so let me get this right. an insurance company for bitcoins lol

what is the point. how about a few basic lessons in not trusting strangers that dont want to give out personal info, dont want to use escrow and don't have proof they have the product they wish to sell.

i see many people sending coins to a address owned by themselves and then claim that the funds are stolen or the recipient (nonexistant in reality) did not forfill their contract, thus doubling their coins.

bitcoin does not need insurance. what it needs is to teach the sheeple the proper etiquette and money management skills that they never learned as kids because they relied on the trust of banks so much.

basic lesson one.
legitimate and regulated insurance companies will NEVER get involved with a contract/payment transaction involving illegal products or services. so anyone wishing to claim a loss due to a dodgy deal for illegal goods (the only reason not to reveal true identity), the insurance company will not pay out, due to the funds being linked to funding drugs/weapons purchases ETC.

basic lesson two.
if your handing out coins to a legitimate business, then do some due diligence checks and gather intel about the company. EG there is enough information about bitcoinstore.com mtgox.com to trust them enough to do transactions with, without the need for insurance.

basic lesson three.
a 'person' saying they are an insurance company and promises to reimburse losses no matter what product/service/contract type was not forfilled obviously does not have an insurance license, so you are more then likey to get burnt twice, once for the so called loss and secondly from the premium costs that will never pay out.

if you have a dwolla/mtgox account check your inbox, or find someone you do trust in the community that has not posted it on this forum and ask them

because the lemmings and sheep think its business as usual.. even now.

the other reason is instead of having a order on the list for lets say $100-$110 creating a buy wall, they are cancelling the orders (making a weak/no buy wall) and eating from the top of the sell wall..(guys trying to exit)

but there are still lemming and sheep trying to sell at top dollar. (keeping a sell wall in place) in the hope to buy coin in cheaper to make the price drop very easily due to lack of orders and trying to then buy coin at profit.

the flips side is the fight against the lemmings trying to continue trading... the people just trying to get coin to run.. either way the price can sky rocket or plunge. and then the other sheep on btc-e and other exchanges that follow gox as their Master which will also affect the pricing on the other exchanges..

long story short, the next 24 hours of trading will be wild!!!!

best advise, if you have dollar in mtgox don't cash it out.. instead buy coin and transfer the coin to a different exchange.

many of us done this and never returned to mtgox as soon as the coinlab announcement came out ages back. you had plenty of warning.

i still can't believe people think with a milti million dollar lawsuit pending that business would continue to run as usual.

seriously. make this a life lesson, if you see a notification of a lawsuit get your coin out and move out. your coin and dollar are not protected so don't have the naive belief that because a login page still exists you are safe to continue unaffected.

they have enough hints over the last few days.

Last Will and Testiment

you know when you go to a bar and a complete stranger says some random crap about his life that means absolutely nothing and is not a bit funny and all you and people around you can do is to look at them silently..... well

a hundred years ago most people thought the only way to make money in america was to be a gold miner. buying expensive equipment to mine for gold. now they have found it is much easier to just trade gold in shops/exchanges for profit.

once mining becomes too hard for the masses. the masses will move onto a new way of handling bitcoin. by trading it through service portals which internally (using binary databases) swap ownership, and maybe once at the end of the night they throw a transaction or 2 onto the block chain to even out the ledger(blockchain) between each of the services.

and people will begin selling products for their 20% profit in bitcoins, instead of thinking the only way to get bitcoins is through mining.

so relax mining is important for security, but not that important for profit making. there are more then 10000 ways to profit USING bitcoin that do not involve mining it.

somehow their hotwallets got cloned so now they reset all deposit addressees and changed a few security stuff..

https://twitter.com/vircurex
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=201674.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49383.msg2100642#msg2100642

this is not official advise, just unofficial tip

speaking to most banks, the FSA, HMRC the basic rule of thumb is, if you stay under the wire transfer limits of roughly £850 per customer per day banks wont see it as a risk to require investigating you. speak to your bank about how much transfer YOU are allowed per day on YOUR account. exceeding this second amount will get the banks and......... (dramatic pause) HMRC to start to take in interest in you (ripple effect through to FSA).

basically if you stick under £850 per customer and under the total daily transmission limits your bank account allows then both FSA and your bank will treat you as a personal transaction (not business) so you can get away with a certain amount.
the general amounts are  here but thats generalised as each account type within each bank have their own limits.

so, to those doing occasional localbitcoin style transactions, you don't have much to worry about..much... but don't get "to big for your own boots", and be honest with your bank as to why or what the transactions are for. as saying your selling advertising where infact its bitcoins. and then some scamming &a$tard tries contacting your bank for a transfer reversal, lying to your bank won't have helped your cause.

it is also worth noting that if you do want to regularly exceed these amounts and do it as a business, (hopefully you already know the regulations and what limits there are) to look at if you want to just be FSA authorised or FSA accredited. as they are 2 separate things. (accredited is the more expensive one for businesses doing more then £3mill a month).

i personally would say don't have the mindset of 'what you can get away with' - instead, learn the regulations, learn the limits and do everything official and honest. Purely to avoid headaches and surprises later.

exactly, when bitcoin is $1000 a piece and someone just wants to buy a can of pepsi for under 1$ they would love to be able to send a transaction of 0.001BTC without a fee and without a 10 minute wait. so the solution maybe that the blockchain is used as a ledger for large movements of $10 or more and all other transactions have to use a payment system 'off the chain' which allows merchants to withdraw once they reach $10 or more on their balance.

accepting checks (cheques) is not the same risk as an unconfirmed bitcoin, the closest comparison would be a fake bank note and not having a UV lamp handy to verify its legitimacy for atleast 10 minutes.

this is why vending machines have coin/note checkers built into them, even for small priced items. as fraud is a big thing

shortening the blocktime is not just a tweak. it also involves OBVIOUSLY messing with the reward pay out. because if there are only going to be 5.25million coins produced in the next 4 years. at a rate of 3600 a day. then shortening the blocktime will mess with the maths of rewards and difficulty, etc etc.

so a 10 minute estimate for 25 coins would need to become 12.5 coins for 5 minute estimate. just to stay on track for the 5.25mill coins by 2017. which makes it less profitable for NON-asic miners as they have to push even harder to solve the block in half the time for half the reward. the ripple effect of messing with the block timings is a silly fools errand that will cause more issues then solve

although people think the san fransisco media hype makes bitcoin a big deal for mainstraim proof. well it was a nice way to spread the name bitcoin around in a positive manner. but in reality the reporter used third party services mostly to survive, EG foodler. where the actual bricks-and-mortar stores that are linked to foodler would not take bitcoin direct instore, or even had a clue what a bitcoin was.

bitcoin news should be about the actual walk down the street and pass bitcoins onto the actual shop keeper... That there would be the true point at which bitcoin is definitely going manstream.

which makes places in europe seem more bitcoin friendly, such as the OP's research shows

as some people are now realising sending out 2 transactions is easy, but getting them confirmed 10 minutes+ later is the 'near' impossible part. so accepting 0 confirms is definitely a risk as you never fully know until the 10th minute (first confirm) if its a double spend or not.

even if they get rejected at the 10th minute, because double spends are theoretically hard to achieve. that's still only provable at the 10th minute.

however the option of a payment service which accepts coin to get pre-confirmed, to then use later throughout the day. such as a loyalty/value card system for small daily lifestyle amounts of value would totally eradicate this risk.

much like how MTGOX use to pre-confirm funds to then allow MTGox codes to transfer bitcoin balances between members instantly/risk free.

i would happily put 0.1BTC into a service while i take a shower in the morning, knowing by the time i get to starbucks or want a morning breakfast in a cafe i can spend it instantly without question.

MTGOX missed out on a key feature for their merchant gateway by removing the gox codes. but then again i would not suggest MTGOX for merchant services due to the lack of support/current issues.

if its wallet client is based on the coding originally based on the bitcoin-qt client

Help -> debug window -> console
then type in:
importprivkey 1T3RrAc01nAddr355blahblah

where you change 1T3RrAc01nAddr355blahblah  to your actual PRIVATE KEY

but it may be best that you use http://www.terracointalk.org/ for all future terracoin chit chat, or the alt-coins sub section

just viewed http://bitcoinpresscenter.org/ and also heard it on the podcast on lets-talk-bitcoin and this is what i call an open platform to allow anyone who has confidence to talk to the press to submit themselves as contacts, showing what type of contact with media you prefer EG interview, live interview, written etc.

great work to whoever is involved in setting up this better option for bitcoin press

this is a good thing

now all that is required:
1)add an additional feature for location as well as language because to get some local confidence in bitcoin and not have the U.S domination

2)to google search bitcoin news stories, find the editors email addresses and link them to the service

you guys still dont get it.

what comparisons in real life.... actual real life function does bitcoin have anything to do with gold.

and please dont say because someone gave the name of the concept of creating coins "mining"

because satoshi could have called it vectoring (due to the eliptic curve) and then people will start thinking.. hmm drawings.. hmm art.. oh it must be an asset..

it is NOT a commodity.

it will not appear next to wheat, cattle or oil on the commodity columns of trading platforms. so get that out of your head. it may however appear in the forex columns and treated as a legit currency.

however for tax purposes because of the actual ownership and store of value is much like antique/collectable art/coins it should be treated like an asset for tax purposes.

atleast try understanding what a commodity is and realise you cant change the laws of physics, laws of tax, laws of intellect purely with enough votes on a bitcoin forum.

P.S if you have never heard of the laws of intellect, here goes:

3 people with an IQ of 100 do not together become twice as smart as someone with a 150 IQ

the way i see it, imagine just 11 million people out of the 7 Billion people decide to try bitcoin. and they are not going to invest their whole life savings of $£50k but instead they just want to dabble with $£1k (a months salary)

well for each person out of those 11 million to get 1BTC would end up costing £$1k each as there is only 11mill coins.

in reality though id say half of the coin are being hoarded and not available to be resold. so this would push the price up further to $£2k a coin, where theres only 5mill coins available for all the demand.

money: is a item owned by government used in transactions (its laymens term for FIAT)

commody: a raw material used in the production of other materials/products that has a internationally recognised value and quality base.

currency: anything used as a valued item in a transaction.

bitcoins are not a commodity. you can not grind them down to make chocolate or bread. you cant melt them down to make electrical parts or jewellery. you cant cut them up to make beef steaks, or other meat products and you cant refine it to make car fuel or power generators.

so now you know that bitcoin is not "money" as that term is reserved for fiat.. its not a commodity because of it having no other practical use, so that just leave the one thing that bitcoin is useful for.. currency.

the next question is, will the guys behind mtgox turn up to hand over $75mill. or retire in a non extradition country