That sounds more plausible... Wouldn't be bought up, but the governments might devise a plan to ensure all cash gets turned digital, and perhaps set a deadline where physical cash is no longer legal tender.

Cash is so restricted, now, it's been made impossible to (legally) use in a lot of transactions...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/27/cyprus-emergency-restrictions-cash-withdrawals-banks
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-11/spain-to-limit-cash-transactions-to-fight-tax-fraud-correct-.html
http://english.people.com.cn/90777/8149850.html
http://rbth.ru/business/2013/03/25/russia_to_ban_cash_transactions_over_10000_24203.html

etc.

yeah, but cars increase government revenues both in all the permits/regulations and the gas tax. It'd be revenue-stupid for governments to force eco-friendly means of transport. OTOH, Bitcoin threatens to decrease tax revenues by making taxes easier to evade (similar to cash transactions, which are heavily discouraged in most countries, either by criminalizing large cash transactions, forbidding large withdrawals, or even making it semi-criminal to have substantial amounts of cash on-hand).

USD wire withdrawals @ Gox are currently backlogged over a month, either because of severe liquidity problems, or because no bank wants to touch a black market exchange operating in the US.

Banks are being smart here, and it'd be smart for everyone in the US not to do business with exchanges not compliant in every state and country they do business in (certainly not for ideological reasons, but simple practical reasons). I have no idea if B-B is or isn't fully compliant. If any exchange serving US customers has not put up the tens of millions required to be compliant in all 50 states (if they should choose to operate in all 50), the money's at risk of never being seen again, or in limbo for years while the USG sits on its hands, waiting to refund the money back to users.

Basically, any exchange which hasn't announced $50m+ in initial capital funding or a partnership with a company having all the required licenses/permits, is probably operating unlawfully if serving US customers and placing funds with them is a risky action.

Best bet is probably to find individuals who irregularly buy/sell in some circle of trusted friends/associates.

Fwiw, almost every Bitcoin exchange knowingly operates unlawfully right now. It costs tens of millions in bonds and fees (on top of exorbitant annual fees) to get the proper licenses just to operate everywhere in the US. Banks often end up being the enforcers of these state laws because they don't want to touch something illegal (unless it's a drug cartel, I guess). MtGox, for instance, partly because of the CoinLab SNAFU which may've resulted in a totally legal US BTC exchange, is basically a black market waiting for more seizures and cease-and-desist letters.

However, there are plenty of individuals willing to trade cash for BTC, which is important because a broad ban on Bitcoin would be completely unenforceable, which is one of the reasons Bitcoin is so valuable.

They could even bump up the stakes by quietly having an ASIC farm in waiting (wouldn't have to be as big as in your scenario), DDoS all pools so difficulty plummets, then when difficulty changes, bring the farm online and double-spend as much as able to erode confidence and perhaps even convince some merchants to stop accepting BTC. At next difficulty change, halt the DDoS against pools and get everything in order to have all BTC exchanges served at once, while letting everyone mine until next difficulty change. At next difficulty change, shut down and seize funds from all exchanges able, then point their gov ASIC farm back to their old job of bruteforcing encrypted messages, letting the network semi-organically bring itself to a difficulty death spiral due both to the price plummet (due to many successful double-spends and sudden failure of many exchanges) and the huge dropoff in hashpower from the gov ASIC farm being pointed somewhere else.

There are a whole bunch of ways government could sabotage Bitcoin. A truly epic $5000-$5 pump and dump would be one way... If the gov't spent enough, they could slowly build up to $5000, then dump to $5 and artificially keep the price down.

There are plenty of alternative ways to really disrupt Bitcoin, though. You can think of plenty of ways to disrupt Bitcoin while sitting on the can - it's just they all require a ton of cash, and a lot of effort to squash something which hasn't yet proven itself a major threat. Hmm... but then there's the CDC creating new strains of infectious diseases to fight... Anyway, I like the "Satosh Capture" route https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=151367.0 

Wouldn't everyone then place orders on the "meta-exchange" which could probably be done for a lower fee? I'd imagine maybe a .5% commission if done on the meta-exchange's books/engine, but it lists everywhere else for a .6-1.2 commission, and if it gets filled elsewhere, the order-placer pays the fee of the exchange which filled it? That'd be similar to what Bitfinex did - dunno about other implementations...

I'd simply suggest to use escrow from a very high-trust person like John K, who I think will even do m-of-n escrow transactions to almost eliminate third-party-risk.

Another great security is to ensure you do business with people relatively local in case you need to collect through the legal system or appeal to relatives of the person -- at the very least, people within the same jurisdiction as you (and confirming ID is great -- a rather ghetto way of doing this, without relying on scanned gov't IDs, as example, would be to send a postcard with a code on it to the person's alleged address and have them relay the code to you when they receive it).

There are plenty of places to gather an idea of someone's trustworthiness, from WoT to the forum's rep system. Bitcoin (as an "ecosystem") has tons of functionality for determining trustworthiness and doing low-trust or no-trust transactions, but you need to be diligent. Even the largest-by-volume exchange, MtGox, has a terrible habit of fiat withdrawal blackouts of weeks, or in the current case, over a month - so certainly any company or individual can fail to meet advertisements, and that's why it's a great idea to get paranoid.

Oh, hey - that's pretty decent. Thanks for link. Was wondering same as OP. They even have an exchange I've never even heard of being tracked, and having all Lasts on the top bar is great for trying to establish a rough average. Awesome.

FTFY 

Fwiw, there was once some really clever malware which went around (something associated with the first incarnation of GLBSE -- don't recall specifics). It'd monitor clipboard data and if it detected a BTC address, it would change the address to the attacker's address, so when you paste it in a client to send BTC somewhere, it'd end up going to the attacker unless you were careful about verifying the addresses. It was a great lesson for me (even though I didn't lose anything) to triple-check pasted addresses.

OOo. I was wrong, but I think the posts (well - his first reply, anyway) were clearly on-topic. It's a thread about selling a particular item. Someone else is willing to sell the particular item cheaper.

Would it be off-topic for someone to post in a thread displaying "[WTB] X-AT9280m 10BTC" that they'd purchase the same unit for 10.1BTC?

(ETA: just in case of mis-communication, I'm pleasantly surprised by what you did, BB)

There are, for the most part, no rules on politeness here. BTCTalk is firmly opposed to optimism.

You gave yourself good advice. 

Hm. Maybe it's time to really unpeg Bitcoin from the USD and instead get an exchange running where you trade HT (Hooker Time, measured in 10m lease units) for BTC. If it grew large, there would need to be some type of grading system. The Sheldon scale might be appropriate.

Wrong.


Makes me happy.

"Bitcoins are on their way"

Hoorah!

An additional caution:
Forum profiles can be bought and sold without notice given the the community. This is allowed by the forum admin, if only because disallowing it would be impossible to enforce effectively. Unless you trust me not to exploit this, for instance, you should not assume with full confidence that if you PM "Kluge," you will be talking to the person presently typing this message.

The same is, of course, true with BTC services. Just because Super-Trustworthy-Guy owns Trustable-Service, you should be aware that ownership could change without notice at any given time, and Super-Trustworthy-Guy may've even sold his forum and email account to Super-Dodgy-Guy. Beware of that scenario, which has happened, when using any service with a web wallet.

How do you plan on dealing with customs seizures like what frequently happened with the BTC cig seller from Moldova?

Not really. The difficulty doesn't necessarily make Bitcoin any more or less secure. Difficulty doesn't make Bitcoin "work" - it could run perfectly fine if the network were made up of 80kh/s so long as it was very expensive to purchase/lease 1kh/s of hashpower.

Put another way - right now, it costs maybe $125 for 1GH/s with the algorithms BTC uses, and the total network hashpower is ~225TH/s. So, @ $125/1GHps the network "costs" around $28.13M.

Let's say it's the 90s and everyone's hashing on an AMD K6, and (out of my ass) let's say it provided 100h/s for $125. The NV1, RAGE and whatever was out, but my point works out whether GPU mining would've been viable or not. Anyway, the Bitcoin network could still do everything securely if, in total, it still cost $28.13M for the active hardware - it's just the total network hashpower would be something like 225KH/s (no guarantees on my math, there!). This wouldn't be a problem because difficulty would be EXTREMELY low (relative to now). The network would still be secure because it'd cost everyone else the same amount of cash for the same % of total network hashrate. The amount miners earm would basically scale, too - so 1kh/s in 199x's theoretical Bitcoin would earn the same as 1GH/s in 201x's Bitcoin.

Bitcoin doesn't become more secure based on hashpower, but based on how expensive it is to buy a % of the network hashpower. At its heart, though, Bitcoin's really secured by technological advancements in solving BTC's problems being made available publicly. BTC's been really lucky so far to see a relatively smooth transition from CPUs to GPUs to FPGAs to true ASICs without someone quietly developing the hardware and software behind closed doors and suddenly annihilating the Bitcoin network. That kind of scorched Earth attack would require a lot of remedial work on the devs' parts, rapid response by the network's infrastructure facilitators, and strong public awareness of a HUGE failure in Bitcoin. The network may be unusable for days or weeks, and it'd probably involve a ton of reversed transactions. In the same way the Bitcoin network is secured by honest nodes and miners making up the vast majority of service, it's also essential the network be secured by the vast majority of involved designers and developers being honest and open.

uhh... and on-topic @ OP Q (sorry - drinking night): I agree with D&T. It's kind of like asking if the ICBM could've been invented in the 20's. I can't think of a reason it absolutely couldn't (but there probably are some unsolvable problems not obvious), but it'd take many more stretches of the imagination to go from what they had to what they could do. The infrastructure was mostly there back then. DSL and cable Internet connections were becoming commercially available about halfway through. There were encryption schemes which probably would've worked just as well (for their time). The low hard drive capacity may've crippled growth without some type of hardcore pruning system, though (if BTC used MD5, how much smaller would current blockchain be?). Hard drive reliability back then would've been a much more significant problem than now, too. Maybe a 1997-1999 launch would theoretically work if "Satoshi" was about 10x as intelligent and made all the necessary foundational advancements himself. Much earlier, though, and there's probably too much missing to make it work.