I'm testing a four core computer with hyper-threading and after one day of testing, which admittedly is an extremely small amount, it has only produced twice as many bitcoins as the slightly slower GHz dual core computer. When generating new blocks takes so long, it's hard to calculate performance. It would be useful if there was a stand alone utility or perhaps a utility built into Bitcoin which would state how many bitcoin generation attempts are being performed per minute. Then people would be able to change settings on their computer and after just a few minutes, verify how much of an affect those changes have. For example, I would like to see how much of a difference having hyper-threading turned on or off has on the amount of Bitcoin generation attempts occurring. I would also like to see how many more calculations per minute one computer has as opposed to the other.

I think that a very useful thing to have in the BitCoin main window would be an indicator saying "# hashes/sec" to demonstrate how fast the BitcoinMiner threads were running.

Yes. It would be very useful and it will become somewhat essential in calculating a more accurate exchange rate in the future !

Regardless of the number of individual user connections, I would also like to see the total number of connected nodes vs the number of 'generating' nodes in the Bitcoin interface. It would also be good to know the highest and lowest number of connected nodes in any 24hr period.

As Bitcoins usage becomes more 'Macro', just calculating daily exchange rates is not going to be enough to satisfy Bitcoins diverse 'digital' community. Using 'Micro' exchange rate calculations from this data and the existing factors that NLS already includes will enable many more possibilities such a 'live trading'.

It would also be interesting to see the total number of transactions and the total amount of those transactions, again for a 24hr period.

You don't need to affect any aspects relating to user anonymity. You just need to harness the readily available data to plot high, low, medium and the mode.

What I'm basically saying is that this is a 'digital' currency (obviously), yet the projects 'base rate' is still effectively being calculated using 'paper' math !!!

This is not to say, that NLS isn't already doing a great job ! Not to mention satoshi's ( and any others ) excellent work in building the thing.

I think I will make a request list and add a topic in Technical...

I'm far from an 'expert' programmer, but with much IT and trading experience I have a good idea of what 'could' be calculated and added for the benefit of future users.

Having glanced over the 'active' source code much of the above is already being used in the 'functioning' of the software. I don't know whats planned for future releases, but we must have the foresight to collect and harness this type of data. Can any of the above be 'historically' viewed via irc data ? I've been making backwards neural network calculations and future predictions and would like to continue with this to help the project.