Happy to hear you've been able to make contact with the CEO.  Truly wish you luck with your withdrawal as well as everyone else waiting for their withdrawals.

At this point who knows what is really going on at MtGox.  When writing that the CEO is MIA, the reference was to Mark Karpeles being 'publicly' quiet during a period of crisis at his company.  In this regard I am not the only one wondering where he is.  It's good to know he has at least responded to one customer.

That being said
What is taking place now is a classic bank run. MtGox already gained a bad reputation due to the inability for customers to receive timely transactions of both deposits and withdrawals of fiat currency, most notably US dollars.  This situation has been made worse with transactional delays hitting bitcoins as well.  So we now have a situation where no one with more than a bitcoin has access to their funds.  As this is the case it behooves Karpeles, or another non-anonymous figure to provide clarity of what is going on, whether its due to technical failure, investigations, etc.  Simply releasing statements signed by MtGox Support just don't cut it and are reminiscent of failing companies. 

I realize their may be investigations going on that limit what the company can state, but the silence is becoming deafening. 

That can only go so far, any partnerships or incentives being created for miners?

@Swisscex  congrats on setting up so many currencies.  What's the strategy for getting volumes and liquidity going?

rwZrKy2uCAb7Qadb8cAimvbaXrWgBZYzWH

Beyond financial regulation, I think accounting rules/regulation is a much more important area that needs to be addressed. 
areas that need to be answered
1) effects on balance sheets
2) collecting taxes
3) paying suppliers with bitcoins and being able to file as expenses

Not an accountant myself, just thinking aloud, so I figure this list is quite long.  Obviously there are cross currency accounting standards that exist that can be used as a framework.  But lets face it very few domestic businesses are ever involved with multiple currencies. But this changes as more merchants decide to accept bitcoins.   They could convert immediately to the local fiat, but this would seemingly go against the long term point of promoting bitcoin usage.

(side question - when will the spell check on the forum stop underlining in red 'bitcoin' ?)

still don't understand what he was talking about.  The CFTC only has jurisdiction on derivatives (as Chilton stated himself), so until those would be created, bitcoins as a currency and payment solution would come under banking laws (which have begun with FinCen.  If anything, the only jurisdiction the SEC or CFTC has is in regards to if a broker offered some sort of bitcoin product.  But then the regulation wouldn't be bitcoin related but would fall under their client safety and net capital requirements. 

No derivative trading, no CFTC.

Even were options or futures to be launched, they still wouldn't be regulating bitcoins, but only place laws on how those derivatives are traded and how the product is marketed and created.

what happens to bitcoin prices if it actually sells?  Does bitpremier dump them on the market?

@Jeff  - nice post
You said "They analyze his posting dates, trying to guess his local time zone. It's all part of the fun."
Do you have a theory as to who he is?

I think at issue on the banker's side isn't his opinion on bitcoins as much as alternate methods of cheap cross border money transfers.  Can't say I know much about NZ, but Australia has been a leader in low cost FX transfers with such companies as OzForex and Technocash (their target audience are small to medium export/import businesses transferring funds between subsidiaries, vendors, and suppliers).  As NZ has a commodity and tourist based economy, I can only assume they have similar needs to Australia.  Therefore, if a banker from that area is talking bitcoins, it more than just digital currencies, but part of a strategy to maintain their market share on cross-border payments. 

Theoretically, for a bank driven product, something like XRB which is credit based would make the most sense.  A bank could help a firm issue XRB that is backed by their earnings with the currency being tradable between suppliers and buyers and transferable at the issuing bank.  On this point is why a NZ bank, or any other one for that matter would be interested in a digital currency as they could offer reduced rates to the debt issuer, while still controlling the entire loop of commerce.  So, it would be centralized, but via the financial health of the bank or company selling debt.  its actually not much different from the debt offerings used in the shipping industry during the 1500's or so. 

I'll make a prediction here, if a few banks can pull something like this off, IE a digital based debt offering, we'll quickly see the Goldman's of the world jump in, and ultimately create another financial crisis like in 2008 where everybody was borrowing against each other and when a few companies failed, the house of cards fell down.  (Gary V likes to say 'marketers screw up everything', can probably interchange 'bankers' with marketers) But, we are definitely still many years before seeing something like this take place

http://www.playerauctions.com/bitcoin-bitcoin/ &
http://www.playerauctions.com/news-detail/?id=1001

If anyone is interested - we translated the article here http://forexmagnates.com/israel-banks-limiting-bitcoin-buying-waiting-for-regulatory-decisions/

Also, for what its worth, one of my contacts was recently able to make a transfer to a non-Japanese exchange

@Akka - wow, you are fast at catching posts that include bitcoin.  I was going to post the link on the previous article I had written and replied about https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137203 but you beat me to it.

This is the deal in forex trading.  Forex is regulated by the Futures industry which doesn't like forex.  Therefore, forex has been getting hit hard by the US regulators.  But, forex has also shot themselves in the foot with all the shenanigans that occurred there for years. 

Please feel free to post comments at Forex Magnates about bitcoin and possible solutions for brokers. 

Ron

Hmm.. good point, I'll keep that in mind and try to get an opinion from some compliance sources

@Hazek - yeah, that bitcoin/bit-coin makes sense.  On my notes I had bitcoin, not sure where along the process it got changed to bit-coin.  You made a good point about the payment solutions provider thing.  As the article was about setting up to accept payments, my thinking was that a broker applying bitcoin payment would try to integrate it with their existing payment practices.  But, you are right, is a little confusing.  Will definitely reach out over here for further articles.

@Marcus_of_augustus & Spekulatius - the predominate interest is from readers that want to see a bitcoin/usd CFD to trade.  Personally, I don't think the feed sources and liquidity are in place just yet to create a synthetic instrument that trades based on the bitcoin/usd rate, but it may be one of those 'wag the tail' things that if one broker launches such a product it would boost bitcoin trading as it would attract arbitragers etc.

The other group are the 'free currency' anti-regulation people that would like to see greater adoption of bitcoin.  As you guys know, the demand is driven by governments that restrict cross border cash transfers (SA & India are the big ones that come up) and bitcoin provides an opportunity to fund trading accounts without restrictions. 

My take on this is that the regulators are going to give brokers a hard time about bitcoin because of money laundering issues.  The stress that financial firms relieve from regulators about AML is hard to appreciate if you haven't worked on the inside.  I admit my ignorance on AML & bitcoin, but is there a way to monitor this?

My pleasure.  Feeling is mutual, happy to see Forex Magnates being quoted here.

Hi,
My name is Ron Finberg and I am an editor at Forex Magnates and wrote that promo about our Quarterly Report that you quoted, and I wanted to answer about the bitcoin comment.
In addition to our online forexmagnates.com site, we publish a quarterly research report aimed at forex brokers, banks and technology providers.  In the report I wrote an in-depth article about setting up a payment solution system.  It basically goes through the details for brokers on how to become a merchant, choosing a payment solutions provider, dealing with acquiring banks and focused on credit card, e-wallet, and real time bank transfer payments.  In addition, I also added some information about upcoming technology and wrote a little about bitcoin and mobile payments.  The intro to this section was that 'you may not be using these things now, but your competitors will in the future, so its important to be ahead of the curve'

This is the intro to that section and about bitcoin:

The Future
For payment methods, the two biggest trends for the future are globalization and mobile.  As the world becomes smaller and more businesses are marketing internationally, demand for global payment solutions has increased.  This has occurred even as real time bank transfers which are focused on specific countries and regions has grown.  Nonetheless, while these real time transfers are effective in areas with developed banking systems, there is a large portion of the world lacking quick and low cost payment methods.  A natural choice to fill this gap has been pre-paid credit cards.  These products are especially used in regions with high figures of foreign workers. However, the disadvantage of these cards is limits on withdrawals, high fees, and the need for users to hold onto a physical non-replaceable card.  Due to these issues and others, e-currencies are gaining a foothold in the fragmented payment industry.

E-currencies are digital forms of money that are stored either in one’s computer drives or at a third party facility.  Of the many e-currencies available, bit-coin has become the most reputable due to its base code that it was formed with.  Bit-coins are a pure digital currency as it isn’t backed by any country or physical asset, but is simply a product of complex programming code that limits the amount of bit-coins created to limit inflation and cause scarcity.  Like credit cards, to become a bit-coin merchant, a broker works with a third party payment gateway to receive and send payments.  Advantages of bit-coin are that payments from the system become irreversible after an hour, thus limiting fraud risk. They can also be received from clients around the world.  The downside of bit-coins is that as a digital currency, the money doesn’t have any regulatory body supervising transactions and there are money laundering concerns.  As such, as the form of payment becomes more prevalent, financial regulators may impose a limitation on whether brokers within their jurisdictions can receive bit-coins as payments.  Although the idea of an unbacked and universal currency may sound risky to brokers, the fact is that users of the system are growing.  Therefore, as adoption of the product rises, client demand for bit-coin deposits will increase.

As to why I added the mention about bitcoin in the promo.  At Forex Magnates we thankfully have an active readership which has brought up bitcoin payments and trading on multiple occasions, both publicly and privately.  So the reference was sort of an 'inside joke' to those readers. 

Currently we are planning on devoting more coverage to bitcoin after we do a site upgrade. The wordpress payment integration specifically showed us that it's only a matter of time before brokers begin to role it out. 

Interested to hear the community's thoughts
Ron

Hi
I am the author of the article mentioned in this post https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137203 and I wanted to know if I could get whitelisted to provide a reply for the requested information.  For verification reference, you can see my details on http://forexmagnates.com/about/ .
Thanks
Ron Finberg