"According to FinCen's website, the agency received Mt. Gox's registration on Thursday" where the WSJ conveniently found it in time to publicize it on Friday.

A government agency receives an application and publicizes it on its website on the same day or within a day? Hmmn.

Gox may not yet have been told their registration has been approved. Come to think of it - the story doesn't actually say it has been approved. Is approval necessary? I assume Gox has to get some kind of response before they can breathe any easier.

FinCEN doesn't approve registrants. It processes the registration and enters them into a database.
PirateAt40 could register as an MSB and they would still list it.
What registering does is express intention to comply with the regulations.

You people keep saying this, but its a false dilemma. There is no reason bitcoin couldn't hover around .00005 USD (only traded and used within the niche community), or continue to boom and bust, or whatever.

0 or 100,000 are not the only options.

I value mine because I want to buy a house some day, and that's the only thing I plan on going into debt for.  Sure, if you save up a shit ton of money, you can probably buy a house in cash some day, but you're actually probably better off paying the mortgage, especially if you're buying at today's interest rates.  If you can do better investing in the stock market whatever the percentage you're paying on a mortgage, then you're better off with a mortgage than without one.  If you can't, you're better off just paying off a house as quickly as possible.  I feel like I could do better in the stock market and the mortgage interest rates would have to go up substantially for that to change.

Because MtGox PR doesn't exist - they should have announced this everywhere.

USD is in de-facto deflation right now. It may collapse at some point, but don't expect it to happen in the immediate future.

Bitcoin Exchange Makes Apparent Move to Play by U.S. Money-Laundering Rules
Company Listed as Mt. Gox Registers With Treasury Department
By JEFFREY SPARSHOTT
WASHINGTON—The world's largest bitcoin trading exchange appears to have taken a key step to comply with U.S. anti-money-laundering rules and potentially avoid additional run-ins with authorities.

A company listed as Mt. Gox this week registered as a money services business with the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, according to FinCen's website. Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, which says it handles about 80% of all trading in the virtual currency, couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

FinCen in March started applying traditional money-laundering rules to "virtual currencies" amid growing concern that new forms of digital cash are being used for illicit activities. Those rules mandate that exchanges register with FinCen, follow stricter bookkeeping requirements and report transactions of more than $10,000.

About a month after the edict, the Department of Homeland Security seized an account tied to Mt. Gox, alleging the company and a subsidiary were conducting transactions "as part of an unlicensed money service business."

According to FinCen's website, the agency received Mt. Gox's registration on Thursday. The online form listed a street in Dover, Del., as the company's address.

A spokesman for FinCen had no comment on the development. Earlier this month, FinCen's director, Jennifer Shasky Calvery, said that "those offering virtual currencies must comply with…regulatory requirements, and if they do so, they have nothing to fear from Treasury."

Mt. Gox's move may bring the company in line with Treasury's rules, but could also open the exchange to increased regulatory attention.
"It gives them the color of legitimacy," said Mercedes Kelley Tunstall, a partner with the law firm Ballard Spahr LLP, who works on banking compliance issues. "It suggests that they get it, that they need to be careful in these areas. It also means that now they have put themselves on the radar screen and they need to have policies and procedures to watch out for fraudulent activity and illegal activity."

Mt. Gox already had taken measures to beef up its identification procedures for users who deposit or withdraw traditional currencies, a central tenet of anti-money-laundering procedures. In May the company said all user accounts must be verified in order to perform any fiat currency deposits or withdrawals. Verification includes submission of a valid photo ID and proof of residence such as a utility bill or tax return, according to the website.

At the time, Mt. Gox said it had more than doubled its verification support staff.

More recently, Mt. Gox halted U.S. dollar withdrawals. The company said it needed to make systems improvements amid increased trading volume.

The recent regulatory attention paid to bitcoin-related companies has likely caused some banks to become leery of doing business with such companies, attorneys have said.

But becoming registered with FinCen or state agencies that have requirements for money transmitters may not make financial institutions more comfortable working with such firms, Ms. Tunstall said.

"I think that the virtual currency industry still needs to mature before banks will feel comfortable with them," she said.
The rising popularity of virtual currencies, while no more than a drop in the bucket of global liquidity, is being fueled by Internet merchants, as well as user concerns about privacy and jitters about traditional currencies in Europe.

—Andrew R. Johnson contributed to this article.

It's impossible to convince an entire market not to sell.  I agree that the price right now is pretty much 100% psychological, but I think long term it will be based on more market fundamentals than it is now.

In two years?  I'm bullish, but not as much as most people here are.  My bet is $200 - $500.  Keep in mind that most people still haven't even heard of bitcoin, and it's easy to say that it's going to be $1,000 or $5,000, but it's much harder to increase a $1.1 billion dollar economy by a factor of ten than it is to increase a $1.1 million economy by a factor of ten, which is what would be necessary to sustainably increase the price of bitcoins to $1,000.

And that is the reason people should invest.  BTC is either $0 or $100,000+.  Seems like a good gamble to me.    What are the odds really?  I would think at least 50/50 at this point in the game.  Earlier on I would have said it was more like 20/80 or 10/90 that BTC would succeed.  Now is the time to get into for those that want less risk.  Why?  Bitcoin already has traction as the #1 cryptocurrency.  VCs are pouring money into it and there has been a decent amount of press and there are people already using it regularly.