Secondly, I know hardly anything about bitcoins - but here all I see is an arbitrage opportunity. Buy bitcoins from BTC-e and sell them on MTGox, which seems to be consistently around 150 (I assume USD) different.
withdrawing USD from mtgox and transferring them to btc-e takes roughly two hours, depending on which payment processor you choose. okpay is usually pretty fast, but you loose about 50$ on commission. furthermore unless you are verified on mtgox, you've got a withdrawal limit of 1000$ per day. add to that the time interval during which your money is locked up either in the blockchain or the payment processor and you end up with substantial risk between the trades.
The fact that there is a gap that large between exchanges is indicative of a huge liquidity problem in the exchanges. Big enough that I wouldn't go near it...even with my arbitrage-loving mitts.
People have said they're nearly insolvent. They're also being sued I think. So, withdrawing USD from Mt. Gox you're screwed... I waited 3 months and gave, up, converted my dollars into bitcoin and sold it elsewhere.
Here I am as co-founder of a SaaS company that has actual customers, pays 3 of us a salary and still makes profit and I almost feel like a failure because no-one has valued my hard work at millions of dollars, let alone billions.
In a 300,000 user mail system I've seen mail queues grow by many thousands of messages a minute causing hundreds of gigabytes of email to be queued on the disks.
Once the issue is resolved and the queue starts flowing again it can take a very long time for these messages to be sent successfully, especially when you need to scan each one for viruses and account for disk latency that doesn't usually occur on these servers.
http://www.ukpostbox.com/
So far no problems.