I wish it were the case that residence mattered. The truth is that US is possibly the ONLY country that taxes it's citizens even when they live and earn all of their income abroad. Renouncing your citizenship costs ~$400 and even then does not release you from any unmet tax obligations or risk of audit from time during your citizenship.

Worse still, Americans abroad are increasingly being denied foreign bank accounts because of new reporting requirements that the US imposes on banks who accept US citizens as customers.

http://aaro.org/denied-bank-accounts

So, if I mined through 2013 at an average price of say $200/btc and put my coins on gox, then lost them with gox's closure when the price was ~$500 then...

I pay income tax on the $200/btc mined coins - my mining equipment and electricity expenses

Can I then claim property loss at the price when gox closed?

http://code.google.com/p/otroslogviewer/wiki/DonateAndDonors

Happy to see this fine tool getting some fresh work and now accepting donations in BTC. FOSS and BTC are delicious pairings, IMHO.

Wake up Jimmy Wales! People are literally saying "take my money, please" an you are still riding the fence?

No so terribly unreasonable given that thousands of people have accounts on these exchanges and have no proof that they arent goxing.

But, yes, it is speculation both ways.

Shame since the whole point to btc is to not have to trust and to rely on publicly visible consensus.

I in no way support the notion of fucking with the block chain or any sort of rolling back what happened with Gox.

But I do think there remain possibilities of recovering some of the funds for account holders. We simply dont know the truth behind why it's shuttered and there are some interesting theories floating around.

Some of which point to the possibility that the a decent proportion of the btc might still be in the wallets, or might be tied up due to legal / law enforcement demands. Those both leave the possibility that we might see something back some day.

What I havent seen discussed is that Gox almost certainly still has accurate account balance info for customer accounts. The more time goes by the more likely it would seem that data could be lost or buried in legal mess.

At a minimum, I would like to see that data set in the hands a neutral party or perhaps the Bitcoin Foundation ASAP. The small chance of recovery along with knowing that some dispassionate 3rd party knows the balances of account holders would be a good thing.

Perhaps accounts that have an existing btc withdrawal address can be stripped of personally identifying info before they are sent to escrow. The presumption is that someone can sign a message on that address to prove ownership. Accounts without btc withdrawal addresses might need Mark to whip up some php to let them set a valid one.

Stripping it of PII might be good in that it means the escrow party doenst have the complete client list to make Gox less valuable to a potential suitor and means the account holders dont have to trust someone else with their info.

Long term, I wonder if Mt Gox could be run as a low overhead, low fee exchange in a non-profit way until it recoups the current account holders balances?

Maybe it doesnt even need to touch fiat, which would seem to be a high bar in terms of compliance and operational overhead. If it only allowed trading between alts and btc it might be autonomous and useful enough to recover some of the balances for people.

They were rumoured to have LTC support ready and we know the trading engine worked well enough over the last few years. It shouldnt need much in the way of maintenance.

Possible?  Insane?

Love!

HODLing for now

BUYing soon-ish.

pearls before swine.

And maybe right now it's btc that's the pig. It's not for them. Not yet.

Youre effectively arguing with a toddler about why they will shave someday...but are you really ready to hand them the razor right now?

The strategy in the near term isnt to say no to bitcoin. It's to:

A) relegate it to the utility of beanie babies and tulips by making it illegal or at least massively difficult to do any business exchanging btc to and from fiat currencies.

B) hunting down and making very public dramatic arrests of two-bit drug dealers, child pr0n sickos, wanna be money launderers (the pros use dollars and black pesos, or go to HSBC), freedom fighters/terrorists and any and all other "undesirables" they can find that have ever touched a satoshi.

C) Using the global threat of BTC to strengthen the cooperation and information sharing between the legacy banking system. Total financial surveillance is the goal and btc is a great scapegoat.

They seem to be winning big in these areas.

We seem to be bashing our heads against this "last mile" issue of converting btc to and from fiat. I wonder, could we shift some of the attention from btc as a currency and instead focus on btc as a means of exchange. I suspect not. I suspect greed and the general weakness of the human condition will win out. But...

Could we barter services from each other for btc? E-lance/Stack Exchange paid solely in btc?

What if a small cooperative of people doing anything really, but say growing food locally or trying to get their kids to and from school and looked after while parents endure their hours long commute, agreed to use a fixed pool (a fork) of btc to trade responsibilities for duties?

Could some btc philanthropist/early adopter start a volunteer program where by people get paid in btc for doing community service type work? You do some work, earn some btc from that fork, then can pay for stuff you need done with your earnings. Alt coins show that it is almost trivial to create your own fork and then you can use that as a public ledger for any closed community doing just about anything.

Sure, this is all easily dismissed as wishful hippie bullshit. But really, absent something dramatic and probably undesirable like JP Morgan opening an exchange, so much focus on converting to and from fiat is really missing the point and power of btc, IMHO.

The same would be true for ANY currency you weren't already holding. You'd face the issue of conversion and the timing of transfers/wires not meeting your "penny more / penny less" test.

For example, my US bank wont send rubles to my account in Russia. When I want to send funds, they send USD to the Russian bank, which can take a day or so to happen, then the Russian bank converts the dollars to rubles at whatever the exchange rate is at that time and credits my ruble account.

Granted the delays in getting larger sums from Coinbase and the volatility in btc are higher in the btc case, but the basic problem is the same. The key difference with btc is that the actual transfer happens MUCH faster than with legacy banking system.

You might consider buying a small surplus of coins from coinbase and holding them in your own wallet, then once you posses them, contact the party you want to pay and agree on a USD/BTC price, and hit send.  For a little more effort, you gain much more control and faster transfers.

No way dude! Those people are savages...damn serious about their cards. One screw-up and Mark would have been fugu the first time he had to rollback everyone's card packs! Crypto-hippies were the way safer audience (er, dupes) for his style.

That comment was not there ~3hours ago when I looked at source. Just empty doc. Stange that someone is pushing this live now.

The bailout/acquisition strategy doc being shared in other posts seems to square with this comment but both may be wishful thinking.

This would seem to be a massive opportunity for bigger players to enter but I'm doubtful it can be salvaged. Even if you had serious captial to throw at fixing this flaming turd you might easily conclude that letting the sheep panic and btc get crushed back to <$100 prices might be the better play. Certainly less legal and operational headache.

Tradehill is the singular flame-out in the btc world I can recall being done in a standup way. Mark should have learned something from that. Pity.

and I really think Steve is not rolling at all. I think this is exactly the Apple that Steve brought on us. Charismatic as he was, he shunned anything that he couldnt control.

I want to hope that there any forces left in Apple that see the error of this path and can influence a change in direction. I dont see anything to give me that hope, though.

Might this show that some long term holders foresaw the withdrawl suspension at gox (and resulting price corrections across the exhanges) and elected to move their coins to safer harbors?

BDD is weighted toward coins that havent moved in some time, so the implication is that it was old money. Then again, combined exchange volume seems to be 4x what is has been over the last week or so, so maybe large numbers of weak hands panicing?

Wait...what? I thought php could do anything? At least that's what Mark said once upon a time. Maybe they finally turned on their LTC support and it borked their homebrew BTC client?

Shocking incompetence but really just another in a long line of cock ups.

Amazing thread! Amazing company!
buy x2!

I wouldnt bother. I signed up and it was mostly painless with a very friendly phone call a few days later to get account access.

Sadly though I still await any information about how to do wire transfers with IAFCU. Submitted a support request and waited 2 days to hear...."oh international wire transfers...someone will have to call you back". Still waiting.

Similar results for CBX. I have been a customer for a year or more and recently submitted the full suite of docs they want for AML and KYC. I have heard nothing back from CampBx for more than a week.

There just doesnt seem to be a good way to move USD in or out of ANY of the exchanges any more!

Anyone else see the insane bids at btc-e right now?

5000000000.0000009 @ 38.188   

https://btc-e.com/

On a whim and in the tradition of trying to keep the pressure on the established players to support bitcoin, I asked Google Checkout when they would support bitcoin for seller payouts.

The response wasnt yes, but neither was it a "no way". I was pleasantly surprised at the "maybe someday". So...we may be beyond the phase where "they ignore you".

----------------------------------
checkout-merchant-support@google.com   
12:53 PM (1 minute ago)
      
to me

Hello XXXXX,
Google Checkout currently doesn’t provide payouts using Bitcoin, though we may introduce this feature in the future. We’ll take your feedback into account as we move forward with product development.
We always welcome suggestions for how we can improve Google Checkout, so please continue to send us your comments in the future.

Sincerely,
Arthur
The Google Checkout Team

I want to see bitcoin displace PayPal for :

donations to non-profits
donations to open source projects

It's well past time. BitPay or Gox POS should step up and provide a low friction way for these orgs to embrace btc.