I heard about that many people have changed their stance from no to yes since bank started to limit withdraw. It seems banks still have the control, unless people's knowledge about money improves, they will still be the slave of bankers for a foreseeable future

There are many types of private issued community money. In the end a currency is backed by its community, e.g. people who are willing to accept it as a payment medium. Fiat money's community is the citizen in that country. However that is forced upon its users while bitcoin is not, so bitcoin's success is purely depends on its community. This community is boarder-less, that's a big difference comparing with fiat money, where you barely can find someone accept Japanese Yen payment in US

Unless you want to use those money to purchase something immediately, why cash out?

That amount of money usually moves for real estate deals, it is not significant for banks

It is better to chase the new virtual economy and cyber economy instead of trying to take over the legacy economy.  When people hade smart phone based on data network, they automatically move away from their fixed telephone line

The virtual and cyber economy is destined to grow magnitudes larger than today's economy in physical world, and in those economy the legacy system is very inconvenient and slow, so it needs new form of transaction solution like bitcoin, a world wide money

Selling software and subscriptions around the world is the best use case for bitcoin, almost frictionless international payment. In fact everything that can be delivered on internet can be easily paid with bitcoin

You can not really cut the relation towards legacy banking system: Existing people are all living in legacy banking system, for them the easiest way to get bitcoin is to buy on an exchange using fiat money. And you really need fiat exchanges to exaggerate its price once in a while to remind people that bitcoin is still on the rise

A secret weapon

Greek people will use VPN instead 

Actually I don't know if you can specifically broadcast your transactions to one pool that you prefer. If pools have different policies when it comes to transaction priority, then maybe 0 fee transactions could still be done with some pools (They block spam transactions intentionally). And overtime, more and more spam transactions will be queued in the memory pool due to more and more pools are blocking them

Then we have an interesting situation that although there are 200MB queued transactions in memory pool, most of them are spam transactions

Because MTGOX have multiple accounts in multiple currency

2.8 billion yen is like 28 million dollar, that is a small amount if you are doing 1 million dollar transaction per day, which MTGOX might have done easily. So after many days of million dollar deposits and withdraws, finally their Yen bank account shrunk by 2.8 billion yen

An exchange company typically have many bank accounts in different currencies. From their point of view, it is very normal that one account shrink and another account expand, just because they reduced the holding in one currency and increase the holding in another currency at the same time

But if no one understand what is really happened in the company, then lots of strange things will happen. For example, the reduce of 2.8 billion yen in company's JPY account should result in an increase in their USD or bitcoin holdings of similar value, but those bitcoins are gone, and all of these 2.8 billion yen already paid to other customers are legitimate

MTGOX's own book might indicate that Japanese customer are still holding 2.8 billion yen at the exchange (should be in MTGOX's japanese bank account), but these are database entries, whether they really have JPY is not relevant. When customer ask for Yen withdraw, MTGOX could just go to his USD account, sell some USD and get Yen to pay customer

In order to borrow new money and pay back the old debt forever, the debt scale must increase exponentially because of interest

However, interest can be pushed below zero to permanently remove the burden of interest payment, even less debt need to be repaid. Then if you are able to keep borrowing money every year, you would never need to worry about the debt for decades or centuries

That's the truth. P2P network are not able to scale well with large amount of communications

In traditional payment network, there is very little transaction done between participants, most of the transactions are cleared inside one financial institution, and settled between institutions. Similar to trading on an exchange, you never really buy or sell anything, you just play with numbers that represent those things in their database. This makes it very scalable, because everyone is accessing the same database at the same place

However, on P2P network, all the databases are spread across the globe, you have to broadcast transactions throughout the network to update each of them, and those communication will increase exponentially with the increase of network size. So maybe raising the block size is not a long term sustainable solution, but at least it is most simple to implement right now

It is very interesting to see how people reacts to the situation

When a bank is closed during weekend, would people change to mobile bank or just wait until Monday to do transaction again? What if that wait will be one week/month? Or you just pay a little bit more to get your transaction through? Usually people are willing to pay a little bit more to get faster delivery

Greece just had a capital control today and the maximum money you can take out from any ATM is 60 euro, and we all saw that does not affect Euro's value that much, in fact Euro even rose

All of Op's server received an error message: "Warning, the frequency of your transaction is abnormal, thus your transaction is automatically disabled from bitcoin network for 24 hours by Gavin's secret code" 

Or the other way: A Macro payment channel which pays millions of dollars. In today's system it will cost you a fortune to transfer millions of dollars internationally

Actually banks are already begin to handle the micro payments through 3rd party payment processors to , they never charge you for a small fee, but once they accumulated to be above 2-3 dollar, you will receive a bill

Varoufakis mentioned that they might create some cryptocurrency and backed by Greek government. If it succeeds, then people will know that even a clone of bitcoin can save a country, then what bitcoin can achieve will be above the Mars  

Decentralization is the future

The centralized system around the world have all showing sign of split and internal conflicts, no majority party is a norm now. When people are getting more self sustainable and have variety of opinions, a general agreement can not be reached in a centralized system. We just need one basic consensus, and the rest is up to everyone himself, minimal compromise

Volatility is relative. People tends to think that their fiat money's value is stable, this is because people are using it as a standard unit of value, then the value of other things start to fluctuate against it. In fact fiat money's value drops quickly against many things like gold and house, or bitcoin. People use fiat money as standard unit of value because it is easy for accounting

When people use bitcoin as a standard unit of value, then other thing's value will start to drop against it

The biggest problem towards mass adoption is that people's income is not received in bitcoin

In today's fiat money system, many large projects were setup with loan of fiat money, and then money trickle down level by level, so that every employee receive fiat money as income in the end

If you want to use bitcoin everywhere, then only the bitcoin accepting entrepreneurs have the ability to create bitcoin income (And those income are still small part of their main business), they have to actively spend the bitcoin as salary and purchasing from lower supplier to make it circulate

However, due to anti-inflation nature of bitcoin, everyone who get bitcoin will hoard at least half of them, thus after several hand changing, there is essentially nothing left in circulation. Because people are not forced to use bitcoin, when bitcoin is not enough for the transaction, they will consider some other alternatives. In fact, they are more likely to spend fiat money which is dropping in value all the time, and there is never a shortage of fiat money

Of course, many years down the road, when many people have hoarded enough bitcoins as saving, they will start to spend constantly, since their income will be coming from bitcoin's appreciation, that will be the mass adoption time

It will be a good opportunity for people to re-think many critical questions during this abnormal time:

1. Is it possible for every individual in a country to become richer (e.g. pay back their debt and have some saving) without increase the total debt level of the whole country?

2. Who are the beneficiaries of the increased debt, and who are the ones that get hurt the most?

To expand the community is the key to success, but mining concentration definitely does not help to get more people involved. Bitcoiner usually started with mining, and get to know the other aspects later on. We need good more businesses to sell millions of miners to individuals to let them experience money creation in bitcoin ecosystem, and they will feel the difference with fiat money system where no one except the banks are allowed to create money

If the debt is written off, ECB will not get their money back, but their money was created out of nothing anyway. But that might cause a large scale of default from many other southern European countries, and that will hurt the banks' plan: Those money out of thin air should belong to banks but if everyone is like Greece, just borrow and spend those money, then they are actually printing money for Greece! Banks should only print money for themselves, everyone else should borrow from them and pay an interest, that's the plan  

I guess if Greece somehow get out of EMU and start to print money for themselves, their economy will be improved very quickly. And that's ECB scared of, because other countries in EMU will follow suit

This principle does not apply to countries, since their central bank can always create money for government to borrow and repay the debt. However, by joining EMU, Greece gave up the right of money creation, thus become heavily debt laden, this is their mistake

In fact, if you look deeper into this principle, you will find out that central banks are always exempt from this principle, because they could always create money and repay the debt as wish. If Greece defaults, ECB will just print some money to cover the hole

Remember that Rothschild said: "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws"

And this one suits the situation even better:
"The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests."

In fact, the great majority of people are incapable of comprehending the tremendous unfavorable condition set by today's monetary system, and they even appreciate it and worship banks and blame those who can not return the loan (It is impossible to repay all the loan in today's monetary system, if someone managed to do that, others will be more heavily debt laden)