For doing over-the-counter trades, you probably want to get yourself set up with GPG and start using that.  When trading on the forums, you might think you are trading with the trusted forum member but in reality it could be a compromised forum account and you are about to send your bitcoins into some scammer's pocket.  With the -otc Web of Trust (WoT), if the person has authenticated, you then are nearly guaranteed that the party you are trading with is truly the same party whose trust history is well documented.

 - http://www.Bitcoin-OTC.com
 - http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#bitcoin-otc-foyer
 - http://www.bitcoin-otc.com/viewratings.php

There's always IRC chat, Skype, GibberBot, text messaging, and Crypto.cat
 - https://crypto.cat

First ponder this question:
  This morning I deposited a $20 at my bank.  Later in the day a friend of mine withdrew cash and got that exact same $20 bill (let's say I had written down the note's serial number).  Is my money at my bank disappearing?


When you have a hosted (shared) EWallet, like what Mt. Gox provides, you do not own that Bitcoin address.  Instead the EWallet provider (Mt. Gox in this case) owns it, and they simply credit your account each time a new payment arrives at that address.

Once those funds are credited, the coins themselves might be moved to a consolidation account, or used for a withdraw by another account holder at Mt. Gox.

The only way to know your balance at Mt. Gox is from the Mt. Gox user interface (or API), and not by monitoring the Blockchain.

All that was saying is that if there were a release of the client where that bug was fixed, then the first transaction that spends from block 0 would be accepted by some nodes (those running the latest software with that fix) and it would be rejected by others (those that hadn't obtained the update).

Thus the blockchain will split, with some mining capacity happily carrying on with the the fork that includes the "block 0 spend transactions", while others are mining a different longest chain which has no "block 0 spend transactions".  Which of the two ends up winning depends on if enough exchanges, merchants and individuals will accept the coins the miners earned from mining on the fork.  If not, miners finding that their coins are worthless abandon the new fork (and the coins they thought they earned) and stick with the version of the client from before the change was made.

Thus that is a hard-fork feature.  

These hard-fork features aren't impossible to roll out, just that they require an economic majority to accept them otherwise you can end up with a forked blockchain.  To avoid this, the Bitcoin.org developers generally don't propose any hard-fork changes unless there is a damned good reason to do so (and a near certainty that the economic majority will accept the change).  So that Satoshi can spend his 50 BTC (plus whatever else has been sent to that address since [Edited: Thanks Foxpup]) is not a good enough reason to implement a hard fork.  And "fixing" it will potentially introduce the risk of this fork occurring, so it won't be fixed for now and this behavior is essentially now part of the protocol.

It isn't even something on the "wishlist":
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist

You can send cash (GBP) in the mail to Bitcoin Nordic (in Denmark):
 - http://www.BitcoinNordic.com


BitInstant is still in trial mode for their Online Bank Transfer method for buying coins using a bank transfer.  You can try there:
 - http://www.BitInstant.com



Of course, as you mentioned BlockChain.info now accepting funds from Barclays Pingit would be a good option, but if you can't use it from your phone, that takes away that option:
 - https://blockchain.info/wallet/deposit-pingit


Another method to buy bitcoins uses credit card through VirWoX.  How that works is you buy Second Life Lindens (SLL) with credit card, then convert those to BTCs and then you can withdraw BTCs.  With being a new user and using credit card there is about a day delay before you can withdraw, as they complete fraud checks.  They also accept MoneyBookers/Skrill.
 - http://www.VirWoX.com


You can purchase bitcoins with UKash from MercaBit.eu, BitcoinNordic.com and VirWoX.


And, as nomnomnom mentioned, there is of course the growing chance you'll find a local trade:
 - http://www.LocalBitcoins.com


And there may be other methods that work for you as well:
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Buying_bitcoins

You are asking if there are any brokers who accept funds in the form of bitcoins that would allow you to purchase stocks on the public markets?

There are none in the U.S. that (yet) provide that.

There are online brokerages in the U.S. that take ACH / direct deposit transfers, which would allow bitcoins to be traded for USDs and then withdrawn as an ACH.  Any Bitcoin exchange that does Dwolla cash-out would work for this:
 - http://www.MtGox.com
 - http://CampBX.com
 - http://FastCash4Bitcoins.com

There is one type of market where bitcoins can be used to speculate on gold, oil / crude (WTI), and dollars:
 - http://ICBIT.se

There is also a bitcoin-based market where a handful of "equities" for unincorporated entities are traded -- MPEX:
 - http://polimedia.us/bitcoin/mpex.php

There are a couple of methods where bitcoins can be used to fund Forex trading accounts:
 - http://www.bit4x.com/
 - http://www.LiteForex.com

There is a hedge fund that announced plans to invest in bitcoins as one of its asset classes:
 - http://www.hedgeweek.com/2012/10/08/174393/emergence-electronic-gold%E2%80%A6

There has been interest in something like what you are describing, but none to-date have progressed to where this is available today:

Real Life Stock Passthroughs (eg AAPL)
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=112363.0

Buy/Sell AAPL with BTC/LTC
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=100688.0

There isn't necessarily a good reason that this isn't available yet today -- as long as the broker performs the same AML/KYC as a broker that accepts fiat does.  Because bitcoins can be used to transfer funds faster than a bank wire transfer even, it wouldn't be surprising to see support for Bitcoin as a funding method be one of the more common requests.  It's a natural fit, so it will likely be happening.  It is likely just a matter of time.

Well, that was an exercise in futility.   There wasn't much of a dip and there's nothing indicating one is forthcoming before New Money Monday arrives.

So buying back at the current market rate of $11.62 means about a 1% gain, which got eaten up by trading fees.  Following the weekend dip strategy this past weekend resulted in a wash, financially.

Perhaps there will be some who made out a little better thanks to having perfect timining, trading out of some coins on Thursday closer to $12 and at least took a percent-and-a-half gain, but for scorekeeping, there was no benefit (nor harm) from doing the weekend dip trade this weekend.  

Now the weekend isn't over, and there still could be a little further dip, however trading volume is at a pathetically low level, just 10K BTC traded in the past 24 hours at Mt. Gox for example.  When that happens, all that needs to happen is for the tiniest bit of buying to propel the exchange rate up three percent, or five percent in a short amount of time.

That doesn't often happen in the middle of a weekend, but sometimes a rally will appear out of nowhere once Monday banking begins at Mt. Gox (which is in Japan, thus Sunday evening in U.S. timezones).

And the only protection against that when playing the weekend dip is to get back in before others speculating on the dip do the same.  And that time is now.

You pretty much nailed it right there.

Mt. Gox has twice now released "transparency" updates in which they share the amount of fiat deposits they received in the prior 30-day period.
This is probably the most useful metric in trying to come up with money flows into bitcoin.   But once that value is transferred into bitcoin, the difference between a pseudonymous digital currency and the traditional monetary systems becomes glaring.

And bitcoin offers a payment system with non-reversible transactions.   Adding a way to reverse transactions would lower its value as a payment system.  Changes to the protocol require acceptance by the economic majority.  The economic majority will not accept a change that lowers the value of Bitcoin as a payment system.

In other words, relief from the threat of being robbed at gunpoint won't be coming from changes to the protocol.  Therefore, other security measures will need to be considered.  Similar risks in other financial matters have been mitigated by requiring two signatures, or by splitting the keys, etc.   That's probably the direction to look with regard to the risk that was raised in this thread.

Currently:
  5,000.10 USD (= 427.359 BTC) (75 Bids)
with 5 days to go.

I suppose if the amount gets to relatively frothy levels (just guessing here, let's say a hundred thousand or more?) that would be a bullish sign.  But auction sites have a very difficult time overcoming the chicken and egg problem so if the value of an online auction site doesn't get to a frothy level, that doesn't say much either way about Bitcoin itself, I wouldn't think.

The only thing that appears to be new was the Guest Checkout section:
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=119183.msg1282351#msg1282351

Well, "paper bitcoins" in the same way that shares of crude oil in an ETF are paper oil (basically a contract representing a physical asset )

Related:

2012-10-08 hedgeweek.com - The emergence of electronic gold...?
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117289.0

Personal check?   In the U.S., Camp BX is likely the only exchange to accept that funding method:
 - http://www.CampBX.com

Bitcoin project on GitHub has been mirrored:

Then a client that requries a hard fork, I suppose, is implemented with a new algorithm that can accommodate that level of difficulty.   Ask again in year 2050 when maybe that might be something to consider putting on the roadmap for the next 25 years that follow.



Currently that server farm would require about 30,000 AMD HD 5970s.

If they were to hold half the mining power and were to drop it entirely, that means that blocks would take 20 minutes each instead of 10 minutes.  Or confirmation would take 2 hours instead of about 1 hour.   And this would persist for about a a month before it would automatically adjust, right back to 10 minutes.


If an actor or cartel has the hashing capacity to increase difficulty 10-fold, and that party is set on doing harm, then we have bigger problems then worrying about how long confirmations take.

That an attacker has immense amounts of computing power becomes a risk is something that has been recognized since day 1.  See Satoshi's orignal paper, or the several hundred forum threads where this has been discussed.

So I have to do this before anything correct? This is the 1st step?
[/quote]

Yup, OTC (and a growing number of other bitcoin-related trading methods) requires GPG.

If you have Windows, GnuPG or GPG4Win. I don't use Windows so I can't make a recommendation.

If you get stuck, you can ask for help on IRC:
 - http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#bitcoin-otc-foyer

So is BDB still used at all? (e.g, for peers.dat and wallet.dat? )  Or will that likely be changing with the upcoming release that includes ultraprune?

So how does that work?  Are you doing account-to-account transfer for the domain?

I once tried explaining mining in a way a seasoned citizen might understand it ... using bingo cards!

 - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/3978/153

Is there a way to protect from the exchange rate shooting up?

It is extremely likely to jump more than twice its value over just a few days nonetheless jumping an order of magnitude or two.

So if you end up with more bitcoins at a value greater than you feel comfortable holding, you then read up on secure wallet storage.  This likely involves using a LiveOS and disconnected from the network printing some paper wallets and then sending funds to those wallets.  Then securing those paper wallets or bringing them somewhere where they are secure.

Coming "real soon" are easier methods of doing M of N, so there would be two people (or two of three even) that would need to agree on the transfer or it technically cannot occur.  And thus you can hand over everything you have but your funds are still secure.

The title is misleading.  It reads as if you are selling ownership of domains, which you clearly aren't.