I emailed them yesterday, they said it would take up to 15 days until SEPA wire transfers are reinstated.

You can sell Mt.Gox USD to other people though & ask them to send wires or western union.
I sold $2k to chinese people & 450 bucks to a guy on these forums in the last 72 hours.

10 BTC is currently $103 dollars.
http://www.bitcoincharts.com/

Latvia is not poor. Latvia is a first world country with a GDP of $14,700 per capita and houses 2.2 million people.

India has a GDP of $1192 per capita ($99 per month)  and is a third world country which houses 1/6 of the world population at 1153 million people.
http://search.worldbank.org/quickview?name=%3Cem%3EGDP%3C%2Fem%3E+per+capita+%28current+US%24%29&id=NY.GDP.PCAP.CD&type=Indicators&cube_no=2&qterm=india+gdp
10 bitcoins is more than a typical indian makes working 16 hours a day in a month.

Your analysis is good but I disagree $1700 is the peak.
There is every reason to believe AU/oz will break $2000 within 12 months. Every fiat currency is in shambles right now except the Swiss franc, Chinese yuan and yens. Stock markets are crashing like the Titanic.

I've been holding since prices were at $1100 per ounce, I'd still buy in at $1.7k if I had significant extra fiat right now
(which I don't, I'm terrified of holding $ or € long term right now)

$80 is many weeks (or even a month's worth) of salary to billions of people.

I think you're forgetting what is pocket change to you or me, is life-changing money to someone else.
People who can afford internet connection, computers let alone mining rigs are ~5% of the world population.

Consider the fact $100 is the median salary in India before taxes. 10 bitcoins at $10.5 each is more than 100% of that.
And India is not even nearly the poorest country out there.

1 bitcoin per month would be realistic, but still too much for a lot of people

Yes it's unrealistic, but it works.
How do you "play" USD or Euros? You don't. Due to the gigantic market volume it's impossible.

The only profits to be had are either high frequency trading forex bots, or long term holding.
On Mt. Gox, BTC can fluctuate anywhere between 5 to 500% in 1 day just because someone with $200k dollars is placing buy and sell orders.  
That's not a stable market.

What would stabilize the market is billions of $ of daily volume.
No single person could fill 50% of all buy/sell orders in the orderbook in a few seconds & crash the price to 0.01 as happened a month ago.

Mining is a bad business for a rogue government like NK.  
The earnings are prob. much lower than farming WoW/Runescape/Lineage gold.

There is a big shortage of electricity in the country (all imported), and there aren't many profitable $/mhash cards on the market any longer. All they'd find is new 68/69xx cards in bulk

Unless they can smuggle in some special, cheap FPGAs or ASIC boards,
they will have huge upfront costs for potentially little reward (esp. if the price plunges down when they need to liquidate BTC).

It makes much more sense to buy cheap computers & hire slaves or prisoners to farm gold for you in online games. Unethical but cost effective.
http://blogs.forbes.com/insertcoin/2011/06/02/chinese-prisoners-forced-to-farm-world-of-warcraft-gold/

Nah, no hurry or alpaca rush.. I just withdraw once every 48 hours on all pools I mine on.

This is the error:

That's by manual payout.

True.. 90% of the world's population can't afford spending $80 (current rate) per month to buy random services and products online. Most people live on $1-$5 per day (that is, just to survive)
Hell, even lower and middle class people in first world countries are struggling just to pay bills.

Remember that people in first world countries with internet access are a minority.

I'll be spending bitcoins as long as there is something viable to buy.
I don't see a big market so far; the only things I've bought is extenders from Cablesaurus & beef jerky from bitmunchies.

I have a couple ghash of miners in your pool and noticed payout was broken after the Amazon downtime.
Pool seems to hand out work normally though.

Any ETA on fix? Thanks.

Tbh running 6990's below 800mhash is a waste of a good card.

6870x2 seems to have a better mhash/$ ratio though. You get less mhash per pci-e slot compared to 6990 but it's also heaps cheaper.
Yes it's $100 more than two separate 6870's but these chips overclock very well & you can fit 4 of them on a motherboard.

If you want to fit 8 normal 6870's on any board you'd need to buy a MSI BB Marshall which costs $400+ 8 extender cables.

I always run 2 workers per dual gpu card. Makes spotting downtime a bit easier (though the dropped hashrate would indicate problems anyways).

ADAPTER=0/1 is the syntax in Phoenix, or if you use GUIminer on windows you can just select a core to mine with.

Proportional rewards and variance is what is up with it, a flawed and exploited reward model.

Join a pool which pays a constant amount based on work done, regardless of luck.
There are plenty of options. abcpool.co, deepbit PPS (high fee), eligius, rfcpool, mtred.com etc.

Buying a redeemable Mt. Gox code, by far. Only the sky is the limit on what sort of payments people take and offer for those.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1561.0

After you pay (local wire, moneybookers, LR, Paysafe card, prepaid visas or whatever people want in return) they send you the code immediately.

I'm not saying this necessarily bad, but "Tom" is probably a quite young kid/teen rather than a team of professionals or "we's".

He is referencing juvenile internet memes in some of those transfers (maybe some clever members will notice which ones).
Again, that's not a telltale 'bad' sign, but it gives you a hint.

Yes, edited post.

I have ~$250 Mt. Gox USD for sale (SEPA wire transfer EUR or CHF)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1561.340

Uploaded.to accepts bitcoins as of last month. They're a pretty big player, up there with Filesonic, though not as large as Rapidshare or Megaupload.

I successfully sold $450 Mt. Gox USD to bitcoinTrader. Fast buyer.

Still selling $250
Edit:Reserved to sonba.

If anyone wants to buy $700 on Mt. Gox, I have it for sale now.

SEPA wire transfer in Euros or swiss francs.

I thought 'tentative August 5th' would more or less be true after one delay already.

If the 3 weeks thing is true, yes I'd like them to be returned to account balances.