Bitcoin Forum

This hit my Facebook feed a few minutes ago:


Yikes.

Wow. Recently options for moving money in and out of bitcoins have been shrinking. The opposite of what you would expect for an economy that is growing!

Luckily it just means more room for new entrepreneurs to get it right...

Yikes!! indeed.

Though I don't know how much OKPay accounts for volume wise, this is again one of those nasty little developments added to the list.

I wouldn't be surprised to see -at a certain point in time, so with the benefit of hindsight, of course...- that this OKPay withdrawal is just another part of the tactical manouevres undertaken by Government institutions to crack down on Bitcoin.  Would the Japanese be next to hit MtGox big time (and thereby trying to hit BTC as they would like to sell you their "lovely deflationary yen" as an alternative  :-\ ? )

Yes, I think BTC will survive such Government crackdown, but the only question is: in what shape will it be afterwards?
We'll see.

Wow shocker for this Terrible Tuesday.
Anybody know the stand of the Japan Govt in dealing with Bitcoins?

Not ideal...

Could someone offer an informed summary on OKPAY - who used it and why was it a desirable choice compared to say wire transfers?

never thrusted okpay.. 
wiretransfer ftw

If you live in UK and want to send money to BTCE, they insisted you use OKPay as an intermediary.  Annoyingly, when I tried it, I sent a test amount of £100 and OKPay charged 4% commission to receive it.  I'm trying to get it back now but their website has some fault.

OKpay was the easiest way to send money to BTC-e. 

The Japanese don't care about bitcoin. Not enough users in Japan yet.

Is there any evidence for that? or is that your TFH talking?

It's cultist thinking. They told me that their bank just closed the account because of too much traffic basically. It made them nervous. They're looking for a new bank to work with. Governments have bad qualities, banks have bad qualities, but I still don't understand how people think that whatever happens from banks is necessarily a conspiracy against bitcoin. I've run a payment services provider before (DialCoin). You have to be *insanely* paranoid about every cent going through it, because that money can put your company in jail. I don't blame banks for being banks, it's their business model that's broken.

Any banking system to BTC gateway is a way for scammers and hackers to cash-out. Banks don't like that, especially when the funds were stolen from one of their account holders.

"Withdrawals to OKPay accounts will not be cut immediately, but will only be
allowed up to the amount that OKPay users have deposited into Mt. Gox via
OKPay."

Looks like you have hit exactly on why the account was frozen.

You should read a bit more carefully: I am only posing a possibility.

Short term: Slight decline or no effect (in fact I think we've already seen the 'worst' of it)

Mid term: Lower prices on exchanges that rely the most on OKPay, higher prices on exchanges that may or may not use OKPay but have other funding options that are used. Could BTC-e price get any lower? Arbitrage folks will have a field day with this.

Face it, any "BIG BOY" trader who has the power to move the market will have multiple funding routes and multiple exchanges in case one screws up. The little cats will have to wait a week to KYC with somebody else or find a good OTC hookup but they don't have as much of an effect on the markets anyways.

Long term: Price go up uP UP because harder to get = lower supply but same and rising demand = more expensive bitcoins!

inb4 "Lol but making it harder to get bitcoinz means less people will want to use them! In the world of economics, lower supply automatically leads to lower demand, thus making the supply/demand law of economics completely useless! I r smart & know economicz"

you mean moving funny money out of bitcoin (real money).

This sucks, okpay was the most convenient cash option.

This doesn't really affect supply nor demand for Bitcoins. The number of Bitcoins for sale stays the same, as well as the number of people who want to buy them. What can change however is the OTC premium.

You simply do not "crack down" on Bitcoin.

It's about time financial institutions and their sockpuppets (the Governments) grow up some balls and officially outlaw Bitcoin, so they can face the harsh reality: Bitcoin is resilient to bans and regulation by design.

Anyhow I think they know it, so they won't make us the favour to ban Bitcoin - they know they would have lost the battle from the very beginning, so they will try to play their cards in a different way.

Governments are big, with vast and sprawling org charts full of people trying to do things in the interest of that government.
There are a lot of branches on those org charts looking at this stuff with more than a passing interest.  Bitcoin can serve their interests pretty well in so far as its logging ability being useful for tracking transactions.  Use of anonymity addons can be indicative of intent, which is a prong in most criminal prosecutions.

Our tree will be pruned of bad fruit, and even of good fruit infected with a few bad worms, but it has good roots.  It will grow and adapt.

so much exuberance itt  ;)

This development actually makes any sort of profitable arbitrage a thing of the past... especially for folks in the States. The smaller exchanges simply don't offer the kind of volume to compensate for the wire transfer fees on the back end, and getting USD into BTC-e is now impossible. Margins were dangerously thin before... now they've gone negative.

I've always thought it strange that Bitinstant would offer their service of transferring funds between exchanges for a small fee instead of just playing the arbitrage themselves. Maybe they will now that Mt Gox USD codes no longer exist and they they can't offer that service.

This is odd because they released this memo about 24 hours ago...Since then I

1) Tested a $1000 withdraw from gox to okpay - it went through within a couple hours.
2) Tested a $1000 deposit from okpay to gox - it went through within a couple of hours.
3) Sent BITCOINS from my OkPay account (they converted about 3% worse than gox) to another wallet - not sure how long it took but they are there now.

So it's definitely a soft suspension of bitcoin.

It's not odd. Gox's statement was:

https://www.okpay.com/en/company/news/bitcoin-okpay-terms-of-use.html

But BTC made fault and that's it...
https://www.okpay.com/en/company/news/bitcoin-okpay-terms-of-use.html

I just noticed that Crypto-Trade (https://crypto-trade.com) announced partnership with OKPAY and their
current d/w fee is 0% for a limited time!

https://crypto-trade.com/news/19

 :o

They are still working with quite a few exchanges as of today. Including BTC-e, and crypto-trader.