As a professional software developer this may be an opportune time to point out that the bitcoin code is an amateur production.
I have the greatest respect for Gavin and others that have donated untold hours to make bitcoin into a reality and I know from experience how tough self-funded development is.
Nevertheless, make no mistakes, the current incarnation of Bitcoin has a lot of ill-conceived design points and implementation weaknesses (as we have seen from the events of the last 24 hours).
Aside from the blunder that just resulted in a blockchain fork, there is a much larger, related issue looming on the horizon, which is the inability of the design to process large numbers of transactions. It is ludicrous we have people whining about "Satoshi Dice" creating numerous transactions. I could sit down and write a software component that could easily generate billions of transactions without breaking a sweat once it is deployed to a few thousand boxes, if I so chose, and yet you are concerned about Satoishi Dice generating a few million transactions. The problem of high-volume transaction handling needs to be answered at a new level which is, unfortunately, way above the paygrade of the current development team.
