They're not "regulated". They're just registered with H.M. Revenue and Customs. That's like registering with FinCen in the US. That's about AML and taxes, not about protecting customer assets.

"Regulated" in the UK means regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. This is required for any business "accepting deposits".  Reasonable enough; most (more than half, to date) Bitcoin exchanges accept deposits and then steal the customer's money.

These guys are trying to sleaze by, claiming to be only "money changers". If they hold deposits, that's not good enough.

Now this is an expert opinion that can be used in a court filing. Dr. Roger Wattenhofer is a full professor at ETH Zurich, working on distributed systems. He's published some good papers. He was at Microsoft Research for a few years, too.

It looks like the only Mt. Gox creditor who got off their butt and went to the Tokyo District Court is the guy behind "http://www.mtgoxrecovery.com/". So get this to them.

Right. That's the tax treatment gold gets. No surprise here.

What that means is "the cops were here and took or copied all our records".

This is progress.  It should have happened weeks ago.

Mt. Gox is not going anywhere until the Tokyo District Court and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police are through with it.

Not any more.  Since the transaction malleability problem, the trend is against accepting transactions without confirmation.

Spending unconfirmed change is also on the way out, again due to the transaction malleability problem. In the latest Qt client, "Don't spend unconfirmed change" is an option, although not yet enabled by default. When you send a transaction, your "change" from the transaction is unconfirmed, usually for an hour or so. So some part of your account balance will be tied up for an hour each time you do a transaction. This can limit how fast you can do transactions from a single wallet.

This isn't even accounting. It's just bookkeeping.

Real money-handling systems have "reconcilation", where, usually daily, there's a break and the day's journal of transactions and all account balances are captured. Then they're checked against each other and external sources (i.e. does your internal calculation of what's in bank accounts and storage match the bank's numbers). They won't always match, because of outstanding transactions, all of which must be accounted for. Discrepancies that can't be accounted for indicate trouble.

Most real businesses that handle money do this every day. If they've been ripped off, they know quickly, which narrows down the number of suspects and limits losses. Mt. Gox never did it.

This stuff isn't rocket science. Your local supermarket manager is very familiar with this process.  A big supermarket has many checkout counters, many clerks, cash all over the place, credit card transactions of several kinds, merchandise going in and out, and a very small markup. Probably a higher transaction rate than Mt. Gox. Yet if money goes missing in a supermarket, it will be noticed within hours, and who took it will probably be known, and shown to cops if necessary, the same day.

There's a reason that most Bitcoin exchanges fail, and it's cluelessness, not technology.

This is progress. A creditor has officially brought it to the attention of the bankruptcy court that funny stuff is going on. Does anyone have the full filing? Did they file a petition to put in a trustee, removing Karpeles from control?

Here, the people who have to pay up when they lose, and the people who decide who has to pay up and when, are the same.

Derivatives require debt collectors, because they are future promises to pay. The debt collector can't be the debtor. That's a good reason not to deal with them.

“He who sells what isn't his'n. Must buy it back or go to prison” - Daniel Drew, on short selling.

What nuttiness.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is not a "fiat institution". They have nothing to do with issuing currency, or the banking system. They regulate investments sold to US persons. It doesn't matter how those investments are denominated. The investment can be be denominated in oranges, as in the Howey case. Or Bitcoins, as Trendon Shavers found out.

The basic question with any derivative is, "who's the counterparty". A derivative is a promise to pay something under some condition at a future time. Who stands behind that promise? BTC.sx tries to squirm out of responsibility with their "terms", which look like they're copied from some ordinary web site, not a financial service.

This is a big, big problem. A "Bitcoin exchange" is essentially a cash business - they match orders and execute them. There's no inherent financial risk to the exchange.  (Despite this, over half of Bitcoin exchanges have managed to fuck up and collapse.) BTC.sx, on the other hand, is itself the counterparty. They can lose big if they guess wrong or there's a sudden change in the price. (This is how a lot of big banks lost money in 2008.) But BTC.sx only has $150K of their own funds, less whatever it took them to get the thing going. That's not enough financial strength for what they're doing.

ICBIT also offered Bitcoin futures, but they were just running an exchange in them. They weren't a party to the transaction, and reserved the right to close out a futures contract if the other party didn't have enough in their account to pay up.  (But you don't know up front, with ICBIT, how much money the other party has in their account. So any big win is likely to not be paid off.)

That's the problem. Derivatives require financially strong counterparties who can be relied on to pay up when they lose, and systems to make them pay up. BTC.sx and ICBIT lack both.

At some point, everybody mining productively should be using state of the art ASICs, selling for slightly above production cost, and then the rate of increase should slow down to a Moore's Law increase rate or less. How far away is that?

This has little to do with Bitcoin. It's just ordinary stuff that's illegal, whether you pay in dollars, Bitcoins, gold, or cabbages.

The SEC is doing what it's supposed to be doing - investigating stock trading of unregistered investments.

MPEx, "The Bitcoin Securities Exchange" is the problem. It doesn't matter what the stocks are denominated in. They're still investments. People have tried to get around this before. One scheme paid off in oranges. It was still a security.

Remember GBLSE? Any questions?

Funny how a thread this guy started becomes "off topic" after he's caught lying.

Despite the noise from  three law firms filing lawsuits in irrelevant jurisdictions, nobody seems to be representing Mt. Gox creditors in the bankruptcy court in Tokyo. Has anyone representing any creditor ever actually shown up at a Mt. Gox bankruptcy proceeding?

This allows Karpeles to continue controlling what's left of Mt. Gox. Not good.

That's quite possible.

Despite the noise from  three law firms filing lawsuits in irrelevant jurisdictions, nobody seems to be representing Mt. Gox creditors in the bankruptcy court in Tokyo. That allows Karpeles to continue controlling the company.

Computers play chess better than humans now. Much better. No human player has won a tournament against a top computer program since the mid-2000s. If you buy any of the top-rated chess programs for PCs such as Fritz or Houdini and run them in full-power mode, you're going to get trounced. There are now chess programs playing at grandmaster level that run on smartphones. If you've been on the cover of Chess Life, you might win against one of them once in a while.

It's a PayPal problem, not a US legal problem. See PayPal's acceptable use policy. PayPal (and the credit card companies) require extra verification for selling currency and some highly liquid items. That's because of the high risk of fraud.

Basically, to do this, you have to demonstrate enough financial strength to absorb the worst case losses if there's fraud. It's not impossible; every local check-cashing place does this. But it's not something you can do from your parents basement.