Jed McCaleb (of eDonkey2000 fame) was the creator of MtGox. He operated it for a few months before selling it to the current owner (MagicalTux's corporation).

Satoshi's last forum post, on 12 December 2010, included these words:

Google froze my Gmail account until I revalidated it by SMS. I guess someone is trying the cracked MtGox passwords against the corresponding Gmail accounts. Luckily my passwords are both very strong, and are different.

Gah, this is when having BTC is bothersome, missed out on some amazing GF apparently.

At the time MtGox was started up, Jed was the person best able to do this. At the time MtGox was taken to the next level, MagicalTux was the person best placed to do this.

As for the future, that will depend on how MagicalTux extricates his business from this situation. MtGox might emerge stronger than ever, or it might have blown its credibility enough that it never fully recovers.

But MagicalTux, and Jed before him, were always doing stuff that was good for Bitcoin. Without them, the forum would be full of "We need a big exchange" posts.

I think there's no point sending your email to their webmaster.

If you want anyone to read your message (rather than deleting it along with all the Nigerian scams), print it out on paper and mail it to the Red Cross.

Even assuming for the sake of discussion that such a thing is desirable, I don't think there's any kind of verification system that would be convenient enough for the masses, yet robust enough that it can't be spoofed by an agent provocateur.

Here's an article from The Economist that's listed as being "from the print edition":
http://www.economist.com/node/18836780

Obviously it's not the "feature length" article that your friend was referring to.

The guest is Jeff Garzik, who is jgarzik on this forum.

The Bitcoin protocol includes a scripting facility that could be used this way: for a transaction to be spent, the usual private key would be required, plus a per-transaction user-selected password .

Transaction scripting is not yet fully-implemented, but the potential is there.

GetOpenID.com is shutting down after 30th June. This means you can't log in anywhere with a GetOpenID login after that date.

If you've been using an OpenID from GetOpenID to login at Britcoin, Witcoin or any other site where you have a BTC balance, you need to get your coins out before the end of the month or you will lose access to them.

Go for it! Patches are welcomed.

If you're not a coder, you could offer a bounty instead.

I don't know anyone who is selling any. So there's your opportunity, if you're still looking for a bitcoin-related business to launch.

I just saw your post from 7th December 2010 which ended with the words "Where ever will this lead?".

Ouch.

After you send bitcoins to a public key (a "receiving address") and the transaction is confirmed into the block chain, the only way those bitcoins can be spent is with the corresponding private key.

Unless you can recover that private key from a copy in disk or RAM, the BTC cannot ever be spent.

In theory, if you could quickly grab the majority of the network's hashing power, you could perhaps rewrite the block chain to remove your original send, in which case the coins would be available to you again. But realistically this cannot be done without control of the largest mining pools. As 40 minutes or more has passed already, even that window is closing now.

Sorry to hear about your loss.

Well, no, nothing like theft is being proposed. The people proposing block chain manipulation are proposing to manipulate their copies of a block chain, i.e. to change some bytes in some blocks. Changing ones own bytes is not theft.

You, and I, and the rest of Bitcoin's hashing power, are free to choose whether or not to accept the manipulated blocks, and most would not accept them.

Manipulating the block chain would be a stupid thing to do, but it's not theft.

He will get the hang of it eventually.

Not so. See the retraction in the original article.

A newbie who can't post in this forum has identified that the address your coins went to is a donation receiving address of LulzSec:

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=17386.msg223015

Namecoin should modify their software so that it can mine on the same hashes as Bitcoin. It would strengthen both projects to have the added hashing power and/or mining income.