I thought the widespread BTC withdraw delay was a problem started just recently. The delay of fiat withdraws could be an entirely different issue.

A quick preliminary analysis of the failed transactions' block info suggests there perhaps is a legitimate technical issue here. Those failures seem to be "timing" related. Bad wallet/transaction timing issue could occur if they're experimenting with some kind of new concurrent process for trading and/or  withdraws, or trying to cycle/reuse wallet addresses. I'm speculating that some withdraws from certain addresses took place before the addresses are  actually being credited (from another concurrent transaction process). If this is indeed what is happening, a simple but inefficient solution for Gox is just to keep re-attempt the failed transactions, perhaps shuffle the order of the TXs a little bit before each try. Eventually it should workout on its own.

The significance of the Chinese government's statement was blown out of proportion. PBOC's note is not that much different from the Feds' position. Both of them are essentially saying Bitcoin is not something that fits their currency category, but if people want to use it then use it at their own risk. Because most banks and financial services companies in China are backed by the PBOC, it wants further make sure that those entities don't get directly involved in bitcoin businesses or involved in pricing things in bitcoin. I thought such stance was pretty defensive and generous. Why there was this sell-off Friday your guess is as good as mine. I do feel however  speculators are selling perhaps because they saw the chance of them selling bitcoins at $100000 each is diminishing. Just a greedy bunch.

Once those greedy speculators got hurt so badly that they never come back again. Today is a good start.

Flushing those greedy, speculative, blind "investors" out of the bitcoin universe may not be a bad thing for bitcoin's future. Once they are gone we can continue to work on perfecting the ecosystem one step at a time. They are such a distraction. I lost a lot of money today but I will be happy if this self-inflected "crash" keeps them staying away.

Only the discovery of a serious design flaw would cause a detrimental crash. Dumpers will be very frustrated if they fail in their repeated attempts to crush people's faith in Bitcoin through traditional market manipulative tactics. We will see who prevails at the end.

mBTC could potentially be helpful in promoting broader user engagement due to the current lack of understanding by the general public that bitcoin can be bought and owned in fractions. More bitcoin owners hips will likely result more transactions, more liquidity and thus better price stability. I see some merits in it.

I still think that's a better banner than $500/BTC to the business of the exchanges.

No, I'm not offended at all. This is how a healthy constructive dialog should be. I had attempted to decipher the inner workings of the blocks and transactions before but I must admit these things are little over the top of my head. So thank you for summing that up here.

Given the lack of central broker dealer setup and the still limited liquidity the unit price of bitcoin is deemed to fluctuate, in ways that are more than people used to. Fluctuation means ups and downs, or downs and ups. Having said that, I won't be surprised if the price is going to hover around $1K range for a little while. Simply because $1000 is a major phycological barrier to the world's many households, too there is this general lack of understanding and forget that bitcoin can be traded as fractions of any unit on most exchanges. This is also why I raised this question on a different thread:https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=356773.msg3816159#msg3816159
I personally would like to see more people making frequent profits by taking an advantage of the price swings. As long as they don't try to manipulate the market, profitable investors may actually be helpful to price stabilization. Again these are just my shallow 2 bits, believing them may get you in serious trouble.

Companies such as Baidu tend to error on the cautious side. The significance of their initial announcement to accept bitcoin was also over stated by many news outlets IMHO. I seriously doubt whether accepting bitcoin or not has any meaningful impact on Baidu's bottom line. If FAA decides to ban private companies from flying drones to delivery packages people won't freak out on Amazon's future. Or they probably do as well.

This PBOC announcement really has been blown out of proportion by those who can't read and think in Chinese terms. It's nothing more than the Chinese government's attempt to clarify its stances announced previously. Bitcoin is not the country's official currency of course, it has never been. If I were the government I too felt compelled to clarify again that people shouldn't be confused between the country's fiat currency renminbi and something like bitcoin, some people in China surely showed signs of such confusion lately. This announcement was more specifically targeted at the country's banks and financial services companies as most of them are backed by the PBOC. So the government is essentially saying if private entities want to try bitcoin that's their own risky ordeal but don't play it with my money, yet. Chinese policy makers are smart enough to know banning the county's bitcoin exchanges will likely not do much to banning bitcoin or any other altcoin to that fact. Rather than imposing premature, restrictive policies that will surely hamper the country's technological competitive edge the gov is going to stay put and to observe as long as its massive citizenries don't turn insane believing this thing has arrived to replace the renminbi. We can be as wishful as we want apart from reality, but bitcoin is still more of a technology, a new pilot tool for the world to experience real-time low-cost distributed transactions online, than a new economic model, financial revolution or as some had wished a different way of wealth distribution. If bitcoin proves itself to be a good technology that benefits the local economy it will get blessed; otherwise if it becomes too disruptive as a harmful tool it will get banned. That's just my 2 bits.

I was concerned about the potential increase of the trade volume in small and tiny transactions on the network. While such change may help to promote broader customer sign-ups at exchanges I anticipate this will cause a makeup shift in the blockchain composition going forward, if more transactions are carried out at the mBTC level. I could be wrong, but someone with a better understanding of how the blockchained transactions work can shed some light on it.

Do you seriously believe customer support at exchanges get to decide on this? I raised the question here since I felt the common trade unit should be an industry practice and this site is where the great minds of the industry meet. I'm also not advocating the change until all potential implications to Bitcoin, both the positive ones and the negative ones are thoroughly debated. For instances, we don't know what the impact on the block size and network bandwidth will be, and how the exchanges themselves will value the cost/benefits from changes like this. Of course, there others probably will argue "ounce" has been the basic trading unit for gold for ages despite its price increase throughout the years.

Given the current price range of a single Bitcoin, wouldn't it make sense to lower the default trade unit to milibtc (.001btc) on exchanges? I believe it will be a simple change that potentially could make a huge difference. Not sure what the impact on the network this could have though. Any thoughts?