I placed several buy orders on MtGox last night which were clearly above market, inside plenty of bid orders as shown on MtGoxLive. I was amazed that I didn't get filled, and instead it moves the market to my offer. It is as if someone is seeing the order flow before orders are processed, and cancelling their orders on the order book before they're lifted. (MtGoxLive updated to show my bid, so it hadn't stalled)

It may be a high frequency trading expert has cornered the bitcoin market. This is very bad for everyone, as it means the bid / ask spread will be much wider than you think when anyone trades. At the moment, most people are ignorant of the cost of HF trading manipulation because it's so hidden. eg. http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2011/12/19/797701/alphachat-sal-arnuk-on-high-frequency-trading/ It's effectively using inside information to front run your trade.

Here's a proposal to make it harder : exchanges only allow trading every 30 seconds. You place orders whenever, they get filled using an auction mechanism every 30 seconds where the market gets filled the best bid / ask price below/above their order. Think of it like decimalisation of time. It should also help reduce volatility. Please can someone make this? I'll pledge some BTC, I'm tired of paying huge BTC transaction fees.

Thanks for getting this fixed so quickly Zhoutong!

Does anyone else have a problem with Bitcoinica not processing market orders? Mine has been waiting for 9 minutes now

MF Global was a broker. The idea is very similar to Bitcoinica - you fund your account with Bitcoins and Bitcoinica use that as collateral to lend you money, and you use that to trade. The broker needs to have control over the collateral, but they promise to abide by certain rules. Given that you can't encode a broker's entire operation in to a bitcoin transaction, perhaps you can use a 3rd party oracle https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_4:_Using_external_state which bails out your Bitcoin collateral if the broker is bankrupt or disagrees with a fair valuation of your account.

@pusle : You can have leverage with Bitcoin, see Bitcoinica's 10:1. Bitcoins don't prevent someone setting up a fractional reserve bank.
@ctoon6 : You have to have a company account with a positive balance. A firm needs money on-hand to buy & hire, it can't just pay all its workers everything it has at the end of the day.

Yes bitcoin is a money & money transfer system. But if you can't get an acceptable level of fraud prevention, no one will use it for more than petty cash. How do you investigate a suspect Bitcoin transaction? Easy to identify, extremely difficult to trace who controls the destination.
Bitcoin gives you some great transparency but it is unsuitable for a corporation, as any company treasurer could run off with the firm's money and claim he was hacked. Worse, in the case of a firm like MF Global they could run off with the clients' money too. If someone has a technological solution for this, I would love to be proved wrong.

 - Green addresses do raise confidence, but can't be an enforcement mechanism (ie. you go to jail if you send to one). You would just create a black Bitcoin market and a white/green Bitcoin market. Co-mingling would be illegal, but unstoppable without changing the bitcoin protocol to make it effectively equivalent to a modern currency. And if a government controls the protocol, they can control the money supply too.

 - @Red Emerald : There's no win for govt/firms to use Bitcoin for their internal accounts. They would lose convenience (BTC is slower than an electronic ledger), fraud control & sovereign control of the monetary base.

 - @evoorhees : MF Global's fallacy was much more simple - Greed. Bitcoin won't solve that. It didn't "own" the european govt. bonds in the traditional sense you're thinking of, it was collateral in a repo trade. If the european govt bond had actually defaulted, MF Global would be fine as they were short 1.3bn of French govt bonds. See http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/11/01/what-happened-at-mf-global/

Has any merchant had experience with this? I expect it would be hard to claim back VAT on a purchase made in Bitcoin?

Bitcoin has some wonderful features, but could it have prevented a firm like MF Global from hiding/stealing clients' money? It would seem to make it easier to do, not harder.
At present, we can trust big companies because the government can make them accountable if they do something illegal. How can you make a Bitcoin based firm accountable to its clients / shareholders? (GLBSE doesn't count, it's not enforceable)

I'm hoping there's a good answer to this to do with the Bitcoin scripted transactions. Otherwise, we'd have to invent an alternative technology for Bitcoin accounting. But that would be as susceptible to centralized control as a regular currency.

A friend of mine runs a small software business in the UK & regularly uses PayPal to take customer payments. I suggested he extended his site to take Bitcoin, but his main concern was how the taxes would be dealt with by the UK Inland Revenue / HMRC. Has anyone corresponded with HMRC on this, and are there any systems for keeping auditable records of payments made in Bitcoin?
Until this is clear, his attitude was the upside from having Bitcoin payments would have to be significant (>£10k revenue) for it to be worthwhile.

I've sent my 1 BTC

Personally I prefer Bitcoinica's web design, more professional. And better customer service.

MtGox - What happened to merchant services & "margin trading & options coming soon..."?

Great idea, glad someone is organising this. I pledge 1 BTC.

This is like a forum equivalent of Kickstarter.

This is a great way to publicise bitcoin to a target market who would really get it. I would donate bitcoin to sponsor a well-organised competition prize.

I fully support the creation of a Bitcoin Foundation.

Bitcoin is revolutionary for many reasons. Its most interesting feature is it removes the control of money from government, and gives it to the people. If Bitcoin becomes a success, there will be a big incentive for governments to take control of it. Then it would only be as good as fiat. To that end, the Bitcoin Foundation should promote a truly diverse mining pool, and avoid direct control.

Suggestions :
-   Produce an ASIC miner so people can continue to support Bitcoin by mining cheaply at home
-   The Bitcoin Foundation Committee should accept petitions to discuss / vote on governance issues. 1 BTC one vote, like one share one vote.
-   Coordinate donations to support Bitcoin development & PR.
    o   To avoid conflict of interest, maybe only publicise suggested payment amounts & addresses for the core developers
-   Add a regular payment feature to the Bitcoin client, to support these donations/subscriptions
-   Support legal cases, produce patents & trademarks
-   Promote technological financial innovation
-   Organise a Job List so Bitcoin Foundation volunteers can help with the work
-   Collect & distribute regular trusted statistics on the Bitcoin economy, similar to government economic data releases (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=35908.msg442674#msg442674)

Thanks for all your hard work!

+1 for bitcoin URLs

This would definitely improve accessibility for new users. Giving someone a address like btc://152LaGV4xS9SzUTu2yKb6nGwyuxqJEkFZA is more user-friendly and you have the potential for extending the address protocol, eg. btc://MyReadablePublicBTCAddress or btc://username.mtgox for MtGox tokens

Summary : We need regular statistics from Bitcoin businesses & exchanges to give users confidence in the Bitcoin economy

In the world’s financial markets, economic information is released daily by governments on a variety of fundamentals such as manufacturing, sales, job growth & unemployment, and trade balances (1).  Investors and businesses use these reports to gain confidence in the future direction of the market & economy (2). Analysts produce estimates of the upcoming economic statistics, and investment is based upon them.

Producing weekly economic statistics would give our Bitcoin economy credibility and investor confidence.

I am not a trained economist and would welcome input on this from anyone who is. That said, I suggest the following statistics are volunteered by businesses & exchanges :


Businesses (Monthly)
-   Totals of receipts & expenses (in BTC and USD)
-   Total quantity of orders

Exchanges (Weekly)
-   Total number of accounts
-   Total number of accounts with a non-zero balance
-   Total number of accounts with a non-zero balance and have had no trading in 90 days
-   Average account size (BTC & USD) split in to 4 bands

Please PM me if you are interested in helping

  - Isosceles


References
1.     Yahoo US Economic Calendar  http://biz.yahoo.com/c/terms/rtlsls.html
        Bloomberg US Economic Calendar http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/economic-calendar/
2.     http://www.rightline.net/education/economic.html

The MD5 of the bitcoin-0.3.24-win32-setup.exe download from the bitcoin.org front page doesn't match your MD5 sig

The MD5 of my download is b9a71a0a25ac090a3c0e370e01366ae8

There's the MoneyChanger Java GUI. I haven't seen any websites using it yet though.

I've just finished writing up instructions on making a secure Bitcoin USB linux stick :

https://squarethought.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/bitcoin-on-a-stick-usb/

Thanks!

MtGox's https certificate provider StartSSL have been compromised
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/06/22/startssl-suspends-services-after-security-breach.html

I'm not an internet security expert, is this cause for concern? What types of attack does that open MtGox to?