Thanks for the responses.  There was a guy in my city that was on the btcnearme list. (I'm in San Diego).  I sent him an email.

In my opinion, this "5 day wait" is a huge roadblock to adopting bitcoin.  I understand the credit card thing, a revocable payment method for a non-revocable currency.  But it's still a problem.

Like many of you, my assets are frozen in Mt Gox at the moment.

Unlike many of you, I am pretty new to this.  I signed up for Dwolla, initiated a bank transfer (which took 5 business days) and then started trading at Mt Gox.  That was this past Friday evening (US).  So I traded for a day and a half before the hack and freeze.

That day and a half was really fun, tho.  I'd love to start trading at Trade Hill, but it will take another 5 days for the bank transfer to clear to Dwolla.  Mt Gox will be back up by then (god I hope so).

Is there some way to get bitcoins, or otherwise get funds into Trade Hill, without a 5 day wait on a bank transfer?  Or am I just stuck with my new hobby (day trading BTC) on hold until Mt Gox comes back?

Do you think Mt Gox will be back in 5 (business) days?  Or should i just start a bank transfer now?

Any (polite) suggestions appreciated.

I just joined Trade Hill also.  Site was slow this morning, but then they posted a "things should be faster now" news update and things were, indeed, much better.

I like that they have a running status on the top of the page letting us know what's going on.

Shameless plug:  use my referral code if you sign up, you'll get "10% off commissions" : TH-R17433

MtGox is unreachable by me right now.  "The connection has timed out"

I put a buy order in for $12 before I went to bed last night.  Woke up to find it filled, much to my suprise.  Now I see I should have made that $1 instead.  

Looking at bitcoincharts.com right now, MtGox has about 20x the trade volume that Trade Hill does.  This has it's advantages and disadvantages.

One advantage is a smaller spread, the difference between the buy price and sell price.  As a previous poster noted.

One disadvantage is that hackers are going to go after the higher volume site first.

I'm on MtGox.  I started trading there yesterday, after waiting all week for my bank transfer to show up in Dwolla.  I've made 4 trades on MtGox, no issues.

I have an account at Trade Hill, but I have not used it.

If you like Foo Fighters, Bad Religion, AC/DC, etc, I humbly suggest you listen to my band, The Experiments. http://TheExperiments.com 

All our music is free to stream or download.

Thanks.

As for the topic at hand, I am listening to my dog bark at the neighbor's cat, and whine that she can't go chase it.

The day we stop seeing threads like this is the day the hidden fees are explained in the wiki on bitcoin.org, just like the voluntary fees are.

Why is it so hard to just point to the documentation on these hidden fees?  It's because it doesn't exist.  Or at least Google doesn't know about it, which is the same thing. 

Looking around, I see several variation of this:

"There is a voluntary transaction fee that can be paid in every transfer of bitcoins, the amount of which is chosen, and paid, by the person who sends the money. This amount is given to the person who generates the "proof-of-work" block in which the transaction appears, which is necessary for the transaction to be accepted."

That's fine.  But the fee this thread is about was NOT voluntary.

If there are involuntary fees involved in sending bitcoin payments, we need to know about them.

I see wiki pages that say that.  What I don't see is information about how much the fee is and when it is charged.  The devil is in the details.

I'm aware of the voluntary fee.  I see documentation about it.  But what we are talking about here is a hidden, undocumented fee.

Suddenly Bitcoin seems a lot less attractive.

This is the first I've heard of transaction fees on bitcoin.  Major bummer.  I would also like to know the answer to this question.

I was checking out mining yesterday in a pool on my Mac laptop.  I was getting 2000 Khashes/sec using the GPU. I also had a CPU miner going on my linux box, 3 threads at 600 Khashes/sec each. In a day and a half I think I made 0.006 BTC.

I see here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_Hardware_Comparison that some ATI video cards will do over 350 Mhashes/sec (that's M, my other numbers were K).  That's 175X what I was getting on my laptop.

So, if you are going to mine, use the GPU, and use an ATI card.

you da MAN!  I am now 0.001 BTC richer because of you.

http://payb.tc/trademe

Thanks!  Nice site.

I am geek-trader, a guy in San Diego, CA, USA.  I finally got all the Bank transfer stuff done today and was able to make a few trades.  I'm up 9 cents!    I'll be a millionaire in no time!

I was getting it, then I clicked "forgot password" and reset my password, and I can log in now.