http://rt.com/news/218019-bill-ban-bitcoin-russia/

It's a major turn by the administration.  The lapdog legislature is unlikely to act in opposition to the administration.

Given the extremis in which the Rouble finds itself these days, I am reminded of the impact of Cyprus bail-ins.

If you have an exchange, know of an exchange, or even just want to buy and/or sell btc or xmr in Africa, please list your contact here.

Personally, I have a pressing need to send funds to N'djamena, Tchad, ASAP.  I will probably have to use Western Union, and I may vomit.   To avoid this in future, I am creating this thread.

A good way to get a head of future market moves is to game out important scenarios, i.e. ones which result in market moves.  I think WW2b is an important scenario.  Here's my WW2b scenario:  

Occupied Crimea votes independence from Ukraine.  
Ukraine mobilizes military in eastern Ukraine.  
Putin invades eastern Ukraine to "protect ethnic Russians".  
Ukrainian military retreats.  
NATO enters Ukraine.  
Ukraine military re-enters eastern Ukraine.  
Putin escalates in eastern Ukraine.  
Ukraine military retreats.  
NATO in force.  
NATO - Russian air conflict, Russia suffers loses.
NATO - Russian ground conflict, NATO suffers loses.  
NATO uses tactical nukes.  
Putin nukes New York.

How does this scenario affect Bitcoin?

Are there scenarios in Transdniestra or the Baltics which are more likely to escalate than the more narrowly focused conflict in Ukraine?

Fiat currency was imposed upon the modern world on a global scale in 1971, when Nixon finally decoupled the dollar, the global reserve currency, from the price of gold.  Thus, it is a relatively novel experiment, and unlikely to prove stable in the long run.   Since the default of 1933, when debts payable in gold were invalidated,  the US dollar has lost roughly 19/20ths of its value.   This trend is likely to accelerate:  Exponential expansion in debt creates a strong constituency for hyperinflation.

Indeed, in the developed world today, money is debt.  Specifically, debt which accrues interest.  As every schoolchild should know, interest accumulates exponentially when it is compounded.  Sovereign debts have demonstrated compounding for decades, without meaningful surcease.  With substantial volatility, debt overall has increased exponentially since banks were granted control over monetary policy.

Although I would not wish to be tasked with managing such a system, it is conceivable that an exponentially expanding debt could be serviced by an exponentially expanding economy.  This would not be desirable, because all ownership would rapidly accrue to a small interest-receiving class, while the vast majority of the population, the interest-paying class, would be effectively enslaved.  Such regimes always end in blood.  Nonetheless, until social injustice forced the issue, the system would be balanced.  Not stable, mind you, but balanced.  However, exponential expansion of the physical economy requires exponential expansion of physical resource consumption, which is simply impossible, even in a short run, on the surface of a finite planet.

Therefore, resource restriction will destabilize the inherently unstable debt money system, even if brutal repression suffices to prevent popular uprising from overthrowing it.  Any other outcome is so improbable as to be discounted out of hand.  A failure of one of the 5 major sovereign powers (ECB, FRB, BOJ, BOC, BOE) is likely to rapidly spread to the remainder, and the bulk of fiat currency worldwide become worthless.  If this occurs during a window of opportunity, when the infrastructure is adequate, and before it is superceded or co-opted, the largest portion of the resulting vacuum will be taken up by bitcoin.

I solicit discussion of the estimated time for a forthcoming sovereign crisis, and its relation to that window of opportunity.  How can the instabilities of the debt system be usefully modeled?  What are the critical missing elements (scalability, usability, workflow integration) necessary to ready bitcoin for a role as global reserve currency, and how soon can they be ready?  Will bitcoin save civilization, or will the internal politics of software development make that impossible, and doom us - the survivors, at least - to neolithic population levels and lifestyles?

On December 6th I sold 50 BTC, and was informed that I would recieve some $40560.50 in my bank account by 11 December.  This has not occurred.  I have emailed coinbase, tweeted to them, called the merchant services line, &c., for several days, to no avail.  As far as I can tell, they have simply walked with my BTC.

If you have been able to deposit fiat to Kraken, please post.

I am seeking channels for converting onshore RMB to offshore RMB or offshore deliverable commodities.  Suggestions?  Feel free to PM with proposals.

My policy:  everytime you go to a restaurant, tell the waiter you only tip in bitcoin. if they have a phone its trivial to load an app. otherwise, use the coinbase app to send a tip to  their email address.  cabs likewise.  tip better, big enough so the experience is a positive one.

never ever pay for anything  without asking if 'you take bitcoin yet?'  when in power, force it. 
demand payment in bitcoin.

do not be too polite, or lazy:  as well as being good for your book, it is a moral imperative.
make your life better.  they will thank you for it later.
you have a choice.  use it.

 everytime you go to a restaurant, tell the waiter you only tip in bitcoin. if they have a phone its trivial to load an app. otherwise, use the coinbase app to send a tip to  their email address.  cabs likewise.  tip better, big enough so the experience is a positive one.

never ever pay for anything eithout asking if 'you take bitcoin yet?'  when in power, force it.  demand payment in bitcoin.

do not be too polite, or lazy:  as well as being good for your book, it is a moral imperative.

available here: https://forums.butterflylabs.com/classifieds-208, order 25740 placed 8/21.

asking 37.10 BTC for 600 GH/sec in queue, i.e. my cost at bitstamp.net BTC quote. 
you get my queue slot at no premium to retail.

asic at southoftheclouds dot net

available here: https://forums.butterflylabs.com/classifieds-208

asking 39 BTC OBO for 600 GH/sec in queue.

asic at southoftheclouds dot net

Other items sold out.

ebay item 261280384381 if you are interested.  make an offer.  what have you got to lose?
i'll post it in the Computer Hardware forum when whitelisted, or if my 4 hours pass successfully.
until then, this post is part of my "substantive" contribution.

Clearly arbitrage is very much available in BTC world.  There are venue spread arbs, as well as triangle arbs.  Liquidity may be good in a given venue, but that doesn't seem sufficient to eliminate the arbs as long as there are a sufficient number of under-informed market participants, which probably requires inter-market liquidity to be good as well.

Gosh, what are the dimensions of liquidity?  I think depth of book, width of spread, spread volatilty, depth volatility, and the nth differences of mid are all informative of liquidity conditions.  Anything else?  Is there a standard textbook on liquidity issues in arbitrage?