I felt that way for a while but had a change of heart recently.

For a coin to succeed it needs good developers; good support; and good options to spend as currency. LTC has that and if ATMs and PoS allow multiple choices then many others will do later on too. Regardless of whether it is only a small change from BTC or no change, people like alternatives; LTC perhaps already has critical mass to continue for the long term. Others offer alt options that are more than just copying others and those differences might appeal - so the more environmentally friendly 100% PoS might strike a cord with enough people that don't care about the technical criticisms.

My approach now is more that if a coin has three of four elements [substaintial offering something difference and potentially better then other coins; good developers; good support; and good options to spend as currency], then it's worth supporting, as it could take off alongside BTC.

Coins you might have shunned previously may come alive with additional support, making those differences practical and useful. For example, see Namecoin now with Firefox plugin http://youtu.be/Y9c3d4B7V2A

Also then, you shouldn't mistake all options as being copy coins. There are now Bitcoin 2.0 - looking beyond currency, and instead to trade; those could be really important: see Master (MSC); Next (NXT); ProtoShares (PTS); Counterparty (XCP)

You could use a web wallet such as blockchain.info and both know the passwords, just don't use the mobile text as confirmation obviously.

There's no simple way to use two instances of the same wallet.dat. Each instance of a wallet.dat type will spawn new addresses that only it knows; that's why you must do regular backups after transactions, in case that transaction triggers another ~100 addresses to be spawned.

In future there might be more sophisticated options for sharing, each person having a separate wallet and then being part of a trivial n of m setup. Right now you need to be using the same reference point - the exact same wallet, otherwise transactions from one might fail and you might then get confused about which is the valid wallet. If that does become a problem, export all private keys from both and merge to a new wallet and rescan the blockchain for the true balances on those.

I think that's right.. the function of an exchange is a simple one and when it works, it's fluid. If they can evidence that the exchange now works, then that might restore confidence in their ability to action that simple function. I'm not sure people need to be loyal to any exchange, they just need one that works. There are enough new customers heading into Bitcoin that being an exchange that can roll with it, might turn out well. The only difficulty with this then, is whether they can risk that - whether they can honor all withdrawals; if it ceases up again, that would be fatal - certainly for the perception of current Bitcoiners.

The second point there is impt too. They need to act in the spirit of what Bitcoin is and not like ye olde banking industry.

Look at the Ask side http://bitcoinity.org/markets The moment people start to buy the price will rush up to the level that sellers are willing to sell. Unless you already have BTC or fiat and withdraw that, you're very unlikely to be the very few who get the advantage you suggest. It does seem that there are 13k BTC for sell below the level of other exchanges but I'm not sure the data is reality at the moment.

Perhaps there's an opportunity if people have setup sells at a loss just to get out of MtGox but that difference could easily snap shut when they do sort out their problems. The tough problems might be if someone has tried to make undoing the errors hard by creating circular references of unconfirmed transactions, some of which are not valid. Good luck to them but they've landed themselves in a fix AND not done well communicating the real problem. I suspect then they have suffered a problem for a while and undoing it perhaps suggests they've lost money to whoever was scamming them with that bug in their software. The risk then until confirmed is that MtGox might not have the BTC and fiat to honor all withdrawals. I'd like to see them survive and thrive but it isn't looking good from the little we see atm.

Limiting withdrawals might work, so long as internal transfers to new accounts doesn't cause a problem. Restoring faith will require a clear message about what's occurred and a working exchange that turns over withdrawals within limit in a timely fashion.

Incidentally, if you want to free your mind from client programs, take a look at NXT. The way that presents how the private key is everything, is quite an eye-opener - leaves the user quite naked - suggesting that they need to pick a private key! I suspect the variety of user interfaces in future might be quite varied, especially given the complexity of ideas around Bitcoin2.0; thinking of what might be possible in a few years, is quite exciting.

Bitcoin-QT for BTC; though for alt-coins, I prefer the daemons as I can set those to RaspberryPis.
Blockchain for first time use of MSC and PTS, which allows easy send and receive to the one address.
and again Blockchain for small change BTC but then I'm still missing a good option for a wallet on my Android 2.2.2; all the apps I've seen, seem to be only for 2.3+

It's easy to export a backup from Blockchain and I'd suggest everyone who has an address there does that. It's too easy to get locked out, if you forget one of the passwords or if your mobile number becomes unavailable to you. I forgot the second password but had a early backup so could import the private key to QT; that address then lost to me on Blockchain but I could still transfer the balance. Blessed are pessimists, for they make backups.

I think you're looking for negatives and missing the bleeding obvious that such activity will always be a small fraction of any currency. Go and post on a USD forum, if such activity worries you.. hell go post on the CIA forums for that matter, they instigate drug crime.

Far more illegal activity is done in dollars - or any other cash currency.
Thinking of cryptocurrency when seeing that, is just your own confusion about the nature of cryptocurrencies.

If MtGox can do what they haven't done to date and prove that their exchange can function, then there's little reason why they would not be able to continue. Given their poor communication to date, having confidence in them is a problem but that might have also been uncertainty their end about what the problem was.

New users will not care what previous user experience is; if they are confident that the exchange can deliver for them, then they will use what is available. The function of an exchange is a simple one, moving fiat into Bitcoin. There is no issue for most users about which exchange is used to buy Bitcoins, there's no requirement that they are loyal to the exchange as it is unlikely to be needed again; it's just a necessary hoop that we jump to get into BTC. If you are using exchanges to store your BTC or other currency, then you might need to worry more but I'd expect any exchange that has BTC for sale and can accept fiat and provide withdraws in a timely fashion, will do ok.

If MtGox doesn't do a push to communicate that what it has now is different and give new users a good experience, then yes it'll struggle to survive where others can provide. Also if there is a liquidity problem now; if they have lost coins to someone exploiting the problem, then that could be fatal.

If one person or a group can control a market's behaviour just with the buy/sell action they take, then they are a whale in that market. It's a matter of how many people there are in the market and the fish's holding relative to the volume that's passing through.

As suggested above there looks to be one holder that's sat on a FTC buy at 0.0004 for 4097764 FTC = 1639 BTC. FTC isn't going to fall below 0.0004 for a while until that's removed by them.

With a small coin you can shift the market buying lite selling but in BTC, you'd need 500BTC+ to trigger a reaction at the right moment; in a smaller coin, you would be the market. If you moved a few thousand BTC as one in BTC markets, now you might move a single exchange but then BTC is growing beyond any few people's ability to affect it.. MtGox CEO aside of course. Bring on distributed exchanges and peer 2 peer and perhaps that won't be a liability in the future. As always we need more exchanges and more people holding BTC, so that their are no beasts.

I'm not suggesting a change!.. I'm suggesting there is no exact measure but alluding to that human's on average behave in a stable manner, so the fraction tempted or finding themselves in long-term store relative to coins that are lost, might be a relatively stable fraction.. bit like a half-life; you might be able to determine what is cold and what is just dormant from the half-life of those that come alive after a time.

If people are buying, they can't buy for less than sellers are offering. No surprise then if it's open, that it will pull up to where sellers are set to sell. See also http://bitcoinity.org/markets/mtgox/USD

Women are the root of all evil?.. Happy valentine's day troll?

I think that's unlikely, given what it offers beyond currency. People are thinking only in simple terms at the moment but the prospects of it's being used for trade are unavaliable yet offer huge potential. Even if the currency element is frustrated by central authorities, it's unlikely to fail .. it might evolve to not be BTC but if devs overcome known issues, there's little reason it won't be useful for a long while yet. It'll be interesting to see if Turing complete capability can work, that obviously offers a strange new world.

See also: Reddit/u/CoinSearcher My protest at MtGox Offices - 5 to 7th February 2014, Tokyo, Japan.

They served me well but that was last year.. the only glitch was dumping a transaction to JPY rather than keeping it as GBP.

I wonder they might just seize up and obviously then there is a risk for anyone holding anything there. I don't know, if MtGox is legally bond to return 100% or only as much as they can - fraction to all, in the way that Governments would/will do to fiat ye olde bank savers.

You get what you pay for. Buyer beware. Complaining after the fact as if it's the contractors error, is ridiculous. Some contractors will pitch wide of the make for simpe political reasons, that they don't want the contract but they don't want to loose the potential of future interactions. If you opt for a 20% discount, then you are adopting an obvious risk multiplier.

Would it not be possible to take a sum of stale coins - for example all those not moved since end 2010 and then over time learn what fraction of those came alive later. Doing that over a period might suggest what is lost and what fraction is normally forced back into the open after such a long time.

MtGox obviously taking flax for its abliity to communicate information and its price looks substaintially down from other exchanges. However, I wonder that http://bitcoinity.org/markets/ suggests that the Ask/ForSale side of the valley, is still suggesting 19.42k BTC avaliable before price hits $1500. Is the price down because everyone in MtGox is moving back to fiat in the hope they can withdraw that better than BTC?

If sellers are not withdrawing, is MtGox not still likely to survive as a big player?

Also, if peer to peer exchanges come alive, will there be any future for ye olde exchanges or will the cliff between fiat and crypto always require those?

It's very good and useful detail on each coin when those are clicked.. though perhaps some users will miss that detail is avaliable.

I wonder you could also throw the same data into a d3:cluster dendrogram http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4063570 as an alternate way for the user to choose to display this detail.