The only problem is that the only wired connection is on the other side of the house from my room and my parents are using it for their computer.

PHP can do ANYTHING!

Everybody, trust me,

Don't they have order confirmation screen after order submit?

Consider yourself lucky you weren't typing a large catch order. Imagine someone wanting to type "Buy 8000 BTC if price falls to 8" and actually inputting "Sell 8000 BTC limit 8".

First file doesn't actually guarantee success when the use of the non-filer GREATLY exceeds the use of the filer. The purpose of trademarks is to prevent customer confusion, and courts frequently go by that, rather than technicality. A first-file rule basically covers what happens if two same-sized entities had the dispute -- it's either first file, or first use.

It's a whole other matter when, to 99% of people, "bitcoin" has a specific meaning, and this guy is claiming, "Oh, but my 1% of customers are the ones who are right." The purpose of a trademark is so that you can't walk into, say, a car dealership, ask about an Impala, and be sold something made by Volvo instead of Chevy. (And if I just fucked up the brand reference, pardon -- I know little about cars, I can't actually drive because of a vision defect.)

He may have filed first, but thousands of people were using the term already. Even if he was first, thousands of people compared to him and one fictitious client ...

At some point I donated 1 BTC to someone working on this kind of project, though I don't remember who.  In any case, I'm willing to donate more, probably smaller amount this time, but still.

Yep you're right. Even if the client encrypted the wallet when not in use it eventually has to decrypt it when you want to spend from it. AT that moment it is vulnerable to key logger attack and to any nasty viruses that could are residing in memory (waiting for the opportunity to strike). Someone on a different thread (forget which one) suggested that the client implement a unix style permissions system. Maybe also running the client in it's own chroot (something equivalent in windows) would be a good idea. But in the end it's still quite hard to avoid all avenues of attack. My point is that still the more security measures you can implement the lower the odds that some unclever hacker is easily able to steal your coins.

MySQL. Jeez, isn't that really the end of the discussion? What else did they use, FrontPage?

Any other competent technical folks want to get together and discuss putting an exchange together? Not too impressed with the options we have right now.

You can only really use several servers for the website itself. The actual order matching need to be done on a single processor detached from the front end.

I've no idea how MTGox is run, but it's more than likely that adding more servers is not a trivial task due to the inherriant single nature task of order matching.... particularly if they've done some terrible job of integrating the order entry code (php most likely) with the order matching code (more php... lets hope not....).

That is of course assuming that the order matching is being done properly. As other people have commented about other exchanges, there are some wildly bizzare (and unfair / darn right illegal) order matching algorithms being used, so it might be in the case for MTGox that they could just add extra servers and hope that no two buys hit the same sell (or vice versa).