The snapswap.us website claims you can send, trade, receive "any currency."
After logging in on snapswap.us, the only thing they let you do is deposit or withdraw dollars.  My snapswap bitcoin balance doesn't even appear in the account history.
Can you please explain this?  And how to use snapswap with btc?  As it stands, I have to do everything through rippletrade and the bridge.

Thanks for the helpful info, JoelKatz.  I recently started using ripple as an exchange for buying and selling snapswap btc/usd.  I withdraw btc over the bridge.  I didn't know about the withdrawal process you outlined in 1) above.

Bummer.  That mean I can't tradez btc/usd any more on ripple?

When that happens, rescan.
Click on the account so the blue bar appears on top, click the three dots on the right, and hit rescan.
That will bring your account up to date.
Assuming you use the HD wallet then the only backup you need is your original 12 word list.

How do I get my bitcoins out of snapswap?  I just want to send them to my wallet, that's all!  I see no way to do it.

I use ripple.  I just don't invest in it.

You're right, it's there and I didn't see it.  All's well.

OK, thanks for the explanation Rassah.
Now, on to other things.  I need to sign messages to several of the addresses in my HD wallet.  This is actually pretty important, because I'm undergoing an audit of sorts.  And the HD wallet doesn't seem to have message signing; at least I couldn't figure out a way to do it.
Time is of the essence.  If there was a way to export private keys from the HD wallet I could sign messsages to those addresses.  How can I do that?

My very first step out of the gate, I get hit with this reputation penalty.  Rather than accept responsibility for an obscure, tricky design,  you blame the problem on me.

Reputation penalty is for people who do something dishonest, or who inconvenience other users.  I didn't scam or even cause the mildest of inconvenience to any user whomsoever.  So I didn't deserve this penalty.  The fault is yours, not mine.

You should change the way Local Trader allocates penalties so this doesn't happen to anybody else; people to whom it has happened should have the undeserved penalty removed.

Exactly.  We both accepted, he flaked out and I canceled the trade.  And now I pay the price!?
There are still three more trades that he started.  Can I cancel the expired trades or will I get stung again?

I was just contacted, for the first time, through local trader by someone who wants to buy coins from me and something's wrong.  From what I can tell, he doesn't see my chat posts, and I don't see his.  Anyway, he answered my ad yesterday, I entered my phone number in the chat box and said text me.  Nothing.  So this morning, same guy answers my ad again.  I type my phone number and tell him to call or text. Nothing.  I cancel the order from yesterday, because now we're on a new one.  Then I see where it says you "may" get hit with a reputation penalty if you cancel a deal.  May?  Do you or do you not penalize?  What's the deal, does somebody at Mycelium flip a coin to decide whether to penalize each canceled deal?  And shouldn't it be obvious that sometimes you just have to cancel?

Edit:  The guy just answered my ad for the fourth time, and still no communication.  I put my phone number in the ad.
I want to put a stop to this.
Now I have this list of pending deals going nowhere, which I can't cancel for fear of damaging my reputation.  To top it all off, I had to deactivate my ad.

Local Trader needs to have a block function where I can bar clowns like this Leonardo guy.  And allow us to cancel without penalty.

I don't need locks, in fact I can't use it in the U.S.
I want to use coinapult to send coins, but the website won't let me register from the U.S.
Are you locking out all U.S. residents, even though we don't want to use the "locks" service?
Once again -- I am NOT going to use locks, but your website still won't let me register.

Just signed up with coinsetter and I'm already frustrated.
Can't open a business account; personal account is only allowed to link a single bank account.
I can't work with small-timers.
I've been buying more than $100k of xbt per month.
I need a real exchange.

Yes, but which three?

The price now is about right, in my opinion.  And maybe it will keep appreciating at something like an order of magnitude per year for a while.  I can't see a case for dramatic volatility increase.

Read any good books lately?

Inexplicably... indeed.

pm7 explained it, but I'll just add that you can't prevent the reuse of an address.
Let's say you use mycelium HD wallet and Joe Blow sent you some bitcoins to an address it generated.  Now that he has that address, there's nothing to stop him from sending coins to it a second time, and again after that.  This means the wallet has to remember all the keys and addresses it has generated.  Of course, an HD wallet can simply regenerate all of them from the seed, but regenerating the wallet and syncing it with the blockchain would take time, so I'm sure mycelium doesn't that every time you open the wallet.  I don't know the exact method it uses to keep track, but there's a lot of information in the two mycelium threads in this subforum, and mycelium hews pretty closely to the HD bips, if you want to read about it there in the bip32 and bip44 mediawikis.
This is the mycelium HD thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=814907.0

For a month or longer, bitfinex has been trading a dollar or two below Bitstamp, consistently.
It would be funny if people are getting psyched out by the conflict over there.  I'm looking for other reasons, if anyone can suggest any.

 
It would have worked about as well to encode the 128 bits of needed entropy in a string of 22 base64 or base58 characters.  There's your backup.  Easy to decode and get the entropy binary back, which can act as the seed for the wallet.  
And there's nothing to stop any wallet designer, who so wishes, from encoding the binary in a word list per bip39.  For interoperability among different wallets with different dictionaries, use the 22 character string... any wallet, even one as limited as trezor, is sure to have enough memory and processing power to decode its own word list!

Bip39 was kludged into the wallet architecture between the entropy and the master key -- where it isn't needed, and can only cause problems.  Will we be stuck with this contraption in every wallet from now on?

Just in case I'm not getting through:

Whoever came up that whole mess described in the section of the mediawiki titled "From mnemonic to seed" was wasting everybody's time.  The idea that you have to go to such lengths to avoid storing a library of bip39 dictionaries is an illusion.  Merely store your own dictionary; when you need the binary, decode the wordlist.  Simple as that!

HD wallet designers have followed bip39 without giving it a moment's thought or considering maybe the bip's badly designed. But it is the worst kind of bad design; it's a strategic error not a coding blunder, so people operating on autopilot don't see it. Then it gets coded into wallets, and you're stuck with it forever.  And we'll have all kinds of headaches making HD wallets compatible.

I'm staying with legacy accounts, for now.