I'm in my mid-20s and reside in California (USA). I don't think I want to get too much more specific than that! Good to see so much diversity on the forums! 

Yep, I believe it is not so dissimilar to the Yahoo Finance forums (at least when I saw them years ago when I was looking into stock investment). Lots of FUD and wannabe pump-and-dumpers around.

Yep, this is something I think many newbies don't understand, specifically because of things like Coinbase. There should be a sticky somewhere, if there isn't already.

Gox is up ~ 8-9% since the low about a day ago. So, what are you saying? 

Hmmmm:
No more wires, use Western Union? That's pretty insulting. Well, Chase is only doing it for one or two specific accounts, right? And we don't know the numbers of people who own those accounts. And this one is obviously a small bank. Still, worrying....

This exactly. Unfortunately, if you don't pay attention to the USA and you start pissing them off, pretty soon a new client government has been installed in your country. 

Hehe, looking around this forum a bit, there is no doubt that bitcoin is indeed a religion for many people here. Not me -- I like the idea, and I hope it takes off, but mostly I am here to pad my nest egg. 

Considering the lack of a real economy backed by bitcoin -- it is by and large speculation at this point -- what makes you think this? At this point, it could conceivably be "nipped in the bud." Most use bitcoin as an investment vehicle, and no significant VC money has entered the bitcoin sector, so I think we would see adoption and exchange rate plummet if this were to happen anytime in the remotely near future.

I can't say I put much credibility into Alex Jones and Infowars. Anybody think this is worth looking into? Somehow I doubt it. 

I didn't sell, but I also thought the exchange rate could go quite a bit lower, especially on BTC-E, where I trade, since there is shallow market depth. Only had 1/5 bids fill. Oh well, better than nothing. 

I don't actually use private keys very often. Remembering the strong password into my encrypted wallets -- that's what lets me spend my bitcoins. 

Certainly plenty of sock puppets, that's for sure. But yeah, the forum is full of fanatics and uber bulls... it's sort of natural, being a bitcoin forum and with all the speculation around bitcoin. I've pretty much gotten past the point of arguing with fanatics about the future of bitcoin -- what a headache.  

Is this for real? I remember seeing jokes about this. I can't imagine this would make for the most interesting move, but hey, maybe I'm wrong. I'm sure it will create a somewhat distorted picture.

How much does Satoshi have? 

Yeah, it's a bit troubling. Do we know that they have access to DPR's wallets, though, and not just the user/escrow wallets? Are we sure that they actually have access to 600k bitcoins (or whatever the number is), or is that wild speculation as well?

Indeed, bitcoin will reach $1000, I think. In fact, I think it will go several magnitudes more than that, given some time. We're still in the early speculation phase. Once adoption really starts picking up (major e-commerce companies and financial institutions, for instance), the sky is the limit. It might be a while though. But hey -- gives us more time to pick up them coins. 

They are just a shared wallet. The address you have for payment isn't in a wallet that you control, as others have pointed out. Hence, no private keys for you. Blockchain.info provides such a wallet, though. In general, shared wallets like Coinbase and Inputs.io don't give you access to the wallets that contain your addresses.

I think we all know that many of the clone coins -- which represent most altcoins, really -- won't last. But I have to think that a few will stick around. LTC, PPC, maybe XPM, who knows. It's a lot of speculation at this point. But the end? Nah.

Wow, is that really the case? Like, that's the consensus around here? I wasn't sure at this point that they had gained access to the wallets -- just that they had physical possession of the servers. Interesting stuff.

Edit: Oh, maybe you mean the escrow/user wallets, not DPR.

Hmmm, BTC-E has been down for at least 1.5 hours here -- since I got home, anyway. Makes me nervous. Thankfully it's been a boring few hours, from the looks of it.

3 months to default? I'm really not sure about that. I used to underestimate the government's ability to sustain this monstrosity... not so much anymore. It'll be a while. It's okay -- a US default down the road gives us all more time to pick up some more coins on the way.