This is a zero risk, one-way bet (you're offering free money in exchange for me throwing out a number), so I guess I have to post something.

I predict the Mt. Gox trading starts at the roll-back price of around $17.5 BTC and tons of people who have lost faith in BTC over the incident attempt to sell their bitcoins at the new price (which is about $7 higher than bitcoins are currently selling for). The market will quickly self-correct, however, and within 2 hours, my prediction is that the price will be:

$12.72

I store my bitcoin wallets in my dropbox, but like many others here, I had the foresight to create truecrypt containers for them. Yay me!

In my opinion, this whole debate has been nothing more than a publicity stunt by Kevin who is desperately trying to paint himself as a "good guy" in hopes that he wins over the hearts of the community so they rally behind him and persuade Mt. Gox to ultimately end up letting him keep all 200,000+ bitcoins.

The 643 BTC is just a distraction. The real thing Kevin is fighting to keep (without actually coming outright and saying it) is the motherload.

I'm sorry, but Kevin just needs to accept the fact that all those bitcoins were stolen and they need to be returned to their rightful owner(s), regardless of who that owner is. That's the right thing to do, and ultimately, the decision isn't even his (since the BTC are still all in the hands of Mt. Gox).

Hello,

I have been lurking on these forums for quite some time now, but I don't like to just randomly post things unless I have something worthwhile to contribute, so I am only just now making an attempt to jump through the newbie hoops and become a real member.

With that said, I would be honored and would very much appreciate it if you were to take the time to whitelist me. Although the newbie section is understandably necessary, so many of the posts here in the newbie section are simply fluff from people trying to inflate their post counts. I would very much like to enter into real discussion in the forum areas that really matter.

I solemnly vow that:

 - I will do my best to only provide reasonable/logical/useful and/or delightfully humorous (when appropriate) commentary.

 - I will not incite flame wars.

 - I will not feed the trolls.

 - I will follow any/all other rules, to the best of my abilities.

Here's what I did to secure my wallets:

1. Installed Dropbox on home/work computers.
2. Installed Truecrypt on my home/work computers.
3. Created two different Truecrypt containers, each one only 2 megs in size.
4. Placed the encrypted container files inside of Dropbox.
5. Mounted the first container on drive Z: and moved my wallet.dat from my work computer into it (after turning off the bitcoin client, of course).
6. Dropped to a command line and used the "mklink" command to create a symbolic link between the wallet.dat file inside the Truecrypt container and the wallet.dat pointer in my bitcoin user data folder. Note: If you want to store *everything* in your encrypted container, and not just the wallet, you can alternately just run "C:\Program Files\Bitcoin\bitcoin.exe -datadir=Z:\" when launching the Bitcoin client, but I like to just symlink the wallet file so the encrypted container can remain small and lightweight inside of Dropbox.

Now, whenever I want to open one of my wallets, I just mount it's corresponding container using Truecrypt and launch Bitcoin. Using this method, I can very easily and securely switch between multiple wallets from multiple computers. I can mount my work computer's wallet using my home computer and vice versa. As soon as I'm done with whatever transactions I need to do, I turn off the Bitcoin client and un-mount the wallet container.

If you want to keep the Bitcoin client open and running (so that it is always up-to-date with the block chain), just create a new, blank dummy wallet and corresponding container and mount that. Just make sure that you don't ever store any BTC in it or actually use it for anything, since it will be mounted at all times and if your machine was compromised someone could easily send out any money stored in it.

The minimum 5 post rule is the reason why pointless posts like this exist.

*clears throat*

*looks at his new post counter*

For the record, I think that what Kevin did was completely understandable (buy all the bitcoins he could, for as cheap as he could). I certainly probably would have attempted to do the same, given the opportunity.

This, however, doesn't mean that I think he should get to keep the funds. He got lucky and managed to make off with 600+ bitcoins, but that doesn't change the fact that those bitcoins were stolen. In the real world, if something is stolen and sold to someone else, the stolen item still belongs to its rightful owner and has to be returned if at all possible.

I think that most of the people who are rooting for Kevin are people who made out like bandits when the crash occurred and what they're really wanting is to be able to keep their ill-gotten gains. Kevin is their poster child.

The best solution is to take away the ill-gotten gains from the greedy hordes (an image of Cartman whining about not getting his way springs to mind) and just roll everything back to the way it was. I, for one, would love to see the market return to $17/BTC and for everyone's account balances to just be back to what they were and this whole incident to have effectively never happened. Mt Gox will have to spend a lot of BTC to rewind things and put things back in order. I think that's punishment enough for their security problems.

What information would Mt Gox give the FBI exactly that the FBI doesn't already have?

The name/username/email/hash database table is already out of the bag, so the FBI already had access to it, just like everyone else.

The only thing that Mt Gox could really give other than that would have been the exact transaction data and access logs, but if the FBI really wanted that, they could easily get that on their own. They've been blatantly monitoring internet traffic since the 90's.

For examples of these government-run internet spying projects, simply see the following wikipedia articles:
Carnivore - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_%28software%29
NarusInsight - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NarusInsight
COINTELPRO - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
Echelon - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

Hi,

I'm Tom and yes, I know, I have a stupid username (tominator). 

I've been following bitcoins for a little over a month now and I have made about $1,000 now just by mining and selling coins using a couple of my computers.

By trade, I'm a web developer and computer programmer.

I tend to lurk a lot on the forums and on reddit.com/r/bitcoin, just reading and hardly every saying much. Every now and then I see someone posting something similar to my viewpoints on things, but I'm finally getting to a point where I feel like piping up with a comment or two of my own, which is why I came here to introduce myself.

So yeah. That's me.