As I understand it their trading engine supports margin and shorting, but they have yet to actually enable the feature on the site yet (not enough volume).

As for Dwolla deposits, how long have you waited?  Usually it takes a few hours, sometimes as long as a day or so.

What exactly are you trying to hedge against?  If it's the dollar, then Gold seems to be the classic hedge and you already stated that you are overweight there.

Certainly not, but it's a programming environment, not a point-n-click web app generator.  As a programmer, I'm pretty sure you understand the difference.

As a .NET guy myself who has also done lots of Java and PHP dev, I can say that "classic" ASP and ASP.NET webforms should certainly die a horrible death. 

However, the newer ASP.NET MVC platform is the best thing since sliced bread (in my opinion anyways)

In the past I've seen this problem with other Bitcoin exchanges (Tradehill was one).  The issue is probably that when someone places an order it goes immediately into the order book, before the matching engine has had a chance to look at it.  This results in the book being crossed momentarily until the matching engine executes the order.

The solution to this problem is to have new orders queued and not show up on the order book until after the matching engine has processed them.

Is this just speculation?  I feel like this thread needs a chart.

No skeletons in their closet as far as I know.  I've been trading with them since soon after they opened (a year at least? maybe two now?)


My only gripes:

1.  Their site and API have been a bit slow lately.  Probably because they are picking up new accounts.  They are probably due for an infrastructure upgrade.

2.  If you trade via the API and try to log into the website, if your bot logs in at the same time you are logged into the website, you'll get kicked off the site.  So you need to pause any bots you might have if you actually need to log into the website for anything.  Kind of annoying, but shouldn't affect you if you aren't using the API.

Historically (if you look at the 30 day average on bitcoincharts.com) the price on Bitstamp is usually higher than Gox.  I was going to tweak my arbitrage bot now that it seems to be trending lower than Gox, but figured I would wait a few more days to see if this is just a temporary thing or not

Very cute.  But what is it about Linux/JavaScript/Python that's so bad?

Just put your orders on the books.  As long as they are reasonably close to market prices, arbitragers will pick them up.

Probably something trying to prevent SQL injection by stripping out ticks rather than properly escaping them or using parameterized queries.  Sounds like something PHP programmers would do

Gox said 4 hours ago on their twitter feed that this was a DDOS.  Or are you suspecting that Gox is lying about that?  If so, the only people with access to this "proof" you want would be Gox, SoftLayer, Prolexic, or the person actually doing the attack.

You're right, any hash can have precomputed rainbow tables - which is why I also said "any unsalted hash".

The issue with Dwolla is that back in the day they screwed over Tradehill (and probably MtGox and ExchangeBitcoins.com as well) to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

In a nutshell, it went like this:

1.  Dwolla's marketing claimed that Dwolla payments were irreversable.
2.  Because of (1) lots of exchanges accepted Dwolla.
3.  People started defrauding Dwolla using stolen bank account information, transferring money to exchanges and running off with the coins.
4.  Rather than sucking it up and improving their security measures, Dwolla started secretly debiting the exchanges Dwolla accounts - erasing the fraudulant transactions and clawing the money back from the exchanges.
5.  Once the exchanges figured this out, there was quite an uproar.  ExchangeBitcoins stopped accepting Dwolla and closed down soon after.  Tradehill did the same (and sued Dwolla as I understand it).

Since then it seems like Dwolla has beefed up their verification standards so this is less of an issue now, but lots of people are still (justifiably) butthurt about it.

After a 10 second google search for the hash: boobs

And this is exactly why MD5 (or any other unsalted hash for that matter) doesn't work for passwords

Exactly.  I would never use MD5 for something security related, but for this kind of application it is perfectly fine. 

There are known collision attacks against MD5, but the probability of being able to generate a message that both has the same MD5 hash as the original and still makes any sense whatsoever is about nil.

Let's see.. I can think of a few others

ExchangeBitcoins.com - One of the first, closed down in an orderly fashion (can't remember why off hand)
Bitcoinica - Crashed and burned due to multiple hacks (or looted by Zhou)
Bitcoin7 - Disappeared (can't remember if this one was hacked or looted by the owners)
CryptoXChange - probably looted by the owners.
Intersango.com - still technically alive, but pretty much on life support.

In the worst case scenario, we can just start snail mailing envelopes full of cash around.  Sure, it would be inefficient, but the market would survive without the banks.

See here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=179135.0

Seems their bank account was closed and they will be suspending operations until they can get a new one.

Yeah, this blows, was just starting to do some serious trading there.