You're welcome to check out and comment on the exchange service I'm building at www.bitcoinexchange.com (auth: bitcoin/bit). You can test making an order, but it won't be completed and everything might not work yet.

I'm thinking about how I should solve a problem with the trade model I initially chose. That is, bitcoins or euros are reserved to the customer when he makes an order, without a guarantee that he'll really pay for it. That makes the service vulnerable to be DoS'd by some jackass who makes a buy order for all my bitcoins/euros and never pays. It also wrongly changes my pricing that automatically reacts to the amount of available bitcoins/euros I have. I have two solutions for this:

1) Keep the current model, but require more personal identification from the customer (i.e. make buying more difficult), so he's less likely to just be fooling around. Require registration and e-mail confirmation. Set an expiry time and a maximum amount for transactions. The expiry time doesn't help very much in the case of payment by bank transfer, because it must be at least a few days instead of 15 minutes or so.

2) Change to a stock-buying-like solution, where the customer can choose to get his coins immediately at the spot price when his payment is received, or he can set a maximum/minimum coin price at which he is willing to buy or sell. This removes the problem with reservation of coins, but is a bit more difficult for the customer. Some expiry time is also needed for paid minimum/maximum price orders that are not completed because the desired price is not reached in time. After the expiry time the order should be completed at the spot price or alternatively the payment should be returned (this causes some extra hassle).

So, which option do you think sucks less? Any other solutions?

It started increasing right away. I'll see if valgrind can help me.

This is strange... When I start Bitcoin as a daemon on my 64 bit Linux server, it eats up all the 250MB of remaining RAM, 700MB of swap and eventually crashes. On my 32 bit Ubuntu desktop, it works fine and stays at 15MB of memory usage. The server is running a 64 bit build of Bitcoin. Maybe there's something wrong with the build or something.

Thanks, these are getting to look good.

A great way of advertising: Instead of shopping with a credit card, withdraw cash from an ATM and write "bitcoin.org" on each bank note that passes through your hands

Yeah, I'm planning to accept international bank transfers (free within EU), SMS payment in multiple countries, Pecunix and maybe more in the future. Now that the non-GUI and JSON-RPC are available, I might have a fully armed and operational beta of my service in a week or two  .

Gtk is required by the GUI, so it must be linked if you want to use the same binary. Making a separate binary is another option, dunno how much code tweaking and ifdeffing that would take.

In Ubuntu you can also switch to a non-graphical login screen by pressing ctrl + alt + F[1-8].

Is there some hard-coded maximum limit for the amount of connections? I see 45 connections atm. It's been growing nicely in the last months. Just can't get that many coins anymore...

Bitcoin is similar to gold in terms of finite supply and increasing mining costs. Every argument you can make against Bitcoin economy you can make against gold economy, but gold economy still works. Actually, gold currency has been throughout the history unmatched by any paper money in stability.

It's an old keynesian argument that deflation is bad because it leads to a "deflationary spiral" where nobody eventually buys anything, because they can get more the next day. That didn't happen where gold standard was applied. Maybe some people will not buy today, but they'll buy tomorrow when the price is lower and they want to enjoy their finite lifetime. A good example is the computers market - you can get twice as good a computer with the same price if you wait a few years, but people still do buy computers today.

Also, it's good to note that production cost doesn't equal value. You could start printing a currency of your own, but it's value wouldn't be equal to your printing costs. The value is zero if nobody accepts them as payment, or it can be more than the printing costs if many people accept it for payment and there's not too many notes in circulation. That's why I've found NewLibertyStandard's pricing by the production costs a bit misleading, giving the wrong picture to some people that bitcoin value is somehow bound to the electricity cost. He may of course sell and buy at whatever price he wants, but he'll be short on either bitcoins or dollars if it's not the market price (supply/demand).

Exciting scenario

The men-in-black who offer a lot of money for every coin would be effectively just backing up Bitcoin and giving huge publicity to it. I wouldn't mind that. Even if they eventually managed to get 99% of all the coins and that somehow hindered the economy, we could always start using Bitcoin with a new block chain and see how long they're going to pay us.

Plain text is good, but add the heading and list html tags if possible.

I've been considering to exchange for LR. Now that I dig more into it, there are some scam warnings and controversy about its reliability on the net. Do you have some more information to back up your claim?

How about Pecunix? It seems more reputable and better established, although the web UI is not as pretty. Pecunix has the advantage that I could hold my reserves as gold, not as euros which suffer from inflation. The transaction fee is also lower, 0,5% instead of 1%.

You can send me translations of the bitcoin.org site as private messages (or if it's too long, I'll pm you my e-mail address). If you can translate only the front page, it's ok too.

Everyone open your graphics editor and make a "we accept Bitcoin" logo. A good looking logo (preferably better than mine ) would be really useful.

My first version attached.

Do as you see fit, but personally I'd just go with bc or btc to avoid confusion.

Anyways, I'm considering Liberty Reserve as one option for the exchange service I'm building. Credit card processing companies don't seem too eager to deal with an e-currency exchanger.

And btw, the existing exchange services aren't run by Satoshi 

Yes, the exchange of money from your bank account for Bitcoins will not be anonymous as long as your bank account isn't. That goes with any digital currency. The idea is to make Bitcoin a commonly accepted currency so that you can use them in many places instead of always needing to convert them to euros or dollars.