Why should it be done privately? If one person thinks you are a scammer, then multiple people might, so you would have to prove yourself over and over again to people who think you are scamming. Secondly, having it public allows other public opinions to weigh in. Trusted members and people who have been here for a while can weigh in and give their opinions. Furthermore, if someone really is a scammer, then they need negative trust. Having a public discussion about someone scamming ensures that people on Default Trust will see the discussion and neg the person, instead of just one guy giving negative feedback which no one else sees or trusts. If you suggest that they can just pm DT members with the proof that you scammed, that proof can be manipulated, quotes that you say or that the accuser says can be changed. Having it public makes it so that it is more difficult to change what was previously said because people have seen it and may have quoted it. The edit times also indicate whether a post has been modified and for big scammers, theymos or badbear can even revert the posts so that people can see what has actually been said.

As for discussing people behind their backs, it isn't. The scam accusations are completely public. If you are active in the marketplace selling things, you should keep an eye on the scam accusations section just to make sure that no one opens an accusation against you. I also think it is common courtesy to give the person warning and inform them that you have opened an accusation against them. Send a few PMs several days before and inform them that they have X days to complete the deal or you will open a scam accusation. Then when you do open one, you send them the link to the accusation thread so that they can also give their side of the story.

What do you mean by "it drops connection for a while"?

How have you connected the two bitcoinds?

Blockchain.info has had many problems recently, they were just down for maintanence, but I don't know how well that went. For now, you should stop using their service and contact their support.

Time to add another username to the nuking bot: help******

No, bans are given to a person not an account. Using an alternate account to post it called van evasion, and if an account is found to be an alt of an account that is banned, it too will be banned, and the ban will be increased

Regarding the scan accusation section, I think that section is very important. The trust page is not for discussion, you cannot discuss with other people why you think someone is a scammer and whether others think that the lettering deserves trust. The scan accusations section allows people to do that. Accusers and post their proof, and the accused can defend themselves. The section is like the court, where people determine whether someone is a scammer and the trust given is then the punishments.

Actually, I don't think the problem is related to that. They were down for maintainence apparently, although that may have also had to do with upgrading their node to deal with transaction malleability.

On a side note, Blockchain.info needs to get their act together since all of the newbies think that blockchain.info is the "authority" or is the "actual blockchain", and their poor service reflects poorly on new users. It also creates a lot of spam on these forums whenever they go down since every freaks out about "bitcoin is failing because blockchain.info is down!!"

This is entirely blockchain.info's problem, which is a service, not the bitcoin blockchain. Please stop mixing the two.

Binaries are no longer there, only the source tarball.

This is specifically a problem kryptokit which apparently is using blockchain.info's api. Blockchain.info is not the blockchain, since the blockchain cannot be under maintenance. This is service issue with blockchain, nothing can really be done about it.

It is no longer posted on bitcoin.org. I can compile a copy for you and send it over. I have a windows version already compiled, and can compile Linux in a few hours. Since I use gitian, the hashes will match the signed hashes in the gitian.sigs repository on the github.

You only have 0.00006743 available in that address. You may have other addresses in your wallet that make your total balance higher but if you want to spend from that address only, you only have 0.00006743 btc

I think that is a good idea, but the problem is that in the initial payment request, the merchant has no way to know who (identity or bitcoin address) is sending them the bitcoin. They should definitely sign the request, but encrypting it is not possible without knowing the other party's public key, which is hard to know without knowing who is paying and public keys are not revealed until they sign a transaction.

There are two different systems at work there, one for debit card, the other for bank accounts. The one for debit cards or instantaneous, I'm not really sure how it works. The other for bank accounts is called ACH which is a transfer of money between two bank accounts and takes a few days for the banks to be process.

So if a merchant doesn't have an SSL certificate and thus doesn't support HTTPS and the request is sent over http, then someone could perform an MITM attack (just like with everything else using http) and could tamper with the request and the user wouldn't even know it. I personally feel that this is unsafe, especially when both the consumer and merchant have access to private keys which can sign that payment request so that, at a bare minimum, its integrity is verified.

edit: how come we are always told to verify the signatures and checksums of the software we download even if it was delivered through a secure mechanism like https? Shouldn't the same apply to the payment requests?

Most wallets don't sell you Bitcoin. Most exchanges do transactions off chain. They become on chain when you decide to withdraw the Bitcoin and send them somewhere else. I would advise you to use your own desktop wallet since web wallets may not be as reliable. VirosaGITS gave you instructions above.

Did you try changing servers? Maybe updating your software would help.

From what I can understand, if a payment request isn't signed using an X.509 certificate, then there isn't anywhere in the request that is hashed or signed to verify its integrity. So how does it prevent tampering with the request between the server and the user if no authentication is used? Or is there no such mechanism?

I was talking about https in regards to the method of transporting data, not the private keys. The X.509 certificates seems kinda silly and I agree with you. The only problem is verifying that that public key/certificate belongs to the right person.

While yes the merchant needs a static IP/Domain Name, how else would you get data to and from computers without rewriting the internet? How would nodes communicate without using this system.

I agree that all of the messages should be signed by the message sender's private key to ensure that the message isn't modified between the consumer and the merchant. E.g. the request from the merchant is signed by one of the addresses in the output section, the payment from the consumer is signed with one of the addresses used in the payment transaction, and the paymentACK from the merchant is signed with the same key as the first message.

Regarding the http/https, I think that was a good choice since that is an existing protocol which provides some privacy and direct connection between two computers instead of flooding the network like transactions do. Although the choice of X.509 certificates for signing is questionable, I can also understand that because those have names associated with them.

Perhaps you (or maybe I, if I have enough time) can write some code to add such things to the payment protocol and submit at PR.