Find one or more large holders, make contracts with them. Something along the lines of agreeing to buy X BTC for Y USD each over Z months, for example. Now you've locked in a price and your liabilities are better known than if you were just going to buy on the exchanges as needed. Chances are, you'll get a pretty decent rate when buying in bulk, too.

If you have enough BTC in that wallet to worry about the encryption holding up, you should be worried about your computer getting compromised. Get a linux livecd or make a bootable usb, boot up, make a paper wallet while offline. Encrypted, if you prefer. Never let the private key touch an online system until you want to spend the coins. Brownie points for signing the transaction offline when you do decide to spend.

BTC withdrawal delays on Gox have been reported every now and then for a long time now. IIRC the official explanation long ago was that that's how their system is set up. A relatively small hot wallet or something, maybe.

Using an ATM is likely to always be more expensive than buying at an exchange, or OTC. There's so much overhead in getting and maintaining one, considering it's tied to a single location. Where they may shine, though, is small transactions. Right now it's not very easy to buy or sell small amounts of bitcoins. It's not worth the hassle for many to get registered at an exchange and wait for a bank transfer to clear for 20 USD or so. Most sellers on Localbitcoins seem to have relatively high limits - it's not worth their time to go meet someone for pocket change. So an ATM fits this niche quite well, but the users will have to pay a premium.

I'm not sure anyone did. IIRC, Nefario certainly didn't market his big idea as anything other than an... extralegal marketplace from the get-go. The real question is, why didn't it cause any alarm when he started to use his real name? According to the Wired interview, he was the only non-anonymous member of GLBSE - how was that supposed to pan out? How do you have a CEO or whatever he was considered in a clearly illegal enterprise who is entirely traceable, prosecutable and jailable?

Someone seems to be dicking around on btcchina. Some kind of posturing - the bid and ask walls move back and forth, seems to be about 300 BTC worth of either being removed from one side and added to the other, and back again.

People usually feel a bit wary of putting a big "rob me" sign around their necks. It's maybe not a huge risk to say how much you're holding, but it is a risk, and seems to have no benefit.

Hi, the service looks good so far. One thing I'd like to see is the ability to leave orders pending, to be activated when the funds needed for them arrive. Pretty much like Gox does, or at least used to do it. For one, this would solve the issue of having to manually calculate how many BTC you can get at a given rate before placing the order. You could just enter a bid for, say, 10 BTC @ 100 EUR and only the portion of the bid you have funds to cover would go into the orderbook. If you had 900 EUR in  your account, this would create a "live" bid for 9 BTC and leave a bid for 1 BTC pending, for when you either deposit more EUR or sell BTC.

There are other ways to remove the need to calculate BTC amounts, like a "use all funds available" button when placing a bid, but this would also allow users to be a bit less hands-on with placing and removing bids as the market moves. It's pretty crude, and using a bot would be much more powerful, but for someone just trying to catch peaks and drops it would make things a lot easier, not having to manually add a bid every time a sell nets more EUR into one's account.

It can, of course, be a bit dangerous to have pending bids and asks, if you forget they're there... Also I seem to recall Gox removed or at least considered removing this type of feature as it was supposedly contributing to their lag issues. Still, maybe worth thinking about?

Last night in *my* dream a CIAAA Road Service agent helped me and some other folks get away after a heist by throwing a blue blanket over us, enclosing us in some sort of transdimensional bubble, bright blue and shimmering, which bullets couldn't pass through.

I'm not sure dreams are very useful for predicting the future.

Honestly, if we're talking about making Bitcoin acceptable to governments as a reserve currency, there are many more bumps in the road than just Satoshi's holdings. Apart from what I'd expect to be a general unpalatability for governments, there are other relatively large holders, too. I currently see government's embracing decentralized cryptocurrencies only slightly before they stop taxing people, but should the unthinkable occur, I still don't see why any government would elect not to roll their own alt.

1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE is the public key. Apparently, you can send coins to any address as long as the checksum at the end of the address is valid for the address.

http://blockexplorer.com/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE

Like this one? Technically, you can't prove the private key isn't known but realistically, no-one can brute force a string that long.

Pretty sure they don't mean Bitcoin. Even if they were looking at cryptocurrency - unlikely - they'd roll an alt rather than use a currency with 10% of the supply potentially controlled by its unknown creator. Bitcoin as world reserve currency would make Satoshi a world power overnight.

What's to keep you from encrypting the keys before printing to paper?

Wow, that's a big price difference between Amazon and Smashwords. Even the 3.99 USD price seems rather high for 30 pages, though, based on what I've seen of ebook pricing in general.

What if Al-Qaeda transfers a few dollars into your bank account?

No mention of VAT. It's my interpretation Bitcoin is not considered a digital good subject to VAT here.

Something went wrong with this post! Let's try again:

Edit: I should note I'm not a lawyer or in any way familiar with Finnish tax codes. I write this as a layman, my translations may be inaccurate, and I may have misinterpreted some things. Caveat lector.

http://vero.fi/fi-FI/Syventavat_veroohjeet/Verohallinnon_ohjeet/Virtuaalivaluuttojen_tuloverotus

In Finnish, I don't have time to translate fully or go into a deeper summary. They use BTC as an example, but say the same rules apply to other currencies as well. I'll use the same device here.

At a glance, some of the more interesting points:

-Virtual currencies are not "real, official currency", nor are they securities or bonds in the sense meant by the law. They are, however, legal to use, and are treated as "an other, unspecified type of agreement between users".

-Fiat-denominated gains are taxable as capital gains. This applies when selling bitcoins for fiat at a profit as compared to when one bought the BTC, as well as to using bitcoins to buy goods or services directly. In both cases, the value of the BTC spent is calculated at the time of spending, and the cost of acquiring them is determined by when they were bought, first in, first out.

-Losses from investing in BTC are *not* tax-deductible. BTC trading is said to be similar to trading in CFDs, for which there is a precedent from the Finnish Supreme Court, with this conclusion.

-Profits from mining are treated as income gains, realized at the moment the miner gains control of the BTC, and calculated at the exchange rate at that time. (No kidding. Good luck with that!)

-Profits from gambling and games (sale of in-game items, for example) are taxable as income, valued at the exchange rate at the time the BTC gained is traded for fiat. Losses are, again, not deductible, but are treated as costs incurred in hobby activities.

-When receiving Bitcoins as payment, as a business, such income is taxable at the exchange rate at the time of the transaction. Here they give some definition of how value is determined: The value is converted to Finnish currency (EUR at the moment...) at the daily rate, if such is available, otherwise the value agreed upon by the parties of the transaction is used. Intrestingly, here, it seems losses from selling BTC *are* tax-deductible.

-At the end there appears to be a concession to professional Bitcoin trading, where the taxation of such can be treated more like taxation of securities trading,  with a cursory list of requirements, but I'm afraid I don't quite grasp what the implications are. Maybe someone familiar with Finnish tax law on investing can clarify?

IOW, a 51.5% chance of losing 0.1 BTC.

If it's a ponzi scheme, how will that help?