* Day-trading So on a site like btc-e.com, if you're buying & selling on little peaks & valleys you can make significant income. If you buy 400 litecoin for 14

* Day-trading So on a site like btc-e.com, if you're buying & selling on little peaks & valleys you can make significant income. If you buy 400 litecoin for 14 then the price goes up 3 bucks after 5 hours, you've just made over $1,000. You can't make these plays with an offline wallet. I day trade on btc-e.com but always move my coins to an offline wallet when they grow to an uncomfortable amount. Because of my fear of hacks though, I'm only making $30 or $40 bucks. I could dump 7 or 8k into the system and daytrade making over $1,000 a day... but then I'd be taking up the risk that a hack empties my account. Some people take that risk. I'm willing to risk up to 7k on crypto, but I don't want to risk losing it to a random online-wallet hack. However, if I unexpectedly got 5k out of thin air(say H&R Block found some tax deductions never noticed before) I'd day-trade that and risk losing it to hack. Another problem is that if you make profit on btc-e.com, you now have a bunch of USD sitting there[1] that you cannot transfer out. You don't want to withdraw that USD to your bank account because that's a slow process that takes more than 24 hrs. You're out of the game until all that bank stuff settles. I bought a bunch of litecoins on xmas-eve 2013, then on xmas-day the price suddenly doubled. I had to move my coins out of my offline wallet back to btc-e and sell. I made money, but now I had USD in btc-e that I can't get out. Afterall, I don't want to buy the coins I just sold for profit. I have to wait until the price drops. Now, if btc-e got hacked. The hackers would just buy whatever they could with my funds and withdraw the coins. I've lost. ___ 1. Unlike coinbase.com, btc-e.com allows you to have a fiat balance. I guess think of etrade.com, where you can transfer money out of your bank to etrade. Once those funds are confirmed, you can buy stock instantly because etrade already has your money and doesn't need to talk to your bank again.