As in, fixed fixed?  I'm also missing about 20-25 blocks worth of awards, showing as 'None.'  Is that a display bug or a consequence of negative payout not yet paid back in?  My missing awards start with block 989, same as the OP.

If the second, how long would we be mining for "free" until the pool breaks even?

Not at all.  The defendent enriched himself by $xxx as seen by deposit into account YYY.  Money obtained by fradulent means using a complex scheme involving the internet.  Bitcoins wouldn't even need to be mentioned except as a footnote.

OP, on the off chance you are reading this:

You may wish to read up on the Wire Fraud Act.  For example, http://www.lorandoslaw.com/FAQ/Wire-Fraud.shtml

Pay close attention to the essential elements of what constitutes wire fraud.  Interstate commerce is pretty important to the US government at a Federal level.  This isn't small claims Judge Judy stuff if that's what you're expecting.  Violation of the Wire Fraud Statute can result in a fine, imprisonment of up to 20 years, or both.  You sure you want to risk it for $6000?

Seriously, my original email account I registered with, visited the claims site with the same IP I've been signing on for a while, plus password? 

If all of that was hacked I'd have a lot more problems than accessing my MtGox account.  I think they're just stalling to avoid a run on the bank.

Seems to me a lot of your costs are over and above the actual mining hardware.  Even if you return the mining hardware you'll be out a bunch.

Me, I've shut down my miners.  Yeah, I'm small scale -- 561 Mhash/sec, cost me $209.  Not mining at this difficulty until I know if BTC will be > $4 or under .01 once the smoke from the MtGox fireball settles.  =)

I think this may give some of us who heard about bitcoins a bit late another chance to be early adopters.

Most of the users on mtgox signed up in the last month or so, a third in the past two weeks (post june 10).  Which means they only had the opportunity to mine just a few coins at a difficulty of 570k or higher or buy at $10-$32.

There are dozens and dozens of people who have bought hardware specifically to mine once they saw bitcoin at $30.  It's undeniable.  6990s and 5 series are sold out world over.  The same 4 or so terahash capacity we saw come online in the past few weeks will probably go right back where it came from -- returned to newegg or tigerdirect with a small restocking fee -- if bitcoin crashes to sub-$1 levels as a result of this.

Withdrawing my $, assuming the exchange does open and is solvent. =)

Server's down.  I think 60,000 bitcoin users all showed up at once.

No, they are not secure.  They're slightly MORE secure, assuming good, long, semi-random password with lots of special characters.   Seeing the kinds of passwords a trivial cracking attempt busted I'd say a good portion of the userbase are NOT computer security experts and are NOT picking secure passwords.  Those kinds of people are likely to be re-using the passwords elsewhere and are now going to be in a world of hurt thanks to mtgox.

Siiigh.  That gmail address of mine was one I use for 'serious' stuff having to do with money and registration on sites I actually care about (as opposed to all the freebie service ones, where I don't give a rat's behind if someone hijacks).  It was not widely available in the spammer circles.

Now it's out there for spammers and scammers to do their thing to.

Luckily I don't re-use usernames, never mind passwords, so other email and other services shouldn't be horribly impacted.

Thanks mtgox!  Seriously.  And if you couldn't fix your code after all the reports of being compromised there's 0 chance you'll fix it in the future.  Buhbye.

Lesson learned.   When all the rumors of people getting their mtgox & email account hacked (including those running on Linux, with strong-ish passwords, not re-used) started the obvious conclusion was mtgox is compromised.   That was yesterday.  

Unfortunately, I didn't believe it.  Don't have a huge amount invested in bitcoin, but I'll be a bit sad to see it all gone.

While I don't believe this is the end of bitcoin (there's no such thing as bad publicity) the next few weeks could get exciting.  Def. withdrawing everything from mtgox the moment I can.  Changed my email password to a 16 character one with lots of mixed case, digits and special characters just to be sure, but I expect to get LOTS more spam since it's not one I hand out to free sites.

Looks like I need to get disposable email addresses for all exchanges, and only keep enough funds in there I won't miss if they're stolen.

Namecoins are a clone of bitcoins with narrower adoption.  Their marginal utility of alternate DNS is more than offset by not having an established ecosystem like bitcoins.  The same risks bitcoins faced earlier on are there for namecoins.

The only way to buy and sell namecoins is through bitcoins, they are tied to the fortunes of bitcoin. 

TL;DR all the risks of bitcoins are doubled if you go with namecoins.

I would agree, except for one thing.

The chart looks like we're currently in the 'stability' part of 'rally-consolidate-stability-panic' cycle which repeats itself over and over.  IMO there's still potential for someone to spook the current fearful into one more dip before the rally takes off.

No, economies of scale apply.

With current mainstream technologies you can get a hefty competitive advantage by getting industrial rather than residential power rates.  In my neck of the woods that cuts the power cost nearly in half (less if you shut down during peak times).

Developing hardware specifically for bitcoin mining would have a massive upfront capital outlay but would then result in an equally massive operational competitive advantage (read: 1/10th the power use per Mhash).  There are already rumors and theories that this has already happened.

In the grim future of bitcoin there are only pros.  Mostly because the casuals won't be able to compete with transaction rates required to sustain the envisioned high transaction rate bitcoin network financed through small transaction costs * massive amount of transactions.

Bingo.  Mining namecoins was a way to get in closer to the top of that pyramid while there was a huge difficulty vs payout gap.   

Now that the diffuculty in computing either is the same the additional risk of being invested in namecoins outweighs the benefits and I'm be converting the namecoins I mined to bitcoins.

That's like making a step by step guide for eating or breathing.  But I'll try:

1.  Create an account with MtGox.
2.  Deposit bitcoins from your bitcoin wallet into account using the official client (click deposit -> bit coins, use the wallet mtgox gives you for that transaction).
3.  Trade bit coins for dollars (click Trade on mtgox).
4.  Create a Dwolla account
5.  Create a real world bank account
6.  Register real world bank account with your dwolla account
7.  Withdraw funds from MtGox, specifying your dwolla account  (click withdraw -> USD -> Dwolla).
8.  Withdraw funds from Dwolla (dwolla -> withdraw money)
9.  Withdraw funds from bank account (visit bank)

I think that sums it up.  Each of those steps have big buttons at the associated web sites or equivalent (banks have tellers, e.g.) so I'm not convinced telling people where to click on a web page is of much additional value.

They function very simply.  When you deposit funds (whether dollars or bit coins) into your account they are held by the exchange.  Then when you match a buyer and a seller of one currency into another, the funds are moved between the two accounts and a commision is deducted.

The exhanges are simply a trusted third party holding funds and performing the actual trade.

Dwolla and others are simply a way to send money between established real world banking entities.  When you deposit or withdraw funds from mtgox they move them between real world bank account #1 (yours or mtgox) and real world bank account #2 (theirs).

There are at least two entities who have critical pieces of data you do not.  And that is dwolla and mtgox.  Both of them have hard facts on amount of other currencies entering and leaving the trading pools, both over time and immediately.  Mtgox has precise figures on all currencies, and dwolla has a picture only of dollars -- however, they have that sooner.

Since neither of these entities is regulated in any way shape or form you may be trading against someone with a clear picture of trader sentiment while you have to wait while various patterns emerge on the chart.

In fact, it is doubly advantageous to mtgox vested interests to delay posting of new funds to accounts long enough to establish their own position in the market -- the swings in price could be magnified, and price swings cause more trading.

Might want to keep that in mind when choosing your target time frame, or evaluating day trading vs buy and hold.

There aren't enough use cases for bitcoins right now which would support either a large number or a high enough transaction fee.  At least nowhere near the payout of a 50 btc reward for confirming a block today.  We can safely ignore the influence of fees -- several pools keep the fees and only split the reward and nobody cares very much about it.

It's happened before, on a much smaller scale.  We'll see what the current effects are next difficulty increase or the one after that.  The supply of bitcoins entering the bitcoin economy isn't as important as the supply of new dollars or new tradable goods being available for bitcoins.  Short term I believe the first (dollars) may be affected as all the newcomers attracted to bitcoins when it was a way to make a few bucks on the side get bored and leave.

Exact same choice as those who buy BTC speculatively.  They can sell their investment and move on.  In fact, since even 6990s don't drop 50% in 3 days their out is nowhere near as painful.