After the MtGox kerfuffle last week, it seems that some entrepreneurial folks have started a new project:
https://github.com/buttercoin. The idea is for an open-source exchange framework that can handle heavy load with less lag and fuss than existing exchanges. Seems like a great idea! In particular, they seem to imagine a distributed order book, reducing parties like MtGox to the role of handling fiat transactions, although perhaps that is more of a long term goal. The tricky technological part is making a robust framework that can deal with an extremely large number of transactions per second (orders of magnitude more than existing BTC exchanges can perform). For more details you can see their hackpad:
https://buttercoin.hackpad.com/. Apologies if I have mistakenly misrepresented their idea.
My question for the forum: how can I contribute? I'm an amateur coder, but with no particular experience with the technologies they are using for prototyping (CoffeeScript, node.js). The hackpad is a bit of a jumble right now, with just a bunch of design ideas, yet they still urge people to go ahead, clone the repo, and start coding. What's a good place to start?
