With a large, persistent gap between Gox and other exchanges, the only people buying Gox coins are those with fiat already on the exchange.  And that's truly scary for the near-term future of bitcoin, as many people believe Gox USD price is a metric of bitcoin value, and will be deeply disappointed by the likely coming crash in Bitstamp value.

I'm sure Karpales has made a graph of the total withdrawal amounts pending vs. time since the withdrawals were suspended.  How many USD millions are now pending?  5?  10?  20?  Any students of crashes have learned that the build up happens slowly, but when it finally starts, it happens very fast.

The wire transfers I successfully received between 6/1 and 6/13 were from the Bank of New York and JP Morgan Chase.  Nothing was coming from Japan.

It's pathetic communication on Gox's part that leaves us all guessing about what's actually happening.  SNAFU.

I emailed support asking for status update around 7/15, and then replied to their support non-reply on 7/22 asking for the withdrawal to be cancelled.  YMMV (obviously).  Good luck!

And by "insolvent", I mean that in the technical sense - I don't think Gox has immediate access to all of their deposited customer funds.  I think some if not most is locked up in frozen bank accounts.

Today, I finally gave up and cancelled my wire request made on 6/15 that had still not been processed.  I only had to take a 3% haircut moving to another exchange, which was worth it to me.

If Gox has a withdrawal queue, they aren't processing withdrawals in the order received based on EPiSKiNG successful 7/3 withdrawal. I also contacted support a week ago to get an update, and got a non-reply, so contacting support doesn't automatically move you to the front of the queue.

There have been no announcements on the topic since July 4th, when they claimed "global account withdrawals have now fully resumed as of today", which is (and was) clearly BS.  My guess is that EPiSKiNG's successful 7/3 withdrawal was one of the few that were used for testing before their 7/4 claim that all is going well, but then something happened and they stopped again.

Notme, I don't know why you'd defend Gox so strongly.  I'm used to Gox being slow, which is reasonable since it's part of the legacy banking system.  But after 5 weeks of delays and lack of transparency, I now think there's a chance that Gox is insolvent.  Their post on 7/10 saying "In the past we were able to credit customer accounts before the funds arrived in our own bank account", but now they can't, rather backs up the idea, don't you think?

I had a wire go through successfully on 6/12, but my wire requested on 6/15 is still listed as confirmed but not processed.  Funds have been locked up for almost a month now.  So, the "$1 million" backlog claimed to have been worked through were either just June 13th and 14th, or were wires taken out-of-order of request, such as for service providers like bitinstant.  My guess is the latter.

I do think the dam will burst and all the USD will come flowing out of MtGox... eventually.  Given the Liberty Reserve news and the seizure of MtGox's own account, I can't blame a traditional bank that wants to go slow with this new, high volume, seemingly sketchy bitcoin business.  Were I a bank manager, I'd audit their AML/KYC procedures and spot check their data before taking on their account.  And that takes time.

That all said, assuming the USD logjam does burst, will the price rise or drop?  I really don't know.

I'm still waiting on an international wire withdrawal I made on June 15th, several days before the "hiatus" announcement.  Mtgox support has been, ahem, underwhelming on the issue.  I didn't believe their two week estimate - did anyone? - but I didn't expect >4 weeks, and it's been really lame to have thousands in USD locked up for almost a month.  I don't blame Gox for the problem -- it's the traditional financial system at fault here -- but I do blame them for setting expectations they don't or can't meet, and for a lack of honest communication, all par for the course at MtGox.

Does anyone know why Gox went down?

The selloff started while USA was asleep, so perhaps it's attempted arbitrage by European users: sell out now, withdraw via SEPA (which is still available from Gox), and rebuy on a different exchange in a week or two?  Under the circumstances, new fiat is unlikely to be deposited at Gox, so price won't go up, except perhaps for impatient Americans.  Today's the day we learn who is playing with money they can't afford to lose.

Not only that, but there's $570000 in leveraged long positions on bitfinex according to https://www.bitfinex.com/pages/stats , which is about the same as the order book at Bitstamp!

If my math is right, a long position taken at $105 at 2.5:1 leverage and 90% reserve would get liquidated at $75.  Since there's only 3100 btc to $75, someone could sell 3100 btc down to $75, then likely catch the subsequent liquidations to regain their bitcoin holdings at a lower price.  Hmm.  Perhaps that's what the eager bitstamp seller was trying to do when they dropped the price to $90?  Or perhaps there was an eager seller to $95, and the rest was the liquidation of a bitfinex user that took a long position at $120+?  Big liquidations like that used to happen all the time when Bitcoinica allowed 10:1 leverage.

Because they're losing market share, and it might be due to their high fees.  It's especially high when you realize they take the fee from _both_ parties, so they skim 0.6% to 1.0% of every trade.

This seems an appropriate followup to my prediction.

ECardOne has a new domain:
http://banking.ecardone.eu/

Only 18% return in one month, woe is me!  But I know what you mean, it's easy to get hooked on 50-100% per month ROI.  Bitcoin risks are a lot lower now than they were last year, with oodles of good news and publicity so far this year, so it does make sense that returns are now lower than they used to be.

I figure if I can make 5-10% per month, it's worth my time and risk to keep playing in this market, independent of philosophical reasons to be involved in bitcoin economy.  The buy and hold strategy may no longer be the best strategy, though. A 5-10% uptick or downtick could happen at basically anytime, and countering these big market moves is still more profitable than most other investments.

I do find it odd that there are bid walls on MtGox USD, EUR, and CAD.  After being up for 5 hours, the wall is looking less and less fake.

And in stark contrast, Bitstamp still has a sell wall.  It's only half of the 8k sell wall it was last week, but there are almost as many coins are for sale below $132 on Bitstamp (4777) as on MtGox (4869).

Right now, Bitcoin is accepted at Amazon through Gyft.  I bought a large gift card today, cashing out a few coins around $129, mostly because I'm bearish on the LR news, and it was time to cash out 10% anyways.  (side note: Bitpay gives a reasonable exchange rate, apparently at the point where enough btc are available on the bid side at MtGox to cover the sale of the card's btc).

The LR news may push the former LR users into bitcoin with whatever money that wasn't seized, but as you correctly pointed out, businesses are less likely to send money to an online currency exchange with front-page NYTimes headlines like "A case against Liberty Reserve, an online currency exchange, is believed to be the largest global money laundering prosecution ever, the authorities said." link

Already, the LR news has had a chilling effect with the voluntary cutting off of OKPay to bitcoin exchanges. Also, because of the recent FinCen action against MtGox, Bitfinex voluntarily stopped using MtGox citing the risk of a MtGox seizure, which is why Bitstamp and MtGox exchange prices have diverged.  The feds are taking action, and are having a measurable effect on bitcoin already.

The feds have shown that they
1) have very long arms that can reach even into Costa Rica and grab a former American that had renounced citizenship, and start extradition proceedings.  Japan isn't too far.
2) are willing endure the collateral damage of hundreds to thousands of legitimate users of LR

The Feds may not be able to shut down bitcoin, but they know the mantra "follow the money", and I think they might start coming down on exchanges. The justification won't be that bitcoin itself is illegal.  What they'll do is say that the exchanges are not stopping money laundering, online drug sales, weapon sales, or child porn.  At least, that's what the headline will read, regardless of factual accuracy.

Best case scenario for Bitcoin is that MtGox is working with US feds to identify SR vendors, and announce a mass bust of them.  This would mean that the feds are working _with_ the exchanges to identify lawbreakers, rather than trying to shut down the whole damn thing like they did with SR.  No one likes the strict MtGox AML rules, but that might be the difference between the exchanges getting shut down LR style, and being allowed to exist by the Feds. 

Lucif, many kudos for putting out a prediction a month ago, but it seems ridiculous to claim that it's been accurate.  The first wave did happen as predicted, but the last waves did not, and the price is now 3x higher than your predicted price for 5/24.  It's fine to be wrong, it just irks me that you claim you were right when you clearly weren't.  For fairness, I'll put out my own falsifiable prediction: $140 by this time next week, and $150 by June 10th.  The triangle has broken in favor of the bulls.

Alternately, you could blacklist defaulters, and create some sort of insurance pool whereby those that lose money through default are compensated.  Perhaps a small 0.01% tax on transactions to help compensate for the occasional default?

From a regulatory standpoint, the result resembles a Hawala network of trust, and would be prohibited in the US:
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/terrorist-illicit-finance/Documents/FinCEN-Hawala-rpt.pdf

Have there ever been Bitstamp btc withdrawal delays in the past, or is this the first time this bug has appeared?

Things are really looking up for Bitstamp with the increased liquidity and a huge 5.3% spread to attract fiat and more traders.  If I were buying in today, there's no doubt I'd be sending the wire or SEPA to bitstamp, not gox.  Here's to hoping the Gox monopoly ends soon!  Even if the arbitrage opportunity is gone before my funds get to Bitstamp, I'm pretty sure I'm going to like bitstamp more than Gox.  Gox is like an awkward cousin: they may be family, but you can't wait to get away from them ASAP.

I'd been using Dwolla until last week, and I hadn't realized how slow wire transfers from Gox were.  I thought 4 days, tops, but apparently it will take a lot longer than that.

Good point - I'm American, so forgive me if I forget about the rest of the world.   I also have a 0.29% trading rate at Gox, and after buying a few hundred coins should have a 0.2% rate at Bitstamp, so the math works for me: $118*1.0059 = $118.70, a $3.5/bitcoin profit.  The wires are flat fees, a small % with five figure sums.

The only question is if the spread will persist until my Gox wire appears.  If it doesn't, I thankfully won't lose anything, I just won't gain.