Nope, they only accept international wire transfers at their bank in Japan.

There are other exchanges in which a domestic (within the U.S.) bank wire may be sent.
 - http://www.BitMe.com
 - http://www.BitFloor.com

And Coinbase can draw (via ACH) from your U.S. bank account.  There are relatively low limits for the first 30 days.

Dwolla is like PayPal in that you can draw funds from your linked bank account and then send them to an exchange (Camp BX or Mt. Gox), however there are restrictions on new users for the first 30 days.

Just launched, http://HotelsForCoins.com (from the makers of PizzaForCoins.com).

Other than that, not much.   

There is:
 - http://www.turismosupremo.com

There might be something else interesting to you from here:
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Travel_.2F_Tourism_.2F_Leisure

Nope, it did not disappear.

But SatoshiDICE did everything correctly (the payouts went to an address used to pay for the wager).  That's not a "normal" way to handle bitcoin transaction it but it is what it is and it works if you know what you are doing.

So likely some customer of Mt. Gox just received your payouts.  Good for them.  Bad for you.

Mt. Gox could easily prevent this from happening.  If you were to try to use Bitcoin-Central to send a wager to SatoshiDICE their system would refuse the withdrawal request.  They've gone through the effort of blocking those addresses for withdrawals, They did it as a service to their customers who might not know how that works.    (There are dozens of gambling services now which do this same thing, so you could still make the mistake at Bitcoin-Central playing on some other gambling site, but not playing on SatoshiDICE.)

Now it is possible Mt. Gox could contact the customer whose account got credited with your winnings and see if that party will voluntarily part with their newfound wealth.  Perhaps that amount has already been withdrawn by that customer and the funds are long gone.  

This would be the same as forgetting a wad of cash in the drawer at your hotel room and then the next guest ends up with it.  It would be right for that person to return it, but they have no idea how.  In that instance the hotel's rental records might help them find the rightful owner. But if you were to contact the hotel and in turn the hotel checks with the guest but there was no cash found or the guest has already vacated, I doubt the hotel would do much more at that point.

[Edit: I do question SatoshiDICE on how hard it is to see the link to "Read this warning first" on their site.  The warning is needed and something like that should show more prominently on their site, in my opinion.   I don't know if that would have helped to have prevented this specific mistake from occurring, but the way it is now very few will notice it.]

The factors that matter in order to give you the best answer include:

 - Where are you located (country)?  [You mention U.S.]
 - How much are you looking to buy?
 - What payment methods do you have available?
 - How soon do you need access to the proceeds?
 - Is privacy important?

A cash payment method might be the easiest, since it involves meeting in-person, handing over cash and receiving bitcoins.
 - http://www.LocalBitcoins.com

Another person might think BitMe.com is the easiest, as you deposit cash at a Chase bank and it gets credited to your BitMe.com exchange account.
 - http://www.BitMe.com


Others won't think that is thie easiest because they've never used market exchanges before (they only know the "retail" concept, where the price is set by the seller.)   Or there is no Chase nearby, then that's not easy.

A fairly comprehensive list of options is compiled here:

 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Buying_bitcoins

A lot of markets have this problem.

Right now, for instance, it is really hard to buy silver bullion -- most dealers are sold out.  You'ld think it seems almost intentional that they are stopping people from buying silver until the price of silver rises again.

See what I did there?

In this instance, FastCash4Bitcoins only holds so much cash in order to buy bitcoins from their customers.  Some of that cash is in their Dwolla account, some is in PayPal, some is in their bank, etc.     So they can only buy as many coins as they can pay for in the specific payment method they've allocated funds to.  They eventually will restock any methods that run low but that takes time due to the slow banking system.  They don't carry enough inventory to handle huge selling days like yesterday, and the impact can last several days.  And FastCash4Bitcoins is probably the strongest cash-out services out there!

Mt. Gox offers the ability to have your account be "Trusted Status (Level 3)",


 - https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20919111-AML-Account-Statuses

Well, the market matures.

A year ago it was the same question except instead of asking how difficult a $400,000 cash-out would be, it was studying how difficult a $100,000 cash-out would be.

Today, that $100,000 cash-out is no longer a problem.  Some months from now, that $400,000 cash-out will possibly not be a problem (thanks to maybe CoinLab, or other liquidity / bulk seller options.)

So you are asking what solution today exists to a problem that almost nobody currently has.  And by the time more people have that need, there will be more solutions available certainly.

In the meantime, someone today doing this would have to wait four days for each of the $100K per-day withdrawals from Mt. Gox to go through.  It's not the end of the world, I wouldn't think.

Bitcoinica did use AliPay as a method for funding accounts but then AliPay (or whatever intermediary Bitcoinica was using) told them to stop.  Then Bitcoinica folded after a security breach.

Does AliPay let you send a payment person-to-person?  If so, then maybe you can find someone willing to sell you bitcons in exchange for your AliPay funds.  

BTC China at one time [Edit: never] took AliPay, but I don't speak the language so can't tell from their site if they still do:
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BTC_China
 - http://www.btcchina.com

Other methods I've seen are three-way transactions.  An example is where you pay for the purchase in China using your AliPay and the item is delivered to the buyer who pays bitcoins to you.  Using an escrow for this lessens the risk, assuming the shipping and delivery information from the vendor can be trusted.

Who mines the blocks?  Mostly pools.  So the pools do have payouts that might be tracked, but you can't know if the individual payouts are to hosted (shared) EWallet addresses or addresses for local Bitcoin clients. 

There are still many block mined back before pools existed in which still have not been spent.  So with those it can be determined that they haven't been sold.  But nowadays that's pretty much impossible to determine.

Welcome to the world of pseudonymous digital currency.

To compute an average means adding up all transactions over a certain set (i.e., period of time, like 24 hours) and then divide that total by the number of transaction quantities occurring during that period of time.

So let's say right now the 24 hour total include just these:

2 BTC @ $49 (happened 23.75 hours ago)
2 BTC @ $48 (happened 23.50 hours ago)
2 BTC @ $36 (happened five hours ago)

Total of all transactions is $266, and involved the quantity of six BTC, so the 24 hour average is $44.33.

Then over the next hour there is only one more transaction that occurs, 2 @ 45.  But the $49 and $48 transactions drop off as they no longer occurred within the last 24 hours.

So after that transaction has occurred then the next time I do the 24 hour average computation it has just:

2 BTC @ $36 (happened six hours ago)
2 BTC @ $45 (happened within the past hour)

Total of all transaction is $162, and involved the quantity of four BTC, so the 24 hour average is $40.50.  

The average went down even though the "last" went up (from $36 to $45).

You can compose a transaction manually using Raw Transactions  (but make sure you know what you are doing ... and spend every bit of the input except for whatever you want to go as fees otherwise the miner gets the unspent balance).  Make sure to pay sufficient fees (e.g., 0.001 for or much more if the size exceeds 10K).   Then you will want to wait until that transaction gets included in a block before you use the change from that transaction  in any other transaction.
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Raw_Transactions

It isn't normal to end up with a whole lot of these miniature payments.  So you probably want to consider whatever actions are causing you to end up with them and consider if that activity is worth the pain caused.

Another approach would be to export just the private keys for Bitcoin addresses you have with any amounts above a threshold (e.g., 0.0002 BTC) (worth about a penny) and then import just those into a new, empty wallet.   There still might be dust transactions associated with those, but other addresses with a balance below a penny would no longer be harming you.

Currently mining is receiving a huge subsidy at 25 BTC per-block.  But eventually the currency issuance will slow, in under four years that rate will drop to 12.5 BTC per-block.  And four years after that just 6.25 per-block, etc.   

So with a declining subsidy (in terms of BTCs), mining fees will need to start making up for the revenue decline.

Bitcoin transaction fees exclusively are what will eventually need to support mining.

Mining needs to exist as bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency.  It's value comes from it being resistant to corruption.    It protects from this by not having an authority.  Instead this functions by making the authority be the consensus of the network.  Because of this, it is vulnerable to a 51% attack.  So the mining subsidy makes it economical to try to perform a 51% attack.

So transaction fees are to support the mechanism that provides protection.

Where did you give out that address?   For instance if you registered a "change address" on Bitcoin-OTC that would be how someone got your address.

This is not the first time a BitInstant customer has done this.  Unfortunately Mt. Gox account numbers don't have a checksum or some other method of preventing this.  Mt. Gox and BitInstant could easily implement some method to protect against this from happening in the future but that is not in place today.

Previously I've seen where BitInstant has contacted Mt. Gox and the funds were eventually recovered but I don't know how long that takes or the likelihood of that appeal ending up being successful (funds transferred to intended account).

Nope, that's not what happened at all.

The problem is the transactions were being made with funds that hadn't confirmed.  That is essentially all it is.  If that's a problem for you, contact the sender and insist that all future payments be sent only using confirmed funds.

They were offline for half a half-week then there was a burst of activity on Tuesday, so lots of service issues, certainly. 

You probably want to inquire in their customer service thread though:

Official BitInstant Support Thread (Active Customer Support)
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128314.0

CAVirtex implements what is referred to as a hosted (shared) EWallet service.  So you have no control over the bitcoins with you withdraw, you are simply submitting a request to CA VirtEx to withdraw and it is up to them to service that request.   

In nearly all instances of legitimate activity your client will know of the withdrawal withing seconds once CA VirtEx broadcasts the withdrawal to the Bitcoin network.   So it is pretty safe to say that if you don't see your withdrawal on the blockchain then VirtEx didn't send it.

This can happen if the EWallet provider uses cold storage for coins, and the current level of coins in their hot wallet is insufficient to serve the demand.  The delay will vary based on approach and security practices surrounding the cold wallet.  For instance, a competing exchange in Europe can only access the cold wallet during business hours since access requires physical access to occur at a bank vault.

There are instances of spam-like activity where a transaction is sent and peer nodes refuse to relay it right way.  That's not the profile of a withdrawal fro CA VirtEx though so that's not likely what happened here.

tl:dr; wait a bit longer.  If you wait more than half a day and still don't see the withdrawal, then contact the exchange.

Looks like you got professional help:

Volatility is not good for a currency, certainly.

One thing contributing to this situation is the lack of good methods to short bitcoin.  Of course these moves over the past weeks have been frothy, and many buyers were simply in it for the momentum --- with itchy trigger fingers.    If there were good methods to short bitcoin, those buyers would not have pushed the exchange rate so quickly.   And during a selloff, those short sellers would become buyers hoping to lock in their gains.

ICBIT.se provides a BTC/USD futures contract that might give a way to short bitcoins.  Others are coming, including CoinSetter and Kraken.

Those will provide liquidity that should help lessen the volatility when they start to gain traction.