How do they manage the wallet in a secure fashion?

Given that a decent portion of the BTC community seems to be scammers of one sort or another, how does one know that theyre safe? Are they externally validated somehow?

I wouldnt mind being whitelisted if its ok - I have been lurking here for ages but took too long to register and only just realised I would have to create "fluff" posts in the noob section to get out of the spam den we're forced to play in.

Feel free to look up my IP, I've been reading all day

One thing that I have noticed getting setup is that the block chain download is a rediculous hurdle to getting started. This is obviously only going to get worse over time and will impact the overall scalability of bitcoin.

How much headway has been made in having a semi-centralised architecture than enables light weight clients to operate in a managable fashion?

Anyone got some good links that discuss the future state of BTC design?

The spread seems pretty high at the moment - 13.11 AUD vs 11.6 USD on MT GOX - how often do you update your prices?

Hi all,

New to the forum, despite having spent a massive amount of time readin up and lurking.

I am defining a strategy to enter the BTC mining game a bit late. I originally read about BTC back early last year but dismissed it because there was no real market (to exchange goods and services). It seems like things are getting a bit more interesting now so I feel like having a dabble.

I am looking to hedge my investment based on
- uncertainty around asics availability
- certainty around GPU/FPGA
- need to get ROI as fast as possible to avoid being hit hard by the change in block reward rate.

Does anyone know what the current ETA is for the reward rate to drop to 25BTC/block? This will probably affect my investment strategy a bit.

Current plan is to setup a cluster of 7970s (12-16) on junk motherboards to mine as quick as possible (while its still winter here) and then ditch these once breaking even (collecting sale of cards) to then reinvest in ASIC's or FPGA.

Thoughts?