I found this quote from the complaint interesting as well:

"Oh, and by the way, when he tells you that he owns a telecom company don't believe that either. He is in the phone business I found out, but to call it a telecom company is a bit of a stretch.

In actuality it's a sex chat line, you know like the old 900 and 976 numbers that bill you for minutes and guys get to talk to girls while they play with themselves. That's what Joseph's telecom company is."

When CAvirtex started out they were accepting bill payments via a company called ACITelecom - http://acitelecomld.com/

Aha. How confusing

You can deposit ven at Kraken.com and trade XBT/XVN (Bitcoin vs. Ven) there. I'm not sure if this is available in all us states, but if you have an address in Montana, New Mexico or South Carolina (the "no money transmitter license" required states) it should work, I think.

They are correct, however it seems reasonable that Raiffeisen Banka (Slovenia) would resend the transaction through some other intermediary.. how can they possibly justify sending Bitcoin related transactions through a bank that they know will reject them? Bitstamp needs to demand a refund on the failed tx from Raiffeisen Banka and make them resend it some other way.

The fee is 5% - not great I suppose, but it works with your existing cards.. so it's there if you ever need it.

Getting a bank account isn't really easy.. but you can get prepaid cards that have their own IBAN (essentially bank account number) attached. The accounts have no name but you can put whatever name you want on the SEPA/wire transfer and it will be credited just fine. It's a proper anonymous bank account. Wire money, withdraw from an ATM.

Any of these will do;

http://allegro.pl/listing/listing.php?order=m&string=visa+prepaid

It's probably best to get the EUR denominated ones since they will work with SEPA rather than SWIFT (actually you can use them all with SEPA, but SEPA is EUR only so there will be fx fees if it's a non-EUR card).

They have a low yearly limit per card, but the cards are only like $5 so you can just get a few of them.

allegro is a Polish ebay site.. it's a bit hard to navigate if you don't speak Polish but it's doable with help from google translate. In order to actually pay for the auctions it uses a polish paypal clone called payu.pl. It's a bit tricky to sign up to that too but it is possible even without any polish identity or address. You could also try contacting a seller directly and asking to pay by paypal or some other means.. maybe some will even take bitcoin.

Another option that many people don't realize is that btc-e.com allows withdrawing money to any visa card.. including the ones already in your pocket - and it probably works with most prepaid visas you can source locally too. It sends the money through the visa network (using the long number on your CC) so it doesn't require any bank account to be attached to the card.

Just leave it out.. it's usually not necessary with SWIFT payments. Don't add it to the additional message as that could interfere with the payment reference/details of payment which you do need.

Yea.. that seems like the best action imo.. he basically got off.. 24 months supervised release.. which I guess he was already on from before, so essentially no change.. if he cuts all ties now I can't see him getting in any further trouble over this.

Most banks now take applications over the internet.. You will still need to show them a passport and proof of address which either means getting notarised copies and mailing them off, or if they have a branch in your country then maybe you can make an appointment and show the docs there.

Here are my top 50 countries (10877 unique node IPs in my logs)

percent nodes   country
27.56%  2998    United States
7.47%   812     China
6.86%   746     United Kingdom
5.93%   645     Russian Federation
5.87%   638     Germany
4.46%   485     Canada
3.35%   364     Netherlands
2.85%   310     France
2.40%   261     Australia
2.22%   242     Unknown
2.03%   221     Poland
2.00%   217     Ukraine
1.56%   170     Spain
1.53%   166     Italy
1.42%   154     Sweden
1.32%   144     Brazil
1.18%   128     Switzerland
0.92%   100     Taiwan
0.92%   100     Austria
0.78%   85      Czech Republic
0.78%   85      Bulgaria
0.75%   82      Romania
0.74%   81      Finland
0.72%   78      Japan
0.70%   76      Belgium
0.64%   70      Hong Kong
0.61%   66      Norway
0.57%   62      Israel
0.51%   55      Argentina
0.50%   54      Denmark
0.49%   53      Hungary
0.48%   52      India
0.48%   52      Greece
0.47%   51      Thailand
0.47%   51      Slovakia
0.43%   47      South Africa
0.41%   45      Mexico
0.40%   43      Portugal
0.38%   41      Indonesia
0.37%   40      New Zealand
0.35%   38      Korea, Republic
0.32%   35      Serbia
0.30%   33      Ireland
0.29%   32      Singapore
0.29%   32      Malaysia
0.29%   31      Philippines
0.29%   31      Belarus
0.28%   30      Slovenia
0.27%   29      Turkey
0.27%   29      Estonia

There's nothing stopping someone sending child porn (or indeed any 'illegal' data) to someone's bank account by encoding the bits as a whole lot of microtransfers for $0.01 or $0.02 for example.

Easy to joke about this, but someone is going to be very angry when they try to buy some gold with BTC and they demand ID and proof of origin of the BTC before they'll either return the BTC or deliver any gold.

Miners just blindly accept work from the pool.. they would quite happily go to work on mining a block containing a doublespend tx if the pool assigns it.

That could actually be changed if people cared.. the end miners could maintain their own view of the blockchain and refuse to work on anything that goes against it.. however that isn't the current situation.

Using tor, setup accounts at exchanges that allow anonymous crypto to crypto trading.. trade into litecoins (or some other) on one exchange.. move the litecoins to another exchange and then trade back into btc and withdraw.

It's possible.. make a transaction that has less output value than input value.. the difference would normally go to the miner as a large fee, but they don't have to collect it either.. if they don't claim it then the funds are truly gone. The original inputs have all been spent, but the equivalent value never arrived on any new outputs.

The number of 0.01BTC, 0.1BTC and 1BTC keys have all grown roughly 1.5x since Nov 1st. I expect that is roughly proportional to a 1.5x increase in the number of users.. however even 400k may still be a high estimate for the number of users who currently control as much as 0.01BTC.

You can do it using liqpay. https://secure.privatbank.ru/?do=index_new .. once you have topped up your liqpay account using the debit card you can move the funds to btc-e or bitstamp using https://technocashier.com/reg.php?lang2=

The fees aren't too bad.. but not great either (probably around 6-8% in all). I have used it with www.idtprime.com prepaid mastercards that you can buy in most convenience stores.

About 1.09 million - you can see how it changes over time here; http://klmist.com/keysreport.html

IMO the actual number of users is probably lower than this.. most users have multiple keys. There must be enormous overlap with all the different bitcoin wallet services and people create multiple coinbase and blockchain.info/mywallet accounts for different phones/tablets.. in the case of blockchain.info, perhaps installing/uninstalling on 3 or 4 devices could end up creating more than 10 accounts for a single user.

Also people sign up with every new service just to check it out, even if they can't use it because they live in another country.. (eg, coinbase and chinese exchanges). It's possible that there are a lot of users hiding behind large shared wallet keys, but I'm not really convinced of that.. surely anyone putting money into bitcoin will at least have one 0.01BTC key of their own too?

You can see it daily at http://www.klmist.com/keysreport.html

There are 38588 = exactly 50 keys and 58380 keys >= 50 (including the exactly 50 ones). Most of the exactly 50 ones are unspent coinbases that probably belong to satoshi.. so most likely less than the difference so <20k, imo. The sum of all keys >= 50 BTC is 10722974 BTC or 89.4% of all BTC that currently exist.