This is also the second thing I have bought with coins. First was a Nerd Merit Badge.

Ok, so he entertained questions about the IMF and SDRs most of the time, but I asked him about Bitcoin at the end, and his response was pretty basic:

"Bitcoin looks great as an exchange currency, but not as a reserve currency."

He had heard of it before, so I didn't have to explain it to him. Very interesting talk overall, but it was focused more on how a global currency crash would happen rather than exploring options for new currencies.

Yeah!



What do you mean by this? I know that it can be divided down to 10^-8 units, but no further. Are you referring to something different?

Well it shouldn't be too hard. Think if you just bought something from a company with BTC, then you can trace your coins through that company's transactions forever. Alternatively, if there was some large, publicly-known transaction -- say a government purchase -- then you will be able to know exactly what the government does with all those coins.

Governments and companies will not like this aspect, and I'm sure that there are block chain analysis companies / tools in the works. Ultimately, companies and governments will have to accept Bitcoin for it to take hold long term.


Thanks for the article, Steve.

Rickards seems to be encouraging a gold-backed currency for use in international trade, such that countries could not unilaterally drop the standard (or if they did, they would lose the ability to conduct trade).

He also advises a significant amount of study before implementing a new standard, calling for one "flexible enough to accommodate modern central banking practices."

He's the author of Currency Wars, and he's coming to my class tomorrow. He advocates a return to the gold standard.

What would be the best way to pitch Bitcoin to him?

My line of thinking is that we have uncertainty in the rate of growth of the gold supply, but we have much greater certainty in the quantity of Bitcoin being produced. The issue of transport is also solved - simply send (a series of) transactions over the network to transfer a large Bitcoin holding.

One very strong argument against Bitcoin is the public transaction ledger: corporations / governments / individuals would not be able to conduct secret transactions.

I scrolled back through my console output and saw four reconnects - no more reloads!

This is a big development for the site, and I'm glad it finally happened. Thanks for kicking my butt into gear with this thread.

I glanced at the socket.io documentation and found what I needed to make the connection automatically reconnect after a disconnection. You should see messages in the Console at the bottom of the screen informing you of the progress of the reconnect attempts.

Let me know if the new code works for you. Maybe this refresh will be your last 

I will be looking into the socket.io documentation a little more closely to see if I can't force the connection to restart when this disconnect behavior is detected.

I agree that having to refresh the page every so often is pretty lame. It reflects poorly on my site's reliability, even though the real time data stream is controlled by Gox.

Has anyone found any resources on how to start a brokerage? Or a retail forex shop?

This is essentially what Bitcoinica is.

I describe this phenomenon here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60132.msg702035#msg702035

If you watch, the book will correct itself after the next ticker message comes in - it eliminates any bids higher (asks lower) than those given in the ticker message.

I think this will work to select the last 25 transactions, regardless of account:

Thank you very much. I think the trading platform will be a welcome addition to the Bitcoin exchange economy.

I believe MtGox is resetting the socket.io server every two hours. My bandwidth logs show peaks of refresh activity at that interval.

It looks to be the odd (not even) hours where the reset occurs. I too have been refreshing the thing right around that time.

And thanks everyone for the kind words. As for future development, I am building a web-based trading platform that should be very nice.

I also wrote a significant modification to the way it fetches the bars for the chart, so new server + new code should result in a better experience.


The new client-side code has a fix for this that hopefully works now. The issue here is that I can't recreate that bug, so I'm guessing a little bit. Please let me know if anything changes for you.

And we're back, hopefully for a while this time.

I have changed hosting to BitVPS, and for their awesome help, I am placing a graphic ad on my site.

Please let me know if anything is awry with the new hosting. There are some client- and server-side tweaks that should make the site faster when loading data from the exchange.

Of all the days to be down, this one had to be the one with the crazy price action!

Yeah, it's crazy! Someone is currently buying ~86k coins!

I am in the process of switching servers.

Bandwidth is not the issue.

I maxed out the processor on my shared server. (Yes I know I should have VPS/AWS by now)

I'll be working on a server migration today.

In essence, you are taking a little off the top of the market movements.