50k coins bought at around 45 is going to make one hell of a down-side resistance once all this is over and ppl discover that just a few txns got unwound...

If BTC has scaling issues -- that is, if it starts needing a "large" (whatever that means) transaction fee and therefore has a minimum economically reasonable transfer size -- then these insignificantly different forks will get some market.

But a rewrite "fork" that includes multi-currency support (ppl can create "backed" coins on the same blockchain -- colored coins inherent in the protocol), sub-chains with shorter/longer confirm times that are periodically merged back into the main chain and deleted (massively reducing blockchain bloat), double spend detection, and some kind of txout bit-dust solution will get a lot of support as a natural successor to bitcoin.

But maybe he did receive it... that's the problem with no tracking to the destination.  We'll never know.  But the existing tracking proves that Coinabul (who I do not know and have never used BTW) sent him something and that it left the country.

I sell OSHW electronics and the low average price (1-2 BTC) makes it impossible to use a service like UPS or Fed-ex with door-to-door international tracking.  I tell my customers that they are responsible for losses once the item leaves my country, and offer door-to-door tracking which nobody ever chooses b/c it costs 1-2BTC itself.

Now offering and purchasing the insurance really confuses matters.  Was it clear that this insurance offering was a pass through to a 3rd party insurance provider?  Was there a whole legal document detailing the insurance policy that the buyer could have read?  If so, IMHO Coinabul can pass the buck of responsibility to that insurance provider (by supplying the name and claim number to the purchaser for follow up), or point to the legal document.

But the real morale to this story is don't ship something worth 80BTC without full tracking.  Its too damaging to your business when the customs officer keeps the goods or the customer claims it was not received.

You doing 600 sequential write TPS to the same table?  Because Gox can't be issuing simultaneous txns -- all trades must happen right against the highest bid and lowest ask.   If so, man... something is wrong with my database and right with yours!

It can't be the matching... that's just popping the top element off a sorted list in RAM.  Lock, pop, unlock.  The DB write has the same exclusivity (lock) requirements but the op takes a LOT longer...

Actually I suppose they wouldn't have to do it that way; all bids and asks could be in RAM only and just be lost in the unlikely event of a crash (no one would lose $).  But based on the performance I think they are not...

Edit:  Anyway speculation abt this is fun but probably fruitless, Gox is making so much $ right now they aren't going to risk changing anything right now and unfortunately it doesn't seem like the market share will change b/c Gox has "shown" that they can handle holding onto the $ if not the txn speed.  We need a trusted player like bitinstant to compete...

Its just an informed guess on my part derived from writing the Gox stream to a RDBMS.  When you say "producing 600 unique..." it sounds like you are telling me about reads.  These can be cached, etc and so respond much faster... I can also run complex queries rapidly across the Gox data I've written to my RDBMS.

But transactional writes cannot be cached -- by the nature of a transaction they need to be written to persistent backing storage before they are acked.  And of course its very important to commit a trade as a transaction so there is no chance that person A spends his $ or BTC but person B does not receive it.  So essentially the DB performance is chained to the latency speed of the disk -- the time to "seek" and write a few bytes.  But because the time to seek and write a few bytes is not much > then the time to seek and write 10k bytes, if the application chunks multiple operations into a single txn you get massive speedup.  So even with writes its not the RDBMS, but HOW it is used.

Anyway, this is just a theory... but just watch Gox unwind a big market buy, ticking through 100's of .1 btc asks at a human readable speed and it becomes pretty obvious that each trade is handled individually.  This causes all kinds of problem with efficient price discovery, like "fake" walls.  Basically, it looks to me like a bot can use a bunch of .00X btc asks to slow down a big buy and use the time to take down the wall before the buy ticks up to it.

barbstap, you are the perfect candidate to lose $ trading b/c you self-admit to not having much of a clue.  My advice: Sell what you can't afford to lose now, but sell as little as possible.  Forget about the rest, don't pay any attention to the market b/c you seem unable to handle the stress of the volatility.  Check back 5 years from now; your coins will be worth either 0 or a LOT! 

Consider your BTC investment a long term diversification -- currently all of your worth is likely denominated in your local govt currency or strongly tied to it (land inside your country for instance).  If you own a worldwide currency like BTC, that is no longer true.

Changing the physical technology gets you a bit of an improvement, but its nothing like chunking 100 or even 1000 trades in a single database commit.  And askgar you're right non-relational databases are much better suited.  But you are STILL ultimately stuck with a transactional write to geographically redundant physical media.  Even with SSDs this is orders of magnitude slower then every other part of the trade matching engine.  And so you are back to chunking multiple trades in a single commit.

Gox's trade matching engine is fundamentally broken.  Anyone who has worked with databases under real load knows that as load rises you need to chunk multiple operations in a single transaction since a transaction commit involves a disk seek and write (10ms) and a network operation (to replicate the transaction to the backup(s)).  But Gox persists in matching executing and committing every single tiny btc txn independently (or so it looks from the feed).  

They need to either solve this scalability issue by combining multiple DB operations in a single transaction OR (potentially as a stopgap) change their fee structure to discourage sub-dollar transactions.  Especially since it seems like these bids are being used to slow down and obstruct normal market price discovery.  In other words, if you put 10000 .00001 BTC bids at 44 (say) and it takes Gox about 1/10th of a second to process a sale, you've managed to put a 1000 second time wall between 44.1 and 43.9.

you read The Windup Girl?

Yes, I think that ultimately what will constrain the price is this issue.  Ppl will have to include high txn fees to get their block included.  This will finally open a niche for an alt-coin that specializes in small payments.  But an alt-coin that actually solves these issues (and throws in new features like additional securities -- aka colored coins) rather then just forking the bitcoin source base and tweaking some parameters is what is going to succeed.  Probably it will not replace bitcoin -- btc will be used like gold for large txns.

This has been covered SOOO many times.  Bitcoin was in fact designed as the perfect money
[/quote]
same with bitcoin.
bitcoin cannot be counterfeited, but gold counterfeiters can fool many with tungsten
Actually a big strike could inflate gold, or advancing technologies that allow mining where previously it was impossible.
But bitcoin really will not inflate above 21m coins
Your bitcoins are not ON your computer.  The key to access them is.  So destroying your computer will not have an effect on bitcoin if you have make proper backups.  But I think you are right, bitcoins are a little weaker in this regard in theory.  good luck trying to recover your gold out of the molten slag you safe deposit box became after a fire at the bank though!

Technically no maintenance or electricity or the internet is needed to hold the coins.  It is only needed to SPEND your coins.
But I think most agree that gold (or actually silver, because gold is worth too much) is the better post-apocalyptic currency.

same with bitcoin
Liquid: bitcoin is much easier to spend then gold
portable: bitcoin is more portable and it much harder to steal when properly secured
divisible: Actually gold hits practical limits on divisibility -- a .25 USD coin would be incredibly small and easy to lose
consistent: yes
private: yes, to both but only if proper measures are taken.  if i buy an oz of gold with my credit card, its pretty easy to figure out that I own it.
Bitcoin was designed to be a perfect currency for the global internet economy.

Come on!  There hasn't been a rocket pic posted for at least a week!

Kind of makes you think that there may be a LOT of USD sitting on Gox off the bid mountain.

already back to 25!  Panic sellers are crying... manipulators are in shock :-)

Sure it will pull back.  No trajectory is smooth.  But the question you need to ask yourself is will it pull back to 35 from a high of 50, or to 15 from 25?

I've been using campBX for 8 months now with no issue.  But they do not have a large revenue business like mt gox so I think you'll just need to be understanding about delays in customer support. 

Just a guess: as a new user, they are probably sitting on the cash to make sure the check isn't a forgery.  Did you validate your account?  Remember, once they send you your bitcoins the $ is gone and if the check is forged, they get hit with the clawback.

Still in a market like the last 2 weeks, it would be nice if they let you trade the bitcoins but didn't let you take them out of their system (until the check is verified)...

If you buy a 10k wall at X and then it only takes you an additional 1k BTC to buy it up to X+.50 (say) then you already have significant paper profits since your weighted average purchase price is just a bit above X.  Of course, you are counting on other buyers to fill in behind your lead but that seems to be happening pretty consistently for months.

I fully intend to pay for something with a few "mBTC cents" (spoken millibit-cents) some day.  

And just to throw a total monkey wrench in the works:  I propose we reassign BTC someday to be worth either 1 mBTC or 1 uBTC once the currency seems to stabilize.  

Cause nobody wants to own a thousandth or millionth of something.  That would be like constant exposure to the Total Perspective Vortex.

It would be unfortunate to make brainwallets inconvenient to generate because they won't hold coins securely for decades when some people may desperately need them for just a few hours or days during periods of travel or social unrest...

Will one of you guys with deep pockets PLEASE just buy it up to 20 tonight so I can get some freakin' work done tomorrow!!!!  Or dump for all I care!  Just do SOMETHING!!!