Even a 'day or so' is frankly outrageous considering our current technological capabilities. There is no real reason that an international transfer of funds should even take that long. I'll be fair and state that the 2-3 weeks is an outlier situation, but it's not at all unreasonable for someone transferring funds to a 2nd or 3rd world nation.

If you want to get technical transactions on the bitcoin network are using the bitcoin protocol, which happens to be cyphered with SHA256. Also should the community of developers determine that SHA256 was no longer a viable cypher, it would be relatively simple to create a cutoff point in the blockchain where new transactions need to be processed in whatever the next generation cypher is. My point was that if the above protocols are compromised because the underlying cryptography is vulnerable, there are much greater dangers in terms of potential fraud or data security, considering every modern agency in the world relies on the premise that those protocols are secure.

To be fair I don't think that foreign investment accounts are covered under the Federal Deposit Insurance Company either. Or for that matter, there are plenty of charter banks that aren't FDIC insured domestically. Even if MtGox wasn't based in Japan, there's no requirement (except as provided by state law) for a bank to be FDIC insured. In short, if you're worried about your money you probably should have some caveats about putting it into an organization that has no official policy for how it's going to compensate you if they screw up, monetary policy or no.

The basic crypto behind bitcoin is sha256 it's the same crypto used behind TLS and SSL, PGP, SSH, S/MIME, and IPsec. If sha256 is compromised the fact that your bitcoins are now double spendable is the least of the world's problems.

The 'official' wallet software is open source, and is not subject to the sort of transaction malleability that affected MtGox. In short the official software is sound, however, the official wallet software is not designed to handle the volume of transactions that an enterprise environment like an exchange needs to be able to process. It simply isn't fast enough to keep up with hundreds to thousands of transactions per second. To this end MtGox like most exchanges used the official source code as a reference point and created their own custom wallet software to interact with their exchange. Unfortunately they made shortcuts in their coding to do this, which allowed this particular vulnerability to be exploited.

And that's different from the over all distribution of USD how? Most of the people with large bitcoin fortunes are early adopters, and frankly why shouldn't early adopters be rewarded for taking a risk on something that ultimately may not pan out. You don't have to go far to find plenty of people who think Bitcoin is a scam, scheme, or otherwise 'no good'. You yourself imply as much. Like anything early adopters take a big risk, if BTC never got to be worth more than chump change they're out time and possibly money if they invested anything heavily into it. As another analogy, 25-35 years ago there were plenty of people who insisted personal computers would never be popular and there was no market for them. You don't begrudge people like Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates who took a risk on fledgeling technology and came out on top do you? Maybe in 10-20 years BitCoin will have gone the way of the betamax and vhs, but then maybe it won't.

I trust that bitcoin will continue to be a currency with value and use until something else comes along that replaces it (and given BitCoins incumbent status as king of the cryptocurency world is I believe, unlikely in the near future. There are a number of 'altcoins' which each seek to improve upon BitCoin's core functionality in some way or another, but none of them have successfully come close to dethroning BTC).

Bitcoin has a lot of functional benefits as a system for transferring value, even if it is eventually determined that its volatility ultimately makes it unsuitable as a currency for conducting day to day business with. This is especially true when it comes to international transactions. Currently the fees for transmitting USD across international wires, not to mention conversion to local currency (if needed) are significant, and time consuming (I've oft seen quotes of international wires taking 2-3 weeks to complete, depending on where it's going and what not). On the other hand, a bitcoin transaction is instantaneous, and after roughly 60 minutes is pretty much irrevocably entered into the block chain so that there is no possibility of the funds being lost or otherwise delayed in transmit.

Now does this mean that I trust bitcoin to go up, or down, or sideways, or do anything else? Well, I'd like to say I'm hopeful for a strong future for the currency, and I trust that in the long run bitcoin will eventually stabilize as it matures more, but in the short term, we're still in the wild west so to speak.

That's not the standard for declaratory judgment jurisdiction in patent cases and hasn't been since the 2007 MedImmune case, in which the Supreme Court rejected the Federal Circuit's "reasonable apprehension of suit" test. The MedImmune standard is "whether the facts alleged, under all the circumstances, show that there is a substantial controversy, between parties having adverse legal interests, of sufficient immediacy and reality to warrant the issuance of a declaratory judgment." MedImmune v. Genentech, 549 U.S. 118, 127 (2007) (quoting Maryland Casualty Co. v. Pacific Coal & Oil Co., 312 U.S. 270, 273 (1941)).

Have I actually tried what? Actually linking a wallet to a person. No I haven't, but then I don't have the resources available to me that most government agencies do. Sure the chain can be 'long' and it may be difficult, if not impractical to track down the owners of wallets that are mixed with a mixing service, but all of the transactions are public, and therefore CAN be traced, even if it is impractical to do so. Furthermore most mixing services could themselves be classified as performing or aiding in money laundering or structuring depending on local laws about the subject. So while a user of a mixing service might avoid getting tracked down for their drug charges, they could face money laundering charges instead. In my opinion there's little incentive to most users to use a mixing service unless they have dirty coins, the privacy gained just doesn't seem particularly worth it to me, considering the chain is already pseudonymous.

Bitcoin is pretty much the opposite of untraceable. For a bitcoin transaction to be valid it has to be reported in a giant public ledger where everyone agrees on it. If you send bitcoins to someone there is a permanent record of you doing so. Sure the ledger might not associate a wallet address with a particular person, it doesn't for example record 'John Q. sent Bill W.' 100 BTC, but it does record that wallet '1785' sent 100 btc to wallet '1863'. There are a variety of ways to link a particular wallet address to a physical person, especially if that person is attempting to cash out to any Fiat currency (either the transaction has to be done 'in person' or virtually every exchange that allows deposit or withdrawal of fiat currency requires some sort of identity verification, not to mention it's likely being withdrawn to a bank account, which also likely has a name associated with it). The long and short of it is, that if you want to transact business without a paper trail, cold hard, unmarked cash is still the best way to do it.

Blame Canada!

Sorry... Couldn't resist.

I see what you did there . . .

And as usual, people who trust their Crypto Currency to a web based service (especially one with such a short history to it, and no clearly defined security practices) end up getting their shit stolen. Really now, if you want your crypto coins (be they BTC LTC or whatever) safe keep them in a private wallet and encrypt it, don't load your fortunes onto some website, then complain when they get hacked.

This is kind of like carrying around a giant wad of cash in your pocket and then being mad when someone mugs you, keep a small amount of 'working cash' readily available, and keep the rest of it in a safe place. The same logic that you'd use with real money should apply to virtual money.

Java was a bit of a tongue in cheek comment, I realize java itself is not a bad thing. It's just that 90% of the computers that have java installed on them, really don't need to have java installed on them, and don't really benefit from having it installed. 95% of the web works just fine now a days without Java or Flash or anything but the native browser functionality, and arguably the other 5% is mostly websites I'd recommend people stay away from anyways. Having additional runtimes like Java and Flash execute from the browser opens up all sorts of security vulnerabilities that shouldn't exist. The fact that Oracle seems hell bent on including the 'ask toolbar' with Java is just icing on the cake. I tell people all the time, that unless you've got a very specific reason to need Java installed on a machine, you're better off without it.