We now have a twitter account:

    @MetaLair

Hope to catch some of you at BTC London tomorrow.

I agree, although their PR does seem to be getting better. Perhaps they will centralise their communicators more when they relaunch other services next month.

Thanks for these, this one is very useful:

http://blockchain.info/charts

Does anyone have any indicators of:

    1. The number of Bitcoin users in existence?
    2. The % other altcoins represent of the total crypto economy or relative to Bitcoin?

Or you could do something like this:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bitcoinlife/life-on-bitcoin-a-documentary-film

...and that's a consensus from people obsessed with Bitcoin.

Ha! The Bitcoin nodes info has moved to:

http://getaddr.bitnodes.io/

She sounds as happy as my other half when I talk about Bitcoin!

As with everything marriage involves a lot of compromise. Often I find the decisions we've made together are better than the ones we make apart.

Does anyone know where I can get good data on the numbers of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency users and usage?

There were some really good stats at bitnodes.io but this seems to have been taken down now . Does anyone know if there is another copy up anywhere?

I'm trying to locate fact based figures for measures such as:

    • Number of cryptocurrency clients downloaded. I have this for Bitcoin-QT on sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/stats/map?dates=2013-05-01%20to%202013-05-19) any other stats for other wallets and cryptocurrencies would be appreciated.

    • Number of users on: Bitstamp, MTGOX, Vircurex, BTCe etc.

    • Stats on miner and wallet nodes on a given cryptocurrency network.

    • Any other stats that may be available.

Thanks.

MTGOX seems to be down again...

Bids/asks are satisfied between piers on the network. Therefore a bid/ask is satisfied when a pair of wallet-exchange clients with matching bid/asks agree and announce this to the network to process.

Because the system is fully decentralised the paradigm of getting 'closer' to the exchange to reduce trading time no longer applies, every entity on the network will have a different view based on their locality to other nodes with some receiving data earlier than others. The design is fully decentralised so is able to accommodate for this.

Jully apparently now. See here:

https://www.facebook.com/MtGox

Ok, I can now confirm that two of the MetaLair team (one of them being me) will be attending the BTC London conference on July 2nd.

Hope to see some of you there.

+1

Thanks for the warm reception everyone. We're grateful for the positive reactions and all the support we've received so far. We'll be keeping an eye on this thread and making announcements as and when appropriate.

I know that many of you have still got a lot of questions, so we're aiming to do an AMA on http://redd.it/1f7p7z in about three weeks or so.

So our system rollout is two stage:

The first stage enables crypto to crypto exchange. This uses an automated escrow enforced by the network: when two users exchange currency the network waits the for the specified number of confirmations for each blockchain, if both lots of funds are in the longest blockchains after the longest specified number of confirmations the automated escrow provides access to the new funds to each party, if they are not it provides access back to the original funds. Thus only two parties and the decentralised exchange are involved in this transaction. These types of transactions and the bid/ask data are all logged by the decentralised exchange so can be publically viewed as graphs, charts etc.

The second stage extends the automated escrow AIP to allow fiat to be exchanged for crypto using a 3rd party escrow. This could be a person operating from a personal bank account or a large organisation. The 3rd party escrow confirms that: A. Funds are in the longest blockchain after the specified number of confirmations and B. fiat has cleared into the 3rd party escrow's bank account, the escrow releases access to the crypto blockchain address to one party and transfers the USD onto the other party's bank account. Else a refund is provided.

This form of transaction requires three parties: bidder, asker and 3rd party escrow. The decentralised exchange offers a pool service for 3rd party escrows to sign up and make themselves available to bidders/askers in decentralised manner. This is a decentralized system so we are not in charge; we do not control who the escrows are and who signs up. Because the system is decentralised this will be managed by the community through a trust based system. All fiat transactions are also logged by the decentralised exchange. This means all fiat valuations, volume's traded and bid/asks along with any other information are stored in the decentralized exchange and can be can be publically viewed as graph, charts etc.

A trust based system is built into the decentralised exchange, this will be for:

    • 3rd party escrow's,; e.g. a party you know and trust trust this escrow.
    • Bidders/askers, to help identify parties that may have double spent; degrees of trust violation can vary depending on whether a transaction was double spent or an exchange failed due to errors beyond a party's control such as a blockchain programmatic error.
    • Trust will also be ascribed to specific cryptocurrencies themselves if for example they become a haven for double spending attacks and/or their blockchains prove to be programmatically unreliable.

Hope this clarifies the design a bit more.

To clarify, the design provides:

    • Fully decentralised history of trading data; volumes traded and inter currency rates going back over time.
    • Fully decentralised history of bid/ask data; a set of the bid/ask history going back over time.
    • System will also include live bid/ask data.

This is stored in a totally decentralised way so is publically viewable to anyone on the exchange.

The decentralised history will be for all crypto to crypto and crypto to fiat trade data and bid/ask data. Graphs etc can be rendered form this as required.

We've had a number of requests for PayPal donations.

We have now set this up so are able to take donations. Please pay us via this method or PayPal will take some of the money you donate from the donation and the payment can be reversed at a later date.


Please pay the following email address: paypal@metalair.org

Thank you.


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Yes, when we say 'public domain' we will pick an appropriate license/distribution model to ensure it can be freely accessed by as many people as possible.

This design will not work if any parts of it are centralised, restricted or propitiatory: it needs to be totally decentralised (as decentralised as a cryptocurrency) and opensource.

The design of the system will be such that to transfer fiat, e.g. USD for BTC you will need to do the following steps:

1. Download and install the wallet-client.
2. Find a bid/ask that matches yours.
3. Setup an escrow and execute.
4. One party then sends bitcoins to a holding address using a 2-of-3 transaction including the selected escrow. The other party pays fiat into the bank account of the selected escrow.
5. When the escrow confirms that: A. Funds are in the longest bitcoin blockchain after the longest specified number of confirmations and B. USD have cleared into the escrow's bank account, the escrow releases access to the bitcoin address to one party and transfers the USD onto the other's bank account. (The escrow will also take fees). Else the transaction is reversed.

The crucial difference with our design is it is fully decentralised so your BTC will clear to an address you can access on the Bitcoin blockchain, rather than residing as a balance at a centralised provider. This process is true of any other cryptocurrency: it will clear to an address you can access on that respective blockchain, not a central provider.

Anyone can sign up as an escrow agent. So escrows can be either trusted individuals operating on a small scale all the way to large trusted organisations. You can choose which one you want to use based on word of mouth and how much other parties on the network you trust in turn trust those escrow. We are already communicating with one large organisation that would act as recognised and trusted escrow agents on the decentralised exchange. If things go well we should be able to develop the first cut of this system alongside their escrow service so the decentralised exchange can launch with a large provider up and running on the network.

To clarify further; the exchange is fully decentralised so we are not involved in the transaction. Any transaction is between you, another bidder/asker and the escrow.

Transfers between cryptocurrencies are the first step of our design and have an automated escrow process regulated by the network itself so no humans are involved and your funds cannot go missing: you either receive access to your funds if both transfers remain cleared on the longest blockchains after the longest specified number of confirmations, or the network issues each party a refund. Refunds are only issued if funds are not in the longest blockchains after the longest specified number of confirmations, i.e. someone has tried a double spend attack, did not send the funds or something is programmatically wrong with one of the cryptocurrency blockchains. This protects both parties and removes any requirement for trust from the system for crypto to crypto exchanges.

There will also need to be fees attached to all escrow services along with other actions carried out by the distributed exchange. We will not be receiving any of these funds. These fees are necessary to pay various entities on the system to ensure they are correctly incentivised to cooperate within the decentralised exchange.

Currently we are only showing our whitepaper to select investors and members of the cryptocurrency community in an attempt to attract investment. If we are unsuccessful in attracting sufficient interest within a few months we will release the whitepaper into the public domain.

We are hoping to get some independent comments from some select individuals who have viewed the whitepaper shortly in an attempt to help certify that our design is feasible and our stated aims are achievable.

We are a UK based research group that operates across two separate companies based at a major UK university.

We have created a design for a fully decentralised exchange mechanism able to facilitate secure exchanges between cryptocurrencies and also fiat. The design provides the following features:

    • A mechanism to create a decentralised cryptocurrency exchange.
    • An architecture resistant to distributed denial of service attack.
    • Resilience to double spending: parties can specify the number of confirmations they require during an exchange, if an attack occurs during this window the network will issue a 'refund' to both parties rendering the attack ineffective.
    • Fully decentralised history of trading data.
    • Fully decentralised history of bid/ask data.
    • Extensibility: cryptocurrencies can be added or removed from this new decentralised exchange without the need for a central authority.
    • Back-porting these capabilities into existing cryptocurrencies will create further decentralisation. Each cryptocurrency then provides a full set of features to enable this decentralised exchange mechanism: as long as any one cryptocurrency with this capability exists so does the decentralised exchange. The more cryptocurrencies with this capability exist the more robust the decentralised exchange becomes.
    • Ability to extend this decentralised exchange mechanism to allow cryptocurrencies to be exchanged for fiat currencies such as USD and EUR via the same API.
    • Improved cryptocurrency accessibility for everyday users with a large amount of functionality being provided in one combined wallet-exchange based client. This will allow anyone to exchange fiat and cryptocurrencies unrestricted from their desktop, phone or laptop.

We have taken this design and its development as far as we can without funding, so are seeking investment and donations directly from the Bitcoin community.

We wish to develop the core parts of the system in-house and then release them for most of the development to then take place within/alongside the opensource community.

We are keen to take this approach because:

    1. We believe this approach will achieve a better segregation of modules and their contracts, using 'design by contract', if the initial design is in place before the opensource community starts working on it. We are all too keenly aware of the design overlap that can occur in the early stages of design if too many developers are involved resulting in artefacts such as API and feature bloat. We are totally behind opensource development but ask yourself which approach did Satoshi use?

    2. We want to build some proprietary technology alongside the decentralised exchange mechanism to fund a new company that is able to fund its own activities without having any external dependencies. This will allow us to deliver a number of other technologies we have in the pipe related to cryptocurrencies. A lot of these are as interesting as this and we plan to release most of them completely opensource too.

If we don’t receive sufficient interest within a few months we will release this design into the public domain so that it can be freely developed by the opensource community with what help we can provide unfunded.

We believe that a secure design can only be achieved through peer review, especially in the domain of cryptography. Therefore whether this design is developed initially in-house or entirely via the opensource  community we consider that ultimately the opensource approach is the only viable option for a successful implementation: no part of this system can be centralised or propriety in any way.

The two key architects of this design are senior technologists at their respective companies; the first partner's background is in architecting and delivery of ultra-secure communications systems, the second has been architecting and building entire virtual economies since the 90s.

If successful the new company we start will be totally separate entity to these. Between the two authors we have direct access to a development team of fourteen which we are keen to throw into this full time as soon as we are able to attract sufficient funding.

We would like to share the designs we have created with a select group of serious individuals who are looking to donate or invest. If you are technical and looking to donate or invest please contact us at metalair.org with some background on yourself.

For the benefit of the community we plan to make all our work related to the decentralised exchange mechanism freely available opensource: the idea would not work if any part of it were centralised.

We are looking to achieve £200k GBP equivalent to cover all development costs, with the total delivery time estimated at around a year from start.

The costs are commensurate with the level of work required for this proposal; this is not yet another rehash of the Bitcoin sourcecode, there are several completely new components we need to develop as well as extensible client software that needs to be created from scratch.

If we achieve our funding goals and start development we will also be looking for technical collaborators.

We are accepting both crypto and fiat. Please donate to the following addresses if you would like to fund this project:

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Fiat: Please see metalair.org for details.
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If you will be donating an amount at or over £1,000GBP equivalent please contact us as we would like to (optionally) add you to our notable donors' page. http://metalair.org/donors.php.

We are taking investment offers at or above £25k GBP. For serious investors, after an initial introduction, we are more than happy to meet face to face and undergo due diligence to any level required: please see our Investor Relations http://metalair.org/investors.php page.

Donations that fall short of our goal will be used for other research, much of which we plan to publish for free consumption by the community, most of it related to cryptocurrencies.

If we do not receive sufficient interest within approximately two months we will release our designs into the public domain.

Please see metalair.org for more details.