I have been trying to get a withdrawal from CampBX for over a week now. Their losing site insists that my completely valid US address is not valid.

Every response from "tech support" comes in in the middle of the night, with about a 50% chance of being in American English. Any grammatical errors are always ones that an Indian would make.

First, there is no way that any vaguely competent web programmer would take over a week to fix this trivial issue. Second, if Campbx was what they claim to be, they would long since have just cut me the check by hand.

No wonder they can't keep stateside partners. Maybe they could if they were really here.

An online merchant cannot afford to directly take credit cards until he is doing a couple of thousand dollars per month. Until then it's Paypal, which is about a 6% transaction fee, and scarily unreliable.

So a 5% discount for Bitcoin is a win. A few cents more cash, and a lot less pain in the anatomy.  For the immediate future, neither conversion cost nor inflation are relevant: There are already a few monthly expenses, hosting was the first, that I can pay in Bitcoin.

Until you have been an extremely small (like, supporting one family, small) retail merchant, you have no idea how horrid credit cards and Paypal are, and thus how much it is worth to avoid them.

He's an old timer. The very fact that he was willing to publicly use such a large sum strongly indicates that they were legally acquired, either by mining when it was easy, or buying when they were cheap. Even in early 2012, 200 BTC was only $1000.

Umm, just how can the shadow economy have an official anything?

Is Gary North a liar? Either that or he is too stupid to have stayed in business as an economic pundit for 40 years. My mother bought into the y2k crazy and had a bunch of his articles.

I remember one about railroads. He frothed at the mouth about all the mom and pop shortlines that had done no y2k remediation. If he knew enough to count those short lines, then he knew that their _one_ engine was older than microprocessors, and that they could run their business on pencil and paper for long enough to get the neighborhood geek to move their data to a new computer.

I think he lies. A lot.

PS. I'm a programmer. I made a lot of money fixing real y2k problems.

This may be TEOTWAKI.

The problem is that since Dwolla dropped Bitcoin, there is no quick way to move fiat. If you have dollars on CampBX, you can indeed buy BTC and sell them for a profit on another exchange. You then have to collect those dollars, and then snail mail a money order to CampBX to repeat the process.

Even when (if) CampBX gets ACH transfers working, the dollar side of arbitrage will take about a week. With the current volatility that is an extreme risk if your goal is to accumulate Bitcoins. If you're ok with dollars you can lock in a profit.

There is also circumstantial evidence that while they do have access to DPR's personal Bitcoins, and they have a dump of the disk with Silk Road's escrow wallet, they do not have the key to access it. Thus there is a good chance that those BTC are gone forever rather than in the US government's hands.

They claim they're offline to roll out their new KYC system. Sheesh.

That happened all the time last spring/summer. They only have so much working capital. It takes days for them to get fiat to an exchange to buy more BTC.

Does anyone know why they stopped accepting Dwolla? I'm sure that hurt their volume badly.

They now have ACH working supposedly. Anybody know what their delays are? Coinbase annoyed me by waiting a full business day to start the transaction, then blaming taking 5 biz days instead of 4 on everyone but themselves.

If you're in a civil law country, google "lex mercatoria". If you're in a common law country google "Pie Powder Court". If you're one of the other 5 billion people, find a law geek and explain the issue. There was a way.

35, FWIW. With any kind of luck they have 40 good years left, and maybe 20 less good after that.

Gee, someone else who's noticed that even if you have a valid prescription, the Silk Road price is the same as Wal-Mart, and no sane person actually wants to go to Wal-Mart.

QED. People are reluctant to send their coin to Gox to trade for Fiat because it is extremely difficult to actually take possession of the Fiat. A continuously rising percentage of small trades appears to be leaving Gox for other exchanges. The whales are still there because no place else can really accommodate them. Yet.

SD is actually irrelevant. What happened is that I posted an ask a couple of bucks above the current bid, expecting to get it overnight and then buy back in ten bucks lower. This caused the price to go straight down.

That's the way my world works.

Chartbuddy. It's done wonders for my scrool.

Certainly an obvious option if you're in the US. I'm not much of a trader, but never had a problem. And they're easy to get fiat to. Either Dwolla or overnight them a certified check. Either way is faster and cheaper than a bank wire.

It's too early in Bitcoin's life cycle to really despair, as long as you're only playing with money you can afford to lose. A few have already seen three zeros of appreciation. If this thing flies, there's three to six more zeroes in it. If it doesn't, pick up some alpaca socks on the way down. They rock when it's 20 below (C or F irrelevant)

Set the twit bit.