Hi,

I intend to implement trading across chains in a P2P manner (as described
by Mike Hearn in
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_5:_Trading_across_chains).
Note, this is indended more as an alternative chain development, I don't
have any plans for merging it back into main client (not because I don't
want to, but because I think it wouldn't be accepted). Before I dive into
it, I thought it might be a good idea to ask here if the community has any
useful ideas or comments on this topic?

Thanks to Gary Rowe I know about Open
Transactions<https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions>.
They can do "multicurrency trading" too, but it's objectives are quite
ambitious and I'm looking at making relatively small changes in the
mainline Bitcoin client rather than diving into something entirely new.

A little background on why am I doing this, can be found
here<https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bitcoinj/lmVSF8yaJHk/discussion>.
In short it's part of research towards my Master's thesis (more precisely,
an excuse to hack on Bitcoin and sell it as research :)) which should be
about multicurrency (alternative chains) in Bitcoin.

Thanks,
Petr

PS: I hope I'm not too off topic here, but
this<https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=15527.0> thread
indicates it should be fine to post alternative development questions on
this.