I've been watching the BitCoin community -- and this forum -- closely for several months.

I'm a software developer. Myself and 2 partners run a consultancy. We've done a lot of general work but our speciality -- and what we bill as much as $200/hr to do -- is building highly scalable tracking systems for the advertising and affiliate marketing industries. We build systems that can track 100 billion impressions a month with the reliability you need when people are spending 6 and 7 figures on advertising campaigns. (Though nobody we've ever worked for bills on impressions -- nearly everything is billed on Conversions or Sales or Clicks -- everybody wants accurate stats down to the impression).

We've also worked recently for a smaller High Frequency Trading firm. And we've done a fair bit of PCI Compliance (credit card acceptance compliance) in the last year because those changing rules made that a lucrative market.

In other words, we're not weekend hackers.

I personally have taken an interest in BitCoin because I see it as an interesting technology and perhaps the first bit of people-powered-economics since bartering gave way to gov't issued currency.

Here's why I'm posting today:

I've kicked around the idea of building another trading platform and website. We have a lot of custom code that we own the rights to that we reuse from project to project and we're all quite good at what we do. And we look at the general state of BitCoin trading platforms (like MtGox) and we see a very underdeveloped system. We see a community flying by the seat of their pants -- which is quite understandable. What we go back and forth on is if we see a real opportunity to provide a useful service and hit at least a break-even point on our investment.

The first thing we would build would be a very simple trading platform (similar the API's that the other sites are currently using). This would be its own system, a first-class project in its own right. It would perhaps have its own simple readonly website that publishes a "ticker" of activity on the platform.

Then we'd build a site with functionality similar to TradeHill, MtGox, etc, etc, that would merely be granted the first API key on the trading platform.

The fact is we've got a number of home-brewed tools that help us produce reliable, secure software. And that seems to be a novel idea in the world of slapped-together "weekend projects" the existing sites seem to be.

If you're interested in the technology, among other things, we've got a customized version of Tsung we use to stress test systems, and we'd be able to build a blazingly fast trading platform. We use Python for most our web development but we also commonly use Java for things like stats aggregation daemons. We use either Percona MySQL or PG SQL. We have a fantastic python static analysis tool that helps us find security flaws in our code, as well as a continuous integration and security-flaw framework we built on Selenium that hits with a test suite after every deploy. And of course we practice TDD on all core systems and use a CI server to run all our PyUnit (or PHPUnit or JUnit) tests on each SVN commit and we always know who broke the build.

SO my question is to anybody who is still reading: 

Is there a receptive market to this concept? Should we invest that much time in the bitcoin community? Are we going to get a frigid response from people who prefer their current favorite trading sites?

And FWIW, we wouldn't wish to put them out of business. Ideally, though, all those sites would be sharing a central trading platform so people can Sell on siteA to buyers on siteB and siteC. And the platform itself would earn a share of the commision that's large enough to support profitable operation but small enough to leave the trading site operators a comfortable profit margin.

However to let that happen we'd have to have a rigid process of granting API keys because we'd have business each day that would rely on the integrity of each trading site to settle.  That is, if you sell $100/worth of bitcoin on SiteA to somebody that buys on SiteB, siteA will "credit" your account $100 in their system and SiteB will deduct $100 from the buyer in THEIR system and at some point throughout the day or perhaps in batch at the end of the day, actual cash will need to move from SiteB to SiteA.  Of course, ideally, the actual sum changing hands will be a fraction of total trades that day -- that is, if there's a transaction later in the day where somebody on SiteB sells $90 to somebody on SiteA, then at he end of the day only $10 needs to be settled between the two sites. And that settlement, of course, would also use the trading platform in some way.

Consider this a first, open proposal.

Thoughts? Comments? Criticism?