When it started I believe the anti-spam amount was more like $0.10.  Given a spammers costs (and benefit) are likely denominated in USD (or some other non BTC) currency it likely would make sense for the anti-spam algorithm to pull a weighted average price and request the BTC equivalent of $0.10.

Sorry for your loss but would you buy $100 bills for $40 from some guy on the street?

Bitcoin is digital cash.  Nobody sells "cash" 50%, ever, under any circumstances.  It is ALWAYS a scam.

Investing in GPUs now would be as stupid as investing in a farm of CPU miners as GPU mining software started to hit the public.

Simple answer ... no.

Miners can't change the rules of the system.  They can only validate or ignore transactions.  Bitcoin requires a consensus at all times.  Miner's can't choose the potential choices they can only force the network to a consensus on the status of coin ownership between existing choices (created by coin owners).  There is almost no connection to a democracy.  If Bitcoin was a democracy it likely would have failed already.

There is no technical reason ACH can't be processed same day.  There is a large financial one.   Why would companies pay for expensive bank wires if they could get same day transfers for $0.15 to $0.35 (cost of ACH transactions in bulk)?

And still not a single word on the tens of thousands of BTC he is holding.  It is almost like he is pretending they don't exist.  Has anyone called him out on that?

Then wait 5-10 years.  It is that simple.  Bitcoin will never be stable with an ultra-tiny money supply.  It isn't going to happen.  Wanting and wishing for a sub $1B highly stable currency is just a pipe dream.  Look at the volatility of the silver market, although less volatile than BTC it still has some gut wrenching moves from time to time and that is with a "money supply" valued at around $30B.  Now gold with $7,000B "money supply" is rather stable (most days).

There never has been and likely never will be a tiny market which is also highly stable.  What makes something stable (in the free market) is huge sums of wealth on both sides.  "Bid walls" if you want to use that terminology in the tens of millions of dollars.   To move gold (May futures contract) $1 per ounce takes about $250,000,000 (short or long).  When Bitcoin has that kind of market depth it will be stable (or at least stable-ish).   Now how do you get that kind of market depth when the Bitcoin money supply is less than $1B?  (Hint: you don't).  So if you want stable ... then wait.  In 5-10 years Bitcoin will have a lot less volatility.  The BTC money supply will probably be in the tens of billions of US dollars ... or it will be zero.  Either way it will provide the stability you are looking for.  In the interim if BTC is either going to tens of billions or zero over the next decade how exactly would that happen in a gradual low volatility manner?  (Hint: it won't).

Note: this isn't to say one should be bullish on the price change in the short term.  That is a different debate.  However Bitcoin isn't going to be any more stable if it declines another 80%.  It is going to be just as volatile at $20 USD:BTC as it is at $100 USD:BTC.

Well that will only happen when Bitcoins much much larger.  Of course how do you get much much larger with exchange rate only rising even say 2% per month?  You don't.  The value of Bitcoin's money supply is ~$1B, the value of all Silver Bullion is ~$30B, the value of all Gold Bullion is ~$7,000B.  Now bring up a daily candle stick chart of BTC, SLV, and GLD.  Ignore the long term trend (rotate the chart in your mind so the starting and ending points are at the same horizontal level) and just focus on the day to day directionless volatility. 

Even silver is many times for volatility than Gold and Bitcoin is many times more volatile than Silver.  Why?  The size of the market.  Gold is relatively stable because it is so massive.  It takes pretty massive buys or sells to even move the price 1%.  Silver can be thrown around a lot easier and Bitcoin well it only takes a token amount of funds to make a large move.

You can't have a small stable currency (at least not without a central bank*). The road from $1B to $30B is going to be rough.  There is no way to make it slow and smooth.  Maybe the road is too rough and Bitcoin can't ever make it and some alternative (no not the copycat alt-coin junk but a real out of the box alternative) replaces it but I am not willing to write it off yet.  Still even this alternate will have high volatility until it can get "large enough".



* Small currencies (i.e. countries with a money supply of less than say $50B) often need to hold a large reserve of more stable currencies (EUR, USD, JPY, etc) and precious metals.  By controlling the "native" currency and buying their own currency back using foreign reserves they (at least in theory) can reduce volatility.  Essentially as the currency falls against competitors the bank prints more and when it rises against competitors they buy it using their foreign reserves.   The bank works against the actions of the market participants and creates a dampening effect.  Generally central banks can't prevent the long term trend but they can dampen the day to day swings.  Understand that a central bank loses money in this operation, and these losses show up in inflation.  It is the price of stability.

Any SHA256 alt-coin which doesn't use merged mining runs the risk of being 51% attacked in the cradle.  Any SHA256 based alt-coin which does use merged mining means the hashrate for both chains (btc & alt) will remain stable regardless of the shifting demand between the two coins.

So Bitcoin = bad because you have to exchange it for dollars and the banks/govt control dollars?

Maybe someone should let Charter Trust Golden Bars know about .... exchanging BTC for Gold (or other goods & services).

I mean the "warning" is only applicable if the only entry and exit point to bitcoin was USD (i.e. USD -> BTC -> USD).

Well an individual might not but a business does.  If businesses can't sell coins (in mass i.e. thousands of BTC a week) to cover their USD costs then they can't accept Bitcoins.  If businesses can't accept Bitcoins then what is the point in user adoption.

Note I am not bearish.  These challenges will be overcome just pointing out that despite you being able to meet someone at starbucks to exchange $100 for BTC doesn't mean that exchanges aren't necessary.  I will give you one example.  In March we sold about $500K worth of bullion for BTC.  I am not going to meet people in person every day to try an unload $500K worth of BTC.  Even if I could it would massively increase my costs/time AND  I would become a bitcoin speculator (I likely would need to be long tens of thousands of BTC at any period of time).

Now imagine a company doing 10x as much volume or 100x.  Even that isn't nothing like a major corporation.  Exchanges are necessary. 

It is a fools errand.  It would limit the entire Bitcoin economy to just those products which can be produced completely with a Bitcoin supply chain, all raw materials, production, labor, etc solely in Bitcoins.  We are likely decades (as in plural) if ever from that happening.

Also goods even if priced in BTC have to be competitive to alternate currencies.  Here is an example.  I will sell you 1 oz gold coin right now for 20 BTC.  See nice round number 20 BTC.  You won't take it.  Why? Because you could sell BTC for USD and buy the same gold coins for cheaper.  Why would you pay more just to buy it in BTC?  Maybe you would pay a slight premium to avoid the cost and hassle of conversion but to know what a "slight premium" is you need an exchange rate.  Of course by the same logic you would gladly buy a 1 oz gold coin for 10 BTC right?  Even if you are bearish on gold you could buy the coin for BTC.  Sell it and use those USD to buy more BTC.  Still nobody (outside of scammer who doesn't intend to deliver) would sell you 1 oz of gold for 10 BTC because they could do the same thing (GLD -> USD -> BTC) and get more than 10 BTC.

Exchange rates will always exist.  
Merchants will always have at least some costs in dollars.  
Goods will always need to be competitive to other currencies because people have the choice to spend USD/EUR/JPY etc.
Even if you never exchange BTC for fiat or fiat for BTC you need to know an exchange rate to make your services competitive to those offered in other currencies.

In theory yes but anything less than 50% of global hashing power would result in a negligible (in the long term) change.  At this point there is no low cost method you could "rent" that kind of hashing power so you are talking about an outside entity building a massive ASIC hashing farm.  If they are going to do that and build out to more than 50% of Bitcoin's hashing power they have more effective attacks anyways.  Even a 75% reduction in hashing power wouldn't be fatal to Bitcoin.  The adjustment period would be 8 weeks which is punitive and average block time would be 40 minutes.  Most likely for many transactions people would start accepting just two confirmations (80 minutes).  It would be a hit but nothing like a sustained 51% attack.

The difficulty period is a compromise.  The longer it is the slower the network reacts to REAL changes in hashing power.  The shorter it is and the more the network INCORRECTLY adjusts to variance instead of actual changes in hashing power.  It is a potential issue but IMHO a minor one.  For other coins it is more of an issue.  Those with low hashing power or those where botnets or cloud computing is effective give an attacker the ability to "rent" enough hashing power instead of building out new computing resources.  That makes a "difficulty pump" attack more cost effective.

I notice you missed all the facts in the post.  Then again you weren't looking for informed responses or facts, you were just looking to slander and make up claims.

Banks are also greedy and highly bureaucratic.  I can't speak for bitfloor but we met with both BofA branch manager and had a phone conference with their compliance department.  After nine months with no issues, not a single complaint or case of fraud they closed our account.  They cited no reason, and indicated that we had no violated any procedure or requirement.  The letter vaguely indicated that the deposit agreement allows them to close any account for any reason at any time.  They offered us no appeal, nor did they indicate that we could have done ANYTHING differently to prevent the closure.  

Off the record I got an admission that some fraud monitoring software scored our account as high risk as part of a quarterly review.  The bank doesn't want account which potentially could be high cost (although we had paid almost $20,000 in banking fees) and kept a $100,000 minimum balance.  The closure was impossible to prevent unless we were much larger ($15M in annualized transactions wasn't big enough).

So your assumption that if you do the right thing everything will be fine is a joke.  Just about every bitcoin related company has had at least one bank account closed.  It is just the nature of the business.  

I wasn't notified either on my personal email or our company email.  The ACH withdraw was routine and before trading was suspended.  Our company uses (used) bitfloor to dump excess coins.  We make an ACH withdraw at least once a day.  Due to the chaos of the last week the ACH withdraw was larger than normal and it cleared without issue. My point was not that I was somehow special.  My point was that ACH withdraws are going out, BTC withdraws are going out.  Maybe people should stop speculating about frozen accounts, and stolen funds and just make a withdraw.

If you can see past all the FUD you are slinging that is.

I had placed an ACH withdraw request in yesterday prior to the suspending announcement.  It posted to the bank account this morning on time, like every time.  For those worried about Roman stealing funds this was a very very large ACH.  If he was looking to steal anyone's funds I would expect he would have started with this one.

Yeah if he isn't up to a scam why not return the BTC.  In any exchange the BTC is roughly half of the clients assets.  Returning millions of EUR worth of BTC would likely be a massive sign of good faith.  The fact that in that long rambling nonsense (which really doesn't tell anything new that we didn't know on day0) he doesn't even mention BTC is very telling.

I mean he is holding tens of thousands of BTC.  People have pointed this out hundreds of times.  Every single response seems to not only not address it but actually just ignore it.  BTC? What BTC?

I would point out we used BofA at one time.  If bitfloor got the same kind of shutdown notice that our company did, BofA provided no explanation, no freeze of funds, didn't block any services, and simply informed us we had 30 days to finish business and our account would be closed.  BofA informed us we had done nothing wrong however their deposit agreement allows them to close any account at any time for any reason (or without reason) with 30 days notice.  They gave us 30 days notice and everything on the account functioned normally until midnight 30 days later when it all shutdown.  They even let me make a $18,000 cash withdraw the last day.  We got a cashier's check in the mail for the closing balance (couple hundred bucks I left to cover any check card transactions) a week later..

Roman didn't say anything about the account being closed in a few days.  
He didn't say anything about the account be frozen.  
At this point the only thing he said is that the account WILL (future tense) be closed.  
I don't have any inside knowledge but since I went through something similar in 20012 I thought I might provide some insight.

If I had to guess Roman suspending trading to wind things down LONG BEFORE the account gets shutdown in order to ensure that everyone gets their funds back without delay.  Doing it now would let me payout all current ACH, verify all unverified accounts, and payout those ACH before the account is closed.  Once again I have no inside information just basing this on my own recent similar experience.

This.

Occam's Razor

If he intends to return the BTC it would be in his best interest to do so quickly to restore confidence.
He has had ample time to return the BTC.
He has no returned the BTC.
(insert most likely conclusion here)