thte Next NXT team has assembled an interesting Blockchain that is much quicker than bitcoin for confirming transactions but lacks bitcoin's security by several orders of magnitude.

Yeah...PB wants an honest financial system, and he does not like high speed/high frequency trading, among other things.
So a blockchain-based exchange that explicitly doesn't alllow HFT (because all of the order processing happens on the blockchain, with 1-10 minute blocktimes) is probably what we are going to see from Medici and Overstock.
My prediction is that whatever system we see from Medici, it will be slow asset/stock trading, not instant.

I don't see why Bitcoin's 10 minute blocks would be a problem, since Byrne wants Medici to be a replacement for centralized clearing and the fraudulent and harmful practices it encourages (like naked short selling). Centralized clearing only happens like once every 24 hours, so every 10 minutes is massively faster than that.

http://cointelegraph.com/news/113273/overstock-installs-btm-at-corporate-headquarters-offers-to-pay-employees-in-btc

The top half of this story is much good news: 2-way BTM in the lobby at Overstock HQ, employees can now be paid out in BTC (and this is so f**king important for crypto, I can't swear enough)

Bottom section of the piece seems to confirm that Medici will not be built on CounterParty, but that's not exactly a surprise. Given how Overstock operate, they were never going to fully outsource any important elements of the Medici system, it makes much more sense for them to build their own in-house system.
How this will affect CounterParty is an interesting question, given the general shittiness of the markets right now.
I reckon that XCP is still a good, solid project and this shouldn't be taken as a knock-back. 

If BTC had a market cap of $8 Billion I think it would be more secure to require the attacker to purchase the 51% rather than use a bunch of zombie computers + special made chips.

Well.. It is good to hear something is happening but any coin that ignores the BCT community does so at it's own peril.  Most people get the bulk of their info from a BCT ANN thread.  I've been around crypto for a while and just about every coin that has ignored it's BCT following has perished. Is it so hard to keep us poor fools updated about what is happening behind closed doors?  One update a week would ease a lot of minds. Too much to ask? 

I could send you an email address and get the latest. I probably will.  Or would a regular update here be smarter?  It would certainly ease the minds and inform everyone (traders included). The coin is withering on the vine due to lack of information. Do you really want thousands of people joining your slack group just to keep up?  Or would it be easier to keep us up to date here rather than overloading your slack group.

The devs could learn a lot by the way CCN conducts business.  They have their own forums/groups but they keep their BCT followers updated.  Despite what I thought would be a fatal change to POS, the coin is thriving as everyone,everywhere knows what is going on.  Food for thought?

Is "mark"/"marking" reserved for the reputation score only?  So that regardless of the amount of bitmarks given by any individual to another, it is the specific act of giving them (i.e., each transaction) that counts as one "mark"?

 

bitUSD and bitBTC are centralized solutions. The exchange rate doesn't magically sit at one, they have a fund manager.

There may be some utility there, for the darknet, but when the feds shut down the fund manager it all goes to shit.

Look, cryptocurrency functions very similarly to how Liberty Reserve worked. Liberty Reserve servers stored fund allocations and transfers as cryptographic signatures, and then deleted the records. Feds shut it down because it was centralized and easy to shut down. The market adapted.

I'm not part of the slack clique as I have never been invited

Someone having multiple delegate positions is not an attack.  It increases centralisation so is best avoided, but is not an attack.  Would you consider the moment gigahash.io briefly had over 51% of the hashpower on bitcoin an attack even though they didn't actually attack?  Having 5 delegates is no where near enough to even potentially attack the network so please refrain from making wild exaggerations.

Because you can dispose of alt-currency to real products, rather than from XPY to BTC to $ to Amazon.

Let's not do this.  Over the course of the project I have performed well, and at other times not so well.  People are free to make any observation they may, and Melvin has helped the project also.

All anybody really cares about here is making some measurable progress and people marking, then indirectly success of the currency or idea based on this.  Let us focus on that

Today is the day most people prepare to get back to work, and tomorrow is the day they dive in to another year of work.  It is no different here.

So you dont think he made claims with poor knowledge that may damage the confidence in the project? If I were an outsider, my confidence could've been shattered by his comments. Primarily because he's been deep in the project and made lots of contributions.

It has not been independently reviewed by Kristov as far as I can tell. He "started on the review of the design" on November 13, and that was the last I could find on it.

Also, if anyone wants to continue to discuss Bitcoindark their thread is that-a-way:)

Why imply that Mark may have moved on to other things if he doesn't even know thing about where Mark is? Thats FUD my friend. There's many people who only view this post as their source of information about Bitmark, and speaking of development being down 90% from its peak plus that Mark may have left causes Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the very least.

Just leave Melvin, why are you trying to damage the confidence in Bitmark making such claims? if you dont care about it just gtho and stop FUDing.. Im sick of your EMO behavior..

people's eyes are glazing over because there is nothing worthwhile in the code, nobody is reviewing it, they are just assuming other people are. Altcoin fanatics are too gullible