A new US-based exchange could make investing in bitcoins easier for Americans and that may result in increased demand hence an American bubble like the Chinese one.

However, an American exchange would not give intrinsic value to bitcoin, substantially change its utility, or give it any special advantage over other cryptocoins. (Unless the US government legislates that the Bitcoin protocola is the only authorized cryptocoin protocol, and the Satoshi blockchain is the only legally valid one.)  It would improve liquidity, but not necessarily curb volatility.  It may cause Bitcoin to crash faster...

That is of course what the bitcoin hoarders hope for.  Only that anyone can play god and make his own gold. And that is a good reason to expect that bitcoin will be banned, sooner or later, by every government...

One substantial product of all the computing power wasted on mining is a list of strings whose cryptographic signature starts with several zeros.  I don't know whether and how that could be useful in cryptanalysis, but perhaps...

I am with @CAssius on this one.  I don't see religion or race being the cause of war and hatred.  To me, wars and discrimination are always about material disputes - land, jobs, food, gold, oil, etc.  Religion, race, language, politics, or nationality are just convenient and effective ways to define who belongs to which gang.

Granted, organized religions certainly used their power to support or even start wars.  And organized churches often got their power by supporting powerful governments.

US racism was clearly a way to prevent the black ex-slaves from competing economically with their former owners and the lower-class whites. 

Racism is not a natural human instinct, quite the opposite.  Whenever widely different "races" got together without race being used for war or discrimination, they have mixed thoroughly within 3-4 generations.

There have been practically no wars in Europe because of hair color, eye color, or fingerprint patters, because splitting gangs on those criteria would split families and groups.  On the other hand, there have been uncountably many wars between feudal states, even when the two sides had the same religion, race, language, everything.

What makes you think that they really want to find the lost funds? Just because they said so?

An audit done by whom?  By Mark? Gonzague? Roger Ver?

(The PR guy has not said what they intend to do about Mark, has he?)

I was reading about Amir Taaki & friends and the Intersango gox in some other thread.  There they mentioned that Amir was organizing a London Summit.  Is it this one?

It is ~01:30 am in China.  Price may remain stable for a few hours. Or may not...

I thought that "serial entrepreneur" was a mocking term, like "serial killer", "serial rapist", etc.  Funny to see him describe himself as such.

Danny Brewster of Neo&Bee was a serial entrepreneur too, it seems. 

I don't know what the court will say, but they could say that the people were trading non-existent coins, so the balances are meaningless.

Actual deposits and withdrawals are numbers that the court can verify with the banks and in the blockchain.  The trades inside MtGOX are recorded only in Mark's database, and any information that comes from him must be treated as a mere hint that needs independent evidence to be trusted.  The database may have been doctored to give large bogus balances to some clients.

I understood that (1) FXBTC went downn one day earlier than some clients expected and they lost tens of thousands of yuan; (2) The PBoC or other agency has decided that bitcoin exchanges are violating some securities trading laws.

But it is all too confusing. I wish I had learned Chinese when my brain was still soft enough...

Myrmecia gulosa (Latin for "greedy ant", sort of) is known as the "giant bull ant".  A tiny giant bull though. Well,a large tiny giant bull. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrmecia_gulosa

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Sunday May 11

Prediction valid for: Sunday 2014-05-11, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 2823 CNY
Bitstamp's predicted price: 456 USD





[ Plot legend ]

The data point for today May/10 was very good (S = 0.0018, W = 0.939) but again way off the assumed trend.  We must abandon the previous trend, and assume a new straight-line trend fitted by weighted least squares to the last three points (the second one, May/09, having nearly zero weight).  Namely, A + B*(d-d0), where (d-d0) is the number of days since May/08, A = 2743.57, B = +26.48.

The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R, taken to be 6.19 CNY/USD.  Its value was 6.17 today (May/10), and 6.21, 6.21, 6.16, 6.23, 6.18 on the previous good sample times.
 
Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Satuday 2014-05-10, 03:24 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Satuday 2014-05-10, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~16 hours later)

Foiled again again by the treacherous Chinese:

Huobi's predicted price: 2739 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 2796 CNY
Error: 57 CNY (~9 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 441 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 453 USD
Error: 12 USD
 
NOTE: Evaluation of the Chinese Slumber Method coming soon. Prepare to laugh.

A theory why the price went up these last 2-3 days, but only by a little:
The less sophisticated traders at the Chinese exchanges were losing interest because they could not compete with the high-frequency traders. Little by little they were selling their coins and cashing out.  Now that the exchanges have promised to charge fees for HFT (and stopped leveraged trading since yesterday), some of those simple traders, who were already selling their coins but had not withdrawn the money yet, decided to get back in the game to see whether their luck would improve.  So the bought back some coins, got excited when the price went up a bit, bought some more, etc..  But there weren't many such traders, and the trading did not get much easier, so the rally soon stalled.

Not to mention that customs and shipping to those countries are usually a big hassle and MUCH more expensive than credit card fees.  And the risk of theft in transit is not negligible.  And you rarely get a valid warranty.  For most items, is usually better to buy locally from an importer.

I read somewhere that BitPay just got another lump of venture capital investment, could that be it?

Some posts on another thread about this topic:

US way of computing client claims probably hold for Japan too:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg6650519#msg6650519

Example of the US way of evaluating client claims vs database balances:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg6653000#msg6653000

Will clients get their 80% back:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg6654273#msg6654273

Comparison with bitmarket.eu/bitalo:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg6654566#msg6654566

Possible motivations of Sunlot:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg6655051#msg6655051

Who would pay 200'000 BTC for 16.5% of a startup:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg6655447#msg6655447

What MtGOX 2.0 should do to be trusted:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg6656213#msg6656213

Sorry, agreed. There are at leas two threads on this specific topic:
SaveGox.com
More proof that savegox.com is a sham.

Yeah. Mark deserves a second third fourth whatever chance.

Good question. Who supports that media, e.g. Coindesk? Not small investors, I would think... Perhaps some people with large MtGOX balances?   

Well, how much dividend will the MtGOX 2.0 shares pay per year, as percentage of investment?  

There is no way of estimating how much trade they would get.  Why would people trade there rather than at Bitstamp or other exchanges?  Why would people trust their dollars and bitcoins to people who have an even more, er, peculiar past than Mark?

The motivations of the Sunlot team could be all or any of (1) get their hands on those 200'000 BTC with no legally binding commitment to returning them to clients; (2) let Mr. Gay-Bouchery and Mr. Karpelès get away, free and rich; (3) make sure that the assets are distributed according to the (bogus?) balances in Mark's database rather than actual deposits minus withdrawals; (5) pre-empt a police investigation that could find the real culprits for the theft; (5) earn points for the afterlife and a boy-scout medal by helping poor MtGOX clients to recoup a little more of their loss than they would through liquidation.  Have a guess...

EDIT: as for Apple, I don't know currently, but until some years ago they reinvested most of their profits into factories, shops and such; so stockholders got their returns through the increased value of their shares rather than dividends.  Even if  the MtGOX2.0 shares are real equity (rather than the "profit-only shares" of Neo&Bee), the company will have negligible assets of its own, so shares are unlikely to grow in value.