But why? If I am free to travel with more than $10k, why do they need to know that I am travelling with more than $10K? I would guess people declare they have more than $10k once, then either don't want to declare again, or leave the cash at home.  The governments are happy to give the banks trillions of $, they are happy to make your life uncomfortable to help them out too.

We are supposed to be living in a free society, I am aware that that illusion is paper thin, but it is often said and ideally would be enforced.

Well now that Napoli have scored, Wolfsburg need 4 unanswered just to get to extra time!
Napoli look good too, I think this one could be over, strange when Wolfsburg are so good in the Bundesliga.

Yes you have to, but only on any profits you make, so probably not for most people, or very little.
It will be very hard to keep a track of, as each time you mine you will have gained capital, what is the price of that capital and what percentage of that is profit?  I guess you would work it out purely from a mining - electricity cost, then deduct the costs of computers, miners, coolers etc that you bought later.

There is software out there that can be used to help traders work out their tax to be paid, I guess that should work for mining too, luckily (kind of) the price of bitcoin is so low that most people are losing money and are tax exempt.  Don't forget to write that off next year as a capital loss though!

If I can get my bitcoin paid back at $483, then I will take the cash please!
Why would anyone want a $235 bitcoin refund when they can get $483 per bitcoin refund?

I'll take the cash and buy twice the amount of Bitcoin, that'll do me nicely!

You have heard of Soros because he is good at what he does as well as having deep enough pockets to move markets in his favour.
We can't do what he does, otherwise we wouldn't be on here asking ourselves "what would Soros do!?"

If he did choose to invest in Bitcoin, we could move the market massively.  He hasn't chosen to though.

I do think we are near the bottom though, I am not sure enough to leverage my bitcoin on this though, that seems like a quick way to the poor house.  Bitcoin is volatile enough without multiplying it by 3

Apple is flying at the moment, the iPhone6 and 6+ sold massively moving them to a whole new level.
If I was going to short apple, it would be due to the apple watch, along with a lack of any new product in the last 5 years (other than the rubbish watch!)

Bitcoin shorting is a lot more dangerous than shorting apple though, the % swings in Apple are tiny in comparison to a big bitcoin move day!

It's not good, no, but it's not the worst thing in the world either!
Lots of services don't immediately process withdrawals, sp they always take a bit longer than they should.

I would start to worry when days pass without your withdrawals being processed, hours are still ok in my opinion.

25c withdrawal fee, the same really, not good but not a nightmare either, they are manually processing them so ironically them taking longer will also cost more, causing both of your problems!

The longer the price of oil stays low, the higher the peak will be afterwards.
It's all been a big political game by the Saudis, they are indirectly attacking American shale, the Russians and the Iranians by accepting a big loss in their own oil exports.

Now that shale is falling, the Saudis seem to be willing to wait out both other OPEN member and non-OPEC members until they all get together and agree a fair deal to reduce the amount of oil pumped.

It is fair enough really, everyone looks to the Saudis to turn off the pumps, but all that happens is that the others step in and profit at their expence, I can see why that would annoy them!

A government could quite easily get a 51% control, or when the next generation of ASICs are made, the companyies who build them could also probably do it.

That said, it would be costy and without profit at the end, so it would either be a government sabotaging Bitcoin, or a terrorist attack.

They should set a deadline for claims, after that date they can see how many BTC are owed and divide the 200000 proportionally.
If only 200,000 are claimed, then all claims could be met in full, if less than 200k in claims are made, then they can make a nice profit out of it!

I don't understand how it would work with cash, but I said I would rather get a cash refund, at $470 a cash refund is much better than a bitcoin  refund at $230!

It depends completely on how they go about the refund.
If they have 200k bitcoins and decide to only offer cash refunds, then they have to sell 200k bitcoins, which will crash the market.

If they already have the cash and decide to refund in cash, then you have lots of crypto fans with a bit of extra cash in their pockets.  That must result in extra buying, which would be good for the price.

I know that if I get cash, I'll probably put it back into bitcoin, if I get bitcoin, it will stay in bitcoin.  The first is better for the price.

Cloud mining can be good yes.
Bit-x are a good example of a regulated exchange, meaning you can safely put money into your account without fear of being ripped off.

It's all just about getting a good price and making sure you cover your fees, both are doable, but they aren't a get rich quick scheme!

Yes, I think in retrospect we will think that it expanded crazily quickly.
5 years from the very first block to be used all around the world and having a billions of USD value is a fast expansion.

Ok there have been some free services, such as facebook and twitter that expanded faster, but there is very little trust or ability to lose money with those, so the comparison isn't very fair.

I can imagine people saying, "it was worth over $1000 after 4 years of existance, it just took off straight away!"

Yesterday I tried to withdraw some money from a online betting account, I had deposited using paypal and the options for withdrawl were either paypal or straight to my account.
I selected straight to my account, then got an email a few hours later saying that to prevent money launderng, all withdrawls must be made by the same method as the deposits!

I also have a FX account which I need to do a KYC-esque update for every 6 months, why? Money laundering.. It is a bit over the top nowadays, I agree.  Wait until harsher cash controls come in.

I often wondered when at the airport why people have to declare when they have more than x amount of cash with them.  They can do what they want in a free society, why can't they travel with all their money in cash form?

I like RT, they offer the other side of the arguement which you don't often get to see in the west.  I have the feeling it is about as biased oas our press is here, just in the other direction!

It is very noticeable that they use comparison a lot to defend Russian actions.  It is always "How come America can do this (add example here), but when Russia does this (add example here) it is unacceptable!"
It does show the hypocricy of situations well, but it can get a bit tiring as they don't actually excuse what Russia is doing, rather always say that they are only doing something that America would do too.

Just because America does it, it doesn't make it right!

The story is a few days old now:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/17/has-the-u-s-abandoned-americans-in-yemen.html

A fair quote that a US spokesman made is:
“Designating an evacuation point for a large group of U.S. citizens has the potential to put those individuals’ safety and security at risk,”

Can you imagine if they made a meeting point which was then targetted?!  Nothing is as easy as it seems.

The lowest risk would seem to me to be just mining some CPU coins and trading out as soon as possible.
I have been out of the Alts scene for a while now, but I assume you could try Quark or Primecoin, or any that haven't been destroyed by GPU mining!

Hosting a mining pool sounds like a good idea too, but it is a commitment that you can't, or shouldn't back out of on a whim. 

It might be all BitPay does around here, but without bitpay almost no where would be accepting bitcoin!
Maybe the price would be higher, but the future of BTC would be bleaker.  I don't want bitcoin to be an e-gold, I want it to be a spendable currency.

If that means in the short term that people accept bitcoin through BitPay and sell for fiat, lowering the price, I can live with that.

Philidelphia made me think about HIV/AIDS in a very different way.
It humanised the people who are infected, it also showed the way that people act to and around gay people well.

I haven't known anyone with HIV/AIDS, so can't say exactly how I would act around them, but I guess the film has made me see that they aremn't to blame and should be treated the same as someone with Cancer really.

How do they justify not giving us at least 25%?  They recovered 25% of the bitcoins, surely they need to be given back to the people who actually owned them...

Otherwise the deal sounds like this - Kraken kindly accepts 200,000BTC from Gox, then offers to reimburse less than 200,000BTC to the customers, essentially stealing some of the customers coins, then they want us to be happy that they have restored faith in Bitcoin... not sure about that one.