Fun! I just received this response from c-cex support:

Hello! We are very sorry, but we make announce 7 days before delisting in twitter, chat and on main trading page ("Important news") and highlighting coins with red color to let customers withdraw coins we are going to delist. Then we remove markets and give 3 more days for withdrawals. Coins retreival after that is not possible. Let us know if there is anything else we can help you with. Thanks!

So basically, if you are on vacation for 10 days, they just take all your coin and never return it, even though they feel "very sorry." If only there was a way to leave the wallet on the server for a few more weeks, or have support initiate a manual transaction instead of feeling "very sorry," but I am sure the incremental costs would be so prohibitive that, no matter how sorry these crooks feel, they just can't find any way of returning coins to their rightful owners.

If I were you, I would start checking double letters first, considering you wrote "tripple" instead of "triple" in your OP.

Ihr dürft nicht vergessen, dass auch unser "normales" Geld ursprünglich Gold und Silber war. Papiergeld ist entstanden, indem große Banken garantiert haben, dass sie auf Anforderung den Schuldschein (Banknote) in Gold/Silber ausbezahlen. Nach ein paar Jahren haben dann die Leute das Papier besser gekannt als Edelmetalle, und dann ist ganz nebenbei eine kleine "Änderung" vorgenommen worden, nämlich dass man das Papier plötzlich nicht mehr automatisch in Edelmetalle umwandeln konnte. Dasselbe Verbrechen könnte theoretisch auch mit Bitcoin passieren. Der größte Unterschied zwischen Silber/Gold und Bitcoin ist, dass es nicht "schwer" ist, Bitcoin "herumzuschleppen", und natülich dass die Regierung oder andere Räuber bei einer Hausdurchsuchung Bitcoin nicht finden können, wenn man es geschickt anstellt.

I'm here to meet girls. Wrong forum?

A friend of mine found out about it on hackernews about a year and a half ago and asked me if I thought it was a scam. He started mining; I started buying.

Those of you who might be thinking about starting an alt cryptocurrency, why not consider an idea like this for a hash function:

1. Calculate a standard hash function like SHA256. Then take the result, split it into chunks, and apply something like this to each chunk:

2. Calculate the natural logarithm of the input.

3. Take, say, the 4th through 10th digit of the result and use this value to decide among many different candidate functions for step 4.

for example:

4.0. If the value from step 3 is 0, then calculate ln(ln(x)), take digits 3 to 8 of the result and xor this with the original input.
4.1. If the value from step 3 is 1, then calculate ln((x+sqrt(x+5))), take digits 2 to 7 of the result and add this to the original input.
etc (potentially tens of thousands of different functions for step 4)

5. repeat a few dozen times

Let's see how GPUs do on that.

Just a thought.

What is currently the cheapest way to get USD from a US bank account or cash to an exchange like btc-e? All I really want is bitcoins, so if there is an even better way to get BTC directly, I'm all ears. If I can avoid uploading scans of driver's license, utility bills, stool samples etc, that would be nice also, but my main focus is avoiding transaction costs and fees.