The problem is building an economy with lots of different chains. It is hard enough for general adoption and agreement on the value of a coin with just one chain and kind of coin. If there are a hundred chains and different people all have a hundred different kinds of virtual coins, how do you know what your coins are worth? It makes the world of exchanges very complicated.

If there is a global economic collapse I think that people will value physical commodities over virtual ones. It is unclear if people will use virtual commodities to remotely exchange physical ones in times of crisis.

Wiring money would probably be faster, but a lot more expensive.

Depends. Did you have a legal contract with mybitcoin (or anyone for that matter) that said if you deposit the coins you would get them back? Or... Did you just send your coins to an unknown party and hope that they would be nice and reciprocate by returning your coins? If you don't have a legal contract, perhaps you just gifted your coins away.

If you are looking for legal remedy, you have to specify what laws or contracts were broken. I don't see any laws or contracts broken.

I realize that this might not be the moral answer, but it is probably the legal answer. I am not a lawyer so take it for what it is.

Local timezones would be nice. Displaying the current time in UTC on the block statistics page wouldn't be as nice, but it would be easy... (and helpful)

Currently seeing idles on us.btcguild.com. Not seeing idles on useast.btcguild.com. In case it is a DNS caching issue I currently see US as 69.42.216.173 and USEAST as 69.233.243.147

So it sounds like you are collapsing the multiple names (uswest, useast, uscentral) down to a single address with multiple servers behind it. If this is the case, please post the DNS name of this "one IP" as soon as possible so that we can get our miners reconfigured. (And point that DNS somewhere useful in the meantime... )

Thanks for the hard work.

It depends on what you mean by "reliably", but if you mean that the merchant has 100% confidence that they will get their money, the answer is no. The protocol just doesn't work that way.

If this is a cute way of publishing your public address as a way to receive BTC then it is cute, maybe even classy.

If it is supposed to be a way to send money, then it is useless (or at least insecure). If the private key is printed on it (as a set of numbers or QR code or whatever) then all I have to do to steal the BTC is look at it, maybe even from a distance. I can use a camera with a telephoto lens and take a picture of you holding your card. As soon as I do this I can spend your BTC.

If you give me one of these as payments for something, I have to run the transaction then and there to make sure the BTC hasn't already been spent. It is not a way to perform a BTC transaction offline. It is not a way to securely hold BTC.

I suppose you can take the private card and keep it out of sight (literally), but why put it on a wallet size card if you aren't going to carry it around?

Encrypting the wallet will help, but it doesn't solve the problem. When the BitCoin client is running, it will have decrypted your private keys and they will likely be in the memory of your machine. If you have a virus on your machine, that virus can access memory and get your private keys. Even if the devs of BitCoin work real hard and keep your keys encrypted when in memory, at some point they have be decrypted so they can be used. They may only be in memory or machine registers for a few milliseconds, but if you have a smart enough virus, your keys (and your BTC) will be compromised.

Encryption will help when the Bitcoin client is not running and it will protect you against an attack against your backups or other offline copies of your data.

It is essential for security (and the safekeeping of your BTC) that you keep your machine virus and malware free. If you can get to your money on your machine, so can a virus.

There is lots of good advice out there on how to keep your machine virus free, but the basics are to keep your machine patched, use antivirus, and never, ever, under any circumstances, access the Internet when you are logged in with administrative, root, or any other kind of elevated privileges.

In the Windows world turn on auto updates and let them run every day. Use a current, supported version of windows (that means Windows 7, not XP.) The anti-virus software the Microsoft gives out for free is solid - there is no excuse to not have anti-virus protection. Make sure your login account is not an "administrator". Only log in as an administrator when you want to install software.

In the Linux world, make sure you apply security packages from your distribution frequently. Don't run as root.

I don't post this to taunt or scold the OP, just to provide advice to prevent it happening to others.

They would have to publish their wallet addresses (and then anyone can see how much is in the wallets), and then they could send small transaction amounts to a trusted party from each wallet to prove they had control of the wallets.

Feature Request: in addition to affinity, how about setting process priority? I like to have my miners running at low cpu priority, that way they can they can chug at their fastest speed with -f 1, but I can still use my computer. Currently I have to manually adjust process priority whenever I start a miner, it would be great if guiminer could just set it when it creates the process.

Status tool works for me using my newly reset password. It contains my login history, transaction history, and balances. All information is correct.

I am now able to log into MtGox and see my current balances, login history,  and transaction history. (The claim status site, not the regular site.) My balances are correct. (They are low, but correct.)

Was just notified that my account verification was accepted.

So has anyone had their account "verified" by MtGox?

I would feel better if MtGox would just say that we have 60k accounts, only 15k of those accounts were active at the time of the crash, 5k of those accounts have started the verification process and we have actually verified 1,245 of the accounts. Verification is going much slower than we expected, we will bring the exchange back on line when we verify 2,000 accounts. We will post the updated stats of how many accounts are verified once a day.

If we had a message such as this, I would be content to wait a bit, but until I hear that someone, anyone, has been notified that their account has been verified, I will be suspicious that none ever will be and that the exchange will never open again.

This would of course suck, and since this is unregulated and there are no legal agreements between users of MtGox and MtGox, it will be too bad, so sad, but at least if it fails, we can move on. I would just like to know if it is going to fail or if there is any real reason for hope.

Edit: 6/24/2011 06:23 I have been notified that my account has been verified. Good news!

Also interesting is how the number of traders is exploding. I started this about 2 weeks ago and I am at position 28k in the 60k list. Meaning that the number of traders has more then doubled in the last few weeks.

Why? This how markets work. Buyers and Sellers are matched together. Someone was willing to buy at lot of BTC at pennies and someone else was willing to sell. BTC (like any other commodity) really doesn't have an intrinsic value, it is valued at what people say it is valued at. Since BTC is a new commodity and there are not a lot of people trading in it, the market (all the buyers and sellers) haven't really figured out what it is worth.

This is currently the wild west. The opportunities for reward are great, the risks are extreme. Deal with it. Have fun!

Here in Portland as well. If I am in town I would be happy to join a meet up.

Thanks guys.