No problem, I'll leave Gavin to it and get on with doing other stuff that isn't already on the paid developer's to-do list.

LIke altcoins maybe, since bitcoin is already on the paid developer's to-do list.

Hmm, or Open Transactions maybe. So much to do, so little time to do it all.

-MarkM-

Yeah but apparently bitcoin millionaires cannot afford to get test suites made so it kind of sits there waiting for hard working coders and developers to find some spare time to work on such things.

-MarkM-

Hackers attack self-healing blockchain currency in vain, banks eat hearts out - Occupy Wall Street

-MarkM-

How long do Bank and Stock Exchange network outages/glitches usually take to heal?

-MarkM-

Mystery miner snaps up cheap coins using creative "attack block" - Speculation forum

-MarkM-

Is there any truth in the suggestion that it was actually caused by not configuring the database correctly to match the usage pattern the app intended to use it in?

I know with e.g. MySQL one has to consider its config when planning what kind of load you plan to put on it what kind of data patterns you expect and so on.

-MarkM-

Different versions and distros of operating systems likely linked against different versions of Berkeley DataBase too so maybe it would have needed each old version of bitcoin, with each compatible version of the BDB linked to each one, to have found this just by running on testnet.

Edge case unit tests though should be looking for precisely the corner and limit cases of numbers of transaction, portions of transactions, number and type of script and sigs, size of blocks and so on.

Its just the unit tests are not really fleshed out fully yet.

Maybe they need to include trying linking to different versions of whatever database library is being used.

-MarkM-

Running all versions that are not totally obsolete on testnet at same time as running new version on it might have caught this, maybe?

Sure only running the new version on testnet without any old versions there would not test their compatibility.

-MarkM-

Yeah I can see upgrading my connection when my bitcoins are worth $4000 each.

I'd argued for exchange rate as a biggie earlier but to be honest I'd upgrade at even just a few hundred dollars per bitcoin.

To be really honest though, its the ASIC fiasco that is my main sticking-point. I don't want to commit to more recurring monthly expenses while I still do not know whether I'll ever be able to upgrade from a single 5870 GPU to some kind of ASIC.

-MarkM-

Seconded. A "must read".

-MarkM-

Not quite. I have now-relatively-no-longer-new exchange already up and running, but still being actively developed, for a long time now, see

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0

Also, for price lists of assets it handles, see

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

-MarkM-

gweedo is right that it is a can of worms you probably ought not want to get into.

But if you must, then do look up "Cyclos", real life banking software, free open source, kept up to date, bugfixed, and so on.

Has all kinds of goodies such as apps for umpteen handheld devices and so on, but, is really for being a bank not directly an "exchange" per se.

So again it has no hooks in and out of actual blockchain-coinage, but also it lacks actual market order matching engine (which Open Transactions does have and is a big part of why I ever picked up on Open Transactions in the first place). But it does have web front ends, a lot of people don't like Open Transactions because they prefer the insecurity of web front ends to the secure encrypted messages client<->server model Open Transactions uses.

-MarkM-

All the free open source bitcoin exchanges I have looked at are not the latest up to date versions, last time I looked.

They seem to make an initial sketch that kind of works, then go proprietary in making it real and useful and using it with real money.

I myself am going with Open Transactions so far, as that really is free open source stuff all the way, it isn't some old version not actually being used for real in the form you get to grab from github or sourceforge or google code or wherever.

But Open Transactions does not include all the "glue" stuff such as actually checking whether you have any bitcoins in your hotwallet and if so who they are from, and go on to credit it to their Open Transactions account and move it to the coldwallet and so on.

That part I actually do not even want to do, so hey if that is the part you like maybe you could consider acting as a market maker for me, accepting bitcoins from people and sending them bitcoin tokens on my Open Transactions server (for a fee) and accepting bitcoin tokens from people on my Open Transactions server and sending them actual bitcoins in return (for a fee)...

-MarkM-

Actually I am maybe even arguing for having everyone else use Ripple but appending to Ripple the actual gateway functionality.

Basically I am thinking it'd be nice if I could say yes I accept bitcoins, not bitcoin IOUs, please do go ahead and use Ripple to pay me but tell Ripple to pay me bitcoins, not bitcoin IOUs.

Maybe this would be accomplished by having a gateway account that sends me bitcoins, and I tell people my gateway account so they Ripple to it and it automagically cashes in the bitcoin IOUs it receives into actual on the blockchain bitcoins.

(Or devcoins, or litecoins, or whatever crunchy berry coins of the day I happen to like.)

Maybe like "I accept bitcoins, 1mybitcoinaddressvcfdhyj, send care of Ripple account rip22135hkfdjhlmml if you wish".

Or maybe even add to ripple a way to register a bitcoin address with it, so it knows to which gateway account to send any bitcoin IOUs whose destination is my bitcoin address.

-MarkM-

A lot of people do still use local currencies though, so you might as well set up to only use one payment processing system and have that be one that just gives you the Crunch Berries you prefer and insulates you from everyone else's cocoa puffs, dollars, yen, francs, or whatever the heck they use.

-MarkM-

Of course they would, there would be nothing else they could usefully do with such an IOU, giving it back to you, its issuer, would be the only way to get rid of the darn thing. So whenever they want something from you, they fork over their dollars or bitcoins or whatever, it Ripples through the system, and you end up receiving the stale Crunch Berries IOUs your mom and pop or whoever had trusted you for. If your Crunch Berry currency you issue is the only currency you accept its the only darn thing you can end up with when someone tries to buy something from you as you chose it as what you wanted to use as your currency.

-MarkM-

Okay then here's re the fifteen wallets:

Ripple.

No one need care what currencies other people use, they just pay with what they use and get paid with what they use, automagically.

-MarkM-

The people who came up with and/or ran Intersango were some of the most incompetent and/or crooked people ever to hit the bitcoin scene, though maybe so crooked that its not really clear whether their code was deliberately full of holes in order to serve as an excuse for "being hacked" or they were just so crooked they managed to hack themselves despite no gaping holes in the code.

They were some of the most fraudulent "security experts" in the business though so chances do not seem high that the code is likely to turn out to be secure even if they didn't deliberately make it insecure as an excuse for vanishing everyone's money...

TL;DR don't expect the code to be useable for real money / real bitcoins unless you too plan on "being hacked" so you can pocket everyone's money.

-MarkM-

Thats incorrect, it has lots of stuff backing it.

The order books on umpteen exchanges, for one.

That alone adds up to a whole lot of dollars, yen, litecoins, ppcoins, botcoins, britcoins, GBP, etc etc etc.

You might as well say dollars have no value, or GBP has no value.

You might be right, but people go on buying bread, hookers and blow with the stuff regardless of your 'wisdom'.

-MarkM-

Could XRP somehow be coloured?

Oh wait, one could just use IOUs instead of colouring XRPs...

-MarkM-