Glad to hear it.  I'm pulling for you all -- if Ripple succeeds, it should make moving money from fiat into cryptocurrencies vastly more simple.  I'm looking forward to see how this develops.

It took me a few days of almost full-time thinking about Ripple to really understand the implications, and another few days to really appreciate OpenCoin's implementation.  They've pulled together all the best ideas in cryptocurrency (original ripple, opencoin, etc.) and synthesized them into the new Ripple.  The only way to fully appreciate the beauty of ripple.com is to open an account, clicking on the advanced tab, and also read TTBit's thread about his DYM currency in Ripple. I haven't been this excited about anything since I first learned about Bitcoin back in late 2010.  Except this time, I'm going to hang on to more than just a few coins.

The mistake a lot of people are making is assuming Ripple XRP is just another electronic currency like btc, when it's more like a credit to use their system combined with a stock (and notice how careful the principals are to avoid predicting any future performance).  Ripple is a vastly different project than some pre-mined block chain knockoff.  That's not to say that XRP won't gain massive value.  In fact, all the same forward-thinking people who racked up Bitcoins in the beginning are going to do the same with Ripple.

Aside from the brilliant ideas in Ripple, I think the team has the technical chops to pull this off.  The only two doubts I have now are:

1) Legal.  Since there is a for-profit company to target, who knows what kind of legal grief they'll run in to.
2) Customer service/public relations.  They seem a little weak here.  They need to hire a full-time developer relations person, and really stress public relations and customer service among all their staff.  David is going a great job of representing the company in public, but he seems to be the only one trying.  They may all just be too busy right now, but I hope they realize that customer service and public relations, particularly among devs and early adopters, will make or break this project.  We'll see.

2nd world has *been* caught up with mobile devices and smart phones, and the 3rd world is much farther along than most people think.  Depending on the country, Africa's mobile cell use is on par and often in excess of many 1st world countries (particularly since there are not many landlines).  And in East Africa, it's quite common to transfer money via mobile phone. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

Believe me, they are ready for Bitcoin. 

Awesome, Luke.  Congratulations.  As a developer, I'll be paying close attention.

Thanks for promoting this within FoxyCart.

I've made several transfers from bitstamp into Ripple 3-4 days ago, and it was always been immediate (one of the great things about Ripple is that it is typically almost instantaneous). But Ripple is a relatively new project (at least this implementation) and I would imagine that small changes to the API are still happening.   I'm sorry you've had trouble, nonetheless.

So this is the client I saw people discussing on IRC... Bravo, Arvicco, well done!  Glad to know about it, I'll definitely be using it and contributing if I add any interesting features.  And well-done on the MIT license.  Generous move.

Thanks so much!  I appreciate the info.

I'm trying to develop an application using the Ripple API but the server seems to be down a lot today.  Is there some other test server I can use to subscribe to a stream via websockets other than s1.ripple.com:51233 ? 

Also, is the websocket interface the only public interface?  Frankly, I'd rather use HTTP but as far as I can understand from the wiki, the web socket interface is so far the only API with order book data available to the public.  Is this correct?

Thanks in advance and best of luck with Ripple.

Nah.  He's a thinker and doer.  Not one to sit on the beach.  I've often thought about what he's up to now, because he's got the funds to really make an impact now.  I suspect he's been working on v2, on the side if nothing else.  The last 3 years have given him a ton of real-life data to work with.

I suspect he's someone with a wife and young children.  Someone young and with no family would have more freedom to face the legal and political ramifications of inventing a new currency.  Once you have a family, you have obligations to people other than yourself.  Plus, my wife would kill me if I did something like this without anonymity.

I really like this idea, and it's a feature I've wished since I first started using btc back in 2010.  I can' t count the number of times I've send a fairly important transaction, only to realize that I had fees set on 0 for whatever reason (newly installed client, just send unimportant transaction, etc.).

You're probably running up against their daily limits on the total number of Bitcoins they sell (presumably because they have an algorithm to limit the number of coins in their hot wallet per day to x percent).  However, it's a rolling limit, so if you check back a few hours later it may be lifted.

I'm still not very happy with the number of incidents I'm hearing where they overturn Bitcoin purchases a week later after the price has gone up considerably.  In the meantime, that amount is presumably frozen in your bank account.  I don't think they're trying to pull any kind of intentional scam, but it leaves a very bad taste in new customers mouths, even ones they are not directly affected.  I like the ease with which I was able to add a checking account to Coinbase, but I'll probably be using another exchange in the future (trying to move away from MTGOX).  Perhaps Bitstamp, who has by far the cleanest-designed site of any exchange I've seen in 2+ years of buying Bitcoins.  I used them to fund my Ripple account in BTC and then buy a few Ripple and have been very impressed (disclaimer: I haven't actually used them for any BTC trades yet, so do your due diligence).

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Let me add here that I've done several thousand dollars worth of trades on CampBX over the past month or two (mostly buying BTC to pay contractors) and I'm very pleased with their service.

This is great.  As someone who has also been playing around with Python hybrids (C libraries using ctypes), I'm very impressed with what you've done.  I look forward to building it and checking it out in detail.

As glad as I am that you've released this into the public domain, I have to disagree with your licensing choice.  Of course, it's your code, so it's your choice, but in my opinion, ALL open source code relating to Bitcoin should be released under permissive licenses like MIT or Apache, not copyleft licenses.  Firstly, because permissive license are more in line with the freedom-based ideology undergirding Bitcoin, but most importantly, because we should be targeting businesses when we create Bitcoin software.  And no business will touch Affero GPL, unless it's part of a dual commercial/GPL agreement.  Affero is the strictest GPL of them all, and under AGPL, not even an exchange will be able to use your code without activating GPL' s provisions over their entire system (which is why they'll never use it).

Can you imagine if the canonical Bitcoin client had been released under a copyleft license like AGPL?  We'd almost certainly have no exchanges, no bitcoin-notify, no bitpay, no instawallet, and people would still be ordering a pizza for 10,000 BTC.

May I ask why should chose AGPL?

I am surprised that everybody here is tossing out PHP-based solutions as alternatives to SMF.  Why not save yourself a ton of security concerns and use a Python-based bulletin board?  There are several reputable, mature, open source products available.  I haven't used any of them personally but most of them use Django, so they would come with great security features out of the box like auto escaping all template content, with which you would not have been vulnerable to the vector used by this attacker.

When you look at OWASP and other security organizations' evaluations of web frameworks, it's amazing how many vulnerabilities are found in PHP-based software, and how few are found in Python-based software.  So if you decide to go with another solution, as opposed to upgrading SMF, why not give a Python-based bulletin board a try?

Specific recommendation: pyForum http://www.pyforum.org/  It's based on web2py framework.  I have used web2py and I highly recommend it.  Migrating from SMF should not be terribly difficult for someone who understands databases.

Please let's remember that myOpenID is only one of dozens of reputable Open ID providers.  If your site accepts OpenID, you might consider advising users to avoid myOpenID, but there's absolutely no reason to avoid OpenID altogether.  In fact, even if you don't trust any of the providers you find, with a little technical knowledge and a server, you can yourself become an OpenID provider (roll your own).

Mt. Gox must have the single-slot Yubikey, because I don't see how it would be possible to use both slots for a single authentication.  That's too bad, since many services offer the dual slot version of Yubikey, which gives users an extra slot to use for their own purposes.

Depends on what version of Yubikey Mt. Gox is using.  The latest version can store two passwords.  Go to the Yubikey site, download the Yubikey manager software (available for Linux), and check to see how many slots you have available.  I was able to store a 32-character password on the second slot of the Yubikey I received for a specific vendor.  Just be careful not to overwrite the existing slot, or you may not be able to recover your Yubikey.

That's simply not true.  There are hundreds of professionals that accept Bitcoins, and may of them are doing significant business in btc.  I just paid an excellent graphic designer the equivalent of about $400 for word done on one of my sites, for example.

I don't think any of them are living exclusively off of Bitcoin jobs, but given time that may well change.  Bitcoin is uniquely suited for freelance work.  For example, I've been paying $15-$20 to accept overseas wire payments for my freelance work, and the party that pays me usually is responsible for about the same amount. So $30-40 USD to transfer a couple of hundred of dollars.  Oh, and it usually takes 4 business days to clear.  With BTC, it's nearly free and clears in a few hours.

Thanks, techwtf.  Just sent the bitcoins your way.  BTW, I realized there's absolutely no reason why I need to run this cron job from the machine with my web server.  All my other cron jobs need to be located on the web server, but there's no reason this one can't be located on the machine with the bitcoind daemon.  So I don't have to worry about the SSL (still sent the extra btc for that, however).

In any case, techwtf's script is the only Python script to dump wallet contents to an address on the web that I'm aware of that will work with Python 2.7.  Components of the various JSON-RPC libraries are broke on Python 2.7.  So hopefully this will benefit someone else.