It has everything to do with US regulations, because Bitstamp deals in USD, and has many US customers. It would have to drop all of them, if it were to decide not to submit to Big-Brother Central regulations.

Secondly, if you look at the Bitstamp TOS, you won't see Slovenia mentioned. You will see that they are subject to UK England laws under Regulation and Jurisdiction sections.

Furthermore, it says that "The Services we provide are currently unregulated within the UK." So, if they have no regulatory pressure in the UK, they would not have announced verification right after the Bitcoin Foundation meeting with the Washington regulatory cabal.

And please, no nonsense about how that was just a coincidence. 

Thank you for the advanced warning! Will withdraw all funds before that verification mess starts. It was nice on Bitstamp, while we were free of the Big Brother. 

@Nejc Kodric Please announce well in advance when you will be forced to comply with the US regulations, and require all kinds of verification even to withdraw BTC, the way gox was. I want to be able to leave Bitstamp before that hassle starts. Thanks.

Whether you Got that or not is a function of liquidity and volume. Those are a function of professional trader activity to conduct current price discovery and speculate on fluctuations.
The fees for that activity are a major cost to those professional traders, and influence the volume and liquidity of the exchange overal.

So, for you the fees don't matter, but to pro traders and FYB itself they are key, and directly affect your trades also.

It's not even true that you don't really care about the fees. To prove it, let's meet on bitcoin-otc, and I'll charge you the highest markup in the world for my ask. Let's see if you'll still be "willing to pick up my asks" and not really care about my fee.
My point is that's also why FYB don't Got those most of the time.

Because there is more to currency than "saving" a.k.a "hoarding" and "capital preservation".
If you are a small importer in SG, buying say even from China or Japan. Try to send a payment to your export partner in those countries using SGD, as cheaply as you could using Bitcoin! Then try to send the same payment to Europe or the US!

EVEN IF you pay 0.99% to a payment processor like BitPay to protect you from Bitcoin exchange voliatility, I think it would still be cheaper than using any other method available to a small business.

Start with Walmart and ask any successful company that trades in commodities: "If your trade volume is low in a worldwide market of a certain commodity, can your volume be increased by charging the highest markup in the world?" The answer is obvious to a school child.

That's what FYB is doing though - charging top-level markup on a transaction in a widely available commodity. If they want more volume, it's exactly the wrong thing to do.
It's so wrong to do from a business perspective, it makes me wonder if FYB is actually a Singapore government honeypot, which they hope to use to keep track of local btc flow. 
If it's not, we've seen a lot of "exchanges" like that come and go in bitcoin land.

That 80% figure has never been true!
Gox controls no more than 70% of major exchange trades now:
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/volumepie/

That's not even counting Localbitcoins.com, Bitcoin-OTC markets, the new Buttonwood exchanges, meetups, and other private trades.

How much market share gox has nothing to do with the fees FYB charges or how much volume it does either. Exchanges are not religions, where one has to be converted from one to another. Pro traders trade on multiple exchanges at the same time, IF the cost structure is right.

Ok, criminal masterminds, since bitcoin is supposedly only good for criminal deals, what would be the best way to use it while in prison?

I've seen those little paper wallets that are folded over and sealed, so that you can't see the private key. Maybe prisoners could trade those and just write on each one how much is in it. If one prisoner had a contraband android even without net access, he could verify the balances for everyone else as the local broker. And he could synchronize with the main chain via flash drives that are regularly smuggled in, or through a trusted guard...

Is there a better way? What are the risks, besides the obvious?

These last few hours were exactly what I mean: I was trading this heavy downturn on 4 other exchanges - Bitstamp USD, RMBTB CNY, Ripple XRP, and BTC-e LTC. On every exchange I made money by taking manual short positions without using any kind of a trading bot!  It was hours of entertainment, and profit, even though BTC was crashing!

In terms of SGD, at the main place of today's action - Bitstamp - the rate declined to 81 SGD, and now bounced back. At the FYB-SG "exchange" - NOT A SINGLE TRADE during those hours - the top bid stayed at 92SGD!  Pathetic!

I wanted and would have traded this crash manually at FYB, if there were other traders or even their bots, but they will never come at these per-trade fees!  Look at RMBTB - the latest Chinese exchange. It's even newer than FYB, but their fees are half those of FYB, plus they give a high-volume discount, AND they already have more volume!

It's also a much better built site. Compared to that, FYB looks like some school kids hacked it out in their spare time... 

I really want to trade SGD at FYB, but they have to make it appealing for serious traders! My suggestion is that those school kids log into BitStamp, and make FYB work like that...

Every other exchange is also at the mercy of the deposit/wdl processing. Yet their trading fees are much lower.
That's not the point though: at FYBSB there is no api trading, and therefore no arbitrage to the exchanges overseas. So, there is no liquidity, plus much higher fees. That's preventing FYB from growing and keeps the rate artificially high.

92sgd has been at the top of the bids for hours now during a worldwide down trend, but no trades have happened at FYB in that price range. Until FYB becomes a real arbitraged exchange with an API that's actually used, and competitive trading fees, it's better for ordinary people just to exchange through LocalBitcoins.com or something. Right now, FYB is a joke, but wants to charge top dollar! 

The Singapore market isn't big, but the world of traders interested in trading SGD is...

Right now, a "reasonable" price according to the main exchanges is around 91-92SGD. Let's see how fast that gets filled.

I already sold all the btc I wanted in order to see whether FYB is a good trading place. It works the other way around from what you say: if they lowered their fees, they would get more volume. The customer, which is the trader, and their competition, which are the other exchanges, drive that relationship, NOT what the exchange thinks it "needs" the fee to be.

Pro traders only exit the exchange in fiat once in a while, but they trade continuously. So, the exit fees are much less important than per-trade fees.

I think it's still only amateurs or the exchange trading against itself at FYB-sg. That's why the price is staying so much higher during this last downturn. It would be about 5$ lower right now if there were professional traders, but they won't go there because FYB chages 3 times more than the BTC-e for example.
They say it's to cover development costs, but their trading interface is one of the lamest and most primitive I've seen.
The reason FYB is not growing is because they charge too much.

That's the point: if the banks will make this happen anyway, no need to continue deluding ourselves.

I think it will not be a massive fail, but the exchange rate will be set against real assets, as it was in the 10k-pizza days, or whatever being sold on Bitmit and such.

More than half the Bitcoins are already out there. So, it's not only the miners that can spend them. If you have goods or services that I want, I'll pay for them with Bitcoin, even though I am not a miner. So, it might just take more time for bitcoins to spread around, but I think it won't be the massive fail you predict.

Cool. Free country. (Well, not really free, but we all already knew that deep down.)

If Bitcoin without fiat is only useful for buying drugs and occasional 10k pizzas, I think it's best we find that out now. No need to waste time.

I bet it's useful for more than that though. Let's see.

I think this is good news! Let's get this party started! I hope they close all legal ways to trade for fiat.
Maybe then we'll finally be rid of speculators who are only in bitcoin to make fiat and cash out.
Maybe it will bring more people who are willing to buy and sell goods and services for Bitcoin, rather than converting it to fiat as soon as they get it.
Maybe not; it's time we find out though.

There are plenty other ways for us to value bitcoin, such as against gold and silver, other cryptocurrencies, digital gold currencies, or any other commodity and real asset. I think this is the way to finally make bitcoin a currency, rather than just use it as a fiat payment system.

+1 That way you also get mixed LTC, disconnected from your fiat payment.

thufir - one of the original disappearing cloud wallet scammers here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=121033.msg1303811#msg1303811

If it's not the same guy who ran Mybitcoin. com, he followed right in his footsteps.
Probably still here under a different nick.

Something else that's interesting is that thufir aka Sam Maloney registered at this forum only 2 weeks before the MyBitcoin scam domain was registered.

What a coincidence that 2 scammers that use the same MO to steal bitcoins would enter the Bitcoin world so early on, within 2 weeks or less of each other???

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DONE! So, now that you are in with the banks, how does one close her account at bitcoin-central? 

I call on all who agree with Satoshi's and the non-hypocrites among the early adopters' original stance on the banks, to practice what you preached, and close your accounts at Paymium and bitcoin-central, and not use these companies in the future.