I am a long term bull and I'm pleased to see the recent price increases, but I must confess I am puzzled by the pace of the recent price escalation. I have been a little busy and didn't have time to read up on everything I've missed - but perhaps someone can summarize things for me - what are the (perceived) reasons behind the growth in the past 2 weeks? Voodoo chartists please stay away. Thanks.

ok every CALM DOWN and take away the sniffing glue away from your noses

its seems 99% of people are reading "opinions" of what coinvalidation is about, and not reading the fact that it is just the writers opinion as oppose to the facts given directly from coinvalidation. this is known as chinese whispers.

so here goes, please remove tin foil hats and anything producing hallucinatory fumes... read twice and take regular breathes of fresh air to ensure the information is absorbed...

coinvalidation HAVE NOT personally talked much about what their system is, anyone trying to describe it as the abolishment of anonymity are totally wrong.

coinvalidation is a company (not the government) but a business advice company offering bitcoin businesses information on how to PROPERLY comply with AML/KYC in regards to sections of their business involving FIAT.
EG Exchanges
EG companies that convert BTC into FIAT for wages/stock/profit (tax purposes)

coinvalidation is NOT requiring identification of all bitcoin users. only the users that want to withdraw FIAT from legitimate exchanges above the AMLKYC thresholds.

coinvalidation is NOT about red flagging addresses with silk road taint.

now take 3 breathes of fresh air... relax... and now go back to your tinfoil hat conspiracy theories and glue sniffing activities about a new topic.

It's incredible, but after all this time, the owner of crypto.st hasn't answer, send back the FTC as requested or even transfer the FTC from the wallet to where I sent them. He doesn't seem to ever check the email of the site or its support web system.

The fact that bitcoins is still hard to use for the average person probably saved her some money. If the ransom was in dollars, the money would be lost already, and the kidnapper would be asking for more as we speak.

so what is the work-around to fix this, so that the victims are not forced to pay into this scam and then treating bitcoin as a criminal preferred coin. if we as a community help out the victims by solving their woes they wont need to pay into it and think of bitcoin as a bad thing.

"Don't suppose CL [cryptolocker] was created by the creators of Bitcoin??"

"And let's not forget that Bitcoin is referred to as a 'cryptocurrency'."

I'm already at the verifying bank account stage or else I would     

No info, I'm not in the States.

This is pretty interesting though:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=184799.0

I'm with adamstgBit - it really doesn't matter who he is.

If anything - it'll lead to instability. Right now we've no idea who he is. He's almost godlike (not necessarily a good thing).

If we discover he's just a human being who eats, defecates, parties, cries, farts and is altogether human - we might just find a way to discredit Bitcoin  because we disagree with him being a Mormon or that he enjoys deer hunting, etc.

Better we leave things as they are, that way Bitcoin stands on it's own merits.

Who knows? Maybe he knew this all along and he knew that disappearing was a requirement to it's success.

Are you sure it is a requirement to have a credit card? I imagine they intend to add a level III verification tier in the future, but not necessarily requiring credit card for level two.

still no response from bitcoincharts?

So he's against centralized payment system but own's a centralized bank and a online wallet.

Great.

Terrorism is not really a thing, just an intangible concept used by governments to remove freedoms from the populace by justifying it in the name of protecting the state. Like 9/11, the Patriot Act could not be passed fast enough to remove rights and freedoms from American citizens in the name of securing America from "terror", which has been ongoing for 13 years and counting as more and more freedoms are eroded and destroyed, pushed along by false flag attacks (The Boston Bombing) that seem created to get us used to fully militarized police.

A "terrorist" activity essentially means any action against the state that they don't like, which gives them much flexibility in enacting unconstitutional laws and power to go after anyone they please, for any reason. In this the US is highly guilty of pushing their "War on Terror", which if you think about it, how does one have a war on an intangible concept. It is just a smokescreen and nothing more.

That said, US dollars and other fiat currencies have been funding war and terrorist activities long before Bitcoin came along. The only pundits who push that as a negative point about Bitcoin have nothing else bad to say, so this is them spitballing. Much like the "Bitcoin is used to buy drugs!" arguement...pretty sure the drug trade is Dollar based and still basically is, but no one calls for a ban on Dollars to stop the problem. If this is the only ammunition they have against digital currencies they are a desperate bunch indeed.

I'm not sure it's coinbase's fault that people on the internet are still using inflated (aka bogus) MtGox rates?  The reason that MtGox's rates are way higher than every other exchange is that you can't withdraw USD from MtGox if you sell bitcoins there.  Coinbase and BitPay and others are just being practical and basing their exchange rates off of exchanges other than MtGox's inflated rates.