Bitcoin Forum

Let me start off by saying this post is not bashing Bitcoin, I love the stuff.

What legitimate purchases are currently being made with Bitcoin?  My cynical outlook predicts the huge majority are only being used for purchasing illegal products/services on underground websites such as silkroad.

I am aware there is a huge list of websites which accept Bitcoin, but I am guessing they make up a small fraction of bitcoins being used?  I'm also sure a lot of donations made to controversial causes like Wikileaks could be considered.

Thoughts?  Again I am not bashing, just want to hear your opinions.

No way to measure for comparison. If you've looked at the website of various people/organizations accepting BTC for goods/services, then decided to believe BTC is mostly used "illegitimately," there's not much of a way to disagree.

The forum's marketplace certainly shows many legitimate ways to spend Bitcoins, and surely you'll find many successful transactions, but again, that'd be like throwing the Wikipedia page at you with the many goods & services you can spend BTC on.

Steam games (and TF2 items) are popular, home-made goods (food, knitted goods, lasers), FPGAs, fantastic coffee beans, lots of computer components, BTC's an exceptionally easy way to convert between various currencies/"exchanges" (for instance, AmazonUSD to DwollaUSD), houses (someone buy mine, please!), VPS services, game consoles. Those are off the top of my head.


What kind of evidence would convince you?

Again with this topic?  There are several threads around, but I use BTC for real stuff.  Examples:

 - Recently purchased 80,000 yen for 200 coins, saving transaction fees that would have taken 4% of value.
 - Recently arrange shipping of a small value item ($50) from the USA via intermediary.  Postage was $9.72 and I paid 3 coins to help compensate for his time.  Useful, but unexciting item, just not available locally, and the company didn't ship outside US.
 - Transferred funds to AUD account to fund legal action to recover a loan (well, part of the legal cost).

And yesterday I purchased
 - a magazine subscription.
 - purchased some GPU power for another non-BTC project.

I have bought and sold a bunch of products from iPhones, candy, computer gear, store credit cards.   I regularly sell products on my website for bitcoin with an automated checkout system.

thanks for replies.  don't need convincing, to be honest my personal view on the legality of drugs makes me fully support websites such as silkroad, I was just interested to see what would be thrown up in discussion..  apologies for same old thread, please link me if you can remember any.

I thought the vast majority of bitcoins were used to buy dollars. Which were then used to buy bitcoins again. Sometimes at a profit (and sometimes not). Hopefully this situation will change as bitcoins become more widely accepted.

No matter, it possibly doesn't hurt to remind people that there are real uses for coins, and as the economy grows, it gets more diverse.

In response to a question I got about the yen, it was a physical delivery.  I travelled 9000 km to a hotel in Tokyo and it had been delivered and was waiting as promised.
As for buying dollars with coins, I do that as well, it pays my daughter's university costs.

I've bought steam games, pci-e risers, a few months of vps squared, i play poker and i bet on sports

These are the things i have done with bitcoin, and i have no intention of spending my bitcoins yet, lol

I've bought a vps  and pay month fee using bitcoins.

I've bought maple syrup, LoL referrals, a couple domain names and even invested in a few Bitcoin in companies around the world.

I've also sold a steam game on www.bitmit.net

www.coindl.com started selling digital goods, and I've made a few sales on it myself.

Second Life relate items mostly. Haven't bought physical items in a while.

Contraband is, beyond doubt, a not insignificant portion of any economy.  However, I seriously doubt that such business is anything near a majority of the Bitcoin economy.  I've personally made dozens of purchases; from a handmade necklace on Etsy, to pretty quartz rocks, to Steam game licenses, to Internet services, to cell phone service (via a Virgin Mobile Top-up card #) to (most recently) candy.  I've never bought anything that could be considered contraband where I live.

On quick look at bitcoinwatch.com tells me that the total volume of bitcoin in motion in the past 24 hours was 904,380.25 BTC while the volume on the exchanges presented on that same page total under 73,000.  Granted, there could be a great deal of cash trading off of those markets and some of that first number is users moving BTC from one address to another.  But it seems a bit silly to think that with a daily volume over 10% of the entire monetary base in current circulation, cash/bitcoin trades could make up anything near a majority of real economic trade volume.

USD -(exchanger)-> Bitcoin -(investments)-> More Bitcoins -(exchanger)-> More USD

My current purpose for bitcoins.

Our little family business is growing, in a small part thanks to the bitcoin community, and will need to expand the number of honeybee hives.

I am hoping in the next couple of weeks to buy bees with Bitcoin  (I'm guessing that might be a first?) ::)

I will have to demonstrate how he could then use bitcoins to buy silver.  

I'm guessing that he will want me to buy the silver and pay him that instead. :'(  But I think this person will be open to it and will think it is cool.  Just a little too technical and won't have the time to learn the ropes.  We shall see...

But just how much of that 904,380.25 BTC is simply people sending coins to themselves for legitimate (change) or illegitimate (laundering) purposes? You don't know. Nobody knows. In any case, 10% of the entire economy is more than a significant fraction, and unless you can show evidence that some other use of bitcoins accounts for more than that, then I stand by what I said.

The kids are trying to figure out how to do that right now.  We only expand as they are ready to learn new things, and a bitcoin online store for our web page is a priority.

To bring this back on subject, bitcoin is useful in homeschooling to learn about developing technologies and learn and be part of international communities, investing, scamming awareness...plus you can buy books and software with bitcoins.

Haven't shown the kids the gambling and porn side of bitcoin yet.. :o

The other day I bought a case of Girl Scout cookies for BTC.  Yum.

I've personally sold about $20,000 USD worth of Cisco gear in the last week for bitcoins.

<--- here

Also, people spend their BTC on Gold and Silver a lot.
Since the number of BTC is limited, most if not all BTC spent will find their way back to MtGox et al. for sale.

I've personally bought virtual stuff like gamecodes and in game items lately. And I'm contemplating to buy a cpu from the trading thread, and probably a kindle via someone who could ship it to me overseas. The most major use of bitcoins for me was to give out loans easily imho.

Did you plan on showing them the gambling & porn side of cash, too?

I did mention that as an unknown.


You don't know that either, so you stand by a myth that you can't possiblely have any more evidence for than I do.  And the truth is, I've much more direct & personal experience with the bitcoin economy than thou.  My intuitive estimate, based upon my own experiences, says that 1) the moving of coins is less than half of all volume and 2) the cash/bitcoin trade is not more than 25% of the remaining legitimate trade and 3) the black market (excluding grey markets such as second-hand) is less than that.  I didn't say that they were insignificant, I said that they were not the majority of the economy.

Never used SR. Not even sure how to log on, but I constantly use bitcoins for:

1) Paying for my Wuala storage (and getting a huge rebate!!)
2) Paying for my VPN (airvpn) which I use for all my traffic as a matter of principle
3) Paying for my smartphone's VPN (mullvad)
4) Tipping my favorite bloggers when they post something intelligent. Unfortunately many bloggers don't post a Bitcoin address (yet)

I also occasionally use bitcoins for
1) Paying friends for take-away food, etc. (generally I need to introduce them to bitcoin first and help them install a smartphone wallet)
2) Buying various gadets, clothes and other stuff on bitmit and elsewhere
3) Transfering money when I have been abroad: (e.g. euro -> BTC -> USD -> credit union (via Dwolla)) making huge savings on wire fee

Bitcoin rocks!

Bitcoin is not just a currency/economic experiment, it is a social one as well.
What Bitcoin is as a currency is a reflection of the Bitcoin community.
So criticisms about the currency reflect on all and some may find offensive.

I fully understand where you are cumming from.
I've been posting my extra stuff around the house for sale on bitmit.net to try and improve things.
There's a lot of my stuff for cheap to try and entice new users to join this experiment. Other people have done
so much more. It's growing slowly but surely.

"Don't ask what Bitcoin can do for you, but ask what you can do for Bitcoin"

Over the past year I've used Bitcoin quite a bit, and never used it for anything illegal. Most of the transactions involved international transfer of value, and some were a long-term BTC investment. Also, sold a few of my mined coins for fiat. This paid off the mining rig completely, which I built so it can work as a powerful desktop too.

Bitcoin will be used for legitimate (or illegal) stuff as much as you and I use it for legitimate (or illegal) stuff, much like fiat cash.

Awesome list of uses, minorman!

For #4, there's also http://BTCTip.com which creates a wallet that can be spent only by that Twitter user.
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Btctip

- bought 5 GPU's from users of this forum with BTC or BTC-EUR
- bought some gadgets-presents from Bitmit
- invested in GLBSE companies
- BTC>EUR>HRK conversion bought me some farming equipment, food crop seeds and cuttings, fuel, groceries etc...
- accepting apartment rental for Bitcoin in Croatia - PM me for price and availability :)

People look at it as Bitcoin is just for buying illegal stuff. But every currency is used for illegal purposes. When people buy drugs they dont just buy them with bitcoin they buy them with USD also. The Ico6 Consignment Section (http://www.ico6.com/consignment-products) has done reasonably well recently. That shows that people are also using it for Legal purposes.

When I saw this, I thought you wanted me to ignore you lol

yeees, yeees... you I had in mind...
PLAN, WHY U NO WORK OUT?

no seriously... why would that be?

I mostly just use them to donate to cool stuff that accepts it. Generally political or artsy in nature. For example I gave a small amount(s) to Adam Kokesh, The Bitcion Trader, ZhouTonged (music), Archive.org, wikileaks, and Al-Queda. Ha ha just kidding about that last one. Or am I. Yes I am.

I bought some jewellry from BitMit.net

I never expected to be buying things like that with bitcoins, but I found the exact piece I was looking for at BitMit. I hadn't been able to find it by trudging the shops or at Amazon. It arrived on time, in good condition, and made a great birthday present for my wife.

On my screen the arrow points to "ignore" which is just under the link I think you meant to point to

I just bought 2 issues of the Bitcoin Magazine.
...
...
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Yeaah, I know, it'll never be published!

But I liked the idea. Im furthermore speculating (<---- watch my name!) with BTC vs USD on MtGox

Hehe, this made me laugh…I just hope you don't end up on a no fly list.