to go kablooey.

Rob Wile of Business Insider tracked the family down to verify their claim, and they showed him all sorts of official-looking documents they say are proof of the sale, which at the time was worth $39,000, or the book value of the Porsche.

The value of those bitcoins might be harder to pin down.

This week, the price of one bitcoin, a digital currency that is randomly generated, or "mined," by computers using DARPA levels of computing power, crossed $100, and the total value of bitcoins outstanding passed $1 billion. You may not be able to bounce a bitcoin into a cup of beer, but you can actually buy stuff with bitcoins, from participating vendors/pimps.

The value of bitcoins has risen tenfold since January, partly thanks to investors looking for a cash alternative amid the Cyprus meltdown and partly because of new federal regulations on virtual currencies that raised fears of government intervention but also gave the currency more legitimacy as real money. Bitcoins have also provenquite appealing to the crowd that expects Barack Hussein Obama to be rounding us all up into FEMA camps any day now, as Salon's Andrew Leonard noted recently.

But bitcoin is not going to supplant the dollar any time soon. After surging to a record high of $147 on Wednesday, the value of a bitcoin tumbled to $117 after a Japanese site called Mt. Gox, the biggest Bitcoin exchange, apparently struggled to keep upwith a flurry of orders for bitcoin.

A bitcoin wallet service, Instawallet,shut down on Wednesday to better protect itself from hackers, who haverecently hit Mt. Gox and the online payments site Dwolla with denial-of-service attacks.

And actually climbing on board the bitcoin train is kind of a hassle, as New York magazine's Kevin Roose found out recently when he set out to buy just one bitcoin.

A media frenzy has suddenly erupted, with mainstream news outlets scrambling to explain to people how bitcoins work and what they could mean (for arguably the best of the lot, see the one by Maria Bustillos in the New Yorker.

Media attention is never a good sign for a bubble.

Adding to the circus atmosphere, Business Insider honcho Henry Blodget tongue-in-cheekily raised his target price for bitcoins to $400 (echoes of his Amazon.com price target from his dot-com glory days). Blodget, who has called bitcoin the "perfect bubble," said that bitcoins could actually be worth $5,000, or $0, depending only on how much people are willing to pay for them.

Today, they're worth a Porsche. Tomorrow, maybe this guy's house in Canada, currently seeking bitcoins. The day after that? Who knows: Maybe 5,000 Dutch guilders, the price of tulip bulbs at their peak.

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Using Offline Wallets in Armory Rock-Solid Security for the Masses

Using Offline Wallets in Armory

Rock-Solid Security for the Masses

Armory provide a first-of-its-kind interface for easily managing offline wallets. You can create your wallet on a computer that never touches the internet, yet still manage the wallet from an online computer with minimal risk of an attacker stealing your funds. By keeping all the private-key data on the offline computer, only someone with physical access to the offline computer can steal your Bitcoins.  And even if someone physically stole your offline system, it might take centuries for them to get through the advanced wallet encryption!  There is just no safer way to manage large sums of Bitcoins, and there is no simpler way to achieve this level of security than using Armory!

Armory offline wallets give you the convenience of a normal wallet for receiving Bitcoins and verifying payments, while giving you the ability to spend them in the simplest way possible.  When you want to spend money from an offline wallet, Armory provides an intuitive interface with clear directions.  It does not require synchronizing the blockchain with the offline computer, and does not require any data on the offline computer except for the Armory software and your wallet file.

If you are holding thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoins, it could be worth purchasing a low-end netbook just for this purpose! Something like the Eee PC from Asus costs between $200 and $300, yet can save you thousands of dollars in potential thefts, while also providing yourself with the peace of mind that your Bitcoins are not accessible to attackers.  Craigslist and Ebay are also good options for getting an inexpensive, used laptop.  Anything with 256 MB of RAM will work.

When you create an offline wallet and use a watching-only copy of it on an online computer, here’s what capabilities each one has:

How do offline wallets work?

You generate a wallet on the offline computer the same way that you do on an online computer. You then make a “watching-only” copy of that wallet to be used imported on the online computer.  Using this watching-only wallet, you can generate addresses and monitor payments exactly the same as any other wallet.  In order to send money, you will be doing the following:

1. Create unsigned transaction (online).
2. Sign it (offline).
3. Broadcast it (online).

With a little practice, you will be executing offline transactions completely securely, in less than one minute!  Until then, the interface is loaded with instructions and descriptions of what you are doing, at every step.  You might not even need the following tutorial to help you!

Using an offline wallet in Armory:

NOTE(1):  There is no special version of Armory needed for the offline computer, and it does not need to be the same operating system as the online computer.   As long as you can install Armory and use USB drives, it will work.

NOTE(2):  You must be in “Advanced” or “Expert” usermode to use offline wallets.  “Advanced” is the default mode when you first install Armory, but some users change to “Standard” to simplify the interface.  You can switch modes from the main window menu under “User”.

First and foremost, you will need a computer that you don’t mind keeping disconnected from the internet. Such a computer does not have any particular resource requirements: pretty much any computer that boots into Windows or Linux, can run Armory in offline-mode.

Once you have Armory installed on the offline computer, you create a new wallet.  Don’t forget to print or copy by hand a paper backup!   Then you “create a watching-only wallet” and load it on the online computer (this part only has to be done once).  The nature of Armory wallets is that the online computer will always generate the exact same addresses as the offline computer, but the online computer cannot spend any of the funds!

1. Load Armory on the offline computer
2. Create a new wallet (with or without encryption)
3. Important: Make a paper backup!  Connect a printer via USB or copy the paper backup information by hand.   Make one or two copies, and store in a secure place.  This is a permanent backup of every address your wallet will ever create!
4. Double click on the wallet and click on “Create Watching-Only Copy” on the right menu
5. Save the file to the USB drive, eject, insert into online computer
6. Load Armory on online computer, and select “Import Wallet” in the upper-right corner of the main window.  Import the wallet file on the USB drive.
7. In the wallet-properties dialog, click on “Belongs To“, and click the checkbox that says “This wallet is mine“.  This makes sure that any funds in this wallet are part of your global balance.

Now that the wallets are setup, you can use the watching-only wallet exactly the same way as a regular wallet, except Bitcoins cannot be sent from it.   Use the “Receive Bitcoins” button to generate addresses for receiving payments, and incoming transactions will show up in the ledger with a slightly different color than your other wallets.

To send Bitcoins from your offline wallet, do the following:

1. On the online computer, click the “Offline Transactions” button on the right, below the logo.  Select “Create New Offline Transaction.”  Alternatively, you can just select “Send Bitcoins” and select the watching-only/offline wallet.
2. Create the transaction as you normally would but the “Send” button will be grayed out since the watching-only wallet cannot sign transactions..
3. Click the button “Create Unsigned Transaction” on the left side.
4. A window will open with the unsigned version of the transaction.  Press the “Save to file…” button to save a *.unsigned.tx to the USB key
5. Insert USB key in offline computer, and click “Offline Transactions“, then select “Sign or Broadcast Tranasaction.“
6. Load the file from the USB key, then press the “Sign” button.   A confirmation window will appear.
7. Verify the confirmation details before you sign it!   The benefits of an offline wallet are lost if you don’t make sure the details are correct!
8. Click “Save to file…”.  It will overwrite the original *.unsigned.tx file with a *.signed.tx file.
9. Eject the USB key and plug it into the online computer.  If the original window is still open, you can click on “Next Step” to get to the broadcast window.  If you closed Armory since then, you can use the same “Offline Transactions” button on the main window, and select “Sign or Broadcast Transaction“.  Once the file is loaded, some green text should appear telling you that the signature is valid and the “Ready to Broadcast!” button should become available.
10. Press the button and you’re done!

Guidance is given at each step within the Armory software, so you may be fine without referring back to this page. And once you do this a few times, it will become a breeze!

Note: At no point in this process is any private data exposed through the transaction data.  It is perfectly safe to transfer the signed or unsigned transaction via email.  The biggest threat to an offline wallet is a USB-key virus that executes when plugged in.  However, such viruses would have to be highly targeted, and can be mostly mitigated by disabling USB-auto-run on the offline computer.

I’m Scared!

It’s natural to be uncomfortable using new software to store your precious savings, especially with such advanced features.  But you know that if you could trust it, it’s a feature you would love!   So, how do you calm your nerves about using such advanced features?

Try it out with small amounts of Bitcoins.  Any time you think to yourself, “Do I really trust this program?”  just pull out your USB key and execute a small offline transaction to yourself (or to make a donation to Armory developers!).  Whether it takes you a day or a year, you will eventually come to realize that offline transactions really do work.  Every time!

Step 1:

Make a new wallet as described above, but you must make a backup.  A paper backup is preferred, because you can visually verify that it is intact, and it’s easier to store (but it will require plugging your computer into your printer via USB cable).  A digital backup is fine if you make a couple copies, just in case one becomes corrupted.

Generate some addresses by clicking on “Receive Bitcoins” a few times.  Write down the first few letters of each address generated.

Step 2:

DELETE YOUR WALLET.  Why did we just delete it?  Because you’re about to prove to yourself that your backup works!  If you can restore the backup once, you can always restore the backup at any time in future.  Just don’t lose it!

On the main Armory window, click on “Import Wallet” in the upper-right corner, and select the type of backup you are restoring.  If it’s a paper backup, you’ll have to type it in manually — the time it takes to enter the wallet information is completely worth the peace of mind you get out of it.

Generate some addresses with the new wallet.  Check that they are the same as the addresses you wrote down earlier.

Step 3:

Using the wallet properties menu, click on “Create Watching-Only Copy” and save the file to a USB key.  Import the watching-only wallet on your online computer.  Generate a few addresses and compare to the ones you wrote down earlier.  I bet you are starting to feel better…

Transfer 0.5 BTC to one of these addresses.  Wait for a few confirmations.

Step 4+:

Whenever you are near your computer, you may ask yourself “Am I ready to trust this thing?”  If the answer is “No,” then get out your USB key and execute an offline transaction.  Follow the directions above to create an unsigned transaction for 0.01 BTC to one of your online wallets, transfer it to the offline computer, sign it, then bring it back and broadcast it.  You are now one step closer to realizing, it really does work!

If the answer is “Yes, I do trust the offline wallets,” well then you’re done!  Congratulations on having mastered the most secure Bitcoin wallet functionality in existence!

You’ll not only calm your nerves, but you’ll learn how to use the feature efficiently.  Once you get the hang of moving transactions around via USB drive, you should be able to execute an offline transaction in less than one minute!

If you do get this far, please consider sending a donation to the Armory developers (the donate button works for offline transactions, too!).  This feature was the prime motivation for creating Armory, and took many months of hard work to make it available to you, for free.  There are lots of new, innovative features planned, but it won’t be possible without you!