Like I said, the library is written in PascalScript because it's meant to be used with Deja Vu (you can download the library from the Deja Vu page). I used a very object orientated and modular approach in my design of the net structure and I didn't use matrices anywhere in the code as would be typically done in a ANN library. The most important files are the core.pas and evol.pas files, they contain the bulk of the code related to the ANN and genetic algorithm stuff. I took a relatively simple approach to the breeding process, the layers in the parent nets are essentially just spliced together to produce a child net (the parent nets must have the same number of layers and the same number of neurons on each layer otherwise they wont breed properly, I haven't really figured out a way to get around that, it's like asking how our DNA evolved and what would happen if a human was born with an extra genome; how could that person breed with other humans?).

The entire process is basically this: first a specified number of random nets are generated to form the 1st generation of nets. Then the fitness/performance of each net in the group is tested and a desired number of the best performers are placed into the elite group. The rest of the nets are discarded and the elite nets are used for breeding the 2nd generation of nets. Then the fitness of all the nets in the 2nd generation are tested and the elite nets from the previous generation are also tested (this is necessary because the training data is broken up into multiple sets so that each generation isn't faced with exactly the same problem, which prevents the nets from honing in on just one specific pattern in the training data). Then the best performers from the 2nd generation are placed into the elite group (elite nets from previous generations can stay in the elite group if they continue to perform well) and they are used to breed the 3rd generation. And this process repeats over and over again for the specified number of generations, and the final group of elite nets are hopefully going to be trained fairly well.

I say that I've never gotten anything useful from it, but to tell the truth I haven't tried running the training process for more than 24 hours. One of the major hurdles to training the nets properly is working out what time interval is the most profitable. High frequency trading doesn't seem to be as profitable as longer term trading nets. I can't really remember now what interval of time was giving me the best result, I think it was 30 mins or maybe an hour. The other major problem is that even if you get a well trained net you need to make sure that the simulated trading which was used to test the fitness of the net is going to carry over into real life trading, and that appears to be a bit more difficult then you might imagine at first glance. Anyway I've rambled on quite a bit and I've gotta go get some sleep so I can't continue this discussion right now but let me know if you do create a blog to document your progress because I'd be interested to see how you go.

I require a graphic designer who is willing to accept odd jobs from me on occasion (mostly logo work). I am a website programmer but I'm not very great at graphic design and I would rather outsource the work to someone who knows what they are doing. I would prefer someone from Australia but it doesn't really matter where you live as long as you speak good english. If you are interested send me a PM with some examples of your previous work. I have a job ready to go right now. All payments will be made via PayPal and in some cases Bitcoin if I happen to have enough spare BTC available.

A graphic designer has been chosen.

No problem, he is certainly a great teacher. He is able to explain things in a very clear and simple fashion and he doesn't overcomplicate anything beyond what is necessary. I've tried watching other lectures on ANN's and all of them are very hard to follow compared to this lecture series. He also has a lot of other great lecture series related to ANN's if you look through the videos in his channel.

This is something I coded more than a year ago when I was attempting to build high performance trading bots. It is designed to be an extension for my Deja Vu scripting application. I was going to keep it to myself but I realized it takes a hell of a lot of computing power to evolve an ANN capable of profitable trading and I was never really able to get a safe and profitable trading bot out of it. I figured I may as well release it for other people to try their luck with it. It's written in PascalScript which probably makes it slower than just about any other ANN software out there (probably why I could never generate a useful ANN). But to be honest I've never really used any other ANN software so I wouldn't really know how fast it is compared to other ANN software. I learnt basically everything I know about ANN's from Jeff Heaton's awesome lecture series titled Neural Network Fundamentals and Neural Network Calculations.

The design I implemented was a simple recurrent neural network type of ANN with the ability to attach context neurons to any other neuron. It's basically just a feed forward network with the addition of context neurons which can remember previous outputs of any given neuron (each context neuron feeds back to only one neuron instead of the whole layer) and you can also control the number of cycles for which the context neuron will remember the data before replacing it with new output data. Of course it can generate entirely random networks and serialize the network into its corresponding weight and DNA strings which can easily be stored in text files. It also contains all the functionality required to breed nets and evolve nets in an automated fashion given some training data. The download package contains some historical price data formatted in the necessary way.

The functions which test and evaluate the performance of each net can be found in the Includes/ANN/test.pas file. I tried many different methods for evaluating the trading efficiency of each net but none of them really worked very well. The method employed in the test.pas file which comes with this library tries to simulate real trading and then measure how much profit was made, but it's quite a difficult thing to do correctly given only historical price data and I am far from a trading expert (hence why I wanted to build ANN's which would trade for me). The library will work as it is but I suggest you try modifying the evaluation functions yourself and see what works best. When you run the training script (scripts/ANN/evolve_nets.pas) you will see the scores of each net in the debug box at the bottom (anything above 1 means a profit was made). If anyone has any other questions about the library feel free to ask.

This makes absolutely no sense... the whole point of cryptocurrency is to be decentralized. How can two groups "fight for control" apart from amassing mining hardware and trying to out-compute the opponent? Not to mention the rebels could create their own crypto-coin at any time. Furthermore, I doubt there is any government on Earth who would adopt cryptocurrency as their official currency, for the simple reason it's too hard to manipulate by printing as much as they want at little cost. It's a completely ridiculous plot.

Lol... I dunno, that sounds a bit weird. I think if Nakamoto is shortened to Naka or Moto that would be a good option.

Bip is not acceptable because BIP is already used in the Bitcoin community to mean "Bitcoin Improvement Proposal".

Bit is not acceptable because 0.0001 has nothing to do with a bit or an eighth of anything.

Nakamoto is not acceptable because it is simply too long and has too many syllables (see Kazimir's post).

Finney is therefore the only reasonable choice but I have no idea what it means and it's currently the least popular option.

Ok, I have removed the extra bounty concerning the re-mining of lost coins, but instead of adding the funds to the main bounty I have created another bonus bounty which requires the implementation of a "Quantum-Safe Signature Scheme". That is something I meant to include from the very beginning because I feel it's important to build quantum-resistance into the system as early as possible.

It would be impossible for your account to go into the negative range. Every block which is added onto the blockchain cannot contain any transactions which make an account go negative. The wiki page about 0-confirmation transactions covers your scenario.

I think they actually meant dollars. In the latest episode they find another "bitcoin stick" and they talk about the value of the bitcoins in terms of dollars. It's possible they included another scene about bitcoin in the latest episode in order to clear that up.

Yeah I was thinking about removing that bounty anyway because there are some downfalls with coin re-mining I want to keep this implementation as close to bitcoin as possible.

It looks like he deleted his post or I'm going crazy. Here's the link: Weaknesses and attack vectors

Check your personal messages.

That's not an issue, that is what the proof chain is for. The only way to overcome the security provided by the proof chain is a secret chain attack (check the link supplied by CasualSam).

It is designed in such a way that no one is required to store anything except the mini-blockchain, and it wouldn't particularly matter if that's what everybody did (clients can however store as much of the mini-blockchain as they desire). It would only matter during an event such as a secret chain attack, but even then it's not entirely necessary to prevent the attack. Read more about the proof chain and the secret chain attack.

Good to hear, but don't give up on your idea so quickly, it has potential imo.

I think someone requested that feature earlier in this thread but I had forgotten about it. It means that the buyer can pay what ever they want (anything above 0 BTC or a set minimum). I might also include such a feature before I release v1.0.0.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. Why would a client need to request account balances from other clients? I assume you are talking about a situation where the node has no ledger information to look at? Wouldn't the same thing apply to bitcoin if one client was to ask another client for the balance of the address? Why would it have any reason to trust the other client?

This could actually be a problem imo. The hash tree design will allow nodes to acquire small portions of the account tree and validate that portion without requiring the full account tree. However in your proposed structure it would require all the account hashes before it could validate them against the master hash.

EDIT: removed unnecessary explanation.

CasualSam, that's a very interesting idea... using the check-in/check-out process you describe seems to be a very clever way of removing the need for a hash tree and at the same time it still allows modification of separate accounts without requiring the client to re-process the master hash from every single account hash. It seems like it would be a bit less secure than a hash tree design but putting the number of accounts in the block headers like you suggest seems like a decent way to recover some of that lost security.

I like your way of thinking.

It would be possible but highly unlikely. I'm guessing it would be like trying to find a private key which already holds some BTC. I'm not really sure though, it will depend on the design of the account tree.

Planned updates before v1.0.0 is released:

- automated install script
- update to mysqli
- possible postgresql support
- multi-language support
- support mBTC and other price formats

Ok, I have released v0.9.7 of BitShop. It adds support for Tor users and other clients with rapidly changing IP addresses. Unfortunatley it still requires javascript to be enabled because it's just so deeply integrated with the way the payment gateway works. In order to add support for those without javascript I would need to completely recode much of the payment gateway and I really don't want to do that.

Version 0.9.7 also allows buyers to recover incomplete transactions in the case where they have accidentally closed the window or something similar. If they come back to the shop website after such an error they will get an option to continue with the transaction. And the last new feature it contains is the ability to change the price type (avg, close, high, low, etc) from within the main configuration file.