I applied for the XAPO card a few days ago, I'll report back if/when I receive it and whether or not it works. I read some reviews that sounded chipper but they could be paid for. Right now XAPO appears to be a customer service black hole, so I have my doubts. I sure as hell am not sending any XBT to them until I get a physical debit card from them first.

I found you can apply for the card through the XAPO site as well as through Bitwage.co, I did both but I'm not sure I understand how that process works and if I duplicated the request or not.

My guess is that they are buying XBT off exchange somewhere from a wholesaler. The rate I have received is what I would consider reasonable and they charge no fee at all, so I'm completely satisfied in that department.

They are very customer service oriented and great to work with, but it takes time to get an account established.

You might also update it to reflect the death of Brawker

Coinbase is the worst XBT service available on many levels. My guess is that the majority of their profits actually come from selling user data to government agencies and from market manipulation (front running / strategic order cancellations). You might as well just use a bank and fiat, you'll get certainly get better customer service and it's much faster to open accounts and transfer money.

Blockchain.info is far better than Coinbase but I still would not use it except for experimenting. There are too many ways to lose your XBT on there - most notably the TOR vulnerability. 2FA as we use it today is not actually secure.

By far the best 'web wallet' is mytrezor.com - it is well worth the $120US or whatever for the hardware & data service. It's very easy to use and as far as I know the most secure option available. Use that as your bank and then find a nice mobile wallet like Mycelium or Breadwallet to store small amounts on for daily use. The Trezor device needs a higher build quality for the case (the plastic is cheap and should be replaced with wood or metal) and I hear the server has occasional downtime, but I've never experienced any problems with the server or the device.

It might slow down law enforcement or the courts a day or two, because they'll want to make sure they have the right people an property. If you buy a stolen vehicle (for example), you're out the cash and the vehicle when the FBI or State police come to collect it, even if you had no idea the vehicle was stolen.

I think don't think credit cards are going away anytime soon because of this exact issue - the CC is really just and easy way to do escrow. The banking aspect will disappear though - it would be trivial just to send the agency an XBT deposit and then they could return it when you return the car.

Has anyone tried renting a car using a CC issued through XAPO yet?

A bank (or anyone) can claim anything - whether or not people buy into it is up to them. In this example the bank is just a scammer - it did a classic bait and switch. Financial schemes and crimes are the easiest to perpetrate I think, due to information asymmetry in financial markets. This doesn't have anything to do with contracts or enforcement.


Possession/control/usage is 9/10 ownership.

DRM does well at controlling physical objects. You could quite easily install a chip that disables any electronic equipment inside cars, computers, phones, etc. that is activated (or de-activated) by sending precise amounts of XBT to pre-arranged addresses.

You can do the same thing with electromagnetic door locks, etc. The technology is here, it's just nobody has deployed it yet. It's a great business opportunity.

None of these issues are really much of a problem, at least in the US. A valid contract needs only two things:

1) Meeting of the minds
2) Consideration

Even verbal agreements are enforceable in US courts (I don't know about elsewhere) so long as they have these two things, so contracts on the blockchain or even off chain are no problem to enforce at all, as long as both parties have assets in the same or cooperating jurisdictions. It will be a pain in the ass for the buyer if the seller defaults, but the buyer will eventually win in court.

Yes


Yes, whether you pay $0 or $499.99 on a $500 note, you're in default.


Yes


The US is #1 in the world for money laundering (serious). Delaware C-corps and Wyoming and Nevada LLCs. How do you think the CIA moves all that money around for their black ops, and why do you think it's called "the company"?

This myth keeps getting circulated here for some reason. XBT's utility has already been demonstrated and validated.

The more XBT you own and refuse to sell, the less there is available for other people to purchase. All things held equal, the relative fiat price will increase as a result. As the relative price rises, more people in general become interested in owning XBT, and more merchants will want to receive XBT in exchange for goods and services. This is all because people (incorrectly) value XBT relative to fiat.

Don't take this the wrong way, but there's a logical break here - if you're always able to buy more XBT that means you're living in the fiat, inflationary economy. Your perspective is 180 degrees from someone who lives in the XBT economy.

When I purchase a good or service, I always try to use fiat. Fiat has much less value to me than Bitcoin (XBT), so I prefer to spend it over my XBT holdings. Why is this the case?

The short answer is that all fiat is now competing with XBT, and all available tools must be compared objectively. Which protocol (fiat vs. XBT) is more stable? Which protocol has parameters that can be predicted with almost 100% accuracy? Which is easier to use? Which creates less friction (lower cost) for markets? Which allows more market participants?

To me and many others here the answers are entirely obvious. However, because the way we currently value XBT is completely inaccurate (exchange based valuations that are easily manipulated), many people will discover too late just how valuable XBT is - simply because they didn’t observe the fundamental value of the protocol.

Instead most people just glance at the relative fiat “price” (where quantities demanded and quantities supplied meet) of XBT and decide that it is unstable and therefore unusable - because “price” is how most people (incorrectly) determine a thing’s value.

In the past, societies have transitioned from one technology to another over a period of hundreds or thousands of years. For example, gunpoweder was invented in 9th Century China and it took around 400 years for the technology to reach Europe.

Now, technologies spread much faster. SMS texting was insanely popular in Japan some years ago, and if I remember right it took about 5-6 years (and a relatively modest hardware design change) for it to spread to the US. But prior to that hardware design change texting in the US was considered a complete joke. SMS was literally the subject of late night comedy.

Based on this information, my guess is that in 5-6 years the Bitcoin ecosystem will be so well developed that it becomes the de-facto standard method of transferring and storing value. I think it will take 10-20 years before people start decoupling the value of XBT from fiat, and begin thinking (and pricing) goods and services in terms of XBT.

This appears useful only if you want to connect to a handful of other high functioning nerds. It needs to be easier to use than FaceBook if it is going to go anywhere.

Undoubtedly, yes. I would love to have my business partners use XBT. Here's why:

1. It's a faster and more secure method of paying/getting paid (lower transaction friction means sales go up)
2. Zero third party risk
3. Money supply is known and behavior is 100% predictable (very important for business) and can't be tampered with - superior to inflationary fiat.

The concept of purchasing power parity allows one to estimate what the exchange rate between two currencies would have to be in order for the exchange to be at par with the purchasing power of the two countries' currencies. Using that PPP rate for hypothetical currency conversions, a given amount of one currency thus has the same purchasing power whether used directly to purchase a market basket of goods or used to convert at the PPP rate to the other currency and then purchase the market basket using that currency. Observed deviations of the exchange rate from purchasing power parity are measured by deviations of the real exchange rate from its PPP value of 1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

Edit to add:

PPP exchange rates help to minimize misleading international comparisons that can arise with the use of market exchange rates. For example, suppose that two countries produce the same physical amounts of goods as each other in each of two different years. Since market exchange rates fluctuate substantially, when the GDP of one country measured in its own currency is converted to the other country's currency using market exchange rates, one country might be inferred to have higher real GDP than the other country in one year but lower in the other; both of these inferences would fail to reflect the reality of their relative levels of production. But if one country's GDP is converted into the other country's currency using PPP exchange rates instead of observed market exchange rates, the false inference will not occur.

Exchange rate != purchasing power.

Purchasing power parity is tough to determine, the Big Mac index that the Economist publishes is your best bet. What you should do is look at how many BTC are required to buy 1 Big Mac over the next 5 years (on average). You'll know deep in your bones what inflationary vs. deflationary means then

I'm in the very early stages of planning a p2p options trading platform for BTC. The idea is that users can create and commit to options contracts using a simple desktop/mobile application. All settlement will be done in BTC (puts and calls for USD / EUR only to start) and code will be open source. The UX will be something like a torrent manager.

This is a fairly difficult project and this is a call for skilled/experienced Qt / BTC / C++ programmers that would be interested in joining the project as paid, contract programmers. If you would like to join please PM me with some info about projects you've done before and what part of the project you can help with. The start date of the project is going to be late March/early April, and I'll probably have this up on Lighthouse at some point soon as well for additional funding that can help with polishing the UI.

Looks like they have some interesting things like Skype available, which is really nice. If they sold a Visa/Mastercard/AmEx gift card that would be a real advantage, but this is a good start and it's nice to have lots of competition in the gift card for BTC arena.

If you only buy and never sell (meaning you only transition into BTC ecosystem, and never transition back into the deprecated fiat ecosystem) you have no tax liability. There are several threads here about how to address taxes, but I think in general if you sold BTC for fiat and made a net profit during the fiscal year you'll have to report that as income on your taxes, as capital gains or however you normally treat securities.

>report to various government agencies

Certainly true, but that's not really a good reason to worry at this point. More important is the risk that CB can lock you out of your coins at any time at their discretion. This has happened with me due to a technical error, and it took a week to get it fixed.

I recommend Trezor / Electrum / Breadwallet in that order of security, and only use CB to buy and then immediately transfer BTC.