AHA! Professor fuddy duddy hates BTC because he favors a demurrage currency like freicoin. The cat is out of the bag!!!!!!!

Ripple to da moon...

Meanwhile BTC:

I got this from an unmentionable official source. Looks good to me!

FTFY

Ripple.

Whoops. FTFM.

His buddy told him to buy and hodl in 2011 and he said no. Also, he is part of the regime wholly responsible for debt enslavement of our generation. He deserves to miss the boat.

Who is that chick behind the bench that just keeps "mhm"ing everything the other guys are saying?

The date is directly from the peoples bank of China, "Companies currently offering services must end services by the Chinese New Year, a weeklong holiday that begins on Jan. 31, the newspaper cited Zhou Jinhuang, deputy director of payment clearance at the People’s Bank of China".
-http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-17/china-bans-payment-companies-from-clearing-bitcoin-news-says.html

China is notoriously oppressive with their monetary system so in the grand scheme of things it could have been much worse. Something along the lines of "any citizen involved in the buying, selling or trading BTC will be imprisoned without a trial for a minimum of 10 years" would have had a terrible effect on the bitconomy. Some people seem to think that Chinas involvement is overrated but personally I think the price would be much lower without it. I'm eagerly awaiting more news from the PBOC to really decide if they "outlawed" it or not.

Banks now have secret branches that report any sort of suspicious activity to the government. If the activity is suspicious enough they will freeze your account "pending internal review". Withdrawing any amount close to $10,000 would be considered suspicious. I'm just assuming from the title that "large amount of btc" constitutes around $10,000 but I could be wrong.

The last time I tried to withdraw fiat from gox back in late 2012 it took about 10 weeks. I can only imagine how long the wait is today.

I think that's what everyone is thinking and not saying.

You left out something very important: "January 31st is the last day payment companies and banks are allowed to deal in bitcoin in China."

I'd recommend ASUS for ultimate reliability. Gigabyte would be a close second followed by MSI. You could probably find some decent motherboards to use for 3x GPU without even using riser cables. This ASUS Crosshair V motherboard mines for me without having to use riser cables. Very nice.

I trust coinbase with my life but admittedly I have never bought a large sum of coins from them. Definitely worth looking into. I would recommend them especially if you're going to buy and hold as they are not technically an exchange in the traditional sense.

At the time of writing this the spread between mtgox and bitstamp/btc-e is greater than $200.

Is gox really that insolvent?

I guess I should clarify this.

I pre-ordered from BFL and we all remember that debacle. Unless a unit is -IN STOCK, ASSEMBLED, READY TO SHIP TODAY- then it probably isn't worth it from a breakeven BTC standpoint. I spent 65 BTC on miners that would never mine 65 BTC. We can postulate that if they were in stock at the time that -maybe- they would have made close to 65BTC, but the nature of mining is diminishing returns at its finest. Every difficulty change yields less and less. If you have any question about this just fire up the genesis block; insert some conservative figures for shits and giggles and you'll still never see a positive BTC return. With all the new mining manufacturers and die shrinking we are probably facing another 1000x difficulty increase very soon. I will absolutely -never- pre-order a miner ever again, and if I happen to have spare cash I will just buy BTC instead from now on. YMMV but that's just my two satoshis.

Money follows attention.

I did indeed receive a brand new sealed EVGA GTX770 exactly as described quite quickly I might add. Would love a proof of purchase so I can qualify for step-up program.

+1 for just buying BTC