Hmmmm, all the brokers and exchanges close every weekend.

This is so obviously true.

I could pay people good money to polish turds all day long.  Doesn't mean that they are going to be worth anything at the end of the week.

$0.10 USD

Greed is part of human nature, always has been always will be.

The greatest British Prime Minister in my lifetime, no doubt about it.

The youngsters who criticise her haven't got a clue.  

Before Thatcher union membership was compulsory in many companies.  There were no strike ballots, strikes were conducted at the will of the union furhers and not participating would result in death threats or even actual murder.  How would you like to work in a place like that huh?  As most essential utilities were in public ownership they had the whole country over a barrel.  

If telephone bills were too high or the service was shit, too bad!  It took at least 3 months to get a telephone intalled and there was only one telephone company which offered a choice of 3 colours of standard telephone in black, white or beige.  If your electricity keeps going out, unlucky!  You can use our electricity or none at all sucker!  Only one gas company so if your boiler breaks down we will come around and fix it in a week or two if you are lucky and we don't go on strike.  The UK left fought tooth and nail to keep it like this and still hate Thatcher for defeating them.

Almost unbelievable now, it sounds like Zimbabwe but I am not exaggerating.  The country was effectively being governed by vicious, unelected demagogues.  Most of our industry shut down as a result.  

Bankers have nothing on those guys when it comes to evil.  If the government didn't do as they were told by the unelected union dictators they would just shut everyone's electricity off.

The UK would be reminiscent of pre 1989 Poland by now if she had not been PM.  This is why she won an unprecidented 3 elections in a row, each with higher proportion of the vote than the previous election.

As for the leftist they long for days when they could live like kings in their mafia fiefdoms with zero social mobility and a captured population of proletariate.  

We could do with another PM like her right now.  Unfortunately all we have to choose from are spineless wretches.

Damn right.

I am no expert but I have trading in stocks, FX and commodities on regulated markets for over 20 years in a purely amature but very active fashion.  I was participant in the dot com bubble in the 90's and the recent credit crunch so I would class myself as quite battle hardend.  

If this starts falling it will have no buyers until it hits rock bottom.  There will be no brakes; nobody covering shorts and no real world assets to limit the fall out.    

Sure it might go up some more.  

Most likely some people around here are soon going to see some primal brutal human fear kicking them in face.  Remember these words, soon you will understand their meaning.

Thanks! I will have a look at them.

Going to keep an eye on this as it definately has potential to be transformative technology.

Yep you are right I cannot benefit from this.

If I ask my suppliers in Guangzhou or customers to accept money via a system that has a client with 1 hour download time they are going to think I'm crazy.

It would have be small and have built in exchange and transfer fuctions like my brokers webpage.

This technology is nowhere near ready for use in the real world outside of hobbiests.

I'm am still going to get some though as it has some serious volitility and would a nice gamble for day trading

SSL is very user friendly because applications have been built to make it invisible to average user.  Most people who are using it are not even aware of it's existence.  If it had any complexity or required the user to have techinical knowledge then it would be a failure.

I know how blockchains work as I have spent the last couple of days researching Bitcoin.  I understand how the distributed ledger structure of Bitcoin functions.  Every client clearly does not need to have a record of every transaction in order for it be deemed safe, only the most paranoid would believe this.  Yes it would be less safe than currently but more than safe enough.  You only need to have a large number of super-seeders to record every transaction detail and authorise transfers.  If bitcoin has not been designed to cope with this kind of structure then whilst it is undoubtedly a major step forward it is not the finished product that the world needs.

Lol at changing at my ISP.  The general population or the are not going to do this.

I regularly transfer money around the world so any system that can do this without it being skimmed by third parties is obviously going to be of interest.  

I am not investigating this as a potential toy or out of intellectual curiosity.  I am looking at it as a tool.

Digital currency is the future, however if Bitcoin ever wants to become widely adopted then it needs to be more accessible for the end user.

If it can't accomplish this then another digital currency with similar properties will.

Kind of reminds me of Bram Cohen's first version of bitorrent.

Ok thanks, I'll try it. 

I run a small ebay business and I have listed a few items on Bitmit as a trial.

I was wondering if someone could recommend a light weight wallet that I could use store any bitcoins that I get?  Ideally it would only be a few megabytes in size and not require heavy downloads to keep it in sync.  

I sure most people are aware of this but the general public do not have technical skills or ISP contracts that allow heavy bandwidth usage.

In my opinion the fact that user friendly client software is not easily locatable is a major stumbling block for wider acceptence of bitcoin.  A lightweight client should be one of the first things that you stumble across when looking into Bitcoin.

Most people are not going to be willing to download a 6gb+ wallet in order to be able to use bitcoins, it's just not going to happen!

I really like the idea behind bitcoin and I am hoping that it takes off and becomes widely used.  

You technical people really need to get to work immediately and make it more user friendly whilst you have bit of momentum and press coverage!  

If Bitcoin is going to have a future it needs to be at least as easy to use as Napster was.