BitstampBTC is, at least since Gox's Dwolla seizure, clearly below the MTGOXBTC price. Furthermore, the market depth on Bitstamp is heavily skewed to the sell side.

The obvious conclusion would be that this reflects the perceived risk of holding currency in Mt. Gox accounts, as well as difficulty in getting funds out. You can make about 3% on arbitrage after fees, buying on Bitstamp and selling on Gox, but it seems that's too dicey a proposition for most - to make any real cash at 3% you'd have to lock in quite a lot of funds.

However... What does the situation tell us about who's buying bitcoins in general? Traders must concern themselves with the concerns outlined above. Joe Schmoe, just looking to buy bitcoins to either hold or spend directly, however, would be interested in getting the best price. Yet, not much buying is going on at Bitstamp.So does the bid/ask disparity between gox and bitstamp tell us something about the ratio of currency speculation to "naive" buying interest?

It seems short-term speculation must currently be very significant in determining the price versus buying to hold or use, otherwise the bid/ask on bitstamp would look quite different.

Chartbuddy should have its own thread without any meatbag noise among the glorious bot signal.

Is it yet possible to make split-key wallets? I mean a wallet with a private key derived from keys provided by two or more parties, with each party only knowing their own portion of the key, and the generated private key accessible only to someone knowing all of the input keys? If this can be done, no trusted 3rd party is needed. No possibility for arbitration either, though.

So far we have two users with a handful of posts to their name posting the e-mail version with account seizure mentioned, and others posting different e-mails. I'm not convinced yet. Also, it's dwolla, not mt gox's bank accounts.

How?

I'm saying they have to provide reasons to trust them, and an undeground vault is not one.

What if they do? As long as they let you withdraw bitcoins to some address, you can send those coins elsewhere and there's nothing an exchange can do about it.

All this hype about security measures is beside the point. Personally, I'm not giving significant amounts of bitcoins to anyone to hold unless they guarantee I will be able to withdraw my coins, and I have a reason to trust them to live up to their word.

I don't ask my bank how strong their vaults are. That's their problem. I trust they'd be in serious trouble if they decided on their own to take withhold my deposits from me in some way not allowed for in my contract with them. That trust is what anyone wishing to run a bitcoin vault needs to gain.

Like the "final capitulation" from the 2011 crash was final?

Why do you think such a program would be any good? If it were any good, why would anyone distribute it?

Where's the decentralization here? You still need to trust NashX with your bitcoins, right?

What was the volume on those buys?

If a sell clears the bids downward a good way and the asks don't follow, anyone buying would create such a spike.

Taxing transactions would be pretty extreme. People transfer funds between their own wallets all the time, for perfectly legitimate reasons. For instance, I wouldn't want some bar owner to see how many bitcoins I have when I pay for a beer.

Is there a robust exchange available to Syrians, locally? If not, I don't see any significant cashflow into Bitcoin there. See what happened in Cyprus - once your funds are held, it's too late to transfer them anywhere.

We had 20,000+ BTC worth of bids @ 120-ish quite recently, didn't we?

The UK flavour of Wired, wired.co.uk is better than the US one in my experience. They do run many of the same articles, but the UK site just seems far more intelligent.

That's your choice to make, but you may find it'll take a long time to build trust if you remain anonymous. Regardless of anonymity, a basic shipping info page would be useful, and should be easily found before making an order. I, at least, want to know whether I may need to deal with customs when ordering something.

Where are you based? I couldn't find any real info on who you are, where you ship from etc. on the site. If it's there, maybe it's too buried...

Maybe your IP block is on their ddos-prevention blacklist currently. I don't have any insight into how Prolexic works but seem to recall some folks being prevented from connecting as a side effect of the anti-DOS system before.

Alternatively, some relays in between you and gox may simply be having issues at the moment.

Only if we go below $20 or so per coin.