Serious face:
A mix of both.
This is the best answer.
It really depends on what your trying to do. Some moneymaking methods are almost exlusively black or white, but with websites and seo it really depends.
If you're trying something that is going to be very short term and you want almost immediate results, you're pretty much going to be using blackhat methods. If it is too blackhat then you might get some quick returns, but then things will mostly dry up quick and you'll have to move on to the next thing.
White hat methods will work for building a solid long term website that you can potentially profit from for years. If you stay completely white hat though it might take a while to get it built up to where you're actually making money with it.
If you work on a totally whitehat project, and then just use a few of the safer blackhat techniques for traffic generation then you might be able to advance the timeline for your project by many months, but still be able to have a long term profitable website.
I tend to build mostly whitehat sites and use mostly whitehat methods, but try to get a good knowledge of blackhat methods so I can clean the idea up a little bit and incorporate some of it into my own projects. What will be required is different for every project, so you just need to evaluate what you need to accomplish and find the best methods to achieve it.
You're just trying to game the system a little bit to gain an advantage. Nothing wrong with that at all.
The thing with blackhat methods is you need to be careful and really understand how they work. It can be really easy to ruin a really good project by using BH methods incorrectly.
Hope that helps,
wolf
