Deepbit pays transactions fees for distributing earnings.  Could that be the source of discrepancy, or is that price already factored into the 3% fee?

Edit: Probably factored into the 3%.  Talldude's answer accounts for the discrepancy.

True, but we don't see it reflected in day-to-day BTC/USD prices as you do with Au/USD.  I think as more foreign currency Bitcoin exchanges open, we'll see the value of the BTC less-closely associated with the USD.

Thanks Fitty for the free keychain!   It'll help bring up Bitcoin in conversations, and much cheaper than a tattoo too.

Exactly.  If you're measuring BTC value in USD, then a fall in value of USD also means a fall in value of BTC.

Also, even if you were collecting for an actual debt owed, it specifies that you must accept notes and coins, not Visa/Mastercard/Paypal. 

Transaction fees.  Miners validate the transactions.  If you want a confirmed transaction within a reasonable amount of time, you'll have to pay a fee.  The supply of miners and demand for confirmations should find a balance.

Of course it was a fluff piece.  Everything on CNN is fluff these days (with the exception Fareed Zakaria).  Given the target audience though, I think it was still balanced coverage and overall some good PR for Bitcoin.  (I would have expected them to have opted for a more sensationalist story, focusing on black markets and what not.)

And honestly if they had started diving into the more technical benefits, the typical viewer would have tuned out.  Instead they showed someone buying lunch with an iPhone, which will appeal to many more people.  And the story mentioned how Bitcoin ideologically opposes fiat, which should appeal to any Teapartiers who happen to be watching CNN instead of Fox.   Collectively,  iPhone owners (and would-be owners) and Teapartiers should easily account for the large majority of the American population.

Error: divide by zero exception uncaught.

Sadly, their page design is more polished than many (legitimate) Bitcoin sites I've encountered.

I've been listing my auctions as accepting Bitcoin. But I think I'll also start offering a small discount for using Bitcoin, if for no other reasons:

• No possibility of charge-backs.  I could even ship to Nigeria and not have to worry about the transaction being reversed against my will.
• Save the ~3-4% that Paypal would charge me on each transaction.

Perhaps I'll even require Bitcoin for international buyers.   I've noticed many sellers simply refuse to ship internationally, or to specific countries with bad reputations for fraud/lost mail.  This is one area where Bitcoin has potential to find an early niche use.

I also noticed an article promoting Paypal on Android as 'P2P':

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/07/paypal-debuts-peer-to-peer-payments-on-smartphones-via-nfcp2p-paypal-payments-coming-via-nfc-capable-phones.ars

Perhaps they mean P2P as opposed to B2B?  Either way, it seems another PR effort to hijack terms associated with Bitcoin.

The Forbes blogger posted a follow-up to the original:

http://blogs.forbes.com/timothylee/2011/07/14/advanced-bitcoin-anonymity/

Hey Andreas.  Nice client! 

I'm trying to build it from source but at this point I need the Zxing library.  I made a quick attempt to build Zxing from source, but it failed.  Before I invest more time in building Zxing, I was wondering if you could direct me towards a compiled jar library of Zxing.  I didn't see it on their project page, only a source zip and the APK file.  Did I overlook it?  Or should it be extracted somehow from the APK?

Thanks.

Yes it does indeed appear so.  Upgrading from SL to Lion has roughly doubled DiabloMiner.app's performance on my MacPro from an average of 140MH/s to 285MH/s with a Radeon HD5870. 

I think it's probably advisable to only keep a small amount in a mobile wallet, not only because of the current lack of encryption, but because mobile devices are more easily susceptible to theft and loss.  I suppose you could employ other measures such as regular backups and remote wipe capabilities.  But still, in most use cases, I expect a user would only want a few bitcoins on his person anyway.

Keep up the good work developers!

A fair policy.  Hope this counts towards my five.

I have a 5870 in my Mac Pro1,1.  I tried out DiabloMiner.app in 10.6 Snow Leopard, which yielded an average of 140MH/s.

After an upgrade to 10.7 Lion, I now see an average of 273MH/s.

I'm not exactly sure why the change appears so drastic.  Perhaps it was an upgrade to the ATI drivers and/or OpenCL framework.  Or perhaps 10.7's UI is just much more efficient with its use of the GPU for acceleration.  (Java version is still 1.6)

Either way, it was a welcome bump in my mining efforts.   But I think perhaps it could still perform better by booting into Ubuntu.

I hope I soon graduate from the kitty pool of the forum.