Very nice.  Tipped you some beer bitcoins (a bitbeer? one beercoin? ).

Writing to him is a waste of time.  He is a zealot.  Write to YOUR representative, voice your opinion and ask him or her point blank if they support Sen. Manchin's dubious (and almost certainly unconstitutional) proposal.

Well that escalated quickly.

The funny thing is the people the most "scared" are the ones who don't own a single satoshi.

There can't be negligence if you voluntarily choose to use a piece of software you have been informed is provided as is and may not be suitable to your needs.

The only negligence would be on the party using the software which failed to conduct their own research on if it was suitable.  So unless it is your belief that MtGox is going to sue MtGox for negligence there will be no lawsuit.

It would be like buying a car "as-is" and then suing because it doesn't meet your needs.  "AS IS" = "AS IS" and is pretty well established in civil law. 

MtGox claims 1M users.  Lets pretend they are all 100% legit, fully verified, no throw aways or duplicates.  Lets also pretend 100% of them may use MtGox in the future.  That would be $300 per user which is an asinine valuation.  Cheaper to let MtGox die in bankruptcy and buy the customer list from the trustee.  Still I guess anything is possible.  Some people have deep pockets and a phobia of just holding their coins.

Saying "$20 per session to talk to someone" is one thing, claiming to be a psychologists is another.  If people want to pay the guy to hear them talk that is fine.  Claiming to be a mental health professional when you are not isn't cool.

The US DOJ got involved.  It makes Japanese regulators look asleep at the switch.

Gross incompetence on a scale which goes magnitudes beyond what MtGox's harshest critics could ever possibly imagine.

I mean in accounting the absolute most basic reconciliation is to balance the chart of account against the actual funds.  The books say we should have x BTC and we check and yup we have x BTC.  The books say we should have y USD and yup we have y USD.  This isn't to say accounting should end there but this is the absolute most basic check and for the story to be believed they simply never did it for years.

In a transaction each input is the unspent output of a prior transaction.  Only the outputs being spent are defined in the transaction.  The number of outputs in the wallet doesn't matter.  If you received the following outputs 1 BTC, 0.1 BTC, 0.2 BTC, 0.05 BTC, 0.01 BTC and you were creating a tx which spends 0.25 BTC the wallet/client might pick the 0.2 BTC and 0.05 BTC.  Those would be the only inputs in the transaction.  The others would remain unspent to be used in future transactions.

The timestamps that Satoshi refers to on a meta level are the blocks in the network.  Transactions are placed in blocks, blocks reference other blocks to form a chain.  This doesn't increase the size of a transaction.

Sharim secret sharing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing ) is an algorithm for sharing a secret as "pieces" between multiple people where some subset is needed to recreate the original secret.  So encrypt your cold storage wallet using SSS which requires n of m keys.   Distribute the m keys to yourself and friends.   Even if n of them conspire against you they would need to be able to retrieve the encrypted keys from secure storage.  Someone which has the encrypted and doesn't know the keyholders would not be able to gain access.

If you are super paranoid put the encrypted secret in deposit boxes in banks in different countries.

And a ton of yuan being deposited.   They also had zero fees and insane volume when the price collapsed just as fast when the inflows of yuan dried up.  

Lower (or no) fees increase trading volume and that lowers spreads and increases liquidity.  In theory this lowers volatility but that in itself is price neutral.  If the price is going down then it would just go down in a more uniform manner.

Of course I do.  My (and all) bitcoins are decentrally stored on the blockchain spread across hundreds of thousands of computer all over the planet.  A wallet contains no bitcoins, it contains keys which allows one to authenticate a request to transfer those bitcoins to the control of a different key (a transaction).   The Bitcoins are in the blockchain, they are always in the blockchain.  I still retain control over the future movement of those Bitcoins if I retain control over the private key(s).  They key(s) don't need to be online.  Now with offline signing the keys don't ever need to be online.

I was speaking more on the law.  Bitcoin is trustless and fungible and should remain so.  That doesn't mean that someone can't be arrested by law enforcement.  Generally speaking accepting currency in good faith for goods or services is not a crime even if the currency is the proceeds of a crime.  The accepting party acting in good faith is not liable for the return of the funds.  However knowingly accepting stolen funds is generally speaking a crime and rarely are criminals allowed to keep the proceeds of a crime.

BitSimple is unique in that you can buy and sell instantly without any funds on site.  The site never holds user funds.  Coins remain in your wallet (where they belong) until you wish to sell them.

Agreed.  BitSimple takes it a step further in that we never hold any user bitcoins.  The transferring a coin to BitSimple IS the sale, and the transferring of a coin to the user IS the purchase.  The only coins in our wallet our company coins.  Users are free to retain control of their private keys, secure their wallet however they best see fit and still have instant liquidity.  There is no need for confirmations so any user can sell their securely held coins at any time by simply making a bitcoin transactions.

Bitcoiners need to start expecting more from their exchanges and not grasping for implausible centralized authority solutions for a decentralized network.

That is my understanding.  Good faith is the important part.  Obviously it doesn't protect someone who knows (or should have a reasonable suspicion) that the money is the proceeds of a crime.   Doing otherwise would undermine the confidence in the currency, much like the OP proposal would fatally undermine the confidence in bitcoin.  If a merchant, user, or exchange can accept Bitcoins in good faith and then have those coins rendered worthless through no fault of their own .... why would they want to accept a bitcoin?  Even if they are interested in crypto-currency they would just support a coin without that risk.

If it were possible this would make me respect the man even more.