I am proud and excited to announce that BitMe is now accepting several new payment methods in addition to AurumXchange VouchX:

• Direct Deposit to your bank account
• Cash Deposit
• Wire Transfer - US
• Wire Transfer - International

BitMe is now in open beta and open for trading BTC/USD. Deposit Funds now
via AurumXchange's VouchX!

Liquidity providers receive 0.55% rebate on executions, liqudity takers pay just 0.60%!

Check out the API, our GitHub, and idle in #bitme. More features to come soon. Any suggestions/requests are welcomed.

The first 40 users to register will receive 0.5 BTC as a gift, so join now! Now reached over 40 users!

Has anyone seen this article before: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm

Apparently written by three employees of the NSA. Also interesting is one of the referenced authors at the bottom is Tatsuaki Okamoto, very similiar to the claimed creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Originally posted here: http://bitmex.tumblr.com/post/23037662600/the-bitcoin-drama

I mined my first block in April 2010. There weren’t any mining pools to join or any expensive hardware to buy. You just ran the original client running in the background taking advantage of that idle core you thought you needed. This is when the network difficulty was significantly lower and before Bitcoin landed in so many pop culture news outlets.

The many security events that have happened in the Bitcoin community and most recently with Bitcoinica has had me thinking much lately about security. Security is not a mathematical certainity. Even the Bitcoin blockchain itself has it’s vulnerabilities, and while most are inconceivably unlikely, the fact still exists. And this is when we are dealing with a highly logical and controlled environment.

The certainity of security goes down even more when you have less control of your environment. This is the essence of security, you must be able to predict and control what happens. The ability to do this is significantly lowered when dealing with third-parties or those you don’t know or aren’t able to trust for lack of information. With all the hype and low-cost of running applications “in the cloud” (marketing sucks), there is a trade-off. You have less control of your environment and thus less security.

If Bitcoin is still around 5, 10, or even 15 years from now then I’m sure we will have a much more secure environment than of that which exists currently. And we will have those who took the risks first to thank for it. This situation isn’t unique to Bitcoin, all we have to do is look at a couple major industries like finance where the banks blew up and essentially are still insolvent or the oil industry which while drilling miles deep under the ocean caused massive ecological damage. This is the natural order of things. A forest grows, burns, and starts over, so will Bitcoin.

NOTE: BitMe does host it’s testnet environment “in the cloud”

[Any recommendations/bug reports are still appreciated, but you will not receive any monetary reward for them]

Any recommendations/bug reports are still appreciated, but you will not receive any monetary reward for them

UPDATE - 2012/07/08 - liquidity providers now receive 0.55% rebate, liquidity takers pay 0.60% fee

UPDATE - 2012/05/25 - liquidity providers now receive 0.10% rebate, liquidity takers pay 0.60% fee

UPDATE
The testnet version of the site is now available for testing: https://test.bitme.com

BTC for Bugs
For the next couple weeks I will be rewarding people for trying out the testnet version of the site and to find bugs.
I will give 5 BTC for trivial, 10 BTC for minor, 20+ BTC for major bugs to the first to discover and/or describe it best for reproducibility.

Bugs Found - 127 BTC paid out

• trivial - poor alignment in bid/ask radio selection in Chrome - thanks splatster
• trivial - "commodity" typo in terms of use - thanks splatster
• trivial - unnecessary margin on order cancel button (actually is on the form element) - thanks splatster
• minor - buggy behavior when clicking "New" multiple times for an order - thanks bencoder
• trivial - clicking "Terms of Use" link on join page causes user to lose entered data - thanks bencoder
• major - even after logging out, back button of browser still shows you previous HTTPS page. - thanks flatfly
• trivial - lots of feedback on important details, user experience - thanks Sukrim
• minor - login may fail with general error message under some conditions - thanks flatfly
• trivial - prevent form double submission - thanks flatfly
• trivial - no background on password strength bar in IE - thanks flatfly
• trivial - orderbook spamming, bid/ask precision grouping - thanks bencoder
• trivial - layout issues in IE (specifically in IE8) - thanks raitoninglass
• major - easily exploitable DoS atttack vector due to JS minification/building - thanks flatfly - 20 BTC owed
• trivial - typo in terms of use, should be "...make use of personal information..." - thanks flatfly
• major - partially-executed orders are not reflected properly in orderbook - thanks EskimoBob - 20 BTC owed

Known issues

• Overlapping elements on mobile/small screens
• some functionality broken without javascript enabled
• The 'Place Order' blue button is overlapping on the next column
• Not supporting older than IE8
• Placing an order broken in IE
• Favicon 404s on testnet
• CSRF token doesn't update on order failure

==================================



tldr;
* I made an exchange called BitMe, it will launch on testnet only either this Sunday night or Monday
* I will be rewarding people to try it out and to find bugs

I will update this original post once the testnet is live.

In the works for approximately 8 months or so, through at least 2 different iterations, I am finally ready to launch the testnet version of my new exchange, BitMe. BitMe aims to be a secure and simple alternative platform that takes a forex-style approach to trading, using a base currency and counter currency, although a trading commission is taken from the receiving currency upon order execution.

For the purposes of the testnet launch a 0.50% fee will be charged for all order executions. Although this will change once launched to the realnet to reward liquidity providers.

For the next couple weeks I will be rewarding people for trying out the testnet version of the site and to find bugs.
I will give 5 BTC for trivial, 10 BTC for minor, 20+ BTC for major bugs to the first to discover and/or describe it best for reproducibility.
At my own discretion I will decide the category the bug falls into.

Known issues that I'm not interested in:
* Overlapping elements on mobile/small screens

Initially only BTC/USD will be available for buying and selling. Sorry, I don't have any plans to add any others anytime soon.

I welcome anyone who is interested to idle on #bitme on FreeNode.

~Sean Lavine (freewil)

I've taken the testnet-box, updated the files for v0.6.0 (has 130 pre-generated blocks) and added a Makefile with some handy commands for controlling the testnet-box. You can find it on github.

I'm using this in a couple of projects I'm working on, including the bitcoin Node.js module.