Yes, but 10% of blocks in an hour equal 6 1 minute blocks or 0.6 10 minute blocks.

If both chains have 1000 TH/hour, after 30 minutes miners on each of the chains were hashing 500 000 000 000 000 times. One chain however created 30 blocks/confirmations, the other one only 3 blocks/confirmations. Security wise (= how much work was put into the chains) they are equal though, so 10 confirmations on the fast chain would equal 1 confirmation on the slower one.

As there are more losses to orphans on faster chains, this is not 100% true, but I hope you understand now what I was trying to say.

By the way with 2 block chains at equal hash rate (1 with 10 minute blocks, 1 with 1 minute blocks) it takes exactly the same amount of time to have the same amount of security. As difficulty will be 10 times lower on the faster chain, to have the same amount of confidence as 6 confirmations (1 hour) on the slower chain, you need 60 blocks on the faster one.

In the concrete example with Litecoin, also 6 confirmations on a 2.5(?) min average chain mean that (if everything else were just the same - hash rate and hashing algorithm, which they aren't) these 6 confirmations equal just 1.5 confirmations on Bitcoin at the same difficulty.

How many confirmations one requires to be sure that there won't be a double spend is up to the person receiving the money, so there might be an advantage in receiving initial confirmations faster if you require only very low security. These won't be as secure however as a slower, more difficult chain.

A bot needs the following:

One time:
A statement from a user account that he/she controls a certain payout address, ideally signed with the private key of this address. The bot looks for these specially formatted messages and either replies (more difficult) or just displays it on it's status page (e.g. "Bitcointalk.org: Account "Sukrim", Address "1Bitcoinaddress123")

At tipping time:
Just post/publish a short line as a comment (in the future maybe via PM?) similar to reddit right now with the tipping amount. The bot then would either just conform it on its status page or even write a comment on the page itself (more difficult, so maybe in the future).
This might be viewed as spam in some communities though, so having a button + API that can be embedded into an existing page via greasemonkey etc. might be an alternative.
The bot then would keep an open ledger (maybe even with the program "ledger"!), so also others can see which posts have created how many tips.

Having it just crawl the internet for magic strings might be a bit too much though, maybe something where you can sign up your website/forum to be bitcointip enabled should be possible though. Still I'm not sure how this actually would work out, especially since it will be probably necessary to only look at posts after a certain time and date - if the site cannot provide this, crawling might take some serious time and effort, depending on the forum. Also providing this as an external service might get you banned for crawling/botting quickly. If you on the other hand have people manually enter every single post or comment they make in a list for potential tips, this will be far too much effort for them.

Good for lenders: VIR goes up if the market goes up
Good for borrowers: VIR goes down if the market goes down

If you don't like VIR rates, you always have the option of placing an offer on the open lending market that might get filled.
I for example could try to get some 100% loans filled instead of the 85% or so that VIR currently offers. On the other hand if there's a sharp upward spike soon, the person borrowing from me will be quite happy, as he/she will have great returns that he/she won't have to share with me. This is why I (even at the currently quite crappy VIR) rather loan out at VIR until the market really seems calm enough to risk a lower (but above VIR) longer term loan.

Realme, Bitcoinexchanges haben keine Ladenschlusszeiten, wieso sollte der Händler also die BTC länger behalten als nötig? Optionen und Futures gibt es übrigens auch, ob man da die Aufpreise zahlen will, ist ne andere Frage.

BitPay und co bieten eben an, die ganze Wechselei zu übernehmen, dann kommt man als Händler gar nicht mehr mit Bitcoin in Berührung, wenn man das nicht will.

Chefin, ich kann's gut verstehen, wenn Lieferando mit Sitz + Kerngebiet Deutschland keine Bitcoins akzeptieren will. Allerdings hat man bei anderen Geschäften dann durchaus Vorteile - z.B. wenn man mit etwas handelt, das von den USA mit Embargos belegt wird oder das PayPal nicht unterstützen möchte wie kubanischer Rum oder Zigarren. Auch um komplett neue Kundenschichten anzusprechen kann das hilfreich sein - in vielen auch europäischen Ländern darf man gar keinen Paypalaccount aufmachen z.B. oder Kreditkartenzahlungen von dort werden nicht akzeptiert. Wenn du Bitcoins bekommst, können die auch ruhig auch aus Nigeria oder Somalia kommen - die Dinger gehören garantiert dir. Damit kann man auch Vorurteile abbauen (ich kenne einige Leute aus "Risikogebieten" die ziemlich damit zu kämpfen haben quasi überall als Scammer/Bettler/Schmarotzer abgestempelt zu werden). Da ist dann ein eventuell schlechterer Wechselkurs des Zahlungsanbieters noch immer besser als gar nichts bestellen zu können (oder dürfen!).

Are there "watching only" API keys that would allow only to query balances of an MtGox account? On the other hand it would allow to query very often and get the trades that way... Maybe one can release/activate such a key only for a limited amount of time?

Der Händler kriegt von Bitpay immer so viele EUR wie verlangt (z.B. 100 EUR). Wieviele Bitcoins BitPay dafür zu welchem Wechselkurs von den Bitcoinusern verlangt ist Sache von BitPay, dem Händler kann das egal sein.

Naja, wenn man keine BTC hat, muss man die eben borgen um von fallenden Kursen zu profitieren (darum ging's ja in der Frage, weil sowas ja manchmal unklar für Leute ist wie man an was Fallendem verdienen kann). Ob das so klug ist momentan muss man eben jeweils für sich selbst entscheiden... könnte man das vorhersagen, würde man ja dauernd verdienen.

True, but as you said "a", not "the" private key. These would be so rarely used anyways that they can and should be kept offline and only signed statements are transferred.

dansmith implied that they first need to get some coins sent to their address to be colored... maybe that's the case with some current implementations(?), but it's not really needed, as you in the end just use some arbitrary coins as tokens. Remotely declaring them to be these tokes might actually help and is possible as Bitcoin is an open ledger system.

MtGox is too. Ripple can more easily be made decentralized than MtGox and there are actual plans to do so, compared to MtGox.
The server currently isn't but will be, the principles behind are already better documented than anything on MtGox.
The client is already OpenSource.
XRP are premined, Ripple itself is (just like Bitcoin) more than just a currency. Also, besides a few hundred XRP you can use Ripple without needing them ever again. Currently you get far more than you will ever need in your lifetime for free in this forum.

Hm, a grand total over all accounts (including the internal one(s) where fees are credited to) in both currencies maybe daily and a scanned bank statement with the current amount + signed MtGox screnshot/history sheet that proves that the numbers add up maybe monthly should boost confidence that you are not secretly running fractional reserve operations.

The issue might be to make sure to actually catch the right moment with ongoing trades, as there might be deviations in the numbers through trading 24/7. It should be possible though with a ledger from MtGox and Bitfinex to find a point in time where these numbers balance out.

I'm not too sure if there's a need to show individual account balances or transactions, a grand total (200k USD + 400 BTC in, 180k USD and 450 BTC out) each day or hour should be possible though I guess. If you do it individually that might cause strategies to emerge on taking advantage of this (though it's not clear if a 100k USD deposit will be used for lending to bulls or directly buying, it will be used to buy coins sometime soon probably).

Short selling...

Bitcoins ausborgen + verkaufen, Preis fällt --> Bitcoins zurückkaufen, zurückgeben + Zinsen zahlen, Rest (entweder in BTC oder USD) gehört dir.

They can even color arbitrary coins not in their possession, just tell someone you have e.g. 1 BTC lying around and they can release a statement that this coin now represents 1 kg of gold, redeemable with them once you pay them the price for that gold.

The private keys for that _payment_ money need to be safe of course, the ones for the _special coins_ don't even need to be in their possession.

Actually I haven't withdrawn money yet (other than a single bitcoin, which worked... ) - and to verify that they don't do fractional reserve, you anyways need a fully fledged bank run or audited bank + mtgox statements... highly unlikely to happen on demand.

I'll just wait for a week or so if the market continues to go down, then I might withdraw some of my profits or also just trade them to get some coins. So far I had no issues in depositing money (though at a different account than the current one in HK) and Raphy was usually on top of things + answering to mails.

I got everything properly credited (sans a few hours of interest in the last few days, as was already discussed) on my account though. Maybe some traders can also give a statement on how they are doing. Actually most people in this thread seem to be lenders, I'd love to see more success stories from the people who borrow the half million USD+ that is usually lent out.

Today will probably a bad interest day (dipping quite below average returns so far), but I had already a week of these before, so let's see how this works out until May.
As it seems that I have quite a few very short positions taken, I'd still like to have verified that interest is credited atomically by the hour (meaning 0-60 minutes loan = 1 hour interest, 61-120 minutes 2 hours interest etc.) and it is possible for me to gain 5 times the interest in an hour by having the same money borrowed for 12 minutes back-to-back.

Ripple is for example using something else than Proof of Work - they use consensus. That way they don't mine for their blocks and cannot be 51% attacked.

Other coins (I'm not sure if some are still alive) wanted to use Proof of Stake which means that to 51% the network you need to hold a big portion of the coins, not a big portion of the hash rate.

OP is claiming that... not me.

Colored coins are nearly the same as taking a bank note (e.g. 1 USD), noting down the serial number and stating that anyone who hands you this bank note can redeem something that is potentially worth much more than this bank note (e.g. a bar of gold).

As the security is provided externally (it is hard to counterfeit this bank note - or the colored coin) all that actually needs to be trusted is:
* The list of coins with their additional values to be correct (e.g. "note #12345 is worth 1 kg of gold to me")
* That the value actually CAN be redeemed (which might create legal hassle if certain limits are broken, like me handing out 1 million USD colored coins to 1 million ppl. and after some trading amongst them suddenly somebody wants to redeem ALL of them at once) and the additional value is rectified.

All in all you create a new currency with you as the central authority and backed by Bitcoin by issuing colored coins. If you for example sell 1 BTC colored coins that can redeem 1 oz of silver, it might currently be smarter to keep the coin than to redeem it. Similar to actual silver dollar coins which are worth more for their silver than their face value for example.

I'm not sure if there's any development/technical issue with this other than accidentially spending colored coin for their face value if they have a redeem value that is far higher, I guess this is rather a question of trust.

Ripple allows for similar mechanisms, just backed by exactly nothing while colored coins are backed by their coins.

What's nice depending on the implementation is that you could break down colored coins further than the redeemable part might allow (trade 1/100th Apple stock? Easy! To really redeem them you need however at least 1 full coin...). This can be desirable or not, depending on the redeemable part.

War vor 2 Jahren genau das gleiche, dieses Mal ist's eben Lag und nicht Hack...

Mal schaun was dann bei der großen Bubble zu Weihnachten 2013 oder der im Jahr 2015 bei Gox schief läuft, vielleicht mal ein gesperrtes Bankkonto oder Probleme mit Behörden (z.B. gesperrte Domain).

Uhm, you know that you can just track the addresses linked to pirateat40s operations? Unless he laundered them (which he likely didn't) you can still trace them on the block chain right now. Same with the known "heists" where transactions were published.

Just do your research and see for yourself if these funds ended up at an exchange...

Founder != owner...