One of the problems I have with selling (which I could now do at a profit...finally) is that I am not sure I could get back in again if I wanted to.

I could see all manner of hassles cropping up for the exchanges and they having no real alternative but to shutter their doors at any time.  Put the right kind of injunction in place, and a little pressure on the right judge or regulator, and we could have a pretty tight lockdown.

I've no idea if this bothers any other potential sellers or not of course.

Exactly right.  I pay a very reasonable rate for my power, and the linemen, management, commissioners and everyone else involved in getting that power to me make a good living wage largely because there is not a parasitic 'private investor' class to leach off of us users.

As soon as thing were privatized in CA where I lived at the time, Enron gouged the shit out of us customers for natural gas claiming 'market conditions'.  And when the transmission lines were privatized in the mid-west, we had the biggest power outage ever IIRC because the 'investors' were pocketing the money which should have gone into maintenance.

Some wise person who's name I've forgotten once made the statement "When you hear the word 'privatization', you better put your hand on your wallet.'

Coupled perhaps with the vastly different bid side curves which show up from time to time between Tradehill and Mt. Gox (if they can be trusted at all.)  If anyone is doing things manually with a fair amount of money, a brain-fart and/or fat-finger could induce quite a blip on Tradehill.

I started to write the most simple brain-dead bot to capitalize on the phenomenon, but got interested in other stuff and the artifacts are fewer and farther between these days.  I was delighted to see it happen yesterday.  Look at about the 05:00 mark yesterday on Bitcoinity.org's 24 hour mix graphic.

The happy thing is that I have gotten a lot of my manual bids over the past few months in at a pretty healthy discount to spot.

The sad part is that they are pretty much all underwater anyway

I'm a fairly happy customer of Tradehill who they have always treated well, and for that reason generally a supporter, but...

I do think that they should always (including now) make it front and center on any landing page that there exists a 'bitcoin.org' which is as official as it gets for the popular open source implementation of the Bitcoin software and network.  And that that may be what the visitor is looking for.

Unless and until they do that, I will have a lingering sour taste in the back of my throat about this.

Unfortunately, yes it is.  I don't really mean to piss on your cheerios (if you are indeed legit), and I probably would not have done so had the question been addressed in the OP.  I would actually really like to have such a service available but I am a deeply suspicious person by nature.

The marker along these lines which would tend to mean a lot to me would be if it were run by someone with a long history (like a decade or two) of making useful open source software and providing useful insights which are undeniably favorable to privacy advocates.

I caught one of those downdrafts where Tradehill diverges from Mt. Gox yesterday and filled my immediate quota.  I don't think I'll be much of a buyer again until and unless there is a reversal which takes us under $2.00.  But who knows?

Huh.  Seems to have broken through $3 pretty easily...I would have expected more people to have previously decided to bail at that marker.

OP: It sure would be a shame if got pre-occupied whining about some manipulator or whatever and missed the train.

How could you prove that your service is not a honeypot?

I've always felt that one of the most likely ways to be monitored up the wa-zoo was to sign up for a service which caters to privacy enthusiasts (and survives for more than a few weeks.)

Perhaps you could switch to the frequency domain and make use of complex numbers?

Not to be too droll about things, but that seems to be the opposite of a 'problem' for a good number of Bitcoin entrepreneurs these days.

But for the rest, how about this modification:

A utility which a user can run in the privacy of their own home which will look for magic addresses meeting some criteria of interest to the user.  Open source it, of course, to lower the paranoia about back doors.

I've heard that people in Asia will pay an absurd amount of money for phone numbers with 'lucky' numbers and such.

Seems to me that Bitcoin addresses could be generated at a very fast rate.  There's a business opportunity for someone.

I wanted to test out my instawallet thingy so I just sent you a little something.

On a totally unrelated note, that IS a rather cool address:

  1Ga9Dizn1p6ctGWausC1osLSrXFdioxide

Without consulting a periodic table, I think I see Gallium, Tungsten, Carbon, Strontium and Florine.  And sort of Zink, Gold, Osmium.  I'll have to look for such things in other addresses.

Given that Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme in it's death throes, and so many people 'know' this, it seems like a no-brainer to keep on adding to a maintenance account.

It does not seem that the price has gone up so much and so fast that someone would get margin call unless they choose to be liquidated (or are woefully under-capitalized.)  Seems like most traders in this environment would just keep adding to their maintenance account to avoid this until things turn around.  That would be the smart move.  Right?

I've not used Bitcoinica (yet), but could you not just keep adding funds to your maintenance account?

It seems to me very unlikely that the Bitcoin system will be anywhere nearly as susceptible to the 'virtual' issues that vex our current debt-based ones. 

For one, it is the regulatory structures facilitate the extreme leverage and notional derivative values and such in our monetary systems, and there are none in Bitcoin.  Achieving a the same effect in the Bitcoin economy would require users to trust a counter-party with 50-1 leverage, and there is little reason to do that with Bitcoin.  If parties do and the counter-party goes bust, sad day for them.

For two, the only 'to-big-to-fail' is the Bitcoin network itself, and it does not derive it's strength from such games.  I don't see that it would ever need to.

This is very much the case, and I am happy to clarify that if there was anyone who was confused here.

I personally tend to write off anyone who does 'know' something pretty quickly and rarely regret doing so.

Seems like the last three big spikes (i.e. 10k -15k BTC within an hour or so) have resulted in higher prices.  My sense is that the numbers of BTC acquired during these periods at least covers the native inflation of Bitcoin, and BTC has been raising in value since this started to occur.

It almost seems like some fairly big player(s) are sucking up BTC after a period of backfill.  Maybe they are playing the market and will dump at higher prices, but I could also imagine them sitting on their positions for the same reasons I sit on mine.

And they have other things to worry about in Japan:

http://enenews.com/daiichi-elementary-4-million-bqm%C2%B2-of-cesium-in-soil-sample-from-school-in-chiba-10-1-%C2%B5svhr-at-another-elementary-school-nearby

I've heard that the total value of the property in Tokyo exceeded the total value of private land in the entire US at it's peak (but that seems outrageous to me and I have trouble swallowing it.)  It would be quite something if it went from that level to an abandoned ghost city, or one which only old people could live in.