I didn't find using a wire transfer to send funds to mt. gox difficult at all. Just log on to my bank online, send the money, wait for it to appear in my mt. gox account. It's not instant, that's about the only thing that could be better.

Of course, I don't know how difficult US banks are with transfers.

I can't see anything you could do to stop speculation except somehow make it impossible to use Bitcoin for any kind of trading. Which, obviously, rather defeats the purpose.

Asking whether speculation is bad is like asking whether the wind is bad. It's there, everything we do will just have to take it into account.

If plastic is OK, I could print up a coin-shaped container for the computer, with the BTC symbol on top, as long as the diameter doesn't need to be larger than 100 mm.

edit: now that I think about it, a tin should be doable as well by printing the shape wanted in ABS and hammering some suitably thin sheet metal into shape over it... Though I haven't done anything like that since grade school. Would probably end up looking quite... hand-made if I did it.

Soo... mining for cell phone numbers by promising to pay 2 bitcents?

What's the point of even asking? Speculation is a natural consequence of the fluctuations in exchange rates. You can't do anything about it even if you wanted to.

While you can, at least historically, profit from speculating with Bitcoin, that's not what it was created for. Exchange costs matter less if you don't get stuck on the idea of cashing out. Bitcoin is a currency. Even if you think of it as an investment in and of itself, if it ever really takes off, there will be no point in trading BTC for other dollars - you'll be able to pay for things in BTC directly.

Getting confirmations takes some time. On average, you should see one confirmation appear every 10 minutes or so. There's more to it, sometimes the network is busy with a large volume of transactions and for this reason you may want to pay a small transaction fee when sending Bitcoin, as the miners will prioritize such transactions. I'm not sure we've seen such volumes yet, though.

Pretty sure this is spam. Who advertises iPad cases in their sig?

The amount of goods and services being traded for Bitcoin is an unknown. Due to the nature of the currency, it is likely to always remain so. I suspect, but can't prove, of course, there's quite a lot of illegal goods being traded, drugs being a prime candidate. You'll never get a good picture of how much that drives BTC prices.

Is it possible to have a one-way mirror to the forums, so you'd have a read-only section here with the messages posted to the NNTP groups shown? I think moving discussion to a less mainstream medium might result in the perception Bitcoin is being run by some kind of small elite group of individuals.

I don't really see why. If you want to buy such coins for anonymity reasons, you'll have to conduct the trade in an untraceable fashion. If you do that, what do you care where the coins have been before? They can't be linked to your real name either way.

I tend to agree. I didn't say all forms of agnosticism are logical positions. Personally I don't see how anything that can affect the universe could exist without being subject to the laws of nature.

I understand perfectly well you want us to finance your business. I just don't see why I'd want to. I don't want a loan. If  you can't loan to others, that's your problem. I see no profit in giving you money, so I won't.

Could you point to some examples? I haven't noticed this happening much, but then I've not been reading the forums that actively, either.

I've spent something like 600 BTC, probably more, on various things since early this year. Most of them before USD parity. No regrets, I knew the exchange rate might go up. Now, as then, if I want to buy things with BTC, I'll buy the relevant amount at spot price and leave my hoard alone.

The dictionary definition of "atheism" seems to be an active denial of any gods. That is to say, believing that there is no god. This is, IMO, how it should be, because then it makes sense to also have the word "agnostic", which encompasses the spectrum from "in the absence of proof, I do not believe in the supernatural" to "I don't know whether supernatural things exist", perhaps also including "There is no way to know".

The difference between atheism and the more atheist-leaning end of agnosticism, then, is that an agnostic acknowledges they can, in theory, be swayed by proof to believe in the supernatural, while the atheist never will.

So basically, trust issues aside, you're proposing to hold my coins for me and charge me 1% for each withdrawal and deposit?

I'm not sure I see why I'd want this service.

Would you like to tell us why we'd want to give you our money?

Could you have a searchable database of the addresses associated with your bills? That would let the user have some peace of mind that the BitBills they're buying have at least been issued by you, making it harder for others to print counterfeit copies.

It's still not perfect, as anyone with access to the same holograms you use could print their own cards, pick a few addresses from the database and print those on the back of their fake cards, but at least it introduces some risk of discovery if whoever is the real owner of the card with the address the scammer hypothetically picked redeems their bill, and limits the number of fakes possible to make.

Human.