Destructive people like Vadroiy, Micon, Mage, etc must be really proud about the level of distrust they have brought to this community.
A huge lender (pirate) publicly states that he will pay back everything within a few days, and everyone and his mother start panic selling. A lender is supposed to pay back, so paying back should actually be a good thing. But people like the one mentioned above the above have already planted that much distrust, that every move is interpreted as a bad sign.
Now every community has to deal with destructive and vandalizing members, however, I think that the Bitcoin community spectacularly fails in this regard. Distrust, vandalism, blaming, insults - all those things reign freely in this very forum.

Someone mentioned that there is a Bryan Micon poker system.
So I googled and clicked on www.micon secrets.com  (remove the space)
As soon as it opened, his website tried to install some backdoor (HTML/Rce.Gen3) on my system.
Luckily for me, aviria catched it. Avira description about the backdoor: http://www.avira.com/en/support-threats-description/tid/7512/tlang/en
I confronted Micon with this and, of course, he just claims that it is not his site.
Maybe I am wrong but I don't think that there are that many Bryan Micons out there that try to sell some poker system.

During the recent MtGox glitch an interesting observation could be made:
The buyers buy at any price, it is the sellers that are trying to bring the price down.
As all the low asks vanished, one would have expected that there is no more buying, because of the high price. But instead the buying continued regardless of price. Later the price was only brought down by sellers making huge dumps instead of cautious selling.
So the question that arises is what is the incentive for sellers to sell at some lower price?
Why is the Bitcoin world inverse to the real one, where buyers try to keep the prices low and sellers try to keep them high?

I tried to figure out how the win calculation is done on BTCDice.

Example:
http://btcdice.com/details.html?q=8183

Processed Time: 2012-07-20 09:54:27
Processed Time: 2012-07-20 09:52:03
Key Date: 7202012
Bet: lessthan 48000
Bet TX: c7bd37655431824053e4aab796feb0e1b72ea1786bd1604ad091c0a7c33ca985
Payment TX: 392592eeade96445887f4c7382bf5466fbc6ad8c97ef724f5fdcbb28f57bdca9
Paid to Address: 15pgcDLLJBzQLTjy2F6oo7iaymRnrFv5if
Payment TX Status: CONFIRMED
Bet Amount: 1.00000000
Outcome: WIN
Payment: 1.31050550
Lucky Number: 25067

less than 48000   1BTCDiceLs79syendE1DM1XCaHcKkzBNnP      73.2422%   1.333x   1.650%   98.35%   0.0100   100.0000   133.0000

The calculation works this way:
result = 1.0 BTC * 1.3333 * 0.9835 - 0.0005 BTC

Bitcoin is really a hackers dream.

Last year, some hacker managed to steal huge funds from mybitcoin.com. How got blamed? The operator of mybitcoin.com. No one cared about the actual hacker.
This year, a hacker stole 45k from Bitcoinica. Everyone blamed the operators. The owners replaced the funds. No one cared about the actual hacker.
Now recently more funds where stolen from Bitcoinica. MtGox even knows who the hacker is, but "of course" cannot share this information. So same thing as every time, no one cares about the actual hacker. Everyone blames the operators and tries to lynch them.

Conclusion: In the Bitcoin world it is OK to steal, the blame will always be on the victim. A hacker can even use his real name and real address, and still no one cares. Blame and lawsuits are always on the victims...

Yesterday I withdrew some bitcoins from tradehill. I was under the impression that this is a fully automated process, hence it should take less than 2 hours. However, I still have not received my coins. That means this process either was never or is no longer fully automated. I doubt that is is the former, so I ask myself how to interpret this change to manual at tradehill?
Does anyone else have the same issues?

LOL it's an open source project - there are no 'leaders' as you describe them.
No one can force anyone to do anything.

You must be new here. Never heard of the cult-of-solidcoin?

There are a few very outspoken anti bitcoin members in this very forum. But spending at least 15 hours a day in this forum bad-mouthing something they apparently hate, one has to ask what is their real aim in being here. So it would be great if we could have more data about those people.
This leads me to asking, does anyone know if as a result this last hack some user data of this forum is already downloadable somewhere?
I guess seeing some email and/or IP addresses could probably reveal their real mission. I mean, just image we would a bunch of paypal addresses.

I think we can all agree that coinhunter is acting like a dick. We most probably can agree the the changes he made was without knowledge of what the code actually does. Basically he delivered some crap product. Then when someone tells him about some bug/issue he simple ignores it or even blame the one that discovered it being a terrorist. So he is probably the worse guy leading any software development.

Yet, all that said, it seems he does have a lot of followers. We knew some of them before the whole solidcoin saga. So we can say that at least some of them are (or better have been) rational and intelligent people, and we can guess that those are not (all) sock puppets of coinhunter. So what does make rational and intelligent people into some fundamentally extremist. Well, we have seen this behavior in religion and to some lesser extent in politics. It always needs some charismatic, or at least very weird, leader. Look at Scientology/Ron L. Hubbard or Nazism/Hitler or Davidians/Koresh as examples.

Now look at apparently intelligent people, like viperjbm, BitcoinPorn, FlipPro, to just name a few. They did become true followers of coinhunter and are now apparently completely submerged in coinhunters world. So it seems coinhunter can cast a spell over people. And as we all know he doesn't do this with his work. I can only conclude that apparently he has some talent to be a leader - he is a natural born leader.

To cut a long story short, I think he wastes his talent by pretending to be a developer. I mean, he delivered only junk and despite this still got all those people as his followers. So I think he should drop his staged development, and concentrate on his role as a leader. If he really wants he could be the next Jobs/Hitler/Lenin/Hubbard/whatever-he-likes.

Bruce,

I and several thousand other people, forum members or not, were very exited and looking forward to this bitcoin conference. Mind you, bitcoin is the internet currency, so the "whole" internet was watching, or actually, not watching, because there was no live feed, no blog posts, no press release, no pictures, nothing.

I don't understand how you can make a bitcoin conference and lock out the whole world. Yes, I heard some lame excuses about a broken laptop, and expensive internet connections. This wouldn't even be an issue in some third world country, so I doubt that this could be an issue in the middle of NYC.

In hindsight this conference looks more like a secret meetup of some secret society. The only thing that was leaked out of the conference is that there will be a few more conferences in the future. Whoever will run this conferences, please don't be selfish - communicate about it, let the world know what is happening while it is happening. Use this past conference outside communication as an example how it should not be done.

If you would have done the publicity that such a conference does deserve, I am sure the exchange rate would have risen by at least 2 or 3 dollars, instead of fallen by almost 1 dollar. Now how to you explain your family and friends that you have just wasted this big opportunity to solidify their bitcoin wealth by 25%. Or do you no longer care, after the mybitcoin debacle? Do you think that after loosing 49% one doesn't want to gain some 25%?

I think it is also a lost opportunity for OnlyOneTV. In the short period of time when there was some sort of live feed, there were more than thousand viewers. Numbers that you never had before. I can only imagine how much more thousand viewers only got the "off air" message, and remember your business now as OnlyOffAirTV. Bit lost opportunity, better don't tell your sponsors about this.

BTW, to make this clear. This is no bashing on you, Bruce. I like and watch your "daily" shows, and as a long time viewer I know that you are exaggerate sometimes, like the fact that you call this a daily show, while in fact there can be a full week between shows. Same thing was you stating that some 15 media outlets will be there, I guessed that this will be not that much, but probably a few. Actually almost no one knows the truth, because there is no information about it.
In fact, you did with your bitcoin conference, what you said is the worst thing to do, stopping all public communication, going incommunicado. Sorry to say this, but this behavior reminds me of some guy named Tom Williams.

Someone claimed that some parts where recorded, so here is hope that you make at least this recording available. I and, I am sure, a few thousand other people would really like to watch this. But to quote you: a day in the bitcoin world is like a week, a week is like a month. So according to you, those recording are already some weeks late

Best regards,
aq

Is there some bitcoin related bounty website out there? I mean a site where I can fund proposals by sending bitcoins.
If there is none, would anyone care to set up such a website?

Proposals where I would vote with my bitcoins:

1) Enable wallet encryption in the official client. It is in the code for some time, but I think it will not show up in some official client for some more ages using lame excuses.

2) Make bitcoin-qt the official client. From a users perspective it is way ahead of the current official bitcoin client.

3) Register a bitcoin: handler to be handled by the official bitcoin client. This should have been implemented since a few years. I can only guess that the developers haven heard about this new invention: clickable urls in web browsers </sarcasm>

4) Enable private key import. Eventually this would enable bitcoins "stored" on printed paper for savings. Code is in the repository since around February. Again I guess it will never show up.

5) Add a generate private key and import private key dialog to the official client. I mean not everyone knows how to use vanitygen or does even know what compile your own client means. With this I could create a private key that I just print on paper, send my savings to the related address and can later redeem it at any time by entering the private key. Would be a great yet simple system. Again I almost can hear some lame excuses.

As one can see, most of those would be more usability proposals than development proposals. I think we as a community have to "lead" our developers in those things, because, frankly, most of the times it feels that the (core) developers are living in there own world not understanding reality. Prime example wallet encryption. With this I am pretty sure allinvain would still have its 25000 bitcoins and could single handed pay a few full time developers.

The main point of such bounties would be, that as more people will join a certain proposal with there bitcoins, the "pressure" to the developers would increase to step aside lame excuses and just implement/enable things. And I am pretty sure that a lot of people would join, because some points have been asked for since ages.

Back to my questions, where do we have such a website?

To have pure bitcoin instant payments (no ewallets, coupons, etc) one has to accept a payment at 0 confirmation.
So the question is how can someone accept a 0 confirmation transaction? Well, first of all, especially for small amounts, it is
a lot safer than most think. One has to trick the network to be able to double spend.
But how can we raise the bar? These days we don't have a lot of independent miners, we have a few big pools.
Almost all coins come from one of those few pools. So if someone wants to "validate" a transaction at the 0 confirmation level, one has to ask the pools if this transaction would be included in the next block. And since we only have a few pools, and the pools are connected, this would be a very secure way to thrust a 0 confirmation transaction. So to double spend one would have to mine his own coins, without adding the specific transaction, and faster than the remaining network. However, at the current difficult level this is practically impossible.
I don't recommend such a system for larger payments, but for smaller ones.
We would only need to add some API to a few pools to query the transactions.