Bruce,

I and several thousand other people, forum members or not, were very exited and looking forward to this bitcoin conference. Mind you, bitcoin is the internet currency, so the "whole" internet was watching, or actually, not watching, because there was no live feed, no blog posts, no press release, no pictures, nothing.

I don't understand how you can make a bitcoin conference and lock out the whole world. Yes, I heard some lame excuses about a broken laptop, and expensive internet connections. This wouldn't even be an issue in some third world country, so I doubt that this could be an issue in the middle of NYC.

In hindsight this conference looks more like a secret meetup of some secret society. The only thing that was leaked out of the conference is that there will be a few more conferences in the future. Whoever will run this conferences, please don't be selfish - communicate about it, let the world know what is happening while it is happening. Use this past conference outside communication as an example how it should not be done.

If you would have done the publicity that such a conference does deserve, I am sure the exchange rate would have risen by at least 2 or 3 dollars, instead of fallen by almost 1 dollar. Now how to you explain your family and friends that you have just wasted this big opportunity to solidify their bitcoin wealth by 25%. Or do you no longer care, after the mybitcoin debacle? Do you think that after loosing 49% one doesn't want to gain some 25%?

I think it is also a lost opportunity for OnlyOneTV. In the short period of time when there was some sort of live feed, there were more than thousand viewers. Numbers that you never had before. I can only imagine how much more thousand viewers only got the "off air" message, and remember your business now as OnlyOffAirTV. Bit lost opportunity, better don't tell your sponsors about this.

BTW, to make this clear. This is no bashing on you, Bruce. I like and watch your "daily" shows, and as a long time viewer I know that you are exaggerate sometimes, like the fact that you call this a daily show, while in fact there can be a full week between shows. Same thing was you stating that some 15 media outlets will be there, I guessed that this will be not that much, but probably a few. Actually almost no one knows the truth, because there is no information about it.
In fact, you did with your bitcoin conference, what you said is the worst thing to do, stopping all public communication, going incommunicado. Sorry to say this, but this behavior reminds me of some guy named Tom Williams.

Someone claimed that some parts where recorded, so here is hope that you make at least this recording available. I and, I am sure, a few thousand other people would really like to watch this. But to quote you: a day in the bitcoin world is like a week, a week is like a month. So according to you, those recording are already some weeks late

Best regards,
aq

Nice update.

That said, I have an, IMO important, feature request:
Mtgoxlive.com is very misleading using the default settings. While the real market depth looks more like in your screenshot, it scales both sides independently in the default view. That is very unlucky choice for the default view, because it suggests a very misleading market state, and a single graph where the scale changes in the middle is just counter intuitive. It would be best to add a dollar based single market axis and make this the default view. Why? Because this is how it is being viewed in reality anyway, and so one could see how much fiat is involved on both sides.

Excellent idea! This will be much needed for bitcoin to become useful for the average person.
That being said, I think you should add a -slowboot option and have the fast download as the default behavior.

Maybe you could combine the idea from RaTTuS with the download: have one thread load the block backward from the p2p network, while another thread downloads the cache files from the central servers. Now let those run until they meet each other. That could even solve the validation of the centrally stored mirror files, because if those are bogus the two chains would never match.

Both points are valid. However, having said this, there is a lot of open source software out there that seems to be developed much faster. Most of the open source developer love their projects and put long hours of work into them, without being payed. Call it enthusiasm, call it motivation. So one can suspect that somehow the bitcoin developers are not as motivated or enthusiastic as one would like them to be. And I think it is legitimate to ask about the reason, or at least why it appears to be so.
So I say, we should try to motivate them. As I know from myself, you can't buy enthusiasm, but money could help a little bit. That is one of the reasons I started this other thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=35905.0. Unfortunately there is still no bitcoin bounty website out there

I think you guys have a wrong picture about the "development" of bitcoin.
Basically, there is almost no development going on, I would at best call it maintenance.
I don't believe that there are even 10 lines of *code* changes commited on average per day, so one could probably even teach his grandma to review those

ixcoin, I0coin, and all the other are just plain copies of bitcoin. So why would anyone use those. What you say is the same as "we should replace all digits with some other symbol, because if mathematics fail, we can use the same mathematics using other symbols".

The shorter maturity of ixcoin combined with Freds precomputes coins gives only one person some advantage: Fred himself.
So either you like to be trollish, or maybe you are one of Freds multiple accounts.

Me being open minded, I give you some advice how you could possible exercise some get-rich-as-an-early-adopter thing:
1) add some additional value to your block chain, like namecoin.
2) don't try to replace bitcoins, makes no sense to replace it with something similar.
3) don't mine yourself a too huge chunk before you go public.
4) don't pay others to use your chain, try to get their attention by the added value of your block chain.
If you have some clever idea and are not shy of doing some real coding (changing 10 in bitcoin to have ixcoin is not coding) then your block chain could really take of.

+1
That would be great to have anyway!

+1

Just bought one as a test too. Literally within 2 seconds after pressing the confirm button, the coin showed up in my wallet and then I got the emails. Very nice service, albeit not the cheapest one.

Maybe it is only me, but I believe that 0.0035 BTC != 0.00035 BTC 

Well, if you are a fan of alternative block chains, make your own. Will take you only a few minutes.

1) Download bitcoin or xicoin source.

2) Define a new genesis block
https://github.com/ixcoin/ixcoin/blob/28b781f6390173dd31d771c4e061468256758dfe/src/main.cpp#L1515
Don't forget to start with some message like "To see the farm is to leave it"

3) Change the has hash of the genesis block to whatever you made it in (2):
https://github.com/ixcoin/ixcoin/blob/28b781f6390173dd31d771c4e061468256758dfe/src/main.cpp#L33

4) Optional step: get yourself more money: change the value of a single block
https://github.com/ixcoin/ixcoin/blob/28b781f6390173dd31d771c4e061468256758dfe/src/main.cpp#L639
Fred wanted 96 per block, instead of 50. Pro tip: make it a few thousand at least, miners will be happy

5) type make

6)
7) profit!!!

The trust lies in the 2.5 year old block chain.

If Satoshi would have done like Fred - "I pay you all 5 times your electric bill for generating some random hash values" - a lot of people, like today, would have mined for his money. But as soon as he runs out of money, everyone would have stopped too and the project would be declared dead.
So what makes bitcoins different to FredCoins is that initially no one was payed to do it, people found it usefull (or fun) and only after some years then they started to value bitcoin with USD.

AFAIK you wont be paid mining IOcoins, at least until Fred weights in with his money. Apart from this, it is the same.
And by reading some postings in this very forum, I think they serve an additional purpose. A lot of miners don't understand difficulty and the fixed supply rate. So they can be happy mining some trillions of FredCoins / IOcoins, at least until they realize that it was just wasted electricity. And that means more for the bitcoin miners, but don't thell them

If every random stream of hash values is money in your eyes, I am happy to sell you a bunch of those. And I have a very big depot at /dev/random

Money is about trust. All those FredCoin miners did it only to get some bitcoins from Fred. No one is keeping FredCoins because as soon as Fred runs out of his subsidizing money it will be game over for FredCoins.

You could be very right. The last decrease was in April, bitcoin value was below $1. The decrease was followed by a 3 month rally up to $30.

Not correct.
Bitcoin: money.
Namecoin: DNS.
IXCoin: 'little Fred wants to get rich' scam.
IOcoin: it could be fun to make a new chain, so lets do it - maybe Fred wants to buy some IOcoins too

This is really great. All those worthless forks like Xicoin, 0coin, StupidCoin, GetMeRichCoin, FredCoin,... are pulling mining power out of bitcoin, so that the remaining miners get more. We should give a big thank you to all those forkers and their foolish flollowers.

You could also buy them on https://bitmarket.eu using paypal. I did this a few times, and always had them within a few hours.

I really cant believe that Bruce does not want this scam at his bitcoin conference 

if we assume that he owns the genesis block http://blockexplorer.com/block/000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f and hence also owns the very address, we can all start donating, which apparently some people do already: http://blockexplorer.com/address/1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa
But it is still a long way to 3 million

+1

Every day lots of members pops up in this forum, jealous that some other have more bitcoin. As being jealousy doesn't look that good, they invent some "we have to change bitcoins, so that I get more" thing. Of course it is always the fault of early adopters and satoshi. And of course, everyone know 2009/2010 that bitcoins will be explode in 2011. So of course, everyone would have mined in 2009.

Go all, mine xicoin, or whatever the scam of the day is called, we all know that it will explode in 2013!