Best place to buy bitcoins?

[Elwar]

Where is the best/cheapest place to buy bitcoins?

On the scale of several thousand dollars at a time.

[kpitcher]

There are a few exchanges tradehill (http://www.tradehill.com/?r=TH-R12541) and mtgox (http://www.mtgox.com). The only downside is moving money or coins out of the exchange accounts to your private ones as that can be limited to about 1000USD value a day.

You can find private buyers/sellers via IRC and the bitcoin forums (http://forum.bitcoin.org). The one advantage doing it this way is you can have someone wire/ACH/ or other payment method bypassing this limit. If you do the direct route be sure to use an escrow service like ClearCoin (https://clearcoin.appspot.com/)

[hugolp]

There are a few exchanges tradehill (http://www.tradehill.com/?r=TH-R12541) and mtgox (http://www.mtgox.com). The only downside is moving money or coins out of the exchange accounts to your private ones as that can be limited to about 1000USD value a day.

You can find private buyers/sellers via IRC and the bitcoin forums (http://forum.bitcoin.org). The one advantage doing it this way is you can have someone wire/ACH/ or other payment method bypassing this limit. If you do the direct route be sure to use an escrow service like ClearCoin (https://clearcoin.appspot.com/)

Also, if you dont want to go through the exchanges (MtGox, Hill) apart from ClearCoin, you have http://bitcoin-otc.com/ with a web of trust where you can see the reputation of the people you are dealing with in the "over the counter" chat room (ebay style).

But most important of all, is that Bitcoin is not an investment is a currency. If you have a business you could start accepting bitcoins. If you have a webpage there are several bitcoin open source modules that integrate the most famous software.