Some interesting new information from Bashiok.

A player asked about the possibility of the RMAH being used to buy and re-sell items from the Gold Auction House of other regions.

For example, you "lock-in" your RMAH to NA, your primary characters are on the NA servers, but you create a new character in the EU servers, buy items from their Gold Auction House, and then put up for sale on the Real Money Auction House (which is US-based.)

Bashiok made it very clear that this is not possible:

Characters are still region based. Just like Diablo II. You could log in to USWest, or USEast, or Europe, or Asia, but you had different characters on each. There's no possibility of trading between regions.

He also went on to say:

Each region is compartmentalized. Character's on one region cannot play with characters on another region. Similarly, each region has its own gold and currency-based auction houses. Only characters on a region can use that region's auction houses (and of course a restriction from the currency-based if it's not your home region).

Here is the original source of all of these citations, although the top link is probably your best source now because Blizzard has gone through and deleted many of Bashiok's (and user's) posts regarding the Korea/RMAH Gambling delay being the primary reason for the D3 global launch.

What Bashiok (Community Manager) wrote, though, directly contradicts with what Robert Bridenbecker (VP of Online Technologies) said in an interview. More details about that interview here and here.

Robert said that you're locked into your own RMAH, but you can still access the Gold Auction Houses of whatever region you're logged in to (even if it's not your own). When you pull up the RMAH window, while logged into another region, you only see the RMAH from your home country.

"If you say you're from the US, we're going to treat you like you're a US player and wherever you connect in the world, we will enforce you as a US player. If you say you're from Korea, the same thing applies."

Bashiok, however, is saying that if you login to other realms you can only use their Gold Auction Houses. Which means you can only pull up your RMAH menu while on your home region, and it simple won't be an available feature if you're logged into another region.

So, which one is it?