Thanks! I did get your PM and I'm working through that and others and will respond in a day or two after I've done some thinking on it.

It's the fees. Getting funds to btc-e eats at your margin

Ya, spoke to a company that is doing exchange aggregation and trying to act as clearing houses between them. Launching in a month or so, but that sounded optimistic to me after hearing their plans. If they succeed though maybe that'll help develop an arb infrastructure that will wither out the discrepancies.

On my site we were thinking of grabbing data from multiple exchanges and aggregating them to one bitcoin spot price feed, instead of just delivering mt gox like we and others do now. This like what happens with gold wrt to the spot price. People aggregate data from different dealers in the otc market and somehow determine a central price. We were considering doing time and trade weighted averages or some convolution method but kept doubting anyone would find a benefit from this.

It's true because the developers of the alt-coins suck compared to Bitcoin. Fixes don't get ported quickly or at all in many cases.

sold all my bitcoins

gla who still got the bitcoin fever. be careful.

(i got the sickest feeling a crash is starting, lack of liquidity in the exchanges)

Selling mtgoxUSD/BTC at 3-15% vig.

Depends on amount, market conditions, payment method etc

Payment methods are; Neteller(USD) , Skrill (USD/EUR), Stars, FTP, Party, Paypal

PM with; amount and payment method and I will give you a quote

I dunno if a crash is incoming or not, but I sold almost all mine now, as well. Since I bought most of them in February at $25 each or so and never intended to speculate or invest with them and just "fell into" the boom, I just decided to book the massive win instead of sweating it out and compulsively checking the market ten times a day. All told I bought about $5,000 of BTC over the last few months and by the time it was done I sold them all for just under $20,000, so I'm obviously thrilled.

I figured the bittersweetness of losing value by selling early beats out the disappointment of losing value by selling too late.

This whole experience has definitely piqued my interest in other forms of investing, but I'm a big believer that it takes a massive amount of hours to become truly elite at any given activity and I've got a good thing going with poker right now, so I don't really have enough time to put into stock markets or currency exchange to approach it with true competence.

No one ever lost money by taking a profit.

Say hypothetically i had 10,000 Bitcoins, what would be the best way to turn them into cash $ without raising suspicion?

What do you mean raising suspicion?

You can probably find people who'd give you cash for bitcoins, or gold or silver. I'd pay greenbacks if you happen to live somewhere close-ish to me and this is not just a hypothetical.

you should be able to sell 10k bitcoins on 2p2 pretty easily for poker site cash, skrill, or bankwire.

don't jump ship this is going to $300 easily

im interested in buying some for cash/bankwire as well. PM me if ur selling. I've been around forever and have plenty of references etc.

Used localbitcoins.com to find somebody who shipped me a GDMP for my BTC. Funds went into escrow performed by the site, got my code, released the funds. Simple!

Go on localbitcoins and post. There are lots of people who want to buy huge amounts of bitcoins with cash or bank wires. There are also services like TangibleCryptography that act as escrow and match large buyers and sellers without using an exchange. They can do 100k+ for you if you want.

Dude, I know you just learned about bitcoin and all, but can you PLEASE read the FAQ and Myth section before posting more? You keep saying things that are addressed there.
Bitcoin FAQ
Bitcoin Myths

Regarding all the PPcoin mania: PPcoin is the ONLY alt-coin that significantly changes the bitcoin code and tries something innovative. Unfortunately it is fundamentally flawed. The problem is that you don't need 51% to double spend. If you hold any significant amount of coins, you can attempt a double-spend and succeed in proportion to the amount of coins you hold. The white-paper on it acknowledges this. There is no solution to this, but the author hopes that some solution can be found in the future and thinks it is a cool experiment. Of course, the current crop of idiot investors don't read the white-paper and don't know anything about crypto or the enormous weaknesses of all the alt-coins, so that doesn't stop them from buying it hoping it will go up like bitcoin, but the coin can never go anywhere with that kind of security hole.

If you want to look into alt-coins, look into Ripple
Here's a decent post on why alt-coins are a terrible investment. Also, in this thread, expert poster DeathandTaxes goes off on smoothie about why alt coins wont work because they dont provide value.

I sold most of mine today too. I bought at 46.

on Mtgox the volume has been dropping like crazy today, believe it started around 28k now its at 20330 yet the price is staying right around 142-143

The DeathandTaxes thread is very good, nice link. The altcoin thing is crazy, people are only into that because they think "oh I wish I had a chance to buy BTC when it was $1...oh look this is like BTC and it's $1".

I do think it will pop when Mtgox adds it (anyone disagree? Would like to hear opinions), but it's just so damn dumb, there is no need for it, no businesses even take it and it basically is no better than Bitcoin.

Definitely hearing things from people I think are smart about Ripple though, meaning to look into that.

This is a very interesting issue for me. You seem to know what you're talking about so I'd like to run a few thoughts by you. Most talk online about alt-coins, as you said, is mania or uneducated speculation.

You've probably heard about the recent protocol upgrade that was supposed to patch a flaw that would allow people to tweak the rate at which their client generates POS blocks, and then make a whole bunch of blocks in a short period of time and cause havoc. I don't really know how this works yet because the developer never really explained what the upgrade changed in detail, some have said you can figure it out by looking through the source code but that takes time and I haven't done it yet.

Regardless, any blockchain has a vulnerability like this to some degree. With significantly less than 51% of the hashing power, someone would be able to generate 2 or 3 blocks in a row and attempt a double spend. That's why a number of services require a handful of confirmations before accepting a transfer.

The bigger issue to me seems to be how to decide who gets to make POS blocks, the previous vulnerability existed because someone could burn up all his stake at once to make subsequent blocks with a minor tweak. Each client did some hashing at a slow rate which, along with enough coin-age, allowed one to generate a block. As I understand there's still some hashing that needs to be done to generate a POS block, and I don't know what's stopping a dishonest miner from sharply increasing his hashing speed to make a lot of blocks.

I've wondered if it would be possible to pseudo-randomly select unspent inputs, seeding the randomness with hashes of previous blocks. Each unspent input would be weighted according to size. If a client is connected to the network with the private key pertaining to the randomly selected unspent input, that client can create a new block, sign it, and receive a reward. If no active client controls the unspent input, then a different input is chosen, and so on...

This would make it impossible to create proof-of-stake blocks with offline stake, and offline stake is certainly a valued security and convenience feature, but that might be a worthwhile trade off compared to the expenses and potential vulnerabilities with proof of work. If you want to reap the rewards of mining, you need your coins on an active client. If you want complete safety, stick coins in an offline paper or brain wallet. Maybe there could be a separate private key for each address used to sign proof of stake blocks, that way you could mine proof of stake blocks without having to risk exposing the private key needed to spend inputs.

There are probably a number of other factors or obstacles that I'm missing, since I'm not super familiar with the nitty gritty of the block chain, but if a system like this could work you'd have something fairly comparable to proof of work, I believe. Having 10% of the online coin gives one a 1% chance of making two blocks in a row, .1% to make 3, .01% to make 4, and so on... Which is equivalent to having 10% of the online hashing power. You could then use 4+ confirmations for most low-priority, high-value, or high-risk transactions, and 0 or 1 confirmations for everything else.

btw a skeptical friend sent me this link, I haven't had time to read it fully but it seemed like it was missing a few things that were pretty obvious, has it been fully debunked anywhere yet? I skimmed it and felt the actual extrapolations they made from the blockchain were pretty dumb and probably ignore the existence of stuff liek Satoshi Dice, but I dunno, I skimmed it.

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1009

Article not so good, as pointed out in the comments.

i think the volume was abnormally high the previous day or two. usually, whenever there is a lot of new money that gets into gox, the volume spikes, and price goes up. or conversely, when somebody sells a huge amount, the volume spikes, and price goes down. right now, none of the traders want to sell at less than 143, and nobody wants to buy at more than 143. i think this just means that the price has settled til the next big move (up or down) happens.

gox wait list is now 14000+ accounts. its tough to predict the markets. but im still very bullish.

i usually leave my pc running during waking hours and run various programs(eg defragg, virus/spyware scanner, BOINC, TF2 hats lol) when im not using it.

is their any validity in mining BTC with an idle computer?

Gox traffic can be low on weekends when no new bank deposits are clearing. Unless there's a sell-off.