the DOM looks like that every day on every exchange

That is simply not true. Their AML verification takes no more than a week. Though I was referring to the time it takes to deposit from bank to dwolla after you are already verified which is 3-4 days. Takes 2 days or less to receive a withdrawal to bank too. (My last one was in there next day.)

do you people use Dwolla?

I've been just blown with advertizing...

is that like PayPal without the PayPal bull****?

I use dwolla yes. It costs $0.25 total to get any amount of money (even thousands or tens of thousands) from bank account to mt gox. By far the cheapest way for americans to get money into bit coins. However, it is not the fastest method available if you don't use one of their sync'd banks (which is just a few small ones afaik.)

guess why the crash then...

without the major players providing liquidity it's just lol for buy size

They, of course, haven't. Just because you can sell a limited number at 750 to the dollar doesn't mean they could sell the whole 100 billion of them.

So, I've only been reading up on ripple and (don't assume any of this is correct, I'm unsure enough that I considered not posting it) so far I'm here:

Ripple has an internal currency, ripples, or XRP for short, which can be transferred to different ripple addresses electronically. The 100 billion XRPs were all created by the network creators and they say that they will farm out at least 50 billion of them by free giveaways, use another 30 billion to fund the software and do ??? with the remaining 20 billion. We only have their word for any of this. Ripples can be exchanged for other currency or visa-versa but this is external to the network just like in bitcoin (i.e. it requires a third party to create an exchange or just sell them and the value isn't pinned to any other currency).

Whether or not these XRPs maintain a value in a different currency, they are required in order to use the ripple network. You have to keep a reserve of XRPs in your account in order for it to exist and you'll also have to pay XRPs in transaction fees (these XRP fees vanish, they don't get collected). So, in order to create an account, you would have to purchase or be given XRPs. As I understand it it's currently very easy to get given XRPs.

Unlike bitcoin which forms its distributed ledger by trusting the longest blockchain (the one that theoretically at least 51% of the computing power must have agreed on), ripple uses a more direct trust where you actually trust a specific set of a few thousand people and they form consensus on what the ledger contains. The client obviously comes with a set group of trusted people/entities, but you are free to choose your own. They suggest geographic and ideological diversity etc. This ledger is used to keep track of the XRPs mentioned above and also the IOUs.

The IOU appears to be the mainstay of ripple. The general idea seems to be that you or an agent build up trust pipelines and then exchange IOUs over that pipeline. Mostly this would involve a "gateway" as an agent. This gateway (Gateway A) would (hopefully) be well trusted in the ripple network and you would pay Gateway A in a currency (let's say $50 and for the moment ignore the gateways charging a fee for their service) and receive an IOU for that amount. You would now have a $50 IOU from Gateway A. You can then send this IOU to anybody who is willing to accept Gateway A's IOU. If you sent it to me, I could send/bring it to Gateway B who would issue me with the $50 if they were willing to trust Gateway A's IOU.

Obviously at the end of this Gateway B would have a Gateway A IOU and Gateway B would have $50. They can either wait it out (until B wants to send A $50) or use another form of settling up (XRP perhaps, or bitcoin or any type of funds transfer). Or, of course, Gateway A could go belly up and leave anybody holding its IOUs up **** creek without a paddle. I think the settling up part is the bit I'm least clear on.

And that's my current understand of Ripple. I think it's interesting, although on the technical side nowhere near as cool as bitcoin. I have to admit that initial reaction is to think they can go **** themselves with their method of distributing the XRPs but I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

why isn't this huge? it looks like far better then anything else I've seen...

the DOM looked like that and the price still ran from $50 to $250

Dwolla is pretty huge relatively speaking... It has received $5m in VC funding from some firms including Ashton Kutcher's. They process 7 figures in transactions daily, and do 7 figures in revenue despite having "only" a $0.25 fee. They had a fairly large presence at SXSW this year (though I sadly wasn't there) which was cool.

seems like the worst prediction in this entire thread. will internet drug dealers replace bitcoin with something else? or will silk road close or be shut down and nothing else takes its place?

afc. (upside is just the news fueling new accounts) once the demand stalled it was just a matter of time one big sell order (or several) would trigger a collapse.

you can see the same stuff at several illiquid instruments at NYSE ( that is if they are not arbt to death with cointegration vs the liquid instrument)

could it have a small struggle getting below because looking at the bitstamp order book earlier there were a lot of open orders to buy at $50, potentially a lot of people could see $50 as their buy price?

I really think it'll drop when Gox re-opens but I'm not putting my money where my mouth is cause it's too much of a hassle for me to sell now and buy more later.

I hope I'm wrong, but I just think too many people have been stuck for for the last 10 hours going "god, everyone told me it was dumb to buy this stuff, and they were right, and now I can't even cash out, what if this site just runs off with my money" etc etc. I feel like all the real believers will buy as much as they can on this dip, but most of them probably put most of their cash into BTC already.

Just my guess, could be totally wrong, I'm a dummy!

That's what I think too. Immediate drop followed by quick rise.

Imo ripple has two promising ideas. The first idea is consensus. The second idea is a credit network, moving debts into a more local domain is interesting. These ideas may be incorporated in future designs.

It's unclear to me whether ripple will take off. Something interesting I found while researching altcoins in general is that everyone wants their cut and bakes that into their system. BTC is/was pretty rare that it was not set up in that way specifically.

This reddit thread pretty much sums up a lot of my arguments.

Anyone who's looking to buy bitcoins atm, I've got some Dutch tulips for sale - the price is going through the roof, buy quick!

I think it's more likely to be the opposite. People who wanted to dump coins likely didn't get them to Gox in time, but people wanting to buy with cash takes a lot of time and it likely was there or about to be there. I doubt very few people who were ready to sell their entire holdings on Gox, so they have the coins available to sell on other sites and already would have sold (or will wait for a rise, and aren't desperate to dump as soon as Gox opens).

I think a drop to $0 is pretty much impossible, because there are far too many true believers. It'll probably drop to ~$1 or below with sparse trading and will end with a whimper and not a bang. That might take years. We're still in the libertarian (the ones who don't understand economics or currency) honeymoon phase.

Mtgox opens in 1min....
popcorn time

Massive lag. Wp mt gox, wp.

I figured it was >50% to crash immediately.

this is going to be so ugly. has to be a straight up DDOS. Their site is barely functional.

This is different from the trading lag they usually experience.

Trading lag - https://data.mtgox.com/api/1/generic/order/lag
Price ticker - http://data.mtgox.com/api/2/BTCUSD/money/ticker

Why can't they just get behind a cdn like amazon cloudfront?

I think they use CloudFare. This isn't a content problem though, it's a backend problem.

Lol'd

Unfortunately that describes a huge number of 2+2ers.