It would be the logical first choice. I am no coder, but someone who can deliver, and puts forward a workable model, I would help fund such a thing.

&
6) Organized crime. Ask any old school wiseguy; digital crime is the future!

If they get their orders in today they would only be ~60,000th in line! They could destroy bitcoin by november 2015!

I suppose the exchanges would have to agree to a similar pact unanimously, AND in a transparent manner. I'm studying that NBBO wiki now! cheers!

So, obviously, criminal-minded hackers are abusing the bitcoin economy by way of these DDoS manipulations, reaping profits for themselves while bringing down exchanges, market viability, public perception. Like gangsters they only care about enriching themselves and give no thought to running their victims into extinction in the process. Nothing new here, crooks is crooks, but this is my thought...

The hackers seem to be attacking the exchanges separately, targeting them at random times. Each exchange seems small enough to be vulnerable, yet the the entire bitcoin economy would be too large to effectively manipulate as a whole (unless they keep running it down like recently, then eventually even its entirety will be diminished to an easily manipulated size) Conversely, no one wants to see a single centralized exchange, and the idea of a decentralized p2p exchange is ...  I don't know enough about this to know if it is even possible? BUT... here's an idea, maybe I'm missing something (or many things), but what if the separate exchanges entered into a sort of agreement... like they could pass the traffic from one to the other, when under attack, and keep the trade moving despite all these random attacks. The idea of a safety valve/co-operative agreement whereby exchanges A, B, C and D agree to carry the locked out volume for each other whilst any one of them are being targeted. i.e. MtGox is getting DDoS hard, so they pass all traffic to the other exchanges, and vice versa. I know this might seem far-fetched, like why would they give business to their competition, and all users would need to be registered with every exchange, not everybody trusts every exchange (or any for that matter). There would have to be a huge leap of faith, and some sort of unifying bond or agreement. I don't know how it would look if it did exist exactly, but the idea of forcing the hackers to have to spread their resources so thin seems like a ok idea to my n00b brain. These gangsters are just going to get richer and stronger, and they will steal everything until nothing is left.

So I guess the TL;DR is "united the exchanges will stand, divided they will fall."

Maybe I'm hopelessly naive, maybe this resembles the "central Bank Authority" too much, IDK! Go ahead and have at me. We need to do something because every attack seems to come with the reply from the exchanges of "we have got it all under control and are working to make everything more secure" then 12 hrs later BOOM! Another DDoS and some Russian Mobster gets that much more millions of dollars to launch that much huger a DDoS next time (like a few hours from now)

I'm running the 4.23. I will dl the newer one! I will also avoid running msert while using. thanks. It's actually bug free when I am not running msert, but I'll upgrade anyway, I'm a fan of your product!

One other thing, is it normal for me to lose all the labels I have put on my keys when I import them? last time I imported my private keys to a new multibit client everything worked fine except all my labeled addresses no longer have labels. Its not the end of the world for me, but a little confusing.

Twice my Multibit client froze completely after I hit "send" while sending coins. Neither time was I able to unfreeze any other way except to ctrl+alt+delete and end process. they were small transactions to satoshidice, and I dont keep much in the wallet to begin with, but I jumped a bit anyway. I reopened the client and saw my remaining BTC was intact, but the transactions remained unseen by blockchain for a loooong time before resolving. all the while i'm thinking "what if it was a significant transaction?" I looked through the blockchain and both transactions went where they should have, but I want to understand why my client froze. I was in fact running msert at the time, both times. would that contribute to the freeze? I understand about the allowing process bitcoin.exe function in microsoft security essentials, is there something similar to how msert works? I cant think of anything else that was going on with my comp at the time, besides running firefox, which was acting buggy as well, but never when msert isnt running.
(the msert killed a trojan btw)

Thanks 

ok I understand this now. I received bunk BTC from the mystery person in transaction labeled #1 in OP. I suppose I didnt notice when I spent them, that the transaction cost me 0.00259 more than I had thought I paid.
and #2 I stupidly donated to SD. I was trying to round up my number of btc and make it look nicer by getting rid of the 0.0006122. Reading that last sentance just made me realize I should go to bed. Its been a long 4/20! 

Thanks for your help, at least I understand double spending better now.

Still a little worried about the multibit freezing - i'll take that over to "alternative clients"

g'nite! 

ok I'm reading that, but the BTc was spent, on my end at least, cuz I no longer have it. and I did no other transactions since about an hour before. so I dont see how I "double spent" it...I will go read that link now, maybe I can figure it out. Its just events like this one make me wonder if some other unforeseen sidestep could wipe out a larger sum of BTC that would be pretty hard to swallow for those uninitiated and wary of btc in general.

ok thanks, my bad.

I was just experimenting with those free sites, and yes, totally a waste of time, however... the mysterious 3 cents I got came from a request payment address I used exclusively for them. to recieve a payment 2 months after I was ever near one... seems kind of strange. also that it is a transaction that is not found in the chain. how does that even happen.

also, how are the coins useless? are they invalid? the other dollar or so I made from them was ok. I mean I won 5 dollars with it on SD, so It couldnt be bunk. It was the only BTC I could get at the time.

also. where does the BTC go if it is not recieved by the intended recipient?

UPDATE; the satoshidice 0.0006122 bet has now entered into the blockchain (I guess it wasnt under minimum?) so I feel a little better. I would still like to know how in april, I received mystery btc with the transaction "not seen in chain" That doesnt make sense to me, plus, someone is out the $0.03 or w/ever 0.000259 BTC is worth right now. I suppose it is like finding (almost) a nickle on the street, i.e. insignificant good luck, but if my bank had weird unaccountable transactions going thru my account, no matter how small, I would demand an explanation or take my business elsewhere.

Also, multibit has been great up until a few days ago, when various bugs have been showing up. I'm dissapoint, son, cuz I still prefer it to the slow bitcoin client and the unusable (for me at least) electrum.

bear with me if this is n00bish, cuz so am I, but I'm having some problems understanding a couple of transactions.
#1
17 april 2013 15:19
I received 0.000259 BTC from an address I was using to collect from free coin sites, like bunnyrun, only I have not used such sites since late February.
I felt this was odd, also that there is the square symbol next to the transaction (I'm using Multibit) and when I view transaction details, it says "seen by 1 peer, not seen in chain" then when I went to blockchain info it says "transaction not found" mind you...this is me receiving BTC, and not losing it, I merely wanted to see where it came from.
#2
20 april 2013 21:26
this one is a little simpler (somewhat). today I decided to gamble at satoshidice with a very small bet (0.0006122 BTC)
When I hit send, the fuckin multibit froze! not a good sign! i let it sit for 20 mins or so to see if it would eventually respond, i closed every  other program I had running, but I was forced to "end process" (thankfully there was not very much BTC in wallet to begin with)
double fortunately, when I re-opend the wallet it still had all but the 0.0006122 I gambled, but that 0.0006122 transaction sits with a triangle beside it and the details show "not seen in chain" over at blockchain dot info it also reads transaction not found.

I realize these are small amounts, and the first one is even in my favor, but I don't like not knowing what is going on. Plus, the freezing client with the "not seen in chain" transaction, where it did in fact eat my money, but appears to have sent it down a black hole, I find VERY disturbing. What if I had been transferring a large amount of coin? it would be disastrous to me.

I'm not entirely sure if this is a general blockchain question, or a simple multibit question either, so pardon me if this is in the wrong section.
can anyone help me out with my n00bish confusion?

PS I realize now that I placed a bet under the minimum for satoshidice, but shouldn't they simply refuse the transaction? ofc, there was the frozen client thing too, but that doesn't make me feel any better. these things should NOT be freezing on people. If I had lost any significant amount I would have lost what is left of my wee mind.

I was under the impression (from the BFL website) that there would be specialized software included to run with the asic products. Is it really just plug & play? also.. what is you 24 hr BTC reward looking like? I realize this all is variable from the network difficulty etc, but a ballpark figure would be nice to know.
thanks for the sharing mang! I thought the video quality was fine.

does anyone here use VirtEx? I was trying to fund my account, but when I went to my bank acc. page to try and add them as a payee for bill payment option, my bank asks for the name of payee and the province they are in. Niether of these are listed anywhere on the VirtEx site. I tried to use VirtEx as payee name but bank doesn't recognize this. also tried every province. no luck either. Tried phoning VirtEx and message says no one is in office. Did they fly to Caymen Islands?

I heard Judson-Christian ideologies could be used for terrorism too. Maybe we should gas the lot of em?

far as i can see, this guy has made a career for himself taking the unpopular view on things. i dont think he cares about much beyond attracting viewers.

I dunno what anyone was expecting here. Colbert is a satirist, a tv entertainer. his job is to find flaws in people and things in current events and make fun of them, not to promote anything, and certainly not to deliver unbiased news coverage, hell, even the news agencies don't do that. of course, studies have revealed that ~80% of Americans derive their political opinions, and even decide who to vote for, from tv comedy shows like SNL and Tonight show. It kinda shows in the quality of the leaders they elect again and again.
I'm just not sure how he could make a Bitcoin cheerleading session "funny", I know since he was a major Bush-basher everyone thinks he's got some humanitarian agenda behind his comedy, but honestly. He's a showbiz guy, all he wants is attention and admiration. I'm sure he's paid well too.

he's a satirist, wont he just find some way to cast btc in an embarrassing light?

thanks mang. keep up the good work! multibit is my preferred wallet cuz it is so easy and fast.

open wallet - BTC is all there - however in the "messages" window this appears -

"Unable to load "http://multibit.org/version.txt". The error was "javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException
sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path building failed:
sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target"

I have no idea what this means. Should I be worried?