Bitcoin Forum

1. I would like to know how I can type the symbol for BTC instead of always having to associate it with the $. 2. We need more services! Can someone convince a major porn site, or retailer to offer a small discount to people who pay in BTC?

And get me the hell off of newbie please. I really would like to participate in other discussions. Thanks!

I know a chick who would sell nudes to BTC payers only.
She says she wants to show BTC pride.

There is a special thread for this. Look at the sticky threads.

Porn supposedly was the reason VHS beat Betamax. Could this be how BTC becomes established? The anonymous element of it is obviously desirable to many in this instance.

Of course porn will be part of it. In my opinion it should come later because we dont want BTC to seem like its all shady dealings. However the BTC economy needs everything, it has to be a completely parallel economy.

We certainly need to organize locally as well, a sort of Bitlist(craigslist). I understand completely that the power of bitcoin is the internet, but we are human and so is everyone else, except those damn chickens, they are birds...so to get the normals into the BTC economy they need more than abstractness give them some real world features.

Remember that anonimity in Bitcoin is complicated.
Each transactions is recorded in the Blockchain. If I know both the address of the porn site and yours, and I see there is a transaction involving both of you, I can draw conclusions.
Privacy is not as straightforward as it might be advertised by some.

Smart girl, thinking ahead.

For porn, anonymity has not to be top notch. It is legal in most countries and people just need to avoid it being too visible.

The anonymity isn't absolute, but surely it's more so than using your credit card? I was meaning legal-only porn. Just for a person's own personal privacy, rather than to hide some 'wrongdoing'.

Its incredibly hard to convince anyone to use bitcoin, especially businesses. Fact is...they want reliability. Just discussing the fact the the market fluctuates daily is enough to make them ignore me. Ive tried talking many sites into doing it :)

I'm running a small webstore and I will be adding BTC as a payment option since it is a) secure b) has huge Wow! factor. And I can easily adjust prices in real time, or maybe on a certain timeframe average. Need to model to find out which will be a better approach overall.

ergo - big players will not use it for a while, but that's OK with ME :)

I would think you could set a script to look what the value is say every hour, and adjust the price in BTC to match your dollar value that you want.

Perhaps we could start an organization established by donations that will back/insure BTC, I guess it is a little like the FDIC, however all funds are private and since we all have a vested interest in the currency I dont see a problem with trying to increase its value.

say the group could only afford to insure 3 online stores at first(it will depend on the products offered), that will still be a huge positive for BTC, the movement would grow which in turn would bring more retailers and raise the value of the currency.

Ya...i just dont see it happening on any big scale with such a wierd market. best we can hope for is an mmo implementing it into an item mall.

Or we could just suggest to the newcomer store owner that he should only sell a limited inventory, as much as he can financially risk, and on the other hand he could stand to make even more money from BTC appreciation.

I started a thread over at eBid which is the big competitor to eBay about accepting new payment forms.   While "bidding pond" is nice it's not very large and I find the site slow.  eBid has millions of auctions running each day.  They also seem accepting to new forms of payment.  Right now they accept well over a dozen forms - Including cash.  BTC seems like a no brainer.   So BTC fans head on over and post to the thread.

http://forums.ebid.net/showthread.php?151892-Bitcoins&p=1347572#post1347572

I've got these 2 sites live, but I'm just waiting on a couple of content providers before fully promoting them again:

http://bitcoinbabes.com
http://bitcoinboyfriend.com

There is no official symbol exactly. While the b'at (i'm using with as my av here) doesn't get added to the Unicode standard, i like the idea of using the Ƀ ( Capital B with stroke (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/B_with_stroke) ) as the symbol. There has been quite a bit of discussion about which symbol to use officially (https://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=369.0), there is even a wiki page on the topic (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_symbol) showing some of the proposals (with varied levels of completeness regarding pros and cons and things like that)

Ah, and regarding that; the people that run the forum decided that the best way to deal with the excess of lame posts and just plain spam was to cage new accounts till they have enough posts to earn the right to play with the big boys; so to be released you should try to post as much as you can in here while still trying to not post useless or otherwise unwelcome posts (if you upset people too much while still in the newbie pit i imagine you run a big risk of getting banned before earning the right to post elsewhere)

I think seeing that the lowercase ƀ has a natural T element to it, it would be a much better choice.

Once a swarm decision has been made about that, one thing (as a potential retailer) that concerns me is the unprofessional, computer-gamey/wild-westish Bitcoin logo.  A bit of a modern corporate makeover would go a long way.

First impressions in an image and brand conscious world etc etc.

I'm graphically inept, but the lowercase ƀ could be implemented in a logo so that the "itcoin" could get dropped once it gets around.  I've done a finger-painting to show what it shouldn't look like :) ...

http://stashbox.org/1130923/bitcoin.png

.... I'm sure somebody with an artistic bone in their body could make that concept look good, but do you guys see what I am getting at?

In my view, it won't go mainstream until exchanging regular currency to BTC becomes easier.

There are already a truckload of virtual currencies e.g. Pecunix, Liberty Reserve etc. But if you look at who trades in it, there is hardly anyone. If you look at how to get your hands on some, there are hardly any ways.

All that happens is that the currency stays in the hands of a very few.

At least with BTC, it can be generated. But this also decreases trust because the gold rush occurred too recently. It should have been programmed to take longer. Hence we now have these volatile last few days and weeks.

That, plus a drive to get Bitcoin payments easily integrated into all open source (for the meantime) ecommerce solutions with multi-currency and ƀ real-time conversion support is a necessary step IMO to getting wide stream acceptance.

Absolutely and especially for retailers.  When I first heard about Bitcoin (a couple of weeks ago through a forum thread somewhere or other) I had a look at the Wiki retailer list.  If it was easy to implement Bitcoin payments into popular payment systems with risk-reducing real time conversion rates then that list would be a lot bigger, a lot sooner.  I'd be in it, but I'm not.

Awesome I will be adding to the discussion over there shortly.

Just go here to register: https://us.ebid.net/perl/normal.cgi?home=us&mo=register-main  and then click on the link i quoted.

Could you put a limited amount of inventory for sale with BTC? so as not too risk too much, Im sure you will receive business.

As I thought.

If they offered it as a payment method you could then choose pretty much any subset of them for your auctions.  So you could offer items where BTC is only one of the payment options.

With the limitation on online gambling in the US done via the banking system, it seems like bitcoins would be perfect for that area.

Saint Cad

The key problem with going from fiat currency to bitcoins is that bitcoins do not have an "established" value. For example, if you have 1 dollar you can calculate your buying power relative to the currency of another country. With the rapidly fluctuating value of bitcoins relative to fiat currencies, no serious business will dare to use it. Today 2 BTC may be worth $20 and tomorrow work $10...then a week later $50.

One thing that could help is if the community deals exclusively with bitcoins and stops trying to mine them and cash out. If we as a community form a consensus on the value of 1 BTC, we can then form pricing for various products and services accordingly.

Let's try this:

We arbitrarily decide that 1 BTC should be equivalent to $100.00 USD in terms of buying power. A consensus is formed in the community to support this valuation. All products and services from that point should be priced in BTC according to 1 BTC = $100, regardless of what the exchange markets say.

1) If people see that 1 BTC has $100 USD of buying power, they would be less inclined to sell it on mt.gox for a mere $15 in an attempt to cash out.

2) If people can purchase the products and services they want with BTC then it eliminates the need to cash out, so the marketplace needs to be diverse and full of stuff people actually want.

3) For people who do want to cash out, the markets will be forced to adjust accordingly and should stabilize as more people simply transact with BTC rather than cashing out.

this is very close to the solution. but instead of simply saying it is worth $100 say it is always worth x+10 x being the value of BTC in dollars. Because if it were randomly $100, the vendor would have to sell $100 worth of goods for only $15 (as of right now). so maybe it should be x+6 or even less. Or maybe similar to the mining difficulty levels start at x+50 and gradually lower it until the market stabilizes.Do you see what Im saying?

It's been used, Just write the program.

I love it, The slightly religious look. Many are obsessed with Bitcoin, it's almost like a religion.
Hello, I'm Desu and I'm Bitcoiness...

But if BTC goes mainstream it won't be cool and obscure anymore. >:

Ha...

I have an idea, go to your local zimbabwean embassy and try convincing them to adopt the BTC! They seem really opened to new currencies^^.

Seriously though, Wikileaks? That's pretty mainstream, I think their announcement is going to introduce bitcoin to a lot new people and not just the (h)ac(k)tivist kind.

if bitcoin is as strong as i think it might well be .. it will prove itself..· there is a balance ... increasing value of bitcoin is a huge bonus as it increases speculative uptake ie more users.. the volatility and swings make it difficult for purchase transactions. It's initial strength will be in the main the speculative nature and with time emphasis should move slowly from speculative and wild to balanced, predictable and mainstream. I think in a sense one needs to precede the other. The real beauty is the lack of centralised control... there is no levers being pulled in the background...the source code can be viewed and analysed by all and sundry... and if i had written the code... every time i read a headline..  like "bitcoin crashes again" i would laugh my sox off.. all publicity is good publicity.. any mainstream MSM reporting a crash must be painfully aware they are also highlighting the fact that it is recovering again later... so lets not be paranoid about trolls anymore they are our friends... so there you go bitcoins will be worth a penny by the end of the week... LOL  OH AND LET ME LOOSE SOON....

"Bitcoin the most honest and transparent Ponzi scheme ever"
if that sounds like a contradiction, it was meant to....

lol wut

I dont know if this has been thrown around but xenland could make a porntube like site for BTC? Any one want to manage it, i wouldnt have time to keep track of legal uploads all day.
Let me know if your intrested and ill pay back in percentage of monthly net profit.

Im on board i agree that we should stop cashing out and start cashing in. other wise something great will be lost over greed. I would also like to announce im down to design an bussiness if it means increasing the bitcoins buying power. PM if you have any bussiness ideas and would like a bussiness partner to start. I have a valid california wholesale and bussiness license.

Supply and demand will govern all things, bit coins and otherwise

Someone should start accepting donations to do media buys on websites, like at .01 a click
And then make a site that promoted bit coin awareness in a way that the masses will understand

The privacy point will be a huge draw, investments another

Then take the money and or bit coins received to get 50,000 or 100,000 people a day reading about bit coins