I find that Havelock is now moraly obliged to make public who made this trade. This stinks!

Why would they be exchanged for dollars? Isn't it far more likely they'll find their way into other BTC denominated assets??

SatoshiDice has arranged to pay MPEX holders an additional .00223685 BTC per share bringing the total to 0.0035 BTC per share.

Indeed. I'm not worried about Gox going belly up. But I am concerned about the perception of prospective depositors. Coming from the online poker realm... the market nosedived when ewallets were cut out, wires became almost non-existent, WU/MG unavailable or with high fees and very low transfer allowances, and companies started taking 8+ weeks to send checks that would bounce on you. Sites couldn't pay out in reasonable time frames with reasonable fees, and new blood became no more. Nothing ever recovers; the US market just perpetually shrinks and the larger networks more exposed to payment processing problems continually lose market share. My experience is that depositors want to go where liquidity is, and are inherently distrustful of companies with small market share. Often the big sites are viewed as the only options.

The other thing that I learned from that experience, and from the last time this happened -- if Gox can't pay out its customers due to payment processing issues, $1 Gox < $1... propping up BTC.

I really don't mind if the majority of my money can't be withdrawn to a bank any time soon, it's there for longterm investment/trading anyway.
But a company that in all likelyhood lies to customers in order to manage perceptions, that doesn't sit right with me..

The strong hands are accumulating, the longer we're at this point, the more likely it is we are to rise.

This is similar to what it was like at around 120, before it began rising to a high of 136.

BTW, do you know if Bitstamp worked with LR at some point? It seems that Citibank is using that excuse to bounce Gox's wires.

BTC8.83 in the last 25 minutes to be exact.

That explains how "the traditional banking system is unable to keep up with the demands of a growing Bitcoin economy", poor Gox whose load is crashing the Mizuho bank, which has a yearly revenue of +1 billion

Hint, it's on purpose. OP might as well put out a sign.

No Bears allowed!

Declining profitability of mining presents a miner with three choices, stop mining OR continue to mine while selling most coins to pay for the marginal electricity consumed in mining OR mine at a loss and become a speculator.  Any earlier coins the miner may have hoarded are clearly separate and changes in mining profitability have no effect on decisions to hold or sell those coins.

The overall effect of declining mining profitability is miming becomes much more like REAL METAL mining, today most mines operate on very narrow profit margins and sell ALL their metal immediately (or even as futures), they do not hoard and speculate in it because its too risky vs their narrow margin.  This is in fact a good thing because these narrow margin miners create a very very stable supply of new coins entering, every day your getting 144 blocks worth of coins being sold and the exchange rate will fluctuate only because of demand side changes.  That's the behavior we saw during the low volatility year of 2012.

The combination of ASICs, the block reward reduction to 25 (which immediately cuts in half the flow of new coins and artificially doubles the exchange rate) and a media fueled bubble have destabilized all this and we won't know a stable price until all those factors have faded away.

Doing some quick calculations on when an 1st Generation ASIC (~100 Mhash/J) becomes unprofitable to run (aka marginal costs only, ignore all hardware).  Assuming a decline to $30 for BTC and electricity at 0.15 per kWh difficulty would need to reach 440 million, roughly 17 times what it is now or 4 doublings, at present it seems to be doubling every 2 months so I'm predicting 6-8 months for first generation ASICs to be scrap metal.

That's a big profit for 180$ sale