tl;dr: Review and reconcile your Mt. Gox account history against your other systems (Dwolla, Bank account, etc.), you very well could have missing money...

A couple of days ago I was reviewing my Mt. Gox account history and I noticed a strange discrepancy.  I had two withdrawals in the past few weeks, each for $10k, that were marked as "error".  I withdraw to Dwolla, so I went and checked my Dwolla history and indeed found that those two withdrawals had not shown up in my Dwolla account.  The terrifying thing was that the transactions marked as "error" had deducted the USD from my account, but NOT CREDITED IT BACK TO MY ACCOUNT AFTERWARD.  Thus, $20k USD was essentially missing from my account.

I opened a support ticket with Mt. Gox to make them aware of the issue and once a support representative was assigned to my case (~24 hours later or so), and after convincing them that this was indeed a real issue (their side showed all withdrawals processed), they were very expedient and attentive to my issue and we had it solved within 48 hours.  The solution was for them to re-process transactions in question which then succeeded and changed the status of the withdrawals in question from "error" to "processed" and the expected funds then showed up in my Dwolla account.

For all the flak that Mt. Gox has been getting lately regarding their technology, I am impressed more and more each time I have an issue by their attention to customer support.

We've added another raffle for a Series 1 Casascius Physical Bitcoin with firstbits 12y3pR2y.  These coins are out of production, rare, and in high demand, selling for upwards of $1,000.00 currently on eBay.  The raffle is here:

https://www.bitdraw.com/games/3449

Raffle tickets are a mere 25 TKN (0.025 BTC) each to keep them affordable for most Bitcoin users, and yes, you can buy more than 1 raffle ticket (:

Here's BitDraw's original launch announcement with site information and testimonials.

It is my pleasure to announce that BitDraw is now Provably Fair!  We've completely overhauled our winning value selection algorithms to:

• Continue to use third-party truly random data from Random.org for winning value selection.
• Display a hash of the pre-selected random data for each game while the game is open.
• Include additional third-party random data from our announcement sources for each game when the game closes.
• Display a fully transparent log of how all random data is used to select winning values for each game after the game closes.
• Fully document and explain each step of the displayed log on our Provably Fair process documentation page.

No idea what BitDraw is?  Check out our original launch announcement.

To celebrate the launch of our new provably fair feature, we've got three new games to showcase:

First, a promotional raffle for a 1 BTC Bitbill, v.0.07 (beta) that ends April 1st.

Next, a promotional raffle for a 1 BTC Casascius physical Bitcoin that ends April 1st.

Finally, a new on-going daily lottery called "Fruits Basket" where the odds of winning are exactly 1 in 20 (1:20).  Simply buy a ticket for the fruit that you think will be chosen from the fruits basket.  The jackpot for this lottery is starting out at 1000 TKN (1 BTC) and with those odds will likely be won quickly, so hurry to select your favorite fruit!

Thanks to all our regular players that have helped make BitDraw a success and we hope to see some new users soon!  Don't forget, raffle games are guaranteed to select a winner, and the odds of winning are 1 in however many tickets have been sold.  Some of these games have extremely favorable odds!

We're happy to announce the Open Beta of the Achieve Mint!  The Achieve Mint is a web application platform that enables people to create and award real-life achievements to each other similar to how achievements are earned in video games.

What this means for developers is that as video and online games and applications are a subset of real-life, the Achieve Mint can be used as a turn-key achievements solution for your game or application!  The Achieve Mint has a developer API so that it can be integrated directly with your software.  Do you need a quick and easy achievements system in your game?  Do you need to gamify your website or application?  Check us out at the Achieve Mint!  If you are interested in utilizing the Developer API, please send me a private message to receive an advanced copy of the documentation.

Are you a Bitcoin user? Prove it!

[2012.08.13 - 2012.08.20]

I am proud to announce the launch of BitDraw, the Bitcoin community's new premier raffle and lottery site.  BitDraw provides both ongoing and one-shot raffle and lottery style games for your enjoyment. Create an account, deposit some Bitcoin to receive gaming tokens (TKN), and use those tokens to buy tickets to the games. Cash out your winnings at any time by converting tokens back to Bitcoin.  The exchange rate for BTC to TKN is 1:1000.

To celebrate the launch of our site, we've scheduled some promotional one-shot raffles for the following prizes over the next month or so:

2012.08.13 - 2012.08.20 : Casascius ฿10 Silver Round (10 BTC 1 Troy Ounce .999 Fine Silver Round with Gold Bitcoin Logo) (Raffle)

2012.08.13 - 2012.08.24 : 1 Troy Ounce .999 Fine Silver Liberty Dollar (historical, discontinued, and rare!) (Raffle)

2012.08.20 - 2012.08.27 : Casascius ฿25 Coin (Raffle)

2012.08.27 - 2012.08.31 : 1 year subscription to Bitcoin Magazine (Raffle)

Multiple Raffles (check the site!) : Casascius ฿5 Coin

Come on over to the site, create an account, and enter the raffles!  In addition to the promotional raffles linked above, we have both daily and weekly raffles and lotteries that pay out in the intra-site virtual currency, tokens (TKN).  Don't forget, you can increase your odds of winning by buying multiple tickets to a single game!

"But Dustin", you ask, "how do we know this isn't some scam and you're some evil scammer?  How do we know the drawings aren't rigged?  What about SECURITY???"  Good questions!

First, you know who I am.  I'm very public on the Internet.  You can find out all about me at my personal website or follow me on Twitter.  The account I'm posting this under is in my real name.  Look, that's my real face over there!  I'm also known by the handle I)ruid, under which I have an OTC rating. The domain bitdraw.com is registered in my real name.  The SSL certificate authority that issued our site certificate has verified my identity.

Second, the random bits of data used for our random number generation is pulled from random.org, an unbiased, independend third party who's entire purpose is to provide truely random data to the Internet community.  True randomness is important because machines are notoriously bad at being random.  In fact, with enough data to analyze, they can be quite predictible in their "randomness", which is very, very bad for certain purposes like raffle and lottery drawings.  Therefore, instead of using a potentially predictable pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) like is provided by most operating systems and programming languages, we use a proven source of truely random data for our drawings.  Further, the winning raffle ticket or lottery values, as well as a list of all of the tickets purchased, are displayed on each game page for your own verification after the game closes.  While we don't disclose identifiable user information on who purchased tickets and the winners, there is enough information for each user to determine which tickets in the pool they purchased and whether or not theirs was the winner.  We also invite winners of the games to post here in this thread if they do not mind identifying themselves.  We will build the option for winners to identify themselves directly into the site in a future version.

Finally, we know how important security is to the Bitcoin community.  With the last couple years' track record of service site hacks, scammers claiming to be hacked and running off with the users' funds, password database leaks, and the like, we have taken a number of significant steps from the beginning to ensure that our service has as much integrity as possible.  Some of BitDraw's current security features include:

• The entire site is wrapped in SSL, all the time.  This ensures that you know that your browser is connected to the legitimate site and that communications and data in transit such as your authentication credentials are protected from prying eyes on the Internet.
• The site employs an entirely offline Bitcoin wallet.  Bitcoins deposited at BitDraw are sent to an offline wallet and withdrawals are processed manually and only after the withdrawal is confirmed by the user via response to a PGP-signed email. While a bit slower than instant withdrawal, your Bitcoins themselves are completely safe in the event that the BitDraw site itself is hacked or becomes otherwise compromised.
• BitDraw stores passwords securely and enforces a strong password policy.  Our password policy requires passwords to be 12 characters long and have at least one upper case character, one lower case character, one number and one symbol. Passwords are stored as a salted SHA-512 hash.

We hope that these initial disclosures and security precautions allow you to comfortably game with our service.  If you have any questions, would like clarifications on any of these points, or would like to report a bug, please comment in the thread below or email us directly at the addresses listed on our Contact Page.  To report a security issue, please contact us directly via email to security [at] bitdraw.com.  You can also follow us on Twitter for status updates and announcements.

We hope that you enjoy BitDraw, and good luck!

"Congressman Ron Paul, in a rare head-to-head broadcast confrontation, went up against the Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman in an open debate over monetary policy. It was broadcast on the Bloomberg Television, moderated by Trish Regan. Not to put too fine a point on it, Ron Paul won the exchange, so much so that the cameras and moderators just drifted away from Mr. Krugman without so much as a fare-thee-well and left the field to the hero of the campaign for honest money."

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/ron-pauls-clash-with-paul-krugman-displays-power/87810/

We'll be embedding Bitcoin private keys with some stored value into each one of the flag files that are the targets of our conference's Capture the Flag (CTF) hacking competition.

http://www.infosecsouthwest.com/demolitionderby.html

If you like Bitcoin AND information security or hacking, please check out our conference!

I'm interested in using some of the Canadian BTC exchanges however most (all?) of them require Interac transfers.  Canadian banks seem to be the only banks that support Interac transfers, and none of them will allow you to have an account unless you're Canadian.  Does anyone know either a way for a non-Canadian to get a Canadian bank account, know of any non-Canadian international banks that support Interac, or have any other idea of how to handle this situation?

http://www.interac.ca/consumers/productsandservices_ol_eTransfer.php