Building an online currency exchange (by alaric)

The biggest currency exchange market in the Bitcoin world is MtGox. When it goes down, either due to a DDoS attack or sheer high load due to everyone panic-selling, then people who hold bitcoins and care about their value in dollars get the panicky realisation that they can't easily sell them - which causes two things:

1. A drop in the value of bitcoins; people care about their ability to turn them back into fiat money, and will continue to do so until lots of things can be bought directly with bitcoins.

2. Widespread angst that MtGox is a central point of failure for the Bitcoin economy, complaining that they are vulnerable to DDoSes and get high trading lag when under load, and so on.

So, as a high-performance systems developer, I thought I'd write some notes on how to build a more resilient exchange platform. Perhaps MtGox will do something like this, but perhaps more ideally, one of their competitors will, and thereby win some of MtGox's market share, and thus decentralise the exchange market somewhat.

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On the Unfair Distribution of Capital (by alaric)

Oh, dear God, I'm starting to sound like an early-twentieth-century economist with these post titles.

Right, anyway. One of the criticisms that's been levelled at Bitcoin is that the early miners, and speculators who rushed in and bought them cheaply, will end up filthy rich if it succeeds and a bitcoin reaches its potential value of hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.

Why should people who were lucky / foolish enough to rush in at the beginning be rewarded quite so handsomely, while children are starving in the slums of South London?

This is an interesting question indeed.

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Understanding Bitcoin Market Depth (by alaric)

A central part of the Bitcoin economy has been the formation of foreign currency exchange markets, where you can trade your bitcoins for US dollars, Euros, pounds Sterling, or many other currencies.

These things are important, because:

1. They let people transfer their money from the fiat economy into the Bitcoin economy, allowing it to grow.
2. They let people transfer their money out again, making Bitcoin a safer store of value; you're not stuck with it when you want to buy something that can't be bought with bitcoins.
3. They let us measure the "current value" of a bitcoin (to some approximation), thus making it easier to price things in bitcoins
4. They provide endless pretty graphs and statistics to look at.

However, one particular aspect of "the markets" that is commonly not understood is what is known as "market depth", so I'm going to give a quick introduction to how the markets work to lay the foundations, then dive into what the market depth is all about.

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Red Nose Day 2013 (by sarah)

Catching up on all my photos again 🙂

We had a three fold Red Nose Day spanning several days!

I made cakes for the Cubs. Red nose cake pops, cherry scone things which were diary and wheat free along with the dinosaurs, and cupcakes in red cake cases.

I made up games and craft activities such as get the red noses in the hoops, draw the red nose on Alaric, make a fluffy red nose and so on.

Then Friday Mary had to go to Nursery in red spotty clothing - Al whisked her away before I could take a photo 🙁 But I did manage to get Jeany and her Wacky Hair 🙂

The it was off to Centre Arts who were doing Red Nose Day stuff in the shopping centre in Cheltenham. there was a cake competition which I had forgotten all about!

The Giant Cupcake was baked by Vanilla Pod Bakery and was raffled off for £45. The Red Nose was made by one of the ladies at the centre and was actioned for £20.

Recipes for my bakes will be appearing on Salaric Cooking.

Lojbani Chicken or jbojipci (by sarah)

Just before we moved to the new house I came up with the idea of Lojbani Chicken, a character who would help Jean or anybody else understand and learn Lojban but I wanted it to be more than that. I wanted some sort of all languages web-comic thing which is obviously very complex and so it never happened - there were some biro sketches in the back of a note book and that was that.

Then I saw this year is Lojban's 25th and so I sat down and revisited the idea of my chicken. The result was more biro sketches and Mother Lang and her two daughters Coni and Nat, they live on a farm where Lojbani chicken is one of the animals.

A full first story will hopefully be appearing on Wiggly Pets soon 🙂

Once the image above is digitally edited (this is just what I russeled up using my new birthday pens and colouring pencils.) there will be speech bubbles saying such things as fi'i - meaning welcome.

Other existing characters include Esperanto Cat and Toki Pona kitten. I haven't decided yet what creatures should represent any of the natural languages - mainly due to worrying about offending people :/ I might do something like have made up creatures for natural languages and real animals for the constructed languages - suggestions welcome 🙂

I am hoping to produce some more of the characters as part of the 100 birds in 100 days challenge I am currently doing over on Orange Monster.