Almost two weeks to process a Dwolla withdrawl! That is ridiculous, too. 

No wonder I didn't get any confirmation emails on the 5 ask orders I had placed between 11.4 and 12 after the price kept spiking towards 12.  And I thought it was just another glitch in Mt. Gox's email notification system--wrong glitch! 

Good point.  With the current price-volume momentum behind Bitcoin at the moment, the price may be at $8 by early next week.

Of course, I would continue to pay taxes if I could live off of Bitcoin.  Keep in mind, Bitcoin was created to be a P2P decentralized electronic cash system.  One still needs to pay taxes even if he or she lives off of either paper or electronic cash.  Bitcoin is revolutionary, but hardly an excuse for not paying taxes.

I have $2.5k in Mtgoxusd. Will sell for Dwolla in 1 to 2% range depending on amount.  PM for further info.

I just recently installed 0.6.2 in Windows 7 (64 bit).  If I am going to upgrade to 0.6.3, do I need to uninstall 0.6.2 and then install 0.6.3?
Do I need to download the entire block chain again?

Can I just install 0.6.3 over 0.6.2 without having to download the block chain again?

What about my wallet?  Will the upgrading process overwrite my existing wallet.dat file?

It would be nice if Davout and team would add the fee option like in the regular client when rolling out a future upgrade.

jav - great service and thanks for the support and dependability.

FYI - just did a 100 BTC withdrawal and a couple more 50 BTC withdrawals and all went through without delay.
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Thanks...my withdrawls seem to be working again as well.

Yesterday, I did a 45-BTC withdrawl, and it went through right away.  A few minutes later I did a much larger withdrawl (over 200 BTC) and am still waiting.  Perhaps the withdrawl delays are only affecting the larger amounts.  Has anyone tried a series of smaller withdrawl amounts and experienced no delays?

I am still waiting more than 24 hours later

I am still waiting, too.

I am fine with either exchange.  Both are secure.  Mt. Gox is more battle tested than Tradehill. Hackers lay awake at night (or day) trying to figure out how to hack Mt. Gox again.  With all the cash and Bitcoins they have on hand, Gox is a very lucrative target.  I have queried Mt. Gox a number of times on their security measures and have always received prompt and satisfactory answers.  In the Wild West of Bitcoins, Mt. Gox is a "Ft. Gox" of Bitcoin exchanges.

A great idea and it has been suggested before.  Of course, one problem is that porn users usually want their porn on demand.  Who wants to wait around for more than an hour for a Bitcoin transaction to be verified.  But this can be worked out and developers are working on this issue.  In the mean time, we need more creative suggestions like this.

In securing a wallet, there are some things that you need to do that are applicable to any secure computer.  First and foremast, you need a state-of-the-are firewall!  This will keep away 99.9% percent of the hackers, their trojans and key loggers.  Next, don't download shit unless it is from a reputable source that you can resonably trust. For example, I thought I would be a savy techie and download Kazaan to get free MP3 downloads.  It was not until much later on that I realized that I had downloaded a key logger that most likey was able to read all my PGP passphrases.  Lesson learned here, if you are going to deal with software pirates, remember that age-old adage, "there is no honor among theives."  Also, don't be cheap on your firewall.  Symantec, McAfee, Force 7, Avira, and any of their true competitors is what you should be running.

So lets say 1) you have a secure firewall, 2) you have not downloaded any shit from dubious sources, and 3) done a complete full system scan for viruses and trojans from the above mentioned antiviral programs listed above, and 4) after all that are reasonably confident you have a malware-computer.  Then you are ready to download the Bitcoin client.  If you think you are ready, then you are probably not and should download, let's say another anti-virus client, like Avira, and do a full-system scan again!

Once you download the Bitcoin client, get the hell offline.  Disable your wireless, unplug your usb/ethernet cable.

Now run the client and create your wallet.

TrueCrypt, PGP, or GPG are three good ways to encrypt your wallet.dat file.  Of course, you should have downloaded these earlier, only after you believe (not think) you have a secure firewall and a malware-free computer.

Refer to my earlier post about letting the wallet read all the current block chains.

Then go offline again!

Encrypt the wallet and then shred (rather delete) the unencrypted wallet.dat file.

Read my earlier post about what to do next.

In closing, many have compared Bitcoin to the Wild West of the Internet.  This is true.  So if you are going to be a player in the Bitcoin world, you need to learn a lot about data security and encryption.  It is these two elements that are the real instrinsic value in Bitcoin.

P.S. to all you fucking hackers--I know this site has been compromised, so I have to change my fucking passwords again becuase the host of this forums can't even follow the most basic security... ah fuck off!
 

The main theme behind creating a secure wallet is to encrypt it to a strong passphrase and then to shred (rather than delete) the unecrypted wallet.  Next, back up the encrypted wallet ot a number of different physical and virtual locations.  There are risks to this strategy.  The two biggeet are 1) forgetting your passphrase, 2) the encryption software being able to properly decrypt later on, 3) the bitcon client being able to properly read the decrypted wallet.

Also, the above is all for nothing if you are not operating behind a secure firewall that keeps out malware.

To all you newbies, don't trust the software.  Stress test it, before you store a large amount of bitcoins.  Even commerically available encryption software including the bitcoin client does not work 100% on every system configuration.

Stress testing should include:

1) complete removal and reinstall of the bitcoin client,
2) complete removal and reinstall of the encryption software,
3) decrypting a formerly encrypted wallet and allow it to update all the block chains
4) sending and receiving small amount of bitcoin
5) repeating steps 1 to 4 again a week, month, two months later.
6) think of other worst case scenarios for your system and test with the small amounts of bitcoin

Good luck,

I have been using Mt. Gox and Dwolla since May.  Never had any major problems with either.  In fact, it is only gotten better.  It used to take several hours for a transfer from Dwolla to hit my Mt. Gox account.  Now, it is around 10 minutes.  Same with withdrawls from Mt. Gox to Dwolla.  Never a problem executing trades on Gox either... always got my price.  Sometimees Mt. Gox does run slow, but then I am not a day trader either.

I have been a Bitcoin user since May and have followed many of the ups and downs.  The whole wallet.dat security is very interesting and I have been working on my own wallet.dat security procedure for the last several weeks.  I finally feel comfortable enough to start testing it with a small amount of BTC.  There is certainly a lot of misinformation floating around about the best security procedures for your wallet.  It took me quite a while to sift through all the security advice on the forum to develop my own procedure.  The whole wallet security thing is not for the inexperienced.  Bitcoin is on the digital frontier and like all frontiers there are risks.  The best perspective, I believe, is to think of Bitcoin as the Wild West.  There are villains, gun slingers, con artists, thieves, crooks, and some good guys, too.  Bitcoin is not for the timid or the novice in internet and data security.

...have to agree about the posting restrictions.  There seems to be plenty of trolling even with the restrictions.  Okay, I now have my first post.