I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but this is my recollection of Buttercoin's history. Please reply with corrections, and I'll edit.
Mtgox crash about 1 year ago, when their trade engine could not keep up with the large number of transactions. Later we found out that Mtgox could not handle more than something like 50 transactions / second. Buttercoin was a developer's response to Mtgox's crash. To build a better mouse trap that could handle 100x more trade volume than Mtgox.
https://buttercoin.hackpad.com/FAQ-QTRSMzlkLD6
It was originally supposed to be open source, to improve the underlying machinery for all bitcoin exchanges. There were some really bright and ambitious people involved in the beginning too. Somewhere a couple months in, the core developers took VC money, and decided to launch their own exchange instead. I haven't kept up with the project enough to know if they are holding to the initial open source exchange source code promises, but I'm not surprised at all that they want to cash in on becoming a big centralized exchange.
It'd probably be hard to be VC funded, while also giving away their competitive advantage (highly scalable trade engine source code) for free.
https://buttercoin.hackpad.com/FAQ-QTRSMzlkLD6
http://www.reddit.com/r/buttercoin
Mtgox crash about 1 year ago, when their trade engine could not keep up with the large number of transactions. Later we found out that Mtgox could not handle more than something like 50 transactions / second. Buttercoin was a developer's response to Mtgox's crash. To build a better mouse trap that could handle 100x more trade volume than Mtgox.
https://buttercoin.hackpad.com/FAQ-QTRSMzlkLD6
It was originally supposed to be open source, to improve the underlying machinery for all bitcoin exchanges. There were some really bright and ambitious people involved in the beginning too. Somewhere a couple months in, the core developers took VC money, and decided to launch their own exchange instead. I haven't kept up with the project enough to know if they are holding to the initial open source exchange source code promises, but I'm not surprised at all that they want to cash in on becoming a big centralized exchange.
It'd probably be hard to be VC funded, while also giving away their competitive advantage (highly scalable trade engine source code) for free.
https://buttercoin.hackpad.com/FAQ-QTRSMzlkLD6
http://www.reddit.com/r/buttercoin