Think of mining as a lottery.  Each hash is like a lottery ticket.   A slower miner will produce less tickets per hour than a faster one but any ticket could win.  If you and I enter a lottery and you have 50x as many tickets as me it doesn't guarantee you will win.  You are more likely to win, and if we played every week with you have 50x the tickets in the long run you would win 50x as often as I do but I would still win some weeks.  Even if you had a million tickets and I had, I would win some weeks.  Miners don't make progress towards a block a losing ticket is just a losing ticket and your mining rig tries another one.  We say a block takes an average of 10 minutes because it the odds of each hash solving a block are so low that it takes all the miners in the world making attempts for 10 minutes on average to end up with a "winner".

A Bitcoin ATM could use the same "flmsy piece of cover-your-ass-paper" by getting a foreign bank to legal declare they have done the min checks before issuing cards to cardholders and then the Bitcoin ATM could offload that responsibility as well by accepting the card and PINs from that issuer as a proxy from direct verification.


There is no evidence anyone from any agency made this company take fingerprints and facial scans.  Have you used coinbase?  Did they start requiring a facial scan and fingerprints as well as scans of passport?  Two posts up you were applauding another startup which doesn't take these steps.  If the requirements were forced by FinCEN wouldn't it seem likely that all ATM companies would have the exact same facial scan and handprint capture in their ATMs?   It isn't like this second startup is hiding with their very public website and news stories.   Wouldn't that seem to indicate it wasn't FinCEN making some special "Bitcoin needs handprints" rule and instead it was just the action of an individual company deciding to play it safe.

One possibility is that the attackers weren't able to get the Bitcoins from their last round of theft off the exchange before MtGox shut down.  If MtGox hasn't yet removed those Bitcoins from their account they likely know they are going to lose the coins anyways so why not create a little chaos.  Plus if they can drive the exchange rate on other exchanges down (maybe not to $100 but down some amount) and buy Bitcoins cheaper on other exchanges.

Of course MtGox could have avoided all this by halting trading when they halted withdraws.

Yeah it is called peering arrangements.  That is how a card from one issuer can work in the ATM of another issuer.  However part of the peering agreement is that each issuer WILL do AML/KYC.  For a card from slovenia national bank of snow to work on a US ATM network someone stated they do the min checks required by law.  Now the reality is there are tons of shady outfits which don't.  Eventually those shady cards stop working in US ATM networks.  Of course for each one shutdown, another one opens up.  Nothing prevents a Bitcoin ATM to reach a peering arrangement with card issuer by offload the KYC obligation on them.  

I mean do you think ATM operators, or banks, or card issuers, or western union want to do ANY KYC stuff.  It doesn't make any money, it just adds cost.  They do it because they have to.

There ARE NO BITCOIN SPECIFIC AML/KYC requirements.  None.  Absolutely none.  If a particular ATM operator is doing x,y, and z it is because the operator believes x, y, and z is what they need to do to compy with general money transmitter AML/KYC requirements.

There is no regulatory in the US saying "cash ATMs" can do whatever they want but "Bitcoin ATMs" need handprints and photos of passports.  It is that operator who is decided to be cautious and make to without access to the existing networks.   Tomorrow someone could reach an agreement to have all of Chase's networks dispense Bitcoins instead of cash and there would be no different requirements on them than existing right now.


If you still don't get it, you simply don't want to and I think we can both agree we are wasting each other's time.

Not only is it wrong, even if CA wanted to make bitcoins, legal tender they have no authority to do as that is reserved by the federal government.  So unless CA has successfully fought a civil war and become an independent nation before making bitcoins "legal tender" we can safely assume the author of the article has no idea what legal tender means.


CA law makes it illegal for someone to mint, or circulate any money but the money of the United States.  It was a very poorly written bill a long time ago.


In theory that prohibition could apply to Bitcoin miners or Bitcoin merchants, but it would also apply to someone circulating a euro note.


The proposed bill would change that section to read like this


So as long as you don't pass your money off as "the money" of the United States it wouldn't be prohibited.   This was likely the original intent of the existing law anyways.  Someone wrote it sloppy and it really didn't matter until now because a case could be made that miners are breaking the letter of the law even if it wasn't intended to be that board.  Notice how the bill passed unanimously this is more a correcting the grammar of the existing code than anything else.  There is no reason to believe it was the intent of the original bill to ban Bitcoin more than 100 years before Bitcoin was created.

If you can pay by bankwire you can use BitSimple ( https://BitSimple.com ) and you will receive your purchased coins the same day, usually within an hour.

Not in the US.  Please name an anonymous prepaid card which allows you to withdraw cash from any ATM.  You won't find one, maybe prior to Patriot Act when AML/KYC took a giant leap up in restrictions.

Tangible Cryptography.

Is January 2012 old enough?
Never lost a single satoshi of company or customer funds.  
Never broke a trade ("high risk" abort).
Paid back every satoshi borrowed with interest.
Was shut down by the state of virginia, nobody but company lost a penny, relocated, restructured, and now operates as a direct broker of bitcoins then never holds customer coins.   Nothing to have frozen because users hold their own coins up to the point of sale.

Still pretty sure BitPay would meet your criteria as well and I am sure there has to be at least a couple more.

If there was a machine in an airport which allowed you to "slot in" dollars and get Euros (only one way) would you call it a Euro vending machine?

The Bitcoin ATMs don't have to work that way but they do need to conduct KYC/AML checks and verifications.  The reason your citibank ATM doesn't verify any information at the time of use is because you are using your citibank debit card, and to obtain that you opened an account, and at the time they opened your account they conducted their KYC/AML checks and verifications.

There is no special "Bitcoin rule" which prevents a Bitcoin ATM from operating the same way.  There is no reason a traditional bank ATM network couldn't offer bitcoins right from their existing ATMs if they wanted to.  

However for a startup that type of model becomes a chicken and egg situation.  How useful is a Bitcoin ATM which requires an account and Bitcoin ATM card when none of your potential customers have one?  How many customers are going to go to your ATM find out it only works for account holders, go back home, open an account with you, enter all their sensitive information, supply you the documentation online, wait for it to be verified, then wait 3-5 days for their Bitcoin ATM card to arrive in the mail so they can then go back to the ATM to use it?  Starting to see why they did verification at the time of use.

Bitcoin isn't at $119 unless you would like to sell me some of your coins at $119?

The GoxCoinIOU / GoxBucksIOU exchange rate is at $119.

No way to know without an outside audit.  As far as "perfectly legal", MtGox isn't totally unregulated.  They are registered as a "financial services company" (or whatever the designation is) in Japan.  I am not going to try and pour over the regs in Japanese but I am pretty sure there is so law on the books which prohibits a financial services company from trading against its own customers to profit from their loss and rigging the trade by creating precipitating the event which led to the trading losses.

So could they be doing that?  Who knows?  It is just as likely that the buyers are simply discounting the odds.  If you think your chances of redeeming GoxCoin IOUs are "only" 400% worse than redeeming GoxBuck IOUs then the price is a good one.  Some may be speculating that MtGox likely handed attackers a small fortune in coins but it probably wasn't every single coin.  Say MtGox owes depositors 300,000 BTC and they foolishly lost 100,000 BTC to "hackers" (if you can call someone asking you to pay them again a "hacker").  That means even in a bankruptcy situation depositors are only looking at a 33% haircut.  If you buy a GoxCoin IOU for 20 cents on the dollar and get 67 cents on the dollar well you will make a profit.

If there ever was an entity that met the definition of a "zombie exchange" it would MtGox.  They have done so many things which would have annihilated other companies a long time ago.  The only thing which historically would have been a worse bet than a multi-year short on Bitcoin would be betting on the demise of MtGox.

I am not sure where MtGox finds the neverending stream of new marks willing to relentlessly pour cash and coin into their coffers but no matter what happens they always seem to do. They are the only exchange to have a song written about them ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ku1A5Ox8U ) and getting "goxxed" has been a community term which has been generalized to events beyond the exchange. 

I mean maybe that blue ball has magical powers?

They make money off of trades.  They don't make money off of fixing their withdraws. 

Perfect system for MtGox is that they never open withdraws and traders convert all their balances to trading fees and MtGox.

If the value of depositor funds is x and MtGox collects 0.5% (both sides) on each trade then after trades equal to 1000x ( 0.995^1000), 99% of depositor funds will have been converted into fees.  MtGox does a single one time withdraw for the remaining 1% and clears the books quasi legally.

Pretty much the same concept that results in poker sites ending up with 70% to 90% of the funds deposited.

Sad thing is the OP joke was almost on the money.

https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20140220-Announcement.pdf

The next person who accidentally sends them 2 BTC?

Listen to kjj and wheatstone.

This is often known as an xy problem
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem

Proposing solutions for a system you don't understand is almost never successful.

You can't import a privkey unless the wallet is unlocked.
What was the format of the privkey?  Don't post it here for obivous reasons.  If you are unsure of the format just report what is the first digit and length of the key.

Also rule #1 which applies to any technical support situation.  The error message was something like .... is useless.  Copy and paste the exact error mesage.

Obvious shill is obvious.  4 posts all "innocent" inquiries about a scam site.   I remember the days when scammers really worked hard to pull of a successful scam.