Something weird has happened.
Yesterday, someone came over to buy some Bitcoins. We accepted his cash and sent him his Bitcoins. Ed sent them by making a Withdrawal from his own MtGox account TO this person's Bitcoin address.
Unfortunately, this young man sat here with his laptop and his Bitcoin client open... and they never showed up.
Hours Later, they still hadn't shown up.
I emailed MtGox. MtGox promptly replied showing me that the transaction IS IN the block chain.
However.... still no sign of it in the Bitcoin client.
We verified the Bitcoin address from his Bitcoin client app and it matches perfectly.
How could this happen?
Did he have the whole block chain downloaded when you checked both times?
It's not very intuitive to tell if I have them all at the moment. A visual progress bar that showed me how many I had out of how many the community agrees to being the current total would certainly help me out intuitively. When I launch the client on my Mac, the icon bounces up and down for a while without displaying the GUI. Then, the number of blocks shown in the status bar at the bottom keeps going up for a while and I have no idea when it is supposed to stop. It's a bit frustrating as an end user to not have
some sort of estimation indicating the total number in existence. I know that my received transactions only show up when I have the appropriate block downloaded. So I have to wait. Without know when. Which sucks.
I think there is a tool to verify their claim that the transaction actually is in the block chain, but I forgot the name of it. I'm sure someone else remembers, though.
"Never say never."