Informative post. These are my same sentiments. It's easy to be an arm-chair pessimist. But more rewarding to be helping others form an understanding. Not imposing your ideas, but being an available infopoint.

And the protesters are not one political colour. They're people from all planets. Just how the bitcoin community is not of one political group.

Are there any puredata patches?

Blank pages? When I click the arrows I get blank pages.

edit: now it works

Hello mum. Nice dress you got there >_>

haha this is funneh. do the people know we're watching them?

Without looking up what Ganzfeld effect is or reading the comments, try this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z7cE-M0ZaI

Really intense... Damn. I cannot get past 2 mins before it becomes too overpowering.

I think I know what the problem is. Would you mind sending me your account login to support@intersango.com? The front-end of the site is simply display, but internally everything should be fine.

Thanks.

lol he makes really good points.

This is great We need more clients. Since you're working on the network part feel free to ask me any questions. I pretty much know the source code inside out. I'm genjix on Freenode IRC in #bitcoinconsultancy or Skype: zgenjix (although IRC is better

If you're looking for a good library/framework, then Twisted is a really good choice. It's a piece of battle-hardened software and used by several big vendors (like Facebook, Rackspace .etc).

Also AGPL is fine. That poster is wrong when he says it cannot be used in commercial settings- it sure can. Think of other AGPL'ed software like SQL databases. You're communicating over the wire with a daemon. Same with bitcoin. The only time you have to release the source code is when you a) extend the program or b) link against the program/make function calls. Everything else is kosher.

The Vibanko.com sourcecode is open:
https://gitorious.org/vibanko

We're the only long running exchange that hasn't been compromised (formerly Britcoin) and are based in London with a development team. Our group (Bitcoin Consultancy) is also actively involved in developing other areas of bitcoin, operates other services and is working with merchants. And we charge no fees.

Our about us: https://intersango.com/about-us.php

Security: https://intersango.com/security.php

Our development's group website: http://bitcoinconsultancy.com/

We were the ones just at SWIFT's (the messaging network used for international bank transfers) SIBOS conference on the future of banking discussing how bitcoin could be used to improve international transfers.

So we're pretty much heavily invested in bitcoin for the long term. The purpose of our group is to hire people to work full-time on furthering bitcoin. We release many of our project's source code for the community. We're also helping organise the European Bitcoin Conference.

If you appreciate our work, and wish for bitcoin to grow, then use our exchange. In return it allows us to grow our development team to push forwards and create more community projects we can contribute. It's my hope to turn this into a talent base to allow the brightest minds to prosper and develop cool technology- like Google or Apple but for specifically for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Shame about that London RSA talk as it's the day before the Prague bitcoin conference:

November 25-27 European Bitcoin Conference: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40272.0

Why were people using an exchange in Eastern Europe with no public contacts and a previous history of bad security? Same story with MtGox. Same story with MyBitcoin. I honestly cannot understand why.

And I should mention that orderbook volume is usually 1% of the total funds on a site. It probably is a significant amount of funds. It's sad this has to happen to people time and again.

Wait, this is the same Atlas that was a gigantic misanthrope before? Now he is calling himself an altruist?

Your world view is breaking down as you're seeing the gigantic flaws in your belief system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12rP8ybp13s

It's ok. My world view is in constant flux that I've stopped holding dogmas. You should really look into Carl Sagan or James Burke for some other perspectives that will add value to your belief system. They certainly changed me fundamentally.

Well that's nice to know that it was a misunderstanding. These things usually are and it can be hard being a mod. I guess bitcoinmarkets did look commercial at first glance, especially if you're busy.

What's your motivation for opening a new exchange considering how saturated the market is? Why not some other service? Just curious.

Good luck with your exchange though.

Hypocrisy from the same people who are supposed to be fighting for free speech.

OP_CHECKMULTISIG makes it possible to have a transaction that requires several signatures (need 2 of 3 sigs from A, B, C). This proposal is to allow finer grained logic for when a payment is redeemed (A and B's sigs or just C).

Big milestone reached! libbitcoin is the one of the first alternative implementations of the bitcoin protocol (along with node-bitcoin-p2p) to do full blockchain validation! Exciting milestone. It's taken me around 6 hours to download and validate the blockchain.

Here's a sample of validation times at 130k blocks in milliseconds:

112	22	97	316	0
38	407	1795	375
116	51	116	358
81	481	49	325
87	107	18	9
579	56	65	7
2329	98	25	103
8	4	291	155
147	140	185	55
87	15	31	67
12	47	28	16
12	34	92	0

Also I wrote a development statement for libbitcoin (also in the OP).

The Zen of libbitcoin
Readability over speed.
Beauty over convenience.
Simplicity over complexity.
Architected, not hacked.
Flat, not nested.
Explicit, not implicit.
Errors should be loud.
Never is better than right now.
Now is better than never.
Be flexible and configurable.
Build houses from bricks, software from modules.
Stability is god.

Random bitcoin trivia:

First transaction is in block 170

First standard transaction in block 728

The first difficulty change was at block 32256

Blocks 91842 and 91812, and, 91880 and 91722 contain the same duplicate coinbase transaction. The miners can only use that transaction once.
http://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000000a4d0a398161ffc163c503763b1f4360639393e0e4c8e300e0caec
http://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000000743f190a18c5577a3c2d2a1f610ae9601ac046a38084ccb7cd721

2016 (amount of blocks for difficulty re-calculation) corresponds to exactly 2 weeks of 10 minute ideal blocks. 210k (amount of blocks for drop in mining reward) only roughly corresponds to 4 years.

There was a forced fork in the blockchain a while back around 710k blocks when someone DoS bitcoin's scripting system using an excessive number of OP_CHECKSIGs. That's why IsStandard() exists today.

Block 142312 was the first block to have a non-standard coinbase. I think this was one of luke-jr's blocks possibly since it follows his pattern of instant spend.

block 546 spends a tx within the same block: 6b0f8a73a56c04b519f1883e8aafda643ba61a30bd1439969df21bea5f4e27e2

Ya joking?

A scripting system inside a scripting system. Hacks on hacks on hacks will lead to a messier protocol than FTP is now.

Well, it seems good at first glance. But fast-tracking this into the block-chain is probably not a wise idea. There's no rush so it might be prudent to think of this as something for 2 years time or later. Bitcoin is not exploding tomorrow, so there's no big loss from holding off on momentous changes like these.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0001

That's a good place to start. Re-enabling parts of the old scripting system in a controlled manner is a good idea. Adding new operations- not so much *right* now.

PID controllers are completely standard, and the reason to use them (from my experience) is that they can be very easily fine tuned to optimal cybernetic states.

Can you explain your reasoning though for arguing that the difficulty adjustment is a PI controller? P = nActualTimespan / nTargetTimespan? Then where do you get the integral component from the difficulty re-calculation? To me it looks like a simple proportional scaling algorithm.