If you’re in BTC-land you’re probably finding yourself in a bit of a quandry right now… ride it out with Gox? Or dump and run. I chose dump and run, but because Dwolla is not an option, I had to get creative. If you’ve got money (or BTC) and you want to know how to get them the hell out of Mt.Gox before things possibly get worse and you never see your funds again, read on…

1. Create a Coinbase.com account, and immediately link a bank account.
2. Do not proceed to step 3 until the verification of your bank account is completed through Coinbase- this may take several days depending on how you choose to verify (I chose bank account).
3. Now you’re going to quickly pipe your fiat-currency (USD et al) through BTC as a transportation mechanism to get them over to the safe haven of Coinbase. If you don’t have BTC in Mt.Gox, buy as much a you can with your fiat balance at whatever the current ask price is.
4. As soon as the BTC-buy goes through on Gox immediately “Withdraw Funds” using bitcoin as the withdraw mechanism. Withdraw to the bitcoin address displayed in your Coinbase.com account, it can be found under “Linked Accounts”, there will be a BTC wallet address. Send the BTC from Mt.Gox to that address ASAP!!!!
5. It will take ~5min or less to show up in Coinbase.com- soon as it is there immediately “Sell” all of it for fiat currency to be deposited into your bank account. The funds wont be available for a week in your bank account, but you’ll be selling at the current market BTC rate.

Using this approach I was able to quickly get my funds out of Mt.Gox in a matter of minutes (I already had a verified Coinbase.com account, so it was very fast). The key here is to put your money into BTC purely to get it over to Coinbase, then convert it back as soon as possible or you may lose some $$ as the BTC market fluctuates during the transaction period. Also Coinbase does charge some fees to withdraw, but I’ll happily pay a $4 fee instead of losing hundreds of dollars in a DHS freeze. I’m sure there are alternative routes, I encourage people to submit them in the comments.

Hope this helps some people out, I know I was pretty worried when I saw that announcement and all my funds were stored as fiat currency on Mt.Gox with no way of getting them out (I’d always used Dwolla) BTC’em outta there using the method above and all your monies will still belong to you.

Note to self: Avoid Heroku…. bad joo joo.

Verizon MiFi Jetpack 4510L 4G LTE Hotspot ($25 starting bid)

Original Kindle Fire, Rooted and Running Android 4.2.1 ($25 starting bid)

All my gear is kept in pristine condition. You will definitely be happy with your purchase. Good luck and happy bidding!

- Danno

Rethinking The Mobile App “Walkthrough” [via TechCrunch]

What not to do when building a mobile app interface.