Have been reading it a lot lately, and keep running into DNS problems.  A local copy would be good.  Can spider it, if need be.

Don't know much about Perth, but I helped someone sell a house in Canberra earlier this year, and studied the market there closely.  I came away convinced at the time that the housing market is near the top of a fairly big bubble, and while the economic impact of its collapse will not be as serious as it was for the US collapse, housing prices are going to drop quite a bit.  Steven Keen's debtwatch blog is worth reading in this regard.

This year, Australia's economy has been floating like a cork because of China's voracious appetite for primary resources.  When China's manufacturing sector slows down (which I believe will follow inevitably from the economic malaise in Europe and North America), Australia's going to get it in the teeth, and the speculative housing bubble is not going to survive it.

So, just wait.  You don't want to own a house in Australia right now.  And for goodness' sake, don't buy a house in Detroit at this stage.  At least study the economic health of Michigan (terrible) and consider the likely impact of that on Detroit's livability (already terrible, at least in the areas you're considering.)  This is a good time to just watch and wait.

I read the proposal wiki and skimmed this thread with interest.  I wish you well with this project.

I have many questions about your proposal, but the part I'm currently vaguest on is how the reputation management system works.  Is there a centralized reputation server?  If it is decentralized, how are reputation values tracked and validated?

I researched the restricted-execution options today, and you are right, it can be relatively secure.  However, it turns out that allowing arbitrary computations is infeasible for my purposes.  Still looking for good distributed-computation problems.

Oh, I didn't realize you were still talking about allowing arbitrary computation.  Yes, that would be extremely useful, but it would still be hard to establish as secure.

Pretty much every consumer computer in the world already has restricted-execution environments for running untrusted code from the internet.  They're called Java and Javascript, and they're a bountiful source of security vulnerabilities, not so much because they're sloppily implemented, but because in a hostile context it's extremely difficult to establish whether a given arbitrary computation is safe to run.  Do the restricted-execution environments cited in that earlier thread provide better security guarantees than current java and javascript implementations do?

How about useful calculations, or which people would pay money for?

  What if you had to choose a particular algorithm up-front, so that people could run the client without security concerns?

There's a lot of work, ingenuity and computational resources devoted to computation of the hashes which lie at the core of the bitcoin proof-of-work protection.  I do not wish to criticize that, I understand its value.  But I would be interested to hear your fantasies of what you would do with those resources if they could be turned to arbitrary computations.  Would you devote the cycles to Folding/SETI@Home, sell them to people trying to crack password hashes, try to train a machine-learning algorithm to predict stock market prices?  Go wild, I'd really like to hear people's favorite suggestions. 

I liked the Goldstein persona better.

Very uninformative article.

Difference is you weren't wearing a troll as your avatar.

Thanks, this is terrific.

  This site is too sketchy, conflict-ridden and previously 0wned for me to run its javascript.

I've been looking at the bitcoin source code lately.  The first eight commits were by "sirius-m."  What is his supposed relationship to Satoshi?

I would like to do that too, if there were any reliable place to make options contracts.

You're clearly in a hurry to raise some cash... You might want to say what the asking price is...

Thanks.

I would say it's quite likely to go below $2 before it goes above $4.50.

Thanks for the github references.  Interesting.

What's the dependent axis represent?