If these guy's have 1,000BTC to put up for insurance then they can also buy their own offshore fully legal brokerage/securities trading financial services company and do this on clearnet. Nothing illegal about anonymous directors running a brokerage service in Belize, Panama, Seychelles, or even New Zealand if you have a local employee there. As long as you are licensed in that country you can operate. Hell you could operate a legal brokerage out of Liberia.

I think the fact that this is happening at the same time as the Cyprus crisis is purely coincidental. Cyprus is seen as a small far-away country here in Spain and most people won't draw any analogies between its situation and Spain's. It might have been different if the plan for a deposit levy had happened in Portugal or Italy but, even in that case, people would sooner be taking their euros out of banks and putting them under their mattresses rather than looking for alternative stores of value. Confidence in the banking system may have taken a hit, but not in the euro itself. I think the English-speaking media has consistently failed to understand how strong support for the euro is in southern Europe, and all stories about people ditching their euros and looking for alternatives have little credibility.

So what has caused the sudden spike in interest in Spain? Google Trends shows that it has happened for real: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Bitcoin&geo=US%2C%20ES%2C%20DE&date=4%2F2012%2013m&cmpt=geo


The likeliest explanation is that there were a couple of articles about Bitcoin in two widely-read news websites in Spain: elmundo.es and eleconomista.es. The articles were rather bad in quality, but they were among the headlines on the home pages for some time, which probably prompted a lot of people to search for more information.

BitPay is doing this for wikipedia. At first I was a little annoyed partly for Vit's reason, but now I like the idea. Each extra thing you can makes the coins more useful to people and thus more valuable. Sure it would be a better PR boost if they took it directly, but that wasn't really about to happen anyway.

And later, when there are even more uses for coins these places that are only getting old money from pass-throughs will have need for coins and want to get them directly instead of hassling to buy them.

I wish they would switch it back to the old layout. Was much simpler, easy to just scroll down to what you wanted to look at and no clutter. And the lack of contrast is not easy on the eyes. 

With all these people out their yelling about how they have free electricity, I think I'm beginning to understand why I pay so much for electricity. And I'm not even mining.

Who says it is not profitable?  In most cases the rigs running today are paid for.  So every BTC earned is additional profit.  When ASIC's hit, then the GPU or FPGA Rigs might not be profitable unless they get free energy. 

The other concept to keep in mind is that the your mining rig is generating BTC not USD or EUR or the such.  So, if you mine, in hopes that the BTC will go up, then you could cash out in the future at much higher exchange rates.