^^this.

I have a great deal of respect for Amir in setting up Britcoin, but that's twice now I've seen him do a complete disservice to bitcoin in front of a very large potential audience. The other being that Amsterdam payments conference video.  Both times I could not stop hearing "And this one time...at band camp..." 

It's tough on the guy as a young programmer thrust in front of a camera, but this early stage exposure is too important to mess up.  We might not get another shot at mainstream tv. sigh. Why don't they invite Rick Falkvinge on to talk about bitcoin? Odds on he would knock softball questions like those out of the park.

This is why the weusecoins animation style video are so much more valuable, it takes the showmanship out of the equation. People intrinsicly trust a voice over

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOKZYk9pnBI

I saw this extended ad was trending on youtube and thought I'd share the link as its somewhat relevant.

I'm not twisted enough to have an anonymous youtube account lying around, but if I did I would doing some hardcore flaming in the comments right about now.

Um hey Barclays, whose fault exactly was it in the first place that there has been scarcely any progress on payments/money for so long? Stop patting yourself on the back for solving a problem you helped create.

We need to make a bitcoin response video.

Aside from the minor internal rounding intricacies I would like to see the auto suggested price changed.  If I enter 50GBP I want it to auto-suggest the best rate that would execute that volume immediately i.e. totalling the bids up to and including the volume entered.  The way it works now is that you enter 50GBP and execute, the order just sits there because there aren't actually any offers at the suggested price; you might as well label the execute button "don't buy".
Just my 0.02BTC, looking forward to the upgrades.
Thanks guys.

HaHa. I had that thought until I realized I was being blonde and that the bitcoin client basically is already a customised bittorrent program. Its an easy mistake to make.

I do agree that there should be some kind of indicator to new users about what's going on behind the scenes. There must have been long debates about it on #bitcoin-dev though, so I won't overstep the mark.

I was referring to the long initial download of the soon to be 1GB block chain. at Gigabit speeds you could be up and running in just a few seconds.

Mesh networking was being screamed in my head too. I just hope this all comes to fruition before I'm old and grey.

This news got me so excited...
Free bandwidth for EVERYONE.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/29/onlive-ceo-reveals-entirely-new-approach-to-wireless-credits/

direct youtube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QxrQnJCXKo&t=55m10s

Indeed a wall of 1300 BTC is not very impressive.  I remember watching a 'wall' of buy orders 10k BTC high for coins at $20 crumbling before my eyes just the other week. I learned a valuable lesson that day.

Stop trying to use market cap. to make decisions.

Prices are set at the margin.  This is a fancy way of saying that despite the whole town owning Bitcoins, just two guys can go into a room and exchange a single bitcoin back and forth between with each other for escalating amounts, perhaps tripling the value overnight. How much net money had to flow into the economy? None. Yes, in your model the market cap would increase immensly, but it would be a mistake to assign any relevance to it and assume that's how much money 'flowed in'. Let the concept of market cap. go, it has no relevance in a zero sum scenario like a currency.

Market cap. assumes that just because there was 1 buyer at a particular price then everyone is willing to pay that price. The Bitcoin flash crash last week should be proof enough that the premise is false.

Market cap is the upper bound of what you could get for an asset provided you only sell an infinitesimally small portion of it, in other words its purely academic and has no use in the real world.

[/rant]

That may not help you to decide whether to invest in bitcoin, but I hope at least it will help steer you away from basing the final decision on a bogus valuation. My advice is to pull the trigger; based on the fact that nothing focuses the mind like having skin in the game. Once in then decide whether to stay in or not.

Edit; While I was typing I see other people have picked up on this theme, but I'll post anyway.

I think you nailed it.

Man I loved that movie!
Nice trolling BTW.

Losses from Citibank publicly acknowledged.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-24/citigroup-says-hackers-caused-2-7-million-of-losses-on-customers-cards.html
What I don't get is how this is news, credit card fraud is a billion dollar industry; why all the fuss over $2.7million?

...and from the UK.

No shows from Oxford and Cambridge! I guess you don't need Bitcoins if you already have a Swiss bank account

I laughed at the 2 from SOAS, they have no computer science courses but do have a reputation as an easy place to get weed.


sed -n '/\<[[:alnum:]]*\.ac\.uk/p' mtgox_accounts.csv | sed 's/.*\<\([[:alnum:]]*\)\.ac\.uk.*/\1/' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | sed '/\<1 [[:alnum:]]/,$d'
      3 kent
      2 soas
      2 imperial

In the spirit of making lemonade when given lemons, I was interested to see from the how many students were using the mtgox site from .edu email addresses.

Here are the results. (I have trimmed all those with only 1 user for brevity).  Clearly if you're into bitcoin MIT  is the place to be!

sed -n '/\<[[:alnum:]]*\.edu/p' mtgox_accounts.csv | sed 's/.*\<\([[:alnum:]]*\)\.edu.*/\1/' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | sed '/\<1 [[:alnum:]]/,$d'
     19 mit
      9 umich
      8 purdue
      7 vic
      7 usf
      7 ucla
      7 cornell
      6 ncsu
      6 asu
      5 ufl
      5 obu
      5 berkeley
      4 wesleyan
      4 vt
      4 virginia
      4 usc
      4 syr
      4 stanford
      3 wpi
      3 udo
      3 uark
      3 selu
      3 osu
      3 muohio
      3 lynchburg
      3 indiana
      3 illinois
      3 georgetown
      3 drexel
      3 cmu
      3 case
      2 yale
      2 wisc
      2 uwm
      2 uw
      2 upenn
      2 umn
      2 uidaho
      2 ucr
      2 ucdavis
      2 uc
      2 ua
      2 ttu
      2 slu
      2 rit
      2 psu
      2 orst
      2 nmu
      2 neu
      2 monash
      2 hrbeu
      2 hawaii
      2 grinnell
      2 gatech
      2 fiu
      2 columbia
      2 colorado
      2 carthage
      2 caltech
      2 buffalo
      2 alaska