This does already exist and is called "Smart Contracts" in Etherium. It's a blockchain-based "world computer" as they call it themselves. What you would do is code up a smart contract that contains the requirements that you need and have it hold funds (in the case of a bet or something). The contract itself would own the funds and none of the participants in the contract would have the option of removing them from there unless under the conditions that are specifically programmed into the contract.

The issue that you mostly have with this is that the Etherium program (the contract) can not have any contact with the outside world. It cannot look at a sports or weather website to see who should get paid. You need some other way of giving the payout triggers to the contract. One way would be to use one or more trusted services to post the weather or sports results to the Etherium blockchain (in another contract). Your contract can then use that other contract's data to decide who needs to get paid.

Another issue is that the contract cannot trigger itself. It cannot decide that it needs to pay Alice or Bob and then do that. Once the results are in (the sports results are known in the blockchain), someone - probably the winner - will have to ask the contract to process the results and pay out.

In short: A Smart Contract doesn't have to be trusted by anyone, the contract itself is in control of the money involved and not any of the participants or even a trusted third party.

As for the legal status of a smart contract, good question. You'd have to make sure that the initial creating of the contract by both parties is also in the blockchain. You cannot just upload a contract with Alice and Bob's addresses hardcoded in there. You have to make sure that the deployment of the contract and the agreement of both parties to the terms of the contract is explicitly recorded in the blockchain. Alice and Bob will have to both make a transaction to the contract, depositing their funds and signaling their willingness to participate.

I would like to open an account and I want to trade in USD/BTC and EUR/BTC. USD from a US bank account and EUR from an NL bank account. I'm just a little confused as to what to fill in in the registration form.

If I put US as country, will I still be able to use a EUR bank account for deposits/withdrawals?
If I put NL as country, will I still be able to use a US bank account for deposits/withdrawals?

Thanks!

Is the exchange broken? I'm getting "We're sorry, but something went wrong." on all pages after signing up.

Even so... last time I checked running a server 24/7 for a month would cost at least $50. Be sure to check your statement and pricing before you get an unpleasant surprise next month.

Looks like you are running p2pool as well. Can you detail what you did to make GUIMiner work?

I decided that I have enough Bytecoins for now, time to spread the "wealth".

I switched my pool to donate the 2% fee to the faucet. Happy mining!

His statement of controls says that he doesn't, we take his word for it.

Is it possible that he kept a copy of all private keys? Sure, but as he explains on his website: He can easily be held legally accountable. Whether the current legal system will do anything? I don't know, but he didn't make it very easy for himself to hide if he misbehaves.

People over in the announcement thread for bytecoin have found out that GUIMiner just doesn't' work with p2pool (or bytecoin, but more likely the pool). If you are getting some authentication error and guiminer, it's not working.

Apparently, GUIMiner is incorrectly reporting shares or is doing something else p2pool doesn't like and you will not receive a payout (whether those shares are contributing is unclear at this point, I don't get any information from anyone using GUIMiner in my log files so I cannot confirm or deny any of this.)

[edit]
As of now, this pool donates the 2% fee to the faucet. Happy mining!

I like the idea of colored coins, some remarks:

1. If you can decolor (or "wash") a coin, it would mean that anyone could simply destroy shared of your project (or whatever it is that the color represents). I don't think this is a good idea. If washing is to be allowed, it should only be allowed by the owner of the color.

2. In order to issue "shares", I would have to do one of two things:
a) Color the coins people use to by shared and send them back to the buyer.
b) Collect a bunch of coins before issueing shares so I can send those out to share buyers.

In both cases, how do I actually fund the project?

Same here. I have no record of that address ever having been used in any of the pool's datafiles. There is obviously something going on that I don't understand, how else could it be that shares are being found, but I don't see any mention of those miners?? Anyone have this issue with p2pool before?

I cleared the logs recently, so I don't know about before an hour ago, but in the current logs and datafiles, that address is not mentioned anywhere. If you mined them recently, wait. If not, perhaps your miner is incompatible?

I pushed an update to github that should reenable peer discovery via irc on p2pool nodes (re-added the irc channel name). Would other pool operators please pull this code so we can all work together?

You need to allow the node to receive connections on TCP port 16333 for the peer2peer network to work.

If anyone wants to run their own pool node, here is the source code:
https://github.com/gerco/p2pool

The p2p aspects of this code have been largely disabled in the network definition so you'll have to provide seed servers and/or an irc # for the nodes to find each other. I didn't bother to do either so my pool doesn't participate in a network until someone sets that up

I'll be the first to admit that I have no idea what I'm doing with this pool software. I hacked it together and it appeared to work right at the beginning. That said, people are receiving their payouts but I noticed there can be a significant delay. You may not get paid in the block that you helped solve, it may take several hours for that to happen.

I don't know how p2pool keeps track of shares, but it does remember that you solved shares and people are receiving payouts even after they stopped mining for the pool based on the shares they solved hours ago.

If you think you're not getting paid, do these things:
1. Check http://radon.gdries.nl:6327/static/graphs.html?Day to see if you are mentioned somewhere. If so, you will get paid, it may take a while though.
2. If you are not on that list, wait 5 minutes and check again. The list doesn't refresh in real time.
3. If you are still not finding your address anywhere, stop mining and wait a few hours. If you're still not getting paid, something is probably wrong.

I've checked the logs for some people and noticed that their addresses are nowhere to be found in logs or data files. When that happens, there really isn't anything I can do about it. I don't know enough about p2pool to do much other than that.

Lets just hope that someone starts up a non-experimental pool soon. I don't have the time or patience to become a pool operator, this is just an experiment for me.

[edit]
The source code for the modified version of p2pool is here: https://github.com/gerco/p2pool
Do send me a pull request when improvements are made, please

I don't see this address anywhere in the pool datafiles or logs. It also doesn't show up in the logs... I don't know what else I can do to help you.

PM me your address, I'll check the logs for your address. Must be something weird going on. I take it you also have not received any BTE?

Those without payouts, check if you are mentioned on this page:

http://radon.gdries.nl:6327/static/graphs.html?Day

That should contain anyone that submitted at least one share and a breakdown of whether that was good or bad. (Possibly only since the last pool restart, not sure about that.)

Needed to restart the pool. A few minutes of work is lost when that happens and it may take a little while for them to reappear in the lists.

Bad luck? We've had several blocks in seconds and even the same block twice in this pool! Bytecoin is under very interesting circumstances right now Enormous amounts of hash power for a very low difficulty coin causes strange things to happen...

The port number is 6327.

My pool is still giving ridiculous payouts to my own address... I even restarted the pool with 0% fee, but it doesn't seem to help. Anyone have experience with p2pool software that can help me figure this out?? The expected payout is dropping now, so it seems to be heading in the right direction.

I don't want to be misappropriating anyone's Bytecoins, you see!

[edit]
Also fixed the blockexplorer links to bytecoin.in, so those work now.