Bitcoin Forum

By far the most successful electronic payment system is of course Paypal.

Paypal was supposed to be a way to transmit money securely over cellphones and smart phones. That's what the investors thought they were investing in.

When Paypal got funded and began to deploy, it was not real successful. There was no huge demand for it. People didn't want to pay for groceries using their cellphones.

Paypal was going nowhere.

Until something clicked. eBay was growing at an enormous rate and merchants needed a way to get payment.

eBay merchants adopted Paypal in droves and eBay became the killer app for Paypal.

What will be the killer app for Bitcoin?

This is not easy to answer. I suspect it is paying for services rather than goods. I suspect that marketplaces will form that are entirely Bitcoin, almost like bartar markets.

What do you think?

Internet goods and services are an obvious fit, software, design, hosting, etc.

Those are a fit, true, but there is no compelling reason not to pay for those with, say, Paypal.

Micropayment.

Sure there is.  Paypal has a standard transaction overhead of 2.9% plus some small fixed fee, which I believe is about 60 cents.  Currently, Bitcoin has no such fees; and when it does they will be truly market based, likely never approaching 2.9% except in very small or very unusual transactions.

Well, maybe biddingpond will be to bitcoin what eBay was to PayPal.

I don't think so. BiddingPond's user base is not big enough.

latching onto one big existing company is great for a payment processor dealing in an established currency. I don't think that's it's going to happen with bitcoin. It's going to be 285 small operations and a medium sized one, then 4290 small operations, 324 medium ones and a big one, then 34229 small operations 8234 medium ones 124 large operations and a huge one, then everyone.

There just isn't room for a large company to start taking payment now, one customer getting enough coins for one high end car would double the exchange rate. I think it's going to happen fast, but it's also going to happen "in order".

So I agree, biddingpond isn't going to single handedly launch bitcoin into orbit, but it is a small part of the natural process that will make it happen eventually.

And WTF happened to their layout... turquoise on green?

http://www.biddingpond.com/

No, really - WTF. Will they pay for my treatments if i get eye cancer ?

Maybe something like the Zynga games could do the trick, or other big online games accepting them to buy in-game currencies.

 

Or actual games. I would spend some coins at http://store.steampowered.com/ for sure. I will not, however, try to convince them of that, as every time I tried it went over like a bad sales pitch, doing more harm than good.

micropayment + for a virtual good + in a social gaming environment

Maybe eGenesis could start accepting Bitcoin for their other MMO.(atitd)

Also, a kickstarter bitcoin alternative would be AWESOME!

This could be the killer app right here.  It could certainly garner a lot of media attention:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2877.0

I think the issue is that when someone gets bitcoins, they think they have to exchange them for money. The beauty of bitcoins is that the market can grow organically in bitcoin-to-bitcoin transactions.  You want people to receive AND spend bitcoins, not to have to buy bitcoins whenever they need to spend them.

Services are a natural for this.

You want symmetrical services. For instance, I buy a lot of software development services in India, but those developers in India don't buy a lot of services themselves.

The killer app will be something where the buyers receiving bitcoins also spend those bitcoins. So they don't run a "trade deficit".

Model things along the lines of local barter clubs. I think that could be the killer app. A barter club where you offer your services for bitcoins and others offer theirs. I am too new to this community to know that there are probably 100 sites already like this, so forgive me for my ignorance.

If enough of us ask it will at least be advertisement for bitcoins and give the currency some credence, though I doubt they will accept it until it becomes more mainstream.

Probably the best thing going for bitcoins is that the US dollar is going to crash.  Sooner or later.  Probably sooner....

Rake-free poker sounds like a killer app to me.

I think poker will be huge for bitcoin. I don't think it has to be rake free though. I'd gladly pay a small part of every pot to pay for customer service, software, and advertising. Hopefully the low barrier to entry will keep those things healthy and the rake low.

If anyone wants to invest in a bitcoin poker room then I've been working on it.

http://poker.bitcoinvegas.com

However there's lots of side issues that are slowing me down to a crawl. It'd be a definite + to be able to throw money at those issues and breeze through development.

Here's community reaction to our project:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28/internet-poker/rake-free-open-poker-room-run-poker-community-938389/
http://www.liquidpoker.net/poker-forum/940985/Rake-Free__amp;_Ran_By_the_Poker_C...html

It'd also be good if I could find a partner to handle all the business/strategy side of development enabling me to focus on technology. My previous partner withdrew after consulting a lawyer to find that running such a company in the US isn't possible (his company is US-based), and would need to be based abroad in one of these gambling tax-free havens like Ireland.

One concession I'm willing to make would be licensing all the code under cc-by-nc (prevents commercial use) for 1 year to enable such a business to get a head-start before the code is completely GPL'ed.

It's possible to do purely P2P poker using cryptography to shuffle the cards. The problem is that either all n players have to cooperate to decrypt a card, in which case if any player leaves the hand can't be completed; or t < n players suffice to decrypt a card, in which case any t players could collude to learn other players' cards. But it could work for a friendly game.

As a matter of fact it is possible using Public key crypto!

Handshake:
-Generate a key pair.(And keep track of all of them so they can't be reused)
-Hash the private key of both for the pseudo random generator and create the "random" deck.(Separate decks. Maybe cards are not going to be the ideal P2P betting game xD)
-Whoever has the digest of smallest value of their public key"A" draws a card first then "B". One by one hashing their signed card and communicating it to the other.(Which he won't be able to interpret at this point, though, he can validate it later on)
-Play whatever betting game you wish. :)
-Validate the other didn't cheat(He gives you the signed cards he draw and you compare them to the hashes.

Hopefully I word it correctly. You got the basic idea.

Actually that's very slow. If you do choose to accept a central server (that they generate unbiased random numbers) then you can do a distributed shuffle. However you have the problem of one person leaving with their keys when they loose.

Then you have the other problem of needing an escrow to hold the funds in the current pot. It's definitely something I want to do in the future to protect against super-users but not a priority right now.

Something gottach be THE killer app, right?

Which one?

Let the market decide.