Point of potential interest:

I got an under $1K deposit from spooksville, USA on the East coast a few days ago.  Actually, it's also where Dulles Intl Airport is, and where plenty of non-spooks live as well to be fair.  But anyway...

I got a phone call from customer service at about 20:30 Pacific time with the lady asking me if I was satisfied with Wells Fargo's service related to my deposit in that location.  Somehow it did not 'feel' like an ordinary call-center type thing, but maybe I'm just paranoid.  I told the lady straight up that it wasn't me, and I sold something to someone via a broker so I have no idea who deposited the money.  But the money is in the bank so I'm happy with their service.

I went on to ask her about the legality and mentioned that everything I have found indicates that it is perfectly legal to deposit cash in someone else's account.  She said "I don' know anything about that." and more or less hung up on me.

Between this unusual cash deposit pattern and the eventual wire from Mt. Gox which I hope makes it to my account before the earth stops cooling I figure I'll be lucky to retain an account with Wells.  And if the various banks communicate, I might end up being one of the more well-to-do 'unbanked' persons around.  We'll see.  It would be hilarious if I got kicked out of the banking system just in time for the Cyprus style 'bail in' which is, from what I read, now in vogue amongst the corp/gov planners as a means of re-capitalizing Western banks when the run into trouble after rehypothecating my savings and losing it in highly leveraged derivatives bets.

I don't know if Karpeles is up to the task or not, but I'll bet that he at least had something of an NSA-lite (and particularly rich) trove of data on a lot of people.  Most are likely garden variety crooks, but not all.  I think a lot of people have played in the Bitcoin market over the years, and some of them are likely in the 'protected class'.  If Mark can and does play that card he can likely end up situated wherever he likes as the Bitcoin ecosystem moves forward.

Oh ya, from what I can glean (and/or invent in my paranoid fantasy world) the real Bitcoin activity happens in dark pools and generally opaque systems.  So you are right to characterize Mt. Gox activity as 'a few thousand speculators circle jerking nickels of each other.'  But partaking in these circle-jerk sessions from time to time is probably a useful (if messy) means to achieve certain objectives for a lot of the real players.  Or at least has been at an earlier time in the formation of the ecosystem.

I'm hoping that Greenwald stays careful and deliberate.  Being emotional or in a hurry tends to lead to mistakes, and any mis-step in the game they are playing could be fatal.  Literally.

Snowden seems to me to have a mission to inform his fellow citizens about how their governments are operating and the steps he has taken are directed at doing so most efficiently.  Greenwald/Poitras also seems to have shown a lot of restraint in the timings and choices of what is released.  Every time the government and media shills take some bogus defense or produce some talking point, info is released which shoots it down.  And the frequency of the releases seems to be keeping people interested but not overloading them so they have time to think about the issues.  If these guys jump the gun or act out of anger or spite I would expect that their performance will suffer.

I've spent years variously hoping that Krapeles was a crook and watching for evidence of such.  Early on when I was actually buying it would have served me well if Mt. Gox had pulled a mybitcoin.  More recently I've proposed that the reason Mt. Gox was largely unmolested by the powers that be while much of the competition was shut down was (potentially) because they were actively cooperating in a honey-pot operation.  The notable harassment vis-a-vis Mutum Sigmum (or whatever-the-hell it's called) and the other banking hassled did a huge amount to bolster my confidence in Mt. Gox.

To answer your question, I 'go there' because I manage my cash-flow needs such that a month or two (or even infinity) of waiting for my fiat is not going to kill me.  I actually only now started to draw down my BTC stash, and only because I depleted my fiat reserves with a largish purchase.  I hedged my bets; half is (hopefully) coming via an international wire from Mt. Gox, and the other half is coming in through bitcoin-brokers.  The latter is just about done and it's been less than a week.  Not only that, but I paid no fees or commission, and as best I can tell everything is legal.  Both Mt. Gox and Bitcoin Brokers could have their operations locked up, or they could vanish with my BTC.  It's a chance that one takes in this business so I always look for ways to hedge and have options.  But I do feel that if Mark was prone to do a 'Tom Williams', he would have done it years ago.

The detention of David Miranda by the Brits is an interesting observation.  They held him right up to the 9 hour limit and made chit-chat to kill time.  One can only guess that they were still working on the encryption that he was using and didn't get it in the 9 hours they had.  One suspects that a significant percentage of the processing power of probably all of the 'five-eyes' was likely working on the problem.  Or at least the US and UK since it seems possible to me that AU, CA, and NZ defer putting much money into such systems and outsource to the US and UK when there is a pressing need for code cracking.  In fact, it could be the case by this time that the UK themselves simply serves as a US tool for specialized task and also lack the big guns (in a compute resource sense.)

Anyway, if my conjecture is accurate, I would say it's a safe bet that the Greenwald side has some competent technical talent at their disposal by now.

I've started using bitcoin-brokers in seller mode.  I know I authorized several sales, and have no reason to believe that the BTC were not released.  Usually the same day a fiat deposit is made unless I have reason to wait for the deposit to go out of 'pending' mode in which case it would be early the next business day.

I thought about localbitcoins, but something was wonky with their certs (on my browser and machine), I live in a rural part of the country where there is not much interest, and for the hassle, I want to be doing volumes that are atypical on the high side.

I cannot vouch for Bitcoin Brokers, but will say that they seems responsive, active, and competent so far and things are working well for me.  Over half of the BTC I had up for sale has been converted into fiat in my bank account, and so far I have not been ripped off...or arrested...but it's been less than a week.

I also looked around to make sure that there was nothing illegal about depositing cash into someone else's bank account and it does not appear to be so.  Nor is Bitcoin in and of itself illegal, and in fact it's been pretty good to a lot of people who speculated in it over the years, and I take some amount of pride in having done so.  It's anyone's guess about how much longer a channel such as this will remain open.  I'm damn sure going to pay my taxes, and do keep accurate records for this purpose since I suspect that tax evasion would be the attack mode against people who are not doing money laundering or other illegal activities.

The main thread for the broker thingy is on 'services' as I recall.  It gets several conversations per day so it should be on the first page.  My main complaint at this point is that the operator(s) have not responded to my queries about escrowing their identity with a reliable agent such as John K. who seems pretty thorough about this sort of thing.  This failure imposes a limit on how much value I would be willing to risk with them at one time.

Oh ya...unfortunately for the buyer, I (and I think most other sellers) ask based on Mt. Gox prices plus or minus some percentage.  Buyers would likely prefer just about any other exchange be used as a basis at this point I would expect.  But it is possible to convert cash to Bitcoin in a pretty short span of time, especially if everyone happens to be checking their mail at the right time and there is no indication of fraud.

For my part, I'm bullish and excited about the potential of Bitcoin and distributed crypto-currencies generally.  For this reason it is especially valuable to attempt to take a jaded view of things since it is easy to lose balance about things one is excited about.   In my case there are a lot of things about Bitcoin that I genuinely would prefer to see evolve differently, and I'm not prone to holding back on my opinions.  Especially on a forum on the Internet.

Not sure what proudhon's trip is.  Nagle I've always felt believes he is doing at least something toward manipulating the market (and is trying to capitalize on it of course.)  He's probably wrong.  I don't think that almost any of the random jerk-offs (including myself) who populate this forum have much influence on almost anything.

I guess I would consider something who's primary use is as a political statement, a long term store of value, a risk management vehicle, or generally used as a vehicle for speculation as less like 'money'.

Part of it has to do with what options exist.  I use fiat as 'money' (or 'currency') and it works fine for me in that role and at this time.  I personally use Bitcoin as all of the four items I enumerated above...which is why the occurred to me.

But my point is that 'who cares?'  Even if/when I do use it more purely as 'money' (or 'currency') I still will feel very little need to have the rest of society putting one label or another on the solution.  And if that label funnels the solution into a maze of legal hassles it's even less desirable to me that it happens.

Maybe Bitcoin (and gold) are not very 'money-like' after all.  At the present time at least.

In addition to the practical reasons for avoiding the label and thus tip-toeing around the legal hassles, avoiding labeling Bitcoin as 'money' probably would have been somewhat accurate as well.  I would have preferred some very vague term like 'tokens' or 'accounting units.'

I never understood the desperate need on behalf of so many in the community to 'prove' the 'Bitcoin is money'.  The volume of missive on this forum alone attempting to promote that fairly meaningless assertion is impressive.  It seems to me like the community has some sort of an inferiority complex about it.  Just as do many gold bugs about gold.  If one is confident in the strength of their solution, and I personally am about both Bitcoin (in some ways) and gold, then who gives a shit what uninformed people...especially those in the public sector...want to call it?

I've never seen any indication that setting a negative vs. Mt. Gox is dis-allowed.  To the contrary, it seems to be effective

I kind of like the opportunity to guess about what might be happening with my 'competition' in the seller's space.  It adds another element of intrigue.  Of course it might add extra hassle and add opportunities for error if sellers are changing their terms all the time, but so far the brokers seem to be able to stay on top of things.  At least to my level of satisfaction.

This service is actually just plain fun.  It requires some attentiveness in order to provide satisfaction to the buyers, but presumably I could lock up things if I wanted to take a vacation or something.

I'll present a hypothesis which, like most of my hypothesis, I don't necessarily believe.

What if Mt. Gox is making a boat-load of money (which I've always suspected to be true) but their biggest source of grief is AML (which I also expect true) and it is complicated by a lot of legacy customers who are a bit shady and not vetted in the same manner as newly verified persons.

The way to make money in this business is to take the low hanging fruit.  In this case, that would be the obviously clean people who are speculators and what-not.  As a corollary, one could gain an extra competitive advantage over one's adversaries by foisting the problem children off on them.  This would not be unlike the calculus which appears to network providers who are probably not exactly broken-hearted when a bandwidth hog gets pissed and switches service providers.

Anyway, a good way to lose some undesired baggage would be to go through a protracted period of 'problems' in getting people their money.  Or at least certain groups of people.  That is what I would do if I were running things, and also why I have no desire to be running things.

A more likely hypothesis is that Mt. Gox is simply struggling mightily with mainstream financial institutions, regulators, and law enforcement.

The least likely hypothesis in my mind is that Mark is running out of capital unless he has kind of a world-record appetite for hookers and blow.

I'm not trying to knock on the solution which at this point I have every reason to be happy with, but I always play devils advocate and try to gauge observations against the multitude of possibly hypothesis.  So...

A very shrewd operator who was being dis-honest may halt taking in new money with stories about imbalances to give cover to a period of non-activity seen by the seller (who's coin's the operator currently controls.)

Of course a perfectly up-front operator would be happy to avoid an excess of balances for which they were responsible.  I certainly would if I were trying to run such a service.

On balance, the interesting news of the halt in accepting new buyers sellers strongly supports the 'is legit' hypothesis.  At least it does in my mind.

  edit: correct sense buyer/seller which was wrong and misleading.

I've only barely begun to actually take profits, and lord-a-mercy but it's a hassle.  My plan is to use my non-fiat holdings to keep my fiat balances at a certain level as I buy shit.  Even though I have always seen Bitcoin as highly risky, I see having a bunch of money in the banking system as even more risky and have for more than a decade.  I would not have guessed that the US would not have done a Cyprus by 2013 when I was first getting paranoid (and making money) in 2002.  But every day brings us that much closer to 'the event', and the flames are already starting to blacken a few of the unfortunate souls at the periphery (e.g., Detroit pensioners.)

I want to maximize my own intake like just about any other living creature.  So in that sense I'm 'a pig'.  Most of what I've done with Bitcoin is donate it to causes I believe in and some of them don't directly effect my well-being in proportion to the funds I have given.  In that sense I am not 'a pig' I guess.  Having been around at lower values has conspired to make me more generous than I ultimately wished to be.

I was 'victimized' badly through the 2nd half of 2011.  I kept doubling down and losing money for months.  Man alive was I in the red.  But I never sold until earlier this year since I would not have purchased in the first place if I were just going to dump the things without a significant gain.  My speculation was based on value theory and I've not yet deviated from it.  I also assumed a total loss for everything I put in so I was never under any selling pressure either financially or psychologically.

Porche, Mercedes, whatever.  All about the same to me...they are just a 'rob me' or 'audit me' banner as far as I am concerned.

I actually used to be pretty into cars, but somehow that interest just died.  Even when it did exist, though, I never did have much desire for new or fancy or expensive rides.  Tiny sports cars where my chief interest though I always had a weakness for rough terrain vehicles as well.  I drove a first generation MR2 for some number of years.  It was one of my favorite cars ever, but I started out with front wheel drive and never could get to feeling comfortable with real wheels drive when doing 'things' with it.  Plus the thing was twitchy as hell with a racing suspension.  You'll be looking out the rear view mirror to see where you are going in a fraction of a second.  I would carve through mountain roads with amazing grace which was fun.  Around that time I raced a Honda RS125 for a short period.  Even being out of tune it was the most amazing machine I've ever operated.  Light as a feather and contained nothing unnecessary for the goal of getting round a road course as quickly as possible.  It was like riding a scalpel and one felt that they could do anything on it.

If Bitcoin has another big pop left, I'll probably get a boat in addition to other things.  One many not be surprised to find out that I would look for an old wooden fishing boat in good condition which I would prefer to a yacht.  I'd take any boat which has an Atlas engine.

I cannot agree.  This week I went through the process of verifying and was incorrectly rejected twice, then I was verified.  Next I got a withdraw method set up for international wire.  This also was not without need to contact support.

Through these processes I probably had to contact support 5 or 6 times and each time they got back to me and addressed my problem specifically.  And eventually successfully.

I have some complaints about their UI and documentation which may have reduced the need to communicate with them if it were better implemented, and also wish that seeing the string 'p.o. box' did not create a Pavlovian reject response (since I and others in my area use a P.O Box for completely legitimate reasons) but I CANNOT fault Mt. Gox's AML or banking support for not being prompt and effective.

In theory I have an International wire to the US in process.  I'll be interested to know how long it takes after all the pissing an moaning on this board.  Certainly I'll be reporting back.

I guess I and crazymiata made it in just in time as sellers.  Happy days.

With something complex like this, some of the questions and considerations don't appear immediately.  One thing that hit me was that my bank (Wells Fargo) takes until the next business day to change deposit status out of 'pending' status.  They also don't make the deposit scans available immediately.

One exploit I could think of is that a fraudulent buyer issues a check but doctors things up to look like cash on the scan.  In that case I might see the funds (albeit in pending mode) and release my coins then have the check bounce and the funds clawed back.

I deem this to be a low risk thing mainly because the it would be a lot of risk for reward, and pretty clear fraud generally which the bank might expend resources investigating.  None-the-less I probably would want to wait for the banks scans and shift out of 'pending' mode before releasing multi-thousand dollar BTC values.

Anyway, I wanted to get a discussion going on this type of thing mainly because I am unfamiliar with banking generally, various types of fraud that people attempt, and how likely a bank is to pursue what types of fraud.

---

Another risk which is probably not so unlikely that it should be neglected is that Bitcoin-Brokers.org gets put under pressure by regulators or law enforcement and have to freeze things.  It (and the possibility that they themselves are running some sort of scam) are risks that I weighed in determining how much BTC to entrust them with.  I'd welcome any legal theories about where the possible points of weakness are in the various aspects of what they are doing.  And what I and the seller are doing for that matter.

As I mentioned in a previous, I would feel more comfortable if Bitcoin-Brokers personal identities were available through an escrow to be released if they ran.  Partially mitigating this is that it is usually possible to track people down if they use third-party services and one spends enough time and money doing so.  Another mitigating factor is that in my experience so far, the results and service quality indicate a legitimate and effective service.

Looks a lot like this:



but mine has steel tracks and a nice hydraulic thumb.  It's about half the size I was initially intending to get, but I'm not in a hurry and if it takes a long time to dig out a stump or what-not at least it operates economically.  I'm not sure I like the offset arm due the complexity, but in the few occasions when I end up using it I'm sure it'll be great to have, and if I ever decide to take on side-jobs for money it'll be great to have the flexibility.  It can swing 180 degrees within it's track prints if working between buildings or whatever.  The machine is supposed to have only 2500 hours so if taken care of a bit it should be only 1/3 -> 1/2 way through it's life expectancy.

I see a pretty cool old Allis Chalmers cat not far from here with a 2cyl Detroit.  I might follow up on that.


Ya, this thread has had a long and varied life and has strayed from topic much over it's life-time.  That is part of the reason why it has appeal to me.  Not sure how many others feel the same.  In any event, the subject always seems to brings it back on target.

To be back on-target, the pic and story can be an illustration of what Bitcoin can do for a person just as the pic of Caldwell's Mercedes.  Me and cypherdoc tried our level best to inform people that such a thing was possible back in the 'dark' $2/BTC days.  Perhaps someday I'll post a pic of a Lear Jet (although I personally would opt for a Cessna Caravan if money was no object.)  I continue to believe that it is wise to hedge one's bets with other things beside Bitcoin though.  PMs in my case.

I just bought the excavator I've been talking about on this thread over the years.  Liquidated (or -ing) some BTC to float my fiat balances where I want them because of it.  It's not do dig for gold though, but that is mostly because there is absolutely none in my area due to the geology, and the haul-in costs to get the machine to a mining claim (which I also don't have) would be excessive.

Someday I do hope that I can buy tractors for BTC directly and such posts will not be sarcastic.  Actually, now I want a dozer, but that is the idea.  (I want ROPS and a logging winch FWIW )

I started using this service yesterday in seller mode and so far I am very satisfied.  The representative who I've been dealing with has good communication skills.  Not all of my BTC is sold and my banks still labels my deposits in 'pending' so I am still at risk, but I feel quite satisfies with how things are going so far.

---
I have a suggestion about identity.

I prefer to entrust funds only to someone who's identity I can verify if need be (read, if they screw me.)  OTOH, there is every reason to keep an identity private if one controls significant funds as do the brokers.

To reconcile this, I suggest escrowing the vendor's identity.  I was recently involved in a group-buy and the operator escrowed his identity with John K.  The idea was, of course, that in the even that the group buy organizer ran with the items, the identity would be released at John K's digression.  This was very satisfactory to me as I have no desire whatsoever to know any individual's identity unless there is a need.

Perhaps such a thing has already been done for bitcoin-brokers.org personnel, but I did not see it.

---

Lastly, it did seem to me when I was reading this thread that a lot of the participants registered on bitcointalk.org at roughly the same time.  It would be great to see more 'old timers' participating.  Not sure how to arrange that though.

I'll follow-up with an after-action report when all my money is safely tucked into bed.  I am a relative 'old timer', but I've never sold any BTC before, and the last time I even bought any was 2011.