Seems that way.  Ideal time to launch another attack on Mt Gox (if it is indeed an attack).  Midnight on Sunday night when no one is likely to be around at Mt Gox in Japan. 

Interesting news for speculators.  Price skyrockets from under $13 to $14.20 before all trade is suspended and all ask/bids disappear.  Will the trade be rolled back?  Things are slowly being restored now, but there is a chasm between asks and bids.  Asks $14.50+, bids around $12.60.  Probably Mt Gox having problems and hopefully not someone getting tricky with stolen accounts again.

Day low price just went to $2 (as reported on Bitcoin Charts), high was $14.2, and now all trades have disappeared.  Not really good enough.

Correction: You can transfer bitcoins around the world tax free.  If you want to convert bitcoins to money, you then need to feed it through an exchange and a bank to get the cash.  There are fees there. 

PayPal is always getting bad press.  Has been for almost a decade, yet it's still around and as popular as ever.

Bitcoin's value is slowly limping along and falling.  $13.18 as I write this.  There are the usual excuses, such as this being the weekend, and that Dwolla transactions are delayed until Monday so traders can't take advantage of the low low bitcoin prices.  There is nothing new here, and everyone expects a dip on the weekends so there is nothing natural about it.  Bitcoin is in a natural, slow, gradual decline.

We need to concentrate on real world bitcoin services and uses to attract people.  Trying to attract more money any other way just looks like members of a pyramid scheme trying to get more funds into the system.

Looks like so many people anticipate the weekend dip that it's currently doing absolutely nothing.  Still trading in the $13.50-$13.70 range.

An assumption about the 1.9Mhps/watt can only be made if running old hardware that's very difficult to obtain (5xxx series cards).

My set up: AMD 145 CPU, mATX mobo, 2Gb RAM, 30Gb SSD, 6950 (cannot unlock shaders any more).  330Mhash/s, slightly overclocked, RAM downclocked to half, fans at 25%, 80Plus PSU.  Using an accurate power meter it consumes 205 to 210 watts, depending on fan activity.  That's 4.75kWh per day, or 142.5kWh per 30 day month.  It produces around 0.2 BTC per day, and since I pay the equivalent of US 25c per kWh it costs me $1.19 to get $2.72 of income.  $1.53 per day.  Then take out income tax, which few people add to the calculations as they think they'll never get caught when miscellaneous USD$ appears in their accounts, and it's close to a dollar per day.  $30 per month on hardware that today costs about $350.  It's difficult to get excited.

If I could unlock the shaders or overclock further the calculation would be slightly more favourable, but power consumption goes up with hashing speed too.  Adding a second card to the PC is not that efficient as you gain by not doubling up on power consumption by the RAM/mobo/PSU, but you pay the penalty of the CPU now running at 100% due to dodgy OpenCL drivers.

Funnily enough if BTC's price remains relatively static and doesn't budge from $13 to $14 for the next 3 months that would be the best possible thing to happen to bitcoin.  It wouldn't make the traders and speculators happy, but it would remove the extreme volatility that makes bitcoins very unattractive for real commerce.  Long may the mediocre price continue :-)

Depends on your power costs.  That PC would recover its costs within 6 to 12 months.  You've also got to count on bitcoin's price dropping below $10 in your calculations.  Depending on your climate the extra heat generated may be welcome in winter, but cause even more power consumption in summer.  It's the hidden cost of cooling that most miners never take into account.

Many people once hoped that bitcoin's value would continue to go up with difficulty, yet for the past several difficulty increases this has proved to be the exact opposite.  Price goes down with increased difficulty.  As difficulty goes up the hype of getting rich by running your GPU flat out disappears, and with it the interest of new people to keep the whole thing going.

The weekend dip is becoming longer.  I suggest we ask Rebecca Black about the weekend and when it starts.  Friday, according to her.

What I would like to see is a plan on how Namecoin's supporters plan to get ordinary people to use their TLDs in conjunction with the global standard.  There has to be a way to get millions of ordinary Internet users to favour namecoin TLDs to make namecoin mining worthwhile.

It seems there are not as many people using free to 0.10kWh power as is often claimed on these forums.  If someone is mining with US 10 cent power they should still be adding as much capacity as possible.

If there was a way to get bitcoins into and out of Pokerstars (or other major poker site) then bitcoins would suddenly become quite popular with US citizens.

This calculation very much reminds me of the silver bulls, who sometimes write that if every American bought just one ounce of silver they could drive the price up by X, where X is usually 2 to 3 times.  The fact that the vast majority of Americans have no care for holding silver bullion doesn't stop the wishful thinking.  An even smaller percentage of those people would have any desire to own bitcoins.

It seems to me bitcoins are being pushed in two opposite directions.  One crowd wants to use them as a Free currency (free of government interference).  Money for the people by the people.  The other crowd wants bitcoins to rise in value (preferably exponentially) so they can make a fortune selling for government currencies.  The two are mutually exclusive, seeing as bitcoin is a highly deflationary currency.  The fact that bitcoins lost to crashed hard drives can never be regained makes the case for far fewer than 21 million ever being possible in existence.

I want to see it too... so I can sell a whole bunch of bitcoins before the price reverts to the $13.50 - $14 range.

That is of course true.  If you don't sell the asset at a lower price then you haven't realised the losses.

However, it's also the game US banks are playing with toxic CDOs.  They're currently marked to model, not marked to market.  The bank may say they're worth 90c in the dollar when really they're 30c.  Even though the bank has not sold the asset, and therefore not realised the losses, those losses are real and genuine.  They affect bank reserves and can cripple future lending.

Recently I applied for a mortgage and the broker wanted to know what my assets are worth right now, not when I bought them or what I think they're worth.

Indeed.  Diamonds would be a rotten way to store value.  They come in many various grades with different colours, inclusions, and clarity ratings.  Investment gold only comes in 2 grades and you're usually guaranteed that 24 carat gold is 99.99% pure.

I sold at 14.6, waiting for the market to drop again so I can rebuy.  What does surprise me is how quickly the market dropped back.  Currently at $13.70.  I was prepared to wait until the weekend to buy again.

The long term average value of bitcoins is under a dollar, but even the most pessimistic speculator is unlikely to believe that's achievable unless there is a severe disruption to how bitcoin works (hack, economy collapse, government intervention, etc).

Currently there is a slow and steady trend downwards.  I'm using any upward spikes to sell bitcoins.  Did quite well today at $14.60, just shy of the temporary $14.70 peak.  I'll buy in again should the value drop to $12.50.

So, does that mean I'm also speculating in postage stamps, baseball cards, vintage vases, old wine, and classic cars.... by not buying them?  Great :-)