Insurance is not inherently fraudulent.

It's nothing more than allowing customers to spread out the cost of large, infrequent losses over time into small periodic payments.

Every person who drives a car will eventually experience an accident of some kind. By buying insurance drivers pay for their accidents a little bit every month instead of getting a big bill all at one.

Over a driver's lifetime he will pay the insurance company more than the cost of the accidents he's experienced (insurance companies don't work for free). This excess is the price of predictability.

In a free market the cost of insurance would tend towards its optimum value, but of course whenever coersion is involved proper pricing goes out the window.

The theoretical equilibrium monthly cost for deposit insurance would be something like: [(the average amount of bitcoins a depositor will lose at a particular institution during the next 10 years)/120 + (insurance company operating costs and profits)]

Felony blackmail threats against a presidential candidate are a little bigger than a mere marketing campaign.

Somebody went and hand delivered packages to office buildings, at the risk of leaving being identified due to residual DNA/fingerprints as well as possibly being captured on a surveilance camera. To do something that risky for a prank would be incredibly idiotic.

Then again people gave Pirate their money so I suppose anything's possible.

Bitcoin is priced higher than its use for trade would suggest because a lot of people have disposable income they can afford to divert towards speculation.
In times of severe economic stress less of those people will exist; many people will be forced to cash out their Bitcoin holdings to pay bills and a lot more people won't be able to buy and hold Bitcoins even if they want to because they are living paycheck to paycheck.

In that case the exchange rate of Bitcoin (and gold) corrects downward.

If you want to protect the exchange rate of your bitcoins do whatever you can to encourage its adoption by businesses. Get trade flowing between people who would otherwise be unable to transact.

The reason that existing markets are so dominated by speculation is because central banks can print up cheap credit at will to let their friends speculate with.

The ability to do this is severely curtailed with regards to Bitcoin trading.

Right now the exchange rate is 10% driven by commerce and 90% driven by daytraders.

This actually represents a signifigant improvement and it's improving all the time. The ratio needs to invert, though, before bitcoin can really be considered mature enough to be a store of value.

Properly-priced deposit insurance would be expensive due to the nature of the risks involved.

"Society" is just a label we apply to the aggregate actions of individual people.

"Society" once endorced chattel slavery. In an example of one of the slow, infrequent steps forwards the species has made in terms of moral progress the practice is now considered nearly universally unjustifiable. What was once done openly and proudly is now recognized even by the few people who still practice it as a crime that must be hidden from public scrutiny.

So it will go eventually with statism. It's defenders will be regarded by future historians the same way we now perceive the slaver owners and traders of earlier centuries.

How about we use ethics instead? Nobody is justified in using threats or actual violence to compel anyone to do anything.

People will still do it, of course, since the world contains many unethical people but the problem would be enormously reduced if otherwise good people would stop making excuses for predatory behavior by cloaking it in euphamisms like "social contract", "good of society", "will of the majority", "price we pay for civilization", etc. The cost of preying upon other people is greatly reduced when the predators can convince their victims not to defend themselves.

It's too late; that outcome was assured as soon as it became known that an idea was baking at all.

When do the Scammer tags get distributed?

People are being paid to develop solutions  - they just work for a collection of companies like Mt Gox, BitInstant, Paysisus, BitPay, etc.

That being said community funding of the core developers isn't a bad idea.

Some of those excerpts you quoted sound almost like verbatim quotes from forum threads.

Does Rebecca Greenfield have an account here?

Someone on IRC mentioned a SYN flood against Mt Gox today, but I haven't seen anyone confirm or refute it.

You can bet that plenty of elected officials would love to be able to accept dirty money without risking the embarassment of having their freezer full of cash discovered.

fixed

Are you still able to process payments if, for example, the mtgox website is unresponsive for an hour?

DDos or Slashdot effect from the news coverage today?

It's not obvious to me that the attention is negative on balance. The fact that thieves are stealing bitcoin amounts worth such large sums when priced in USD reinforces the idea that bitcoins are worth stealing. What's the net psychological effect of these competing influences?

Speculative premium, which is another way of saying it's overvalued.

There's still too much speculative premium in the bitcoin exchange rate right now for me to store money I can't afford to lose as bitcoins, or to recommend it as anything other than a means of exchange only. That will change in the future when the amount of Bitcoin-demoninated trade increases.

I believe that mid and high level bueracrats will become increasingly desperate to cash out before the fiscal situation becomes untenable so if they start paying attention to Bitcoin at all it will be to launder whatever public funds they can get their hands on for their own use.