I agree with this sentiment overall.  However, please note that the Litecoin and Peercoin/Primecoin core devs are in fact quite skilled*.  All of them are far better developers than I am, and I'm not a bad developer.  Also, at least one of the Litecoin devs participates actively in Bitcoin development (Warren Togami, who is also the founder of Fedora and creator of Spamassassin).

*There may be other skilled alt coin devs, these are just the ones I'm familiar with.

You may be affected by transaction malleability, which can result in bitcoin-qt misreporting balances.  See here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xm49o/due_to_active_malleable_transaction_relayers_it/

There's a patch on that page, but this issue is also addressed (I believe) in the latest bitcoin-qt release candidate:

https://bitcoin.org/bin/0.9.0/test/README.txt

So you may need to upgrade to 0.9.0-rc2 to address the issue.  I'm not 100% this is what you're experiencing, but it sounds like it might be.  I did check on blockexplorer, and the balance there matches blockchain.info.  So you likely still have those Bitcoins, just your client is misreporting the balance.

This is likely what you're experiencing.  Statement: https://blog.blockchain.com/2014/03/05/occasional-unconfirmed-transactions-are-being-addressed/

It appears to have been resolved.  If not, e-mail the e-mail on that support blog or post your transaction id here.

Actually, in this case it probably had nothing to do with Bitcoin directly, but rather with blockchain.info's implementation.  Blockchain.info has been having some difficulties with transactions getting "stuck" the past few weeks.  They've issued a statement about it:

https://blog.blockchain.com/2014/03/05/occasional-unconfirmed-transactions-are-being-addressed/

It appears it has been resolved, at least according to the update they published to that statement.  But the point is, this appears to have been a blockchain.info problem, not a Bitcoin issue.

If you post the transaction id, I'm sure someone will help you.  I'll check back here later today to see if you've posted it.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but if not, you should have a look at this:https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.0  The pool that enabled the double spend (GHash.IO) basically even concedes that someone at their organization was involved in their official response. 

So a pool has now accepted double spends with little to no consequences: https://blockchain.info/pools

If you were being sarcastic, then you probably already know all about this.

Just FYI, when you say "ability to multiply...buy...sell", you appear to be requesting a trading platform, not a simple ticker.  Building a full multi-exchange client with the capacity to perform secure transactions is *much* more difficult than building a simple ticker.  A ticker is easy -- a multi-exchange trading platform...not so much.

What did that say before he removed it?  I'm intensely curious.

Bitcoin in China is over.  I think most of us have already baked this into our price.

What makes you think that FinCEN is going to consider Bitcoin ATMs to be exempt from AML?  Believe me, they won't.  That's why it's been so hard to get them going.

But I agree that cash businesses also must comply with AML if they want to stay out of jail, BUT cash businesses don't have to put up with banks cutting them off at every turn.  And if we develop our own clearing houses....

Cool.  Is your JUSHANG OOLONG the traditional oolong tea that you get at Chinese restaurants?  And it's got caffeine, right? (I *want* the caffeine)

Thanks

I agree, but if you think it's bad here, you should see how bad it has gotten the past 2 days in /r/Bitcoin , which was already suffering from a drop in quality as more get-rich-quick types flooded the reddit.  But the past 2 days it's really gotten unbearable.

Go any more Bitcoin insights?

Yes, my ultimate goal is to get it where people can easily run *both* the online version and offline version locally, with no need to host the online version.  It's a little tricky because of the problems that exist making request to third-party websites from a locally-running javascript program.  Really, this is the only secure way to do it.  SSL for the online portion is nice but still requires the user trust the person serving the site.  Running both portions locally, on my online and offline computers, is the only way I'd consider using this project for a significant offline transaction.

Anyway, this third-party request issue is partially solveable using CORS headers, and blockchain.info has recently, and very kindly, implemented CORS headers for this type of use case.  Anyway, I worked on it some more last night but ran into some very serious issues with AngularJS (the JS framework I used) HTTP client implementation and CORS compatibility, so I've ended up using Jquery to call blockchain for unspent outputs and to push the signed transaction (which works fine).  Anyway, I still want to do some more work before I announce it ready, and although I won't get to anything tonight, I should be able to finish up this weekend.

Thanks for your understanding and sorry for the inconvenience to anyone who has been waiting on this (i.e., xDan).  I'll be sure to check this thread on a regular basis now.

I'll post an announcement here tonight or tomorrow when it's ready for beta testing.

EDIT: Had to work late last night, hopefully will get to it today.

After thinking about it some more, may I please ask everyone to please hold off on using any version of this?  I didn't realize anyone was still interested in it until a few hours ago.  However, it's got some bugs I want to iron out before anyone uses it.  I originally said to use my hosted version at https://bitcoin-secured.com since it was better than using an unencrypted version of the online part, but after thinking about it, I'd prefer people hold off on using it at all until after I do some additional testing tonight, when I'll have time to do so (can't shirk my work duties anymore right now).  You are of course free to do anything you want with the code, since it's MIT licensed, but I'd prefer people hold off until I can do some additional testing.

I'll make an announcement here when it's ready for beta use.

Python is technically not a dependency.  It's just what I used to serve it locally.  It's all static HTML, JS, and CSS, so you can run it from wherever you usually run such scripts.

Can you hold off for a day?  Or else update it tomorrow?  I'll be making some significant changes tonight, like better error handling, etc.

And again, I'll note that I have an SSL-encrypted version at https://bitcoin-secured.com that includes signed MD5 hashes of the offline code for download.

Thanks for the offer!  The source is on github (I'm esbullington on github, the link is somewhere above), so please feel free to do so, but I do have it on https://bitcoin-secured.com which is SSL.  It's just down for a few minutes while I'm updating it.  So I'll have it back on an SSL-enabled site real soon.

Users who use the online portion of bitcoin-secured hosted by a third-party should make sure that

1)  It's SSL-encryped
2)  It's someone you trust

The best way to run the online portion is locally, simply by going to the `bitcoin-secured/online` directory and then running: python -m SimpleHTTPServer

The site will then be available at localhost:8000

Since blockchain.info is now using CORS, this should work, but I've not yet tested it (working as fast as I can to do so).

PS: Please note that I have signed MD5 hashes of the offline code that can be downloaded at: https://bitcoin-secured.com/#/download

Great, thanks so much!

Good news.  blockchain.info now supports CORS so I can connect directly to them while I'm finalizing my own local database of unspent ouputs for bitcoin-secured.  I'll try to push the new version out tonight.  Right now, the script relies on Yahoo to relay the request, which means that blockchain.info's API request limit is quickly reached if a lot of people use it.  This will solve that problem.

NOTICE: bitcoin-secured will be offline shortly will I update it to supports blockchain.info's CORS.  While it's down, please be aware that if you use a non-SSL link for the online version of this software, it's very vulnerable to someone swapping out your Bitcoin address for another.  Either use https://bitcoin-secured.com when it's back up or run it locally (on localhost).  Or wait for someone else to host it on an SSL-enabled URL.