Financial markets, or any market for that matter are not defective by design. What caused the entire crisis was government intervention in the market. Low interest rates across the board in the US, and EU for far too long, the entire Euro, penalising institutions that lent responsibly, and banks being able to lend money they did not actually have.

This was the foundation that speculators around the world build on.

The entire thing was made worse when the actual crisis came, again by government intervention. Instead of all the institutions that had bet wrong going out of business, like a normal market, the government intervened, taking capital from the winning, productive part of the economy, and gave it as life support to the failing, non-productive parts.

It is government action that is attempting to correct the markets (correct and rational) behaviour. And it is the government that is taxing ordinary people (Ireland, UK,US) to pay for it.

I'm so happy that bitcoin is taking the money out of the governments hands, stpooing them from ever doing this with bitcoin.

Having a lower tax rate for companies than your neighboring countries is not "offshoring", it called competition and if a country doesn't want to compete on price then it doesn't have to. But there is nothing wrong with those who do.

The fundamental point of your argument though is wrong, Ireland did not attract foreign companies (such as Google, Microsoft) simply by having a low tax rate. As there are a number of EU coutries with lower tax rates than Ireland. It attracted them with lower tax rates, being English speaking (remember most of these companies were American), and by having a highly educated and capable workforce.

The largest industries in Ireland(not including banking) are Software and Pharma, these require skilled, capable workers and the fact that they happen to speak English and get along quite well with Americans is why Ireland was chosen. OK these companies could have chosen the UK for those reasons but Ireland was more competitive because of the much lower tax rate.

Also on the issue of currency, if Ireland was to switch to bitcoin(not going to happen but lets imagine) yes it would have the same problems. Being that the government took on the debt of the banks and is making the people pay. Changing the national currency to btc won't fix that.

I also think that Iceland and Ireland are two great experiments, both are small countries, both had pretty much the same problem during the credit crisis, and both chose different ways. Iceland let the banks go bust and devalued their national currency, Ireland bailed out their banks and remained part of the Euro. This is about as close as you can get to a countrywide economic experiment as possilbe.

I was in Ireland, until the economic situation forced me and my family to leave.

You should read up on ricardian cntracts, as that is what this exchange will be based on. You wont be able to trade using a browser, you will need to use our(or someone elses) client as it does quite a few things not really possible in a browser, at least not yet.

Because it's based on ricardian contracts, pretty much any kind of stock is tradable, from a share in some company to futures contracts(I would imagine for crops not normally traded on a stock market, if you know what I mean )

We will keep the rules to an absolute minmum. We will also be allowing non-shares contracts to be traded. Keep an eye out for when we do a Q&A session on irc next week.

Wow you really have no idea do you, Ireland is where I went to school & college, and I left just at the height of the whole thing in 2009.

The problem is not and has never been that ordinary Irish people borrowed too much, many did, but certainly not the majority.The banks however lent massive amounts to a small number of builders and speculators, who when the crash came, brought the banks with them.

And what happened? The Irish government guaranteed to bail out the banks if needed, and that is exactly what has happened. The government essentially said the tax payers will cover it. That is everyone, whether they borrowed or not.

In a way yes the Irish do have themselves to blame, thay are the ones who joined the Euro, and signed away many of their freedoms as a result. But make not mistake, it was membership of the Euro that caused the property bubble, being part of the Euro gave Ireland record low interest rates at a time when the economy was booming. I was there, I saw the crazyness of it all. 100% mortgages at rates of 4%. I saw inflation jump through the roof. Minimum wage was €8.50 an hour.

Now the Uk was doing the exact same at the time, to a certain extent, however they have the pound, which has acted as a buffer using devaluation to give everyone a big wage cut.

You think this is ordinary people who did this? This is the work of a few in powerful places who have f****d up and are making everyone pay. I had a great job, I worked in Sun MicroSystems before being fired. And then there was nothing me or my family could do, I couldn't even get a job in a slaughter house cleaning up animal guts. So we returned to China.

Its worse than that. With the Euro we have all these different economies in different stages of boom and bust, but with a monitary policy suited to just one stage.
So when Ireland was in a boom the Euro had interest rates for a bust Germany. Now Ireland and others are bust (as a result of being out of sync with the Euro) and the interest rates are being set to suit booming Germany.
And there is nothing Ireland can do as long as it remains in the Euro, and Irelands political class are in the EU's pocket.

They probably wont stand up, they'll do what they are told, and look at their feet while doing so.

With regards to scammers, you can be sure that when we open the market doors we will have rules in place, and that these rules will change over time. These would be rules to meet to get listed, and operating rules to stay listed. Things like having a ceo, treasurer, and a secretary; like publicising it's accounts quarterly, and even having audits annually or bi-annually by an external auditor.

Thinking of mtgox and what has recently happened we would take action if a company that is listing is acting fraudulently, exactly what action we would take at this moment I'm unsure, that is something we will have worked out closer to launch.

But as always, it is up to the buyer to investigate that company theywish to invest in, and decide what their risk is. Remember enron fooled a lot of people.

For investing bitcoin into bitcoin companies. Although our platform would be really, really flexible so somene could set up meta-trading on it if they wanted.

BCEmporium, I've read some of your comments on the mtgox/barron thread, you certainly are prone to fly off the handle. But I believe you have missunderstood.

Credit rating agency was the working title of our original project, simply because we had not thought of another more appropriate one. Had you actually read the related thread you would understand that the project had nothing to do with any form of credit whatsoever.

That is was a means to rate the risk of a user ripping off another in a trade. It's not a purely reputational system as it takes into account a number of things. Credit rating sgency would be the closest thing in the non bitcoin world to resemble this. Not because it gives credit, but because it rates a persons risk of ripping off the lender(ripping off,not paying back).

Please do take the time to learn about the basic details of something before you launch a crusade against it.

Well bitcoin does have a fairly short history, but this would set the bar fairly high.

Vladimir, I was under the impression that you lived under British law, with England not being a country for quite some time, or have things changed in the lanst day or so? 

Were looking for 2500 capital, investors will be taken on a first come first server basis. Ive already put in 500. how much equity management will get will be decided by the shareholders in the first geneeral meeting. developers currently only looking for btc payment not equity so theyre not getting any yet.

So long story short, your investment is 1 share per btc invested, and then more shares will be issued as decided by first sharreholders in the first general meeting.

If you want to invest contact ColdHardMetal.

A quick question about mtgox, I placed an order to buy (at 0.91) and don't have enough funds, I also have an order to sell btc I do have. If my btc sell order is fulfilled, and as a result I have enough usd in my account, does the order(without enough funds) now get made into a proper order?

And by crash you mean crash of boredom? Nothing has been happening on mtgox for the last couple of days.

I can't tell if you're serious or joking.

http://keyj.s2000.at/?p=458
See link, thought it would be interesting.

You dont need another service, you have one already, I'll give you a cgi directiry. Check after an hour it will be there.

Yes it does, version 1.0.0 or greater has whirlpool, it just doesn't list it as an option, pass in -whirlpool as a dgst option.

It probably means that you'll want to get the source and compile it (don't install if you don't want to ruin your system)

Yes, you're right. The "signature" in a whirlpool hash of the data that's encrypted by the private key.

I forgot to say that.

For the bitcoin stockmarket making orders is going to be done to a webservice using http post request.

So this is a kind of protocol that market orders will be sent to the server with.

The post request will have two fields, signature and data

signature is the base64 encoded binary signature from a openssl 2048bit RSA signature of the base64 encoded data

data is base64 encoded string of a json data structure.
Two elements in the data structure are message and mac
The protocol does not deal with message, so we will leave this part.
mac or message authentication code is a random number appended to the integer of unix epoc(unix time)

The  server that is receiving this request must have the senders public key to verify that the data is infact from the client and has not been tampered.

The server will keep a record of each mac that is sent by this client account(for this public key)

If the server receives a message from the client account, and the mac is the same as one previously sent the message is rejected. This is to prevent replay attack, attackers having the same order processed twice.

The difference between client or server is made by whoever is making the request, the client makes the request, server is the responder.