The first thing I do these days is to look at the web site for an 'about us' which gives personally identifiable or business registration info such that I could go after someone if they cause me a loss through theft.  I currently favor blockchain.info because the proprietor is not afraid to use his real name.  I saw no such thing on inputs.io, and a quick search for an announcement thread here which might contain the information of interest yielded nothing.

I'm curious about your issue with miicard.  The thing is pretty scary, but I did sign up using a bank account without a lot of funds on time.  They pestered me when I closed the account so it seems like the do ping one's bank account from time to time.

Actually, the thread had been pretty quite until you piped up.

For my part, I'm still waiting for a good read on the economics of transaction fees.

Growth at 7 TPS or there abouts is eminently manageable while retaining a realistic P2P structure (possibly part of the reason Satoshi chose it?)  Even notably higher transaction rates would be manageable and probably defensible in case of most significant forms of attack, but the key is that things have to be predictable in order to facilitate good engineering and planning for those who have an interest in trying to help support the system.

An exploration of the social and business setting in which Mt. Gox operate seems to me a perfectly fine way to kill time while waiting for Mt. Gox to send the fiat they have supposedly have in the pipeline.  If they provided any useful information to chew on related to the apparent failure of about half of the services they supposedly offer, the equation might change a bit, but they don't seem to be inclined in that direction.

I'm at day 37-ish awaiting my international wire with no results thus far.  It cannot be argued that a party runs and 'exchange' if their service is only good for one-way purchases.  That is to say, only fiat -> BTC is the operations work.

I currently remain of the opinion that it is most likely that the problems are mostly "not Mt. Gox's fault", but they are failing to provide much information to sustain that opinion.  Some rational for this communications failure would be understandable.  Some not.

One of the many things that would bring would be an increased justification for fine grained surveillance and other methods of population management.  Some may not see that as a particularly bad thing, and that would be particularly the case when faced with a loss of exploitative abilities which have evolved in conjunction with the evolution of our current monetary solutions.  Monetary solutions which I feel are probably nearing the end of their natural lifecycle.

In my part of the world I now pay and extra few cents per gallon for gasoline and diesel if I use either my credit card or debit card.  So, I drop by the ATM and pull out a pocket full of cash regularly.  No biggie for me, and to be honest it helps to be forced to 'do the right thing.'

Using cash for purchases of this and that, and in particular in the provision of sensitive material, is really counter-productive to the goal of individual population surveillance.  This tells me that there is less than perfect coordination between financial institutions and our internal surveillance frameworks.  I view it as a good thing.

OTOH, if somehow cash was deprecated to the point of non-use under a situation where 'naughty' purchases were already cut out from the electronic systems, it could be a pretty devastating combination punch.  I don't see such a deprecation as being eminent, but I also don't completely rule it out under a scenario of extreme economic crisis.

Ya, Ya, it's just that the name sounds so un-Japanese.  There was a similar thing in India IIRC, but now I cannot remember what it was.  OTOH, 'park' sounds outwardly non-Korean to my ear but it's got to be one of the more abused words in that language.

I wonder if Lawsons had an advertising windfall when Eddie Lawson was winning GP championships right and left on Japanese machines (just like everyone else in the sport.)  That was before any notable Japanese riders showed up on the scene.

I went through a several week phase of actively trying to get random people involved, but soon realized that it was driven in some part by a desire to have my speculation in Bitcoin pay off and was thus more evil than I wanted to be.  I don't actively encourage people to buy Bitcoin and in some cases I discourage it.  For loved ones, I just consider portions of my own stash to be earmarked for them.

That said, I have provided both a lot of philosophical input and in some cases physical help to allow certain people to take a position.  But only people who have a much higher than average IQ along with good analytic abilities and plenty of money to burn.  The sums could be argued to exceed the high water mark on the poll selection (iirc, $20k) so I am torn between selecting that, or selecting the 'I don't' element.  I'll solve the dilemma by not voting on this one.

I still get a kick out of the name 'Lawsons' for a 7-11 in Japan.  They were all over the place.  I'm a bit of a connoisseur warm food from such places, and the stuff in Japan was a delight.

I could agree with the characterization 'retro' to describe aspects of Japanese technology and life-ways from what I saw of it.  I think that the entire world deeply appreciates and respects the Japanese propensity for quality in engineering and implementation of their lower tech wares.  I certainly do, and happily pay a premium for it.

That's a positive and a favorable thing in my mind, but I am by this time pretty deeply into the 'Bitcoin Foundation is a loser' frame of mind.  More so than when I was mildly negative about the idea of it's formation several years ago, and this in part because ~vess who led the thing is very possibly a straight-up crook...I can't help but notice that when he is involved in something like Bitcoinica or Coinlabs a lot of money seems to go missing.

One way or another, the bylaws are just words on a piece of paper, and the concepts are so ambiguous that there is an almost infinite amount of wiggle-room even if someone wanted to bother trying to pretend to adhere to them.  When the rubber meets the road I doubt that this text is much more than a marketing ploy.  We'll see.

Annoying yes, but I've seen worse on Internet.  That S3014 (or whatever) guy with a mailing list posts in blue.  That alone would be enough reason to ignore his services and most of what he writes.

I have sort of half and eye open for a suitable exchange since Mt. Gox does not seem to be able to supply USD withdrawals.  Bitcoin-Brokers is my current preferred solution, but I'd like to have a backup.  I have a tortured history with Bitcoin-Central in association with the Instawallet fiasco.  My sense at this point is that they are probably not thieves, but are somewhat armature both in terms of network security design, and in terms of customer services business related aspects.

I'll pass on patronizing Bitcoin-Central at this point until they can demonstrate a little more proficiency in certain key areas.  In particular I'll be watching what they do with the excess Instawallet funds that the little theft windfall dropped on their doorstep, and I'll be watching to see if they actually do peruse the theft as a crime.  Remember that O.J. Simpson retained a private investigator to 'hunt down' the perp who murdered his ex-wife after he was acquitted.  Probably exactly zero members of the general public found that very convincing while probably 50% of the Bitcoin community would happily take Bitcoin-Central's word that they were perusing a criminal investigation into the Instwallet theft.

Seems like they used a single forum thread as a primary part of their business:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=237164.0

Operationally, pretty much everything is done through a popular third-party ticketing system.

My biggest complaint is that they did not take action on my request that they escrow their identity documents with someone such that if they ran it would be easier to track them down.

A good marketing campaign...if not a modestly technical wiki page with some appropriately designed jargon...can do wonders for turning a bug into a feature.  In a similar vein, one man's weakness is another man's strength.  There are plenty in the community who are probably completely happy to consolidate the infrastructure to a comfortable set of operators and get on with the business of running an economy with a proper level of oversight, control, and in some cases with a fair level of value extraction.

As a seller I was very happy with Bitcoin-Brokers when I used them a month ago.  They keep the sellers coins in escrow.  The buyer deposits cash into the seller bank account which can be done at any branch of the bank that the seller uses.  When the seller checks and sees that the funds have been deposited, he/she sends a message to the broker who releases the coins.  It's usually a same-day transaction if everyone is on the ball.

If I use the service again I'll probably stipulate that for sales in the above $1k range I'll wait until the funds are actually in confirmed mode which is the next business day with Wells Fargo.  The only way I see to cheat would be to deposit a check (which will bounce) then doctor the deposit slip to make it look like it was cash, so for higher value amounts I would probably want to be more careful.  For lower value amounts I don't think it would be worth the risk of getting busted to a crook, and the bank would probably take an active interest in perusing such a fraud.

I don't know what the acronym stands for.  It's a premium account of some sort.  I gotta keep $25k in it to avoid fees, and as it happens that's in the ballpark of the kind of money I'm comfortable having in the mainstream in these times of massive derivatives trading and the new popularity of 'bail-ins' as a means of solving financial crises.

I would mention to the OP, that I was thinking of a situation where actual cash (the green paper stuff) was deposited in my name.  Not account-to-account transfers.  That is how Bitcoin-Brokers does things.  They act in part as an escrow agent for the transaction as well as a general organizer it seems.  I was not (and am not) aware of any 'localbitcoins'-like method for doing anything other than face-to-face transactions because I've not looked at it for a while.  There was some bug on their web site when I tried to set up an account, and I felt it unlikely to be effective for my needs anyway so I didn't bother to peruse the issue.

I did one batch through Bitcoin-Brokers (thread in 'services' sub-forum) and it went fine.  I've talked to my personal banker (Wells Fargo) at some length about Bitcoin and specifically about random people depositing money into my account, and she said it was fine and fairly common for rent and what-not.  In fact, I have a rental where the property management company does just this.

My banker did suggest that I set up a different checking account for incoming funds so that I don't have to give out the number for my primary checking.  I've done this now, but have not done any sales on it thus far.  My primary account is a 'PMA' so I can set up another account with no fees or minimum balance.

Good luck to you.  Since Mt. Gox does not seem to be sending the international wire I requested almost a month and a half ago, I may go ahead and sell another batch through Bitcoin-Brokers unless I can find someone who wants to buy about $5000 worth in person in one batch which is unlikely.  At least I got no bites last time I tried to deal in such volumes.

That may or may not be the case.  Not all customers are created equal and some cost much more money than they bring in.  The several reasons for this that I can think up off-hand are:

 - They are generally criminal and are being chased by authorities.

 - They are hand-to-mouth types who are constantly cashing out tiny amounts to eat.

 - They are not prone to 'trading' but rather use the exchange sparingly to translate between value types (e.g., BTC->USD).  I personally am in this category in part because I don't like giving a cut of my profits to someone else as exchange fees.

So it would do wonders for long term competitiveness to attempt to lose the contingent of customers who marginally profitable or a liability.  Even better, shove them off onto a competitor.

Ya, Bitcoin-Central could pull in half a million dollars from this little mis-hap.  I don't know what they paid ~jav for the service (and funding that the service contained), but I doubt that it approached half a million.  Likely they paid nothing at all for it.  Not a bad haul!

If Bitcoin-Central planned to capitalize and were an active party to this crime, they probably would have laundered some of these funds so that someone like you could not so easily analyze the open-source part of the books.  OTOH, they would run the risk of being caught doing so.  On balance, I continue to feel the most likely hypothesis is that Bitcoin-Central are not a part of this crime.  One way or another, it will be interesting to keep tabs on the lingering clean-up of this mess and follow-up on identifying and holding the perps accountable.

I'll mention again that I find the efforts to compensate the victims to have been handled as well as could be hoped for in spite of the lingering issues which could be anticipated.  As usual with these things, one must expect a certain fraction of the complaints to be people trying to game things, and another fraction to be just people who were not paying close attention and/or who don't follow instructions well.

If Phin is being singled out and threatened for his vocal and abrasive tendencies on an internet forum, that would be shitty on the part of Bitcoin-Central.  I would expect a professional and mature organization to let such things roll off their backs.  It would be wise to do so, in fact, as failing would put them at risk of legal action.

As I understand things, 'al Qaeda' translates to 'the base' where 'base' initially meant 'database'.  It was a catalog of individuals who our intel services knew of and could induce to perform certain functions.  They performed certain tasks against the Soviets in Afghanistan where things started of course, but also were players in our actions in the Balkans (esp, Kosovo) all the way through the current efforts in Syria.

Whether they 'went rouge' for 9/11 is debatable in my mind since the event ended up being the key to a new series of actions which many in our government were anxious to undertake (exactly as predicted when PNAC mused about a 'new Pearl Harbor' when out of power at the end of B. Clinton's last term.)  Some might suspect that al Qaeda was simply the most convenient party to produce a plausible explanation for the attacks which the American chumps would find believable.  I do.  The biggest hang-up I have with this hypothesis is that Ayman al-Zawahiri would have to be on-board and I have trouble figuring out how that could have been accomplished.