Those queues are truly shocking.  It looks almost like... any typical lunchtime in a busy shopping mall in my city.

We'll know the bank run is under way when people are lining up outside banks around street corners, ala Northern Rock or Zimbabwe.

The truth lies somewhere in between.  Yes, government authorities will often try to downplay events as serious as Fukushima Daiichi for the simple reason that while a person is smart, groups of people panic.  On the other side you have outspoken individuals who know the louder and more dramatic their warnings are, the more headlines they will attract, regardless of facts.  Nothing makes for attractive attention grabbing headlines like stating we could have a world wide nuclear catastrophe via a spent reactor pool.



Please look up the required exposure levels to cause that kind of damage to humans. 

In regards to bitcoins, the OP struck me as someone desperate to get bitcoin's value pumped up by any means.  Linking bitcoin to Fukushima Daiichi seems pretty outrageous.  He would have more chance getting attention by trying to raise bitcoin's profile for charitable organisations working on treatments for serious diseases, or raising money for impoverished people.

"says Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with Fairewinds Energy Education who has visited the site"

Right after the Fukushima Daiichi incident I followed Mr Gundersen's regular video posts.  He was informative and insightful, but also tended to err on the side of the worst possible case scenario in all his videos.  What better way to get people to pay attention to him? 

To say that the fate of the world depends on reactor number 4 is laughable on so many levels.  Mr Gundersen is a lighter version of Leuren Moret, the alarmist in chief.  Have a little sample of a speech she gave: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DLHHdwNKDA

In her full speech, with a straight, serious face, she claimed the USA used HAARP to cause the massive earthquake off the Japanese coast, in order to damage the reactors and make them spill nuclear fuel, which in turn was to send this contamination towards the USA, ruining the farm land, with the ultimate goal of forcing farmers to sell it at rock bottom levels to the banks.  That was the plan, according to her.  She also claims most of Europe is unsuitable for agriculture due to the Chernobyl incident for the next 600 years.

How does bitcoin fit into all of this?  It doesn't.  Simple as that.

These kinds of cases regarding unauthorised installations of distributed computing software pop up every now and then.

Here's one from 2001 regarding Distributed.Net's RC5-64 cracking challenge.
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300

These problems are compounded by Bitcoin's underground image in the popular media (Silk Road), and frequent hacking, theft, or incompetence (MtGox, Bitcoinica x2, the Polish exchange, etc).  Fortunately in this case the ABC employee just got a slap on the wrist.

The best asset class to be in when share market and general volatility hits is, ironically, fiat currency.  If the feces really hits the turbine then all those lovely leveraged positions in precious metals will need to be liquidated when the price of the metal falls.  Cash rules.  We've seen it before in 2008/2009, and we could see it again very soon.  The market may run to cash until stability returns.

Is bitcoin good enough to be called cash in times like these?  People can guess, but no one really knows, seeing as bitcoin didn't even exist before early 2009 and therefore hasn't been tested in a real squeeze.

One thing has been inevitable since late 2010: Greece is going to be kicked out of the Euro.  It's a mathematical certainty with the level of debt accrued, interest payments required, and coupled with the shrinking economy from which to pay taxes.  The Greeks will soon be revolting.  The question is how many other countries will join them.

That's right.  No one should trust any PayPal to BTC transfers.  The only exception should be trusted friends and business partners.  Everything else is high risk.  It's just the way it works.

I've used BitPiggy a few times over the past year and always found the site to be reliable.  I hope it comes back soon.

Does UBank know your account is associated with bitcoin?  I wonder if they would suspend anyone's account if it received stolen funds, or whether UBank was more keen here simply because of the associated money laundering risks with bitcoin?

Very true.  As a further note to the parent, who asked who would sell their gold now, well, lots of people would.  If everyone just sits there with their gold and thinks 'no point in selling, it'll only head upwards' that will only cause a bubble that inevitably pops.  The price can only rise so much before the early buyers think 'wow, great profit, time to sell'.  Remember that you only have a profit when you sell a commodity/share/etc.  Until then it's just a paper profit.

I sold some gold last year as I was applying for a mortgage and needed cash.  The gold had risen in value considerably since I bought it so it was a good investment.  Right now, a year later, gold's price is lower than where I sold it in my local currency.  Seeing as the mortgage costs over 6% (hint: I'm not in the USA), my gold would have had to rise 6%pa every year from last year to make sense keeping it instead of cashing out.

If I was a Greek living in Greece I'd be buying up gold and silver right now.  Bitcoins?  My bet is 99% of the general population (ie. not geeks) don't know what bitcoin is, where it is bought and how it can be used to move money outside the country.

It's great to see the new site up at bitcoinica.com to put everyone's mind at ease that things are progressing well in restoring the site... 

Nothing restores confidence like no official statements from the main source (Zhoutong was just an employee, not the owner).

Still nothing up at bitconica.com.  Is the demise of the site terminal?  Three days without even a splash page on the web site telling users there's a problem.  Unless every Bitcoinica user reads this forum (or Slashdot et al), they'd think the site's operators took the money and ran.  Not a good look.

Wow, 4.5 days to develop Bitcoinica into a usable platform.  I'm very impressed and wish I could build something so popular, so quickly.  Zhoutong's site was a key member of the early days of Bitcoin (we're still in the very early days, and hopefully not the last). 

Bitcoinica's demise may be another milestone on Bitcoin's overall journey downwards as it gains a reputation in the general media as a currency that's mired in frequent scandal.

I can't help but feel that this week's hack is the primary cause of his leaving Bitcoin.  Things are probably worse than they appear.  After three days we still can't see anything on bitcoinica.com.  Not even a splash page saying the site is down for maintenance.

Many people believe bitcoin's value will go up when the block reward halves.  I think the better question should be, why should it go up just because the reward has halved?  We saw last year that when difficulty was too high (ie. reward too low) that many miners stopped mining and difficulty readjusted itself.  The higher difficulty did nothing to sustain the price, and likewise I postulate that a lower reward (the same as a higher difficulty) doesn't automatically translate to more USD$ per bitcoin.

Bitcoin is just as useful at $1/btc as it is at $10 or $100.  It does the same job.

I haven't been a great fan of Bitcoinica in the past.  The service introduced, at times, great volatility into bitcoin's price and I felt bitcoin itself was too immature to sustain a leveraged short selling system.

But I do admire what Zhoutong and the team he works with have achieved, and I hope they get the site running within a few weeks.  No doubt there will be many sleepless nights ahead.  There seems to be a lot of criticism aimed at Zhoutong at the moment regarding the hack.  Some probably justified, but let's all remember that Bitcoinica is the victim.  There's a thief out there with quite a bit of stolen money.

It was a lame 'crash', but at least it let me hit my buy order at $4.85 and sell soon afterwards for an easy profit.  All is good as long as people don't do something stupid like panic and drop the price much further.  I wouldn't like that 


I wouldn't call the current gold/silver action a crash.  Where's all that money going?  Repaying debt and another gambling, I mean, trading losses.  I'm pretty confident in saying virtually nothing is heading towards bitcoin.

So, why did someone suddenly want so many bitcoins all at once?  I know the super bulls will say it's a savvy investor getting as many ridiculously cheap bitcoins as possible before they go to the moon, but I'm genuinely curious as to why someone would put in one large buy instead of spreading it out over weeks and buying even cheaper.

Maybe they just wanted X amount in a hurry and bought, so we have a rally, just like when someone sells Y in a hurry and dumps the market, and we have teeth gnashing about a manipulator in our midst.

It's quiet.  Nothing exciting is happening with the bitcoin price.  It's going nowhere, with no large swings and manic speculation.

In other words, it's the perfect bitcoin day.

We know there is no inevitability when it comes to bitcoin.  It faces many hurdles.  In many ways, it's already overcome the easiest ones: the technical challenges and proof of concept.  Now comes the hard part: how a pseudo anonymous currency interacts with the real world banking system, where identification of users and anti money laundering and anti terrorist legislation works against some of the best features of bitcoin.  We can't just wave these challenges away or wish they didn't exist.

Someone always needs a fresh group of buyers to sell into their bids.  I'm sure these forums are liberally used to move the price to the advantage of certain parties on a regular basis.  Heck, if I had thousands of bitcoins I know I would 

So, after the sale finished and the market digested the TradeHill news, bitcoin is a great buy at $4.20?