If they have an effective monopoly, that's our fault.  Stop patronizing entities like this.

O RLY?

Maybe I'm in tinfoil hat territory, but I find it hard to believe any entity that claims to have 80% of BTC exchange traffic is not going to leverage its market position for its own personal profits at the expense of its customers.  That is just too much for any entity to have.

I don't have any proof they're personally doing blatant pump-and-dump scams, but the temptation to make self-interested choices, or even to take the exchange down just to protect their own market position, seems as if it will inevitably be irresistible.

I've never dealt with Mt. Gox though I have an account there, and other than being up, coinbase.com frankly did not do much better, having a spread between their buy and sell price of over $40 while Gox was down, a ludicrous spread.  This is why I generally don't keep anything in these untrustworthy exchanges other than when I'm actually buying or selling.  It cuts my nimbleness a bit in responding to sudden swings in the market, but also keeps me from ending up with a lot of money in some belly-up scam operation.

Personally, I'd create a new wallet, transfer the coin out of the old wallet, make sure it confirms, and only then zap the blockchain account.

Well, I know I'll be putting a copy of Mein Kampf on my bookshelf now next to Satoshi's white paper.

Idiot.

So you mean if you don't pay taxes you can get in trouble?  Zounds!  I never knew that!

Karl Denninger is a whack job and an Obama birther who has had a hate-on for Bitcoin since the start.  Google Karl Denninger Bitcoin to see his previous ignorant rantings on the subject.

If this whole affair has shown anything it is that placing excessive reliance in the conduct of any one exchange is a mistake.

Clearly too much reliance is placed on dodgy exchanges like Gox, which may very well be part of the market manipulation in the first place.  For all I know, Gox shut down trading to protect their own position, or to encourage more panicking.  I have difficulty accepting the purity of their motives.

It always amazes me some of the brazen swindlers who manage to find victims around here.  NoTroll.in.  ROTFL.

What does someone have to do, actually name themselves "Scamming Thief" and promise to steal all your money?  I bet if someone did that, they'd still get suckers.

Sounds like what happens in any homeowner's association these days.  And no, I wouldn't live in such an HOA, because they are a total pain in the ass run by control freaks.

But if I did, am I a millionaire?  Am I a billionaire?  Is $1,000 completely insignificant to me?  In that event, I don't give a shit, and just pay because it's pocket change.  And if it does piss me off enough, I buy an interest in the HOA so I control it, or a cartel I'm involved in controls it.

But really, you're describing something like a homeowner's association, one of the most abusive organizations most people live under that is not a government, and I avoid those like the plague.  So the answer is no, I don't consider that contract valid.

Good question.  Every society sets the bar differently.  There are some that don't.  A good example is Somalia. 

For some reason, those societies rarely feature on any list of good places to live.

I have considered that, but frankly, am on the Hobbesian side of that issue.  Mostly.  We may end up in an improved world where Hobbes is wrong, but frankly, we're not there yet.

A currency by its very nature only has meaning in its interface with the humans who use it.

Unless you're pretending Bitcoin is some kind of Platonic object that just sits in space with no interaction with humans, I don't get your point.

Libertarian socialist, though I voted for Ron Paul in 1988.  I do think there should be a social safety net, but it shouldn't cost too much or be too comfortable for the lazy.  I have to admit to voting mostly for Democrats, even though they are increasingly disgusting.

I think philosophy may be more useful an indicator than politics, because politics, at least in America, is absolutely fucked right now.  I'm a preference utilitarian in the mold of Jeremy Bentham or, more recently, Peter Singer.  The best social policies are those which leave people alone as much as possible, so that they can satisfy their personal preferences.  It shouldn't be up to the state to decide what preferences are "good" or to make moral decisions or protect people from themselves.

So, for instance, if a drug addict wants to shoot smack until he dies, he should be allowed to do so, though it might be useful for society to offer some kind of voluntary rehab at no or low cost, because losing a potentially useful person is inefficient.  Spending enormous amounts of money to throw such people in prison is completely useless.

Similarly, qualified people should get no or low cost education, at least in something useful, because that's efficient.  Even if 9 out of 10 people go on to some undistinguished work in a field like math or science, it's a total waste for a potential Einstein to end up as a pizza delivery guy for lack of education at the right time.  The kind of discoveries scientists and engineers make justify spending other people's money to make sure we don't waste an Einstein.

I do agree with the libertarian idea that taxation is ultimately coercive and a use of force to take something from people who would probably not voluntarily give it.  But I don't agree that this means it should never be done.  It should be done, but only in a democratic process and only when the bang is worth the buck.  Governments currently take too much and provide too little.

Not sure about those percentages, but it sure seems to happen a lot.  I think they were disserved by the universities they attended.  There should really be some effort put into teaching basic economics to athletes who are likely to need to manage money at some point, but aren't exactly geniuses.  You don't have to be brilliant to manage your money, just careful, and that can be taught.

I get irritated about people arguing about socialism versus capitalism, as if there were two warring camps, one insisting a hammer is the only tool that can be used for anything, and another camp insisting that only a screwdriver should ever be used for any task.  

There are some tasks, like national defense, that pretty much everyone will agree should be handled by the state, because no one person or entity can provide military services effectively.  There are others, like designing products for sale, where capitalism is obviously the solution.  As a perfect example, look at the shitty cars the Soviet bloc countries created when they were basically in charge of producing them.  You had utter shit like the Trabant, people waited on a list for years to pay too much to buy one, and then it immediately started falling apart.  The government does an absolute shit job at generating consumer products.

The most prosperous countries in the world, often in Scandinavia, have a pragmatic position of using capitalism to do stuff where capitalism works, and socialism for things where socialism works.  America sets the balance further toward capitalism, but we still have some socialist policies, even though people are afraid to call them that when they're popular.  

I tend to think the Scandinavian countries set the balance about right, but the USA, as one example, is never going to go that direction.  We are more likely to go in the direction of Switzerland, which has a somewhat similar federal system.

Americans, having been at a near-war state with the largest "socialist" experiment, the USSR, are naturally suspicious of anything that smacks of that system, since it catastrophically exploded and melted down.  While I am worried we might do the same thing, perhaps even by making the exact opposite mistake as the USSR, we haven't done so quite yet.  Our system, while not perfect, is certainly better than the USSR.

I don't agree with where exactly we set the balance between capitalist and socialist policies, but it's not completely insane.  Yet.

Fuck China.  Being illegal in China is a plus, not a minus.

Such laws are generally widely flouted.  As they should be.

Just a warning.  Gambling with the rent money is the kind of thing that can be indicative of just foolishness, but it can also be a sign of a serious gambling problem.  If you've never done this before, consider staying away from gambling.

Stupidity has nothing to do with it really.  Gambling makes some people behave irrationally and do self-destructive things.  Even smart people.

Be careful out there.

Fate favors the agile.  Get smart or get left behind.