Has Mt. Gox reported in to this forum on this subject (as have some of the other exchanges) and I missed it?  I am quite interested in their experiences here.  One would anticipate that being a larger exchange with no obvious means of discouraging scammers beyond the rest, they would have been vexed by the same issues.

I would trade security for anonymity (preferring the latter.)

I have been prepared to get ripped off on all of the perhaps 20 or 30 of the BTC purchases I have done so far.  I break my purchases into a fraction of the total I want, and keep that fraction to something I can afford to lose.  So far I have not been ripped off.

When I spend BTC I will be similarly prepared to get ripped off.  I've spent significant time researching the providers of certain services I want.  When I have time to deal with the fallout of acquiring the services (VPS, DNS, etc) I'll balance between the vendor's reputation and whatever other details I can find.  And I'll be prepared to be ripped off anyway.

To me BTC is a brave new world.  I am comfortable with the things I lose vs. the things I gain when compared to Visa, PayPal, etc.  So, no complaints.  My attitude tends to be along the lines of "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.", but I can certain understand and empathize with those who don't share this attitude.

My sister is not terribly computer literate or interested in computers, but she was able to understand hashes and the block chain concept.  She's interested, but no where near enough to be involved.

I've not had the opportunity to try to explain the principles to my mother and her boyfriend.  I expect that if/when I do, their comprehension and reaction will be the same as my sister's.  I gained some credibility with them by being interested in and invested in PM's since around the time the US went into Iraq.

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My girlfriend hates the things.  So I take every opportunity to explain to her how Bitcoin is going to make me super rich and how I might even become the king of planet Earth using them and so forth.  Really over-the-top stuff.  Lotsa fun.

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I'm not aware of any of my immediate co-workers actually buying any.  But we are all computer geeks so the mechanics of how Bitcoin works is not a problem.  We are all interested in economics and politics and society and such.  I'm a bit surprised that more of these people have not gotten interested enough to do some more hands-on testing.

Drifting off topic...

My understanding is that the OSX _kernel_ is mostly based on the Mach work.  That a good bit of Mach work happened to be integrated into FreeBSD (previously) was mostly tangential.  As I understand it, the OSX _userland_ leveraged FreeBSD work, at least early on.  More palatable license model upon which to base a commercial product compared to the GNU stuff.  I think Android used the BSD-licensed C libraries for similar reasons.  Not sure where things stand now.

I doubt it.

As long as Bitcoin is competing against inflationary alternatives (and not broken), I expect that it would be a pretty tempting place to park some value.  Particularly when interest rates one can get from mainstream are near zero, and the regulatory and enforcement agencies are captured by the large financial players and assisting them in screwing everyone else.

A monetary system which was highly inflationary and/or highly taxed would be a more suitable one if high liquidity is desired.  Bitcoin could be re-implemented to enhance some of these features...but I'm not sure how popular that would be.  From what I can understand of the Bitcoin project, it seems unlikely that the designer(s) of the system were not prescient enough to have anticipate the phenomenon you are unhappy about

When a lot of money is flying around, it is easier to reach out and grab a piece if one is positioned well do do so.  I suspect that is part of the reason for the current fiscal policies in the US.

Interesting.  That is probably a better method for obtaining a clean facial recognition database.

As a non-FB-user, It will be very interesting (and _very_ alarming) if anyone happens to see my photo in one of their little 'is this your friend' games and I'll be asking about it.

I have to be honest and admit that I am delighted that wallet.dat files are being stolen.  It introduces a very valuable element into the mix that one would need to consider when tracking transaction paths.  I hope that it continues at a level which provides some utility over time.

Here's another early 80's computer enthusiast who never had a facebook account.(1)  I didn't see much point, and increasingly I am sensitive about identity.

I've heard that Facebook has some creepy thing that facial recognition deal going and they will show a user a picture and ask them to pin a name to it.  That is downright alarming to me.  As I told my friends at work, one of the very few things that would induce me to beat somebody up would be if they pinned my name to a photo.

(1)  A heard or read somewhere that Facebook has pre-created nodes for every individual on earth and they just fill them out with whatever info they can get.  When one activates or de-activates an account, it just flips a bit.

Disclaimer:  I do not know with certainty any of the things I have mentioned about FB.

Seems like pretty weak sauce dude.

Where's anything about anything Illegal which seems, accd to the (admittedly non-authoritative) Wikipedia, to be the defining element of money laundering?

Insofar as 'bearer instruments', what's the distinction between the wire transfer or Dwolla, Bitcoin, or the Chilean peso withdrawals?

I imagine that most everyone agrees that if there 'illegally obtained money' being moved around, the crime should be investigated and it's my guess and expectation that Tradehill would cooperate fully (probably it is in their TOS...I've forgotten.)  I see nothing illegal about Tradehill's business, and the I know first hand that in the dealings I have had with them, there was nothing illegal on my end of things.

I would say you are shooting blanks so far.  Perhaps some high-powered para-legal could jump onto Wikipedia and straighten them out if they have got it wrong.

A question which strikes me as at least equally valid:

How is this money laundering?

(This is actually a serious question, BTW.)

Not sure who would sue Tradehill, or for what, but it does not concern me all that much...most of the funds I sent them underwent a transformation and bounced right back to my wallet.dat.

If a lawsuit resulted in their accounts (with my money) being frozen, that would suck but that family of problems was a calculated risk I took before sending them a dime.

If a lawsuit did not result in their accounts (with my money) being frozen, it is unlikely that the Tradehill guys would see their problems getting any better by absconding with what funds of mine they do control.

My general feeling vis-a-vis the fledgling businesses being built around Bitcoin is that they seem to be being started and run by pretty straight-up folks based on Wagner's show, their contributions to the forum, etc.  I've no doubt that they are generally 'fragile', but even if that is the case it does not concern me a whole lot.  I feel I have vastly more control of my assets when doing business with Bitcoin than with most other instruments these days.

Yes, I'm an admitted conspiracy theorist, but...

I believe that there is a huge value in understanding the relationships between individuals, and that is the reason for the extreme interest in social networks these days.  Just ask Mubarak how much he wished he had had actionable information about this in a timely manner.

This is at least part of the reason I have avoided Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc, and why I will probably avoid Dwolla.

I expect that Dwolla will do fine if it can position itself out in front of it's like competition, though it probably never will make a profit on it's exchange and payment business and probably won't really care that much.

Bitcoin also provides a rich tapestry of relationship information.  The difference that I can see, to the extent that I understand it, is that it is much more possible to work around the edges if one cares to, and it would be much more difficult for the authorities to manage should enough people take and interest in and succeed in doing so.


And I, for one, hope it continues for as long as it's mutually beneficial.  Or actually, I should say for the sake of honesty, for as long as it is beneficial to Bitcoin.

What is blowing my mind is that there are two many 'degrees of freedom'...at my current level of understanding of trading at least.

There are colors(red/green) and directions(up/down).  The WTF link describes the colors, but not the direction as best I can determine.

The WTF link states that bids are on the left and asks are on the right.  Period.  Relax that and I could (possibly) see a solution.

Even with your example, I really don't see it (unless the interplay between several bid/ask's is a factor.)

How about this:  Market at $14
  - I see a green bar at 13.10 with a value of +10 (upward and on the left hence a bid added.)
  - I see a green bar at 12.90 with a value of -12 (downward and on the left hence a bid added.)

What is the interpretation?

OP:

I asked the same question earlier and neither got an answer nor have I figured it out since that time.

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On a tangent, and to increase my trading IQ, is there such think as creating a bid 'on the upside'?

For instance, the price is currently $14.  I want some BTC, but I want to try to get them at a lower price.  So I place some orders at $13.50, $13, etc.

But I am also afraid that the market will take off and I'll be left in the cold.  So I would like to tell the exchange to have a bid in at $15, but only fill it if the price reaches _up_ to $15 (even though they could easily fill it immediately and at around $14.00.)

I wondered if somehow the direction of the bars were some sort of a bid/ask or this nature.  I suspect probably not (which makes this part of my post a tangent.)

It seems to me that the attitude toward BTC in the mainstream media has changed significantly in the last few weeks.  It kinda makes me wonder if the potential utility of BTC has not become apparent to a new segment of players.

Most land is probably not terribly valuable except that which has some resources or is strategically located (e.g., Iraq, parts of Iran, Afghanistan, etc.)  The land itself would be a giant money sink-hole with defense considerations and the like.

I good value proposition is the actual people themselves.  If you can force them to work for you, and they are decent workers, that has a pretty good value.  But one can get the best bang for the buck...err...gold or whatever...by leaving the land and all it's hassles to some puppet regime and buy infrastructure like water and power systems.  The puppet regime can then force the people to use the utilities you own.  They could make laws such that it is illegal to capture rain water and must buy all their water from the utility company for instance.  And if you can arrange the right kind of regime, it can even enforce those laws.

There might be a market for things like the Pantheon.  I would get a kick out of owning the thing, and I assume that more powerful people would as well.  It probably could even be done in such a way that the Greek people continue to foot the bill for maintenance and such.

I (not the quotee) am not from there any more...thank God.

I actually kind of liked Austin when I lived there.

I only went to Houston once for a few hours.  That was enough time to see a hit-n-run accident.  The cool thing about it was that both parties ran after about 15 seconds of getting their bearings.

I keep the passphrases for my encrypted wallets in my safe deposit box (the actual encrypted wallets are 'in the wild'.)  If/when I do a large transaction, I'll possibly be giving away one or more of the wallet.dat files rather than transferring coins depending on the situation.

I should put some detailed instructions to my family about what these phrases are an how to deal with them and always meant to.  Just have not gotten around to it yet.  I'll do it next time I access the box.

I started out frustrated because it was not clear to me that I could not realistically just mine a fraction to play around with using just a CPU.  Built the software and got kicked out of the second mining pool I tried for inefficiency.  The first pool (some .cz one) was down or something. 

Much of the info I ran across about Bitcoin was 'ancient' (as in, written some months ago.)  I like building machines, but a little research indicated to me that building an efficient miner was not really the way I wanted to go.  I wanted to acquire more BTC than I could realistically mine in the timeframe I wanted them even with a good mining rig, but less than the cost of a good rig with high-end cards (if they were even available.)  Lesson:  put high priority on ultra-new information (if the author was thoughtful enough to provide a date.)

So, it was purchase for me.

I wished to drain the money I had in paypal for philosophical reasons, so I gravitated to bitmarket.eu.  These guys seem to do some manual research to try to figure out if your are a scammer before they let you play, but that took less than a day in my case.  So far, bitmarket.eu has worked well for me as a buyer, and I still used it from time to time if I want some smallish number of coins in a hurry.  (Funny story...the last time I used bitmarket.eu, the seller had all kinds of issues with Paypal and I had to really work at it to get him his money.  But I had my BTC right away.)

The cost on bitmarket.eu tends to be a bit higher since it is a risk to the seller (I am supposing.)  So I set up a Tradehill account.  I had limited experience with wiring money and was not looking forward to it.  As it turns out,  I can stop by the bank on the way to work, and the money would be in Tradehill by the afternoon and ready to trade.  Shortly after than, I've got what I want in my working wallet.  Not bad at all.  Tradehill has normally been pretty fast at sending me my BTC, but the last time I did it it took until the next morning.  This was an annoyance to me.

I would anticipate the debt ceiling being raised, but could think of two reasons why it may not be:

1) There is a fairly strong inclination on the part of a lot of policy makers to welsh on domestic liabilities (aka, 'entitlements') while keeping multinationals mainly whole.  The debt ceiling could prove a useful mechanism to accomplish this...though not necessarily through freezing it.

2) Most monetary systems seem to have an EOL enforced by the mathematics defining it (and the pressure that the participants are willing and able to put up with.)  I posit that a tempting exist strategy would be for 'important' people to get their ducks in a row then arrange a controlled demolition, and that seems to me the most likely outcome for our current system.  Now might be the time, and the debt ceiling might be the primer, though I kind of doubt it.  My gut sense is that we have some number of years left.