It doesn't matter what the "reasons" are. Depositors have a right to withdraw funds whenever the depositor wants to. If Coinbase is legit, it won't hurt them at all if every depositor withdraws all their funds. If Coinbase has been stealing customer funds, it's better to find that out sooner than later.

So withdraw all funds from Coinbase now.

We're in a holiday weekend. If any withdrawal is delayed past the end of next week, it's time to start talking to lawyers and collection agencies.  You might call up the accounts receivable managers at some of their big customers and see if they're seeing trouble. Buying a credit report on Coinbase from Dun and Bradstreet is worthwhile, and if they're not paying on time, report them to D&B. California small claims court goes up to $10,000, and if they owe you less than that, file in small claims court. That will get you action.

Late payment is a big red flag. Don't delay acting.

Remember when Roger Ver said Mt. Gox was solvent?

No, it's not a Hive problem. The Hive wallet is doing it right, and the Bitcoin Core wallet can do it right but is configured by default does it wrong. When the fixes went in for the transaction malleability bug, the configuration parameter spendzeroconfchange was added. By default, it's set to 1, which is the old behavior. It should be set to 0, but that was considered too disruptive at the time.

Right. Since the transaction malleability attack, It's no longer safe to spend unconfirmed change. So a spend locks up some unspent funds until confirmation. A better fix for transaction malleability may remove this limitation.

The stock wallet already tries to put together spends efficiently, given the items you already have in your wallet. Sending the contents of your wallet to yourself to break up big items is possible, but probably shouldn't be automatic.

Someone is talking about doing this, but they're not putting up the money. The site http://letthebitdrop.com/  is asking for donations. It's not clear how much of a cut of the proceeds the sponsors of the event will be taking. The main promoter is Coinapult, which is an sleazy "online wallet" service. (Read their terms, which are worse than Mt. Gox's. )

This is a non-starter of an idea. There's not enough liquidity in Bitcoin to support a lot of little exchanges. Look at Bitcoin Charts for USD. Once you're out of the top 10 exchanges, volumes are below 20BTC/day, the spreads get big, and the market depth is tiny.

Music tracks. Bitcoin should have become the primary method of payment for music tracks. No need for a central authority like iTunes. Indy bands could sell from their own servers and get paid 100% of the revenue. Load up your music player with a few Bitcoins and start listening.

For music track sales to work, transactions under $1 must be cheap and fast. They have to be protected against double-spending, or people will buy tracks from multiple sources simultaneously using the same Bitcoins.

(Someone is doing this. Unfortunately, most tracks cost 0.01BTC.  One costs $0.999 BTC. The cheapest ones are crap techno. None of the music is above garage-band level. To make this work as a business, you need a better catalog than CoinDL.)

Good. Whenever any financial enterprise has difficulty processing withdrawals, get your money out immediately. That is a huge red flag. Talk to a lawyer. Threaten to go to the press. Raise hell until you get paid. This is a get out now signal for Bitstamp.

Legit businesses with "know your customer" requirements, like stockbrokers, do the checking before they let you put money in.

You just re-invented options.

No, Karpeles was enough of an ass to do it all by himself.

The US Government doesn't seem to care about Bitcoin one way or the other. At the Senate hearing last December, no Federal agency called for new legislation.

China and Russia, on the other hand, are very anti-Bitcoin.

Bubbles are fueled by dumb money.

As for public interest, here's the current report from Google Trends.

Bitcoin interest peaked with the China bubble.

Bitcoin price tracks Google Trends for the term "bitcoin" moderately closely.

Remember, the Winklevii are trying to set up an ETF so they can dump their Bitcoins. They need to find enough suckers.

0.23 exahash/sec! Will it pass 1.0 by the end of the year?

Difficulty will go to the moon!

There's one at Hacker Dojo in Silicon Valley. It's similar to the one in the video, with the hand scanner and license scanner.  There's about a 15% spread between the buy and sell price, plus a $5 fee. Nobody uses it.

Coinbase's main business is processing merchant transactions. They probably don't buy Bitcoins on exchanges much; they just wait for them to come in as sell transactions. Since Bitcoins have been dropping lately, they'd lose money if they kept much inventory.

Right now: Lowest price on localbitcoins $513.06. Bitstamp: $518.00.

All exchanges have sell offers at higher prices than the current price. It's just that localbitcoins shows them on their front page.

Well, duh. If you want to run a financial institution, you have to have some money.

I would disagree that traditional fractional reserve banking is a scam.

What happens in a traditional fractional reserve system is that someone deposits $100 in a bank, so the bank would have $100 in assets (the $100 bill) and $100 in liabilities (the deposit to the account holder). What the bank will do with part of the $100 is they will lend it to a borrower. So now they will still have $100 in assets (now a $10 and $90 that is owed to them from the borrower) and $100 in liabilities (the same $100 deposit).

What is potentially happening with Chinese exchanges is they are taking a 1 BTC deposit, and spending some amount of it, say .1 BTC. In this example they have only .9 BTC in assets (they spend the .1 on themselves) but 1 BTC is liabilities. Hopefully you can see how different these two scenarios are.
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Right. Trouble can occur if a bank has bad loans, which is what caused the last financial crisis. But there were real loans, and real houses behind them. What happened was that the value of those houses declined, and the people owning them stopped making payments.

Also, banks are heavily regulated, and in many countries backed up by deposit insurance. No US depositor lost money because the bank in which they had a deposit made bad loans. (Many bank depositors in Iceland did lose money. Look up "Icesave".)

Fractional reserve banking does not mean the bank gets to skim off most of the money.

Bank of America to Bank of America there is no fee, either.

Bitcoin has no advantage here.