Bitcoin Forum

No one yet has answered this problem: Its too easy to get robbed. You send someone some bitcoins and they can just walk! It's just like posting cash to a stranger, totally stupid.
No-one posts cash to stranger, so no-one will send bitcoins! It's obvious!

In a face to face transaction, use cash - cus its anonymous.
In an internet transaction, use Paypal etc, cuz its the only way not to get robbed.

Add escrow to bitcoin and you've gained nothing now. The whole project is totally pointless!

Why can no-one give me a robust resolution. By robust, I mean not some juvenile, hand waving gibberish arguement.

well, let me just say that I made more than 200 bitcoin transactions with people I don't know, and I never was robbed

This is the fundamental problem with the currency and why I am expecting a near-term price of between $7-$9.

why not <$1 then?

If you get robbed 1% of the time then charge 1% more to do a transaction with BTC. That way, you spread the risk around and come out even in the long run.

I said near-term.  The market is so infantile and speculative that it's going to remain above its fundamental price for quite some time.

You have a point.

I think there will be payment systems on top of bitcoin some day (google, maybe even paypal, visa come to mind), which offer chargeback, fast hassle-free payment and protection from theft to a certain degree.

Bitcoin is online gold, not many trade in gold nowadays, but it's used as store of value. Bitcoin might have similar fate with other currencies pegged to it.

Not a "robust solution", but maybe a direction to think?

Using paypal is the only way TO get robbed.

Bonker doesn't like to read. All the answers are there, even if you refuse to look them up.

Guess its another troll-erday.

I suppose you could publish your list of trusted addys to the community. That might be an approach to the problem, I suppose?

Also, remember the people using bitcoins right now generally believe in the project and want it to succeed. You know nice guys. So I suspect fraud would increase with general usage, as the masses get involved.

Please excuse my ignorace, but how do you determine this 'fundamental' price?  got any formula to share?

Look into asset pricing models.

Someone could make a service like Paypall that uses Bitcoins, couldn't they?

I think these problems will be solved by 3ed party companies that create software to secure Bitcoin transactions, and hardware that allows us to use Bitcoin in our dally life.

http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratings.php

thanks, i'll just assume $7-9 "fundamental" price is simply your speculation, the point at which you would like to execute some buy orders

Then you should sell off all your bitcoin. ::)

If you are fear, you can use the service like https://clearcoin.appspot.com/ (https://clearcoin.appspot.com/) that hold the money so that you can release it to the other one until you receive the product.

Or you may wait for a year for the implementation of contract https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts , at that time you can hold the money until both people signed the contract. If conflict occur, just get a third trusted person to solve it. At that time, the value of bitcoin should rise because it is so easy to use without any third party ;D

I guess TraderTimm doesn't like to write. Can you at least provide a link to a robust resolution? Because I haven't found one so far

Given that there have been a bazillion posts about wallet security, the equivalence of bitcoin to cash and the attendant problems, I'm sure if you were able to do your own homework instead of monkey-hammering out your poorly researched opinions, you might be able to learn something.

But I'm not holding my breath over it.

Ok, that's starting to ease my concern a little. Thanks for that.

While you're right "its easy to get robbed" (until we have more robust infrastructure). For trading/shopping i have to use your argument against BTC, against using paypal/cc over the net. What happens when a seller accepts pp/cc, they INCREASE their price similar to the risk they take (of stolen cc/pp or simply other dispute), with bitcoin the "seller beaware attitude" turns into a "buyer beaware attitude", so its possible to run a "shop" at lower costs with BTC as opposed to cc/pp. This is the problem i have with our RL system, regardless of an outcome of a buyer/seller dispute the creditcard company ALWAYS profit, the seller usually loses and all other buyers pay the price for all of this.

Dude, you're turning out to be a prime dickbag. This isn't a question of "wallet security", it's a problem of transaction fraud. Seeing as you couldn't come up with an answer, some others have come up with a partial solution. But there are still glaring holes in Bitcoin that will see it burn in an early grave if it ever hits the general population in its present form..

Huge lol at this thread:
If bitcoin were useless then no one would want to steal it from you.

stop bullshitting.  you have no idea.

Unfortunately, ClearCoin is now closed to new escrow listings.
  - http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=21659.0

fixed

Uh oh, name-calling - let me get something to cry into.

Transaction fraud discussions are in the forums too, you know, under the heading "bitcoin escrow". Of course, you'd know this if you had bothered to look. Do you research anything you talk about, ever? I'm quite sure by the time any of these problems are solved, it won't be because you posted a few hurried statements about bitcoin in your spare time.

Either offer some kind of strategy yourself, learn about the complexities, or stay out of the way of those who will solve it for you.

If you're too squeamish to use it, don't. 

Funny you say paypal is the only way not to get robbed. It's the same as sending bitcoins, except once you receive the item you do a chargeback. Paypal doesn't care, just like bitcoins doesn't care. If you're not safe with transactions, you will get robbed. Same with pretty much any other scenario dealing with money.

Use clearcoin, otherwise maybe you should not deal with currencies at all if this is your concern.

Since you don't want to do research: R = Rf + B(Rm - Rf)

go from there...

just b/c u throw up a formula u think that makes u an expert on market pricing?  in an infant industry like btc?

tell me exactly what the price of the Dow should be at this moment?  how about the USD?  what about the Euro?  

you can't b/c if u could you'd be making trillions in forecasting fees.  markets are inherently unpredictable and screw 99% of the ppl trying to guess the right price.

i remember that formula from sophomore econ too!

Hmm did you derive it there too? 

Could you please fill in the numbers so we can clearly see BTC price = $7-9
Thanks

I dunno man, that's a lot of jameson ago

No because this will give you the % expected return and then you use that in a discounted cash flow model to get the price.

any kind of bitcoin valuation in which you don't include a markup for knuckleheads who think bitcoin will replace all existing currencies and pour their live savings into it because of this leads you nowhere near 7$.

Step one to being taken seriously on the bitcoin forums: Don't use "BTC Economist" as your username!

I still do see how what you're doing isn't speculation, just the same as those who count "what if % of global economy was in BTC and should cost xxxx". Please correct me if i'm wrong.

+1
#bitcoin-otc is pretty much the de facto standard way of seeing if someone is trustworthy around here.

Sorry, buddy, you continue to mark yourself as a dickbag. Escrow is obvious, but it introduces the problem of a third party. This is a fundamental flaw as any conventional escrow would be subject to regulation. Escrow makes Bitcoin no different to a bank or paypal transaction. As such, Bitcoin is just a geeky reinvention of the wheel.

The nearest thing to a resolution offered so far is the "web of trust", offered by a more constructive poster than yourself earlier in this thread.

But remember, if Bitcoin goes mainstream gangs of very smart people will be looking to attack it.

Any trading / bitcoin commerce site need to have a reputation system. That is how ebay solved the problem once and for all.

What I feel lacking and to be urgently developed at the moment is:

1) a client for mobile phones;

2) an optional encryption and redundant backup of your wallet somewhere in the cloud.

Actually you can get robbed also using paypal ? And all other payment methods. Ok paypal can refound you taking the money from the account that robbed you , but do you think that after taking your money , the thief will leave the money in his account just for paypal to return them back to you ??
That's why there is reputation on ebay , because also using paypal you are not sure to receive what you buy.
There is also the possibility to be robbed when using cash actually.

Yeah, that's a nice system. Not perfect, but it's a step in the right direction.
Thanks

It isn't that much different from "real-world". There are tons of services where you pay in advance because you trust the other party as you know that it would hurt their reputation too much too just walk away with the customer's money.

This works even better in case of a repeated contract: For example if an online service with a subscription of 3$/month suddenly stops giving value for your money, you just stop renewing and they loose a customer. You know that, they know that, they know that you know it... etc ad infinitum. And things keep going smoothly.

I am not saying that what I wrote solves all the problems (one-time contracts such as ebay is a different story), but this argument itself does not prove that bitcoins are worthless.

Yeah, but a key element to Bitcoin is anonymity. Building trust with an anonymous counterparty is tricky.
The "web of trust" seems to address this quite well and also remain decentralised and hence outside easy regulation/control.

But I suspect it is still subject to subversion and this is the danger.

Well then that kind of goes against the whole "bitcoin is supposed to be cheaper" than paypal or whatever the heck. If people are going to price in high risk BTC will become a high risk currency and thus be more expensive to transact with - for the long term.

I don't mind if you think bitcoin is useless, because there is a disproportionate number who think it isn't. Nothing you've suggested is new, novel, or any kind of 'final solution'. So feel free to sit at the sidelines and pick nits out of your fur, leave the trading to the adults.

Is it? No one is preventing you from disclosing your identity. And the system isn't relying on anonymity, the cryptographic mathemagics works anyway. Remaining anonymous is just an option.

everyone knows that. the issue for trade is that a bank account (or paypal, ...) IS identification.

I'm batman and 13GuHYTANS5H7Zerp9zcEjJpBaYzBwuP1k is my address, please pay and don't worry, in case something goes wrong just come to my cave and sue me.

That's a pretty poor excuse. Your original theory is flawed anyway, because there's no reason it should settle in any particular place. It could settle at 20, 10, 1000, we'd just use different amounts of bitcoin for our normal transactions. The decimal point can shift.

Bitcoin isn't useless as long as idiots speculators are willing to trade currency for more bitcoins.

I predict a massive collapse in bitcoin valuation in the next couple of months as (1) mining costs far more than bitcoins can be redeemed for on the market and (2) fresh speculator blood dries up, since the bitcoin market is nearing speculator saturation.

I still plan on using bitcoin 'for fun' with my friends (we'll probably generate our own blockchain though).

+1

I predict a long thread a couple months from now full of old "bitcoin is on its death bed" quotes, after (yet another) massive increase in bitcoin valuation.

We can accept that speculators may be fools.  But do we really want to bet that there aren't enough fools in the world to go around?  Please, the market is a long, long way from running out of fools (or foolish money, as it were).

Nifty idea to generate your own blockchain among friends for fun.  Don't be surprised when they switch to another for profit.

so you obviously don't believe in efficient markets?

I expect that the more BTC is stolen, the more concentrated it will become in the accounts of thieves.

I am offering Bitcoin paper wallets at http://www.casascius.com meant as a remedy to help people not get robbed.

I realize the "why should I trust you" factor is involved - that's not my point - I'm not asking you to buy one.  But part of my desire to produce them is to make Bitcoin useful to more people.  A paper wallet can be managed without technical expertise without risk of being compromised - the only point of trust required is in the person producing the paper wallet.

Maybe you can sell easy to understand guides and/or custom software so regular Joes can do this? Just a suggestion.