Being nice to magpies pays off.

A couple of months ago a pair of magpies were regular visitors to my front door step, where they brazenly hopped around collecting stuff for their nest as I sat inches away.  Since then they've remained regular daytime visitors, often perching on the railing watching me have a cup of tea.  So I got into the habit of throwing food scraps out on to the lawn for them.

This morning when I got up there was a fledgling magpie in my front yard.  It looked so incapable and disoriented that at first I thought it was injured.  All day long its parents have been keeping careful watch over it and swooping anyone who so much as passes my front gate.  Except for me.  They apparently don't give a shit how close I get to it as I potter around my front yard - which is a very good thing as I don't particularly want to have to run the gauntlet every time I leave the house for the next few weeks.

I am a bit worried though as I haven't seen the fledging attempt to fly yet and there are a few neighbourhood cats which have a habit of coming into my yard of a night.  Part of me wants to bring it inside for the night even though I know that's the wrong thing to do.

Pretty bloody tough these days.  And housing costs are ridiculous in the major cities, whether you're looking at buying or renting.  Electricity costs have sky-rocketed here too over the last few years and those two factors combined have a definite impact on most people's standard of living.

The French decision should have no immediate legal impact outside of the EU.  If there are legal challenges in other places, the outcomes will vary according to the specific laws of those jurisdictions.  The issues will be considered de novo in those jurisdictions.

Mark posted a while ago that MtGox was in contact with various financial regulators in Japan.  I don't think he's updated how that's progressing lately but it can take a long time to get decisions about things which don't fit neatly into predefined boxes from regulators.

Places like Australia have a multi-tiered system. We have private as well as public hospitals and you can access health services through government health insurance, private health insurance or even self-pay.  We do have resort like private hospitals, but we don't have the population to support those private hospitals being tertiary care facilities even in our most populous cities.  That's why the major trauma centres and tertiary care units are all located at public hospitals - which are free to everyone (even if you're privately insured, you're not obligated to use your insurance at a public hospital or when you see a private doctor).  

Many public hospitals now private hospitals on the same grounds which means that if you have private insurance or are prepared to pay out of pocket and you don't need to be in a high dependency unit, you can opt for more luxurious accommodation during your stay.  Our private health insurance is cheaper because everyone is already insured at a basic level by the government so private insurers are only covering the "gap" between the fee for service and the government rebate.

There's nothing to stop primary care doctors here charging whatever they like for a consultation - it's just that the patient will have to cover the difference between their fee and the health insurance (government or private) rebate.  

Our system probably wouldn't scale well to somewhere with a population the size of the US.

I don't think transferring the funds to Japan specifically is the issue.  It seems more to be that it receives, holds, and transmits money belonging to others at all.  Many countries require licences if you're doing that even if all of the transactions are purely domestic.

I also think that people are vastly over-estimating the capacity of the exchanges to fight protracted legal battles in foreign countries.  Such fights are extremely expensive and all of the exchanges are relatively new.  While their turnovers might look big, I suspect that none of them have hundreds of thousands of dollars which they can afford to gamble on court cases they may well lose.  For them to continue to exist at all, the exchanges must remain financially viable for their owners.

+1  There are plenty of threads in alt. currencies in which this shitfight can be continued - it shouldn't be shitting up information threads over here.

The Banque de France has an interesting history.  It was a primarily private institution from 1800 to 1946 when it was nationalised.  It was then privatised in 1993.  It's certainly been under private influence for much greater periods than many other central banks.

http://www.centralbanksguide.com/banque+de+france/

The Banque de France is the regulator - it's decision effectively legally defines MtGox as a money transfer business and prohibits it from operating without a licence.  If it's not operating within the law, then it's likely that no bank is obliged to give MtGox an account and they may even be restrained from doing so, not just in France but elsewhere in the EU.

PayPal had to move its operations to Luxemburg and become registered as a bank there in order to overcome EU legal issues, and they'll already been licensed as an electronic money issuer in the UK prior to that.  PayPal literally now acts as its own bank in Europe.

It's really not as simple as finding another bank because that wouldn't solve the problem of MtGox needing a license in order to continue offering money transfers under its current business model.

If you look at PayPal, it has different legal status in different places - it's a bank in EU, a licensed deposit-taker in Australia, a licensed money transmitter in the US.  In other countries, it's subject to lots of local regulations about whether it can transmit funds across borders, what methods of deposit it can accept, and whether or not it can hold user funds.  They have to run their business differently in different countries - just like any international business must  - and the Bitcoin exchanges will have to do that too.  

Off-shore banks are certainly one option, but they don't necessarily offer any particular advantage over channelling transfers through the existing Hong Kong account.

There is obviously a financial burden which comes with having to operate differently in different locations and it may be that Bitcoin exchanges are more viable if they each stick to servicing one region than if they try to operate in multiple markets which all have different regulatory frameworks.

Much as I hate to defend Atlas, I don't think that learning Javascript is beyond his capabilities.  Whether what he hopes to accomplish can be achieved with a rudimentary knowledge of Javascript is another issue altogether, but sometimes the only way you learn that your own skill-set and depth of knowledge aren't sufficient for a particular task is when you try to apply them in a real world situation.

That's not a criticism of you Atlas.  All of us have some things we're already accomplished at, some things we're OK at, and some things where we don't have sufficient expertise to do the job ourselves at this point in time (for me its databases - I can put one together if I really have to, but if it's for something important it would be better to give the job to someone more skilled).  

I know it's sometimes hard for you to accept, but a lot of skill development comes from doing something repeatedly over a long period of time.  It annoys the hell out of my kids sometimes that I'm better at some things than they are but I always point out to them that down the track their capabilities will be greater because they started out with more knowledge in those areas than I did.  For those of us who aren't born geniuses, ability is a combination of knowledge and experience.

If that $200,000 includes the posting of a performance bond, then it's a trivial amount compared to the total amount of funds passing through a major exchange.

Where I think it's difficult for MtGox is that they probably hadn't planned on this level of growth happening so fast when Mark took over the business from Jed.  Both their client base and the amount of money they were dealing with grew very rapidly and they seem to have been playing catch up ever since.  They probably weren't capitalised sufficiently to cope with that rapid expansion because they didn't expect it to happen within months.

They may have been better to stick to one market until things stabilised rather than trying to establish a presence in multiple continents - Paypal didn't launch its Australian service until 2005 and even so they ran into legal issues which mean they operate a little differently here than elsewhere in the world - but hindsight is 20/20 and MtGox tried to be all things to all people. This may make them vulnerable if they run into issues in several locations at the same time - and this is the kind of risk which solid, professional business plans take into account.

New exchanges can learn from the MtGox experience - and they should.  A viable exchange needs more than just efficient software to process transaction.  It needs some serious start up capital, and hopefully we've reached the point where new players who don't have those financial resources will fail quickly.

They're going to run out of room in alt currencies soon.

So are you one of the hipsters or one of the neckbeards?   

At least you know yours is coming.  That must be a relief.

This still happening on Monday?

It's not a lot of seed money, but it should allow an organisation to produce something which helps them secure actual venture capital rather than continuing to rely on donations.

There were MtGox support staff on here last night and they didn't mention the decision.  They usually post their announcements using Japanese time - yesterday was the 21 in Japan.  Off course it's now Saturday afternoon in Japan, so who knows when there'll be further information about what's happening. 


Is a wire transfer from their Hong Kong bank an option for you?

Are you a neckbeard or a hipster?  He doesn't like those.


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49302.msg587016#msg587016

They didn't need to.  MtGox hasn't made any statement yet as to whether they're going to pursue a ruling on that issue, but it's essentially irrelevant to the money transfer decision.

Not to mention that many nations have laws which regulate the sale and exchange of commodities, anyway.

MtGox could call Bitcoin a pog or a token, but it's the various financial services laws of each individual nation which will determine how it's legally defined there and in particular how the exchanges must operate in respect of it.  Different nations may regulate it quite differently.

From MtGox 21 October press release.

https://mtgox.com/press_release_20111021.html