[Karunamon]

The death of one exchange does not herald the death of the market. Absolute worst case, it moves off of public HTTP websites to back channels like #bitcoin-otc

There's always going to be a need for easy, anonymous value transfer.

[revelation]

I didn't imply that the Bitcoin market is failing, but this marketplace. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

[JoachimSchipper]

Is an IRC channel easy and anonymous?

[gwern]

I've traded on -otc ~5 times now (http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratingdetail.php?nick=gwern&sign=...).

It's not easy, by any means, unless you're already familiar with IRC and crypto and signing messages.

But it's basically anonymous: the actual transactions happen in emails or privmesgs and so there are zero records beyond the feedback on bitcoin-otc.com (which is optional and can be meaningless†, for example, the ratings by 'newguy' and 'AVALON' on me), and there's no way to prove or disprove that a transaction happened without full access to the internals of whatever systems one side of the transaction is on. For example, there's no way for anyone to prove that I really did sell 0.25btc for $50 on Amazon; there's plenty of 0.25btc movements on the blockchain, and all Amazon sees is that I redeemed a giftcode from somewhere. And there's even less evidence if you're willing to send or receive cash in an envelope (http://bitcoin-otc.com/vieworderbook.php?type=&nick=&thing=&...). So it's about as anonymous as you want it to be.

† Specifically, you can be fairly sure the AVALON/newguy accounts did leave that feedback on me because the site accepts commands only from IRC accounts which have cryptographically proven their ownership of the account; but there is no way to be sure that I transacted with them or scammed them. As it happens, I did not and those ratings are revenge from a scammer for not falling for his tricks. Same problem as with public keys, and why people talk about web of trusts.