The Vault
A Bank, but not the type you're used to - In the tradition of the first banks (goldsmiths),  The Vault would be entirely focused on security, with an emphasis on ease of access to funds securely and remotely, and would have two types of accounts available

1) Daily Account - Person deposits their bitcoins, pays perhaps a 0.5% annual fee, and in exchange for that The Vault secures and insures them, keeping the specific bitcoins that person lent in a secure and heavily encrypted location.  You might get a physical card, or a QR code, or you could do something cute like have an app that integrates with your browser like secure keychain software does, except this facilitates secure remote payments from your vault wallet.   Basically, you pay them a small fee to guard your BTC.  If you are robbed, the vault is on the hook and reimburses you from reserves kept for that purpose.  This should all be transparent.

2) Timed Deposit Accounts - This is basically you making a loan to the bank where you give them say 100 bitcoins and agree to not withdraw them for 30, 90 days or longer, and in exchange the bank pays you a rate of return relative to the amount of time the deposit is for (1 month - 2% 3, month 5%, 6 month 7% etc.), the bank then looks at various projects and people who need loans, determines which ones are benificial and have a good chance of succeeding and therefore paying back the loan, and they loan at slightly higher interest than they pay the depositor (the spread depends on alot of things, but there is plenty of profit to be made without gouging)  Interest rates would be higher than people are used to now, but the environment of slow deflation makes the money earned when the project is completed worth more than the money borrowed to start the project in the first place, and with the ability to participate in a stable environment means growth and prosperity all around.

In a nutshell, this model focuses on safety and stability above all things, and notably is the only way you can set up a bank in such a way to not follow the practices of fractional reserve lending, which are the downfall of fiat money over and over and over again throughout history.

So would you use The Vault?

Yeah, don't underestimate the low transaction cost - Thanks to the person-to-person nature of BTC, we're probably going to be able to fund the majority of our show BitTalk by soliciting voluntary donations of .02BTC per episode from listeners who think the podcast is worth supporting.  By making fees voluntary, you open up this type of funding model where any individual person contributes an insubstantial amount but it adds up quickly for the cause.  This sort of funding model lets a show like ours stay pretty much entirely independent from sponsorship from anyone in the community we might want to ask "tough" questions of, and so lets us work to help keep the community informed on what might otherwise not be asked (that's my big problem with the other shows out there, all their guests are also show sponsors and it shows)

Bitcoins are inherently finite, with a set timeframe for market maturation, they are also inherently deflationary at some point in the not too distant future, which means it's better to be in them sooner than later.  Those are fundamental realities about the currency.

But the fundamentals I was talking about were actually those of the USD, which if you're familiar with them resemble most closely a boat with a gaping hole in it being compared to a fleet of smaller vessels that have equally large holes.   People are looking for a way to protect their purchasing power (and hoping to speculate on the side and maybe get a little ahead), so value flows out of fiat currencies and into alternative investments.   Bitcoin is going up for the same fundamental reason that silver, corn, pork, coffee, you name it.  And we're just getting started

I'm no miner, but outside of arbitrage opportunities my start-to-sell price is 49.99

To actually answer your question, the market is one of sellers who have bitcoins and are willing to jump through the hoops to trade them for cash now that their value has gone up, selling into a wave of new money mostly from people like me who have been alerted by the recent parabolic move, and are fascinated with the fundamentals story with all its inherent features, not even to speak of the societal implications and how this fits in with the changes to world financial systems.

Bitcoins make good money, and that's especially obvious in the face of how bad "real" money is behaving these days (declining continually in value, so is a very poor store of value).  The greatest hurdle the currency has is one of adoption, but I think the fact that we're here now talking about it with a community of approx. 100,000 users says the hardest part is past - Now we just have to defeat the propaganda about how bitcoin is the currencies of criminals.   That's around the corner just you wait.

It's a new market baby, the only rule is we're making it up as we go.

consolodation

woof, I gotta learn how to use windows movie maker a bit better... trying to split this file into 4 10 minute segments so Youtube will accept it was substantially harder than I thought it would be and I've run out of time, so this won't be on youtube until tomorrow.

Once I systemize this, all episodes will also be posted to youtube at our new account BitTalkRadio

Out of curiousity, why is Youtube preferable vs. embedded mp3 player or RSS download? 

25% of my entire bitcoin bankroll   In a world as crazy as this, you'd be nuts to put all your eggs in one basket.

One of my limit orders got filled for another 10 @ 12.50LR

Frankly the market is pretty stable considering what's happened over the last few weeks.  I hoped I'd have an opportunity at $10 as everyone rushed for the exits, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

In the first episode of BitTalk I bet Atlas 5 BTC that the average bitcoin price would be higher next friday than it was this friday, despite all the talk about "bank run on gox" and various other panic stories, and I'm feeling good about that so far!

because they get a piece of the action for people who join off their link.  This early in the game who knows who the big players are going to be, so every person you sign up is like a lottery ticket that cost you nothing but a little conversation, because some of these accounts are going to see massive volume over the next few years.

at least that's my impression

Amusingly the founded and primary candidate of "The Rent is Too Damn High" party lives in a rent controleld apartment, and pays about 50% the going rate lol.

Yes, you're going to grow out of this.

Regarding the money - Trust me, we do NOT need the state of New York in bitcoin more than we need wallstreet in bitcoin - The money is out there among the people who will turn it into BTC, that's where your capital influx is coming from - people like me.     If I were "wallstreet" I would seek a proportionally oversized share of the market by funneling some cheap USD (just a few million, chump change), then use that position to shake out weak hands in the market, just like they do everywhere else.

Actually, as an exchange you don't need a monopoly to rig the market - you just need to be non-transparent about how you hold your users BTC, which describes tradehills practices pretty well.

Don't get me wrong, I'm using it too - But I'm not keeping more than a few BTC sitting around in that account.   But you trust them, so enjoy!

So not that I'm one to complain about praise, but anybody want to talk about the content of this first episode?   Is most folks on the same page with us, and that's why they're interested in BTC, or do you disagree?

Integrity is very important to us, we are being very selective about who we approach for sponsorship (none of the exchanges until one proves itself, no pyramid schemes or get-rich quicks, etc.) so that we can retain and reinforce our independent nature, and hopefully get some real information out of some of these unknown quantities.

Whatcha think?

oh lawl, i'm a big forum noob - I was fixing and re-fixing my URL link, when the problem was my signature....

or at least you think so.  Me?   I have questions.

And lets be clear here, wall streets involvement is bad for business exactly *because* they make their living off rigging markets - Say what you want about how smart they are or whatever, but privatized gains and socialized losses is pretty good work if you can get it.

Tradehill could be good, but it could also be bad.  If you watch the main guy from tradehills interview on the Bitcoin Show #2 (the video one) he says some odd things like (paraphrasing) "we can't wait for government regulation", that they're based from an undisclosed location in Chile, and that most of the backing comes from "wall street".

Those are some real key alert words telling me further investigation is warranted before you start declaring the new messiah of BTC

Good catch elggawf, it's fixed now and I'm updating the first post

I'll study up more on the markets now that Gox is open again, as I've mentioned I'm new to the community and am still getting up to speed There are some major differences between the market for BTC, and "real world" markets (notably that BTC is less manipulated lol)