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I'm a little concerned about this since I don't have any other online money service accounts aside from paypal. Not so much as far as getting my money out, I can take it out as bitcoins, but as far as putting more money in to buy more bitcoins.
I get my paypal money from doing tarot card readings on the phone, I don't really have the option of receiving my pament in any other form. If I can't find an easy easy way to turn paypal into bitcoin I may have to start trying to encourage people to auction some of it on e-bay. (hopefully with a buy it now that is not too far from the going rate)
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Hugolp and Babylon,
reading the above, I'd like to bet exclusively with you. How can we set up this in a stable way?
As a straight, even odds bet? I figure we need a trusted party to serve as an escrow service. Either that or some sort of personal relationship such as personal info on one another. I don't want to tie up more than 100 bitcoins for that long personally. (I know, that's only about 9 dollars right now, I expect it to be more by then though, and I am actively trading back and forth to make money at the moment) If it is set up at a bitcoin futures market and we are the first ones in I think we'd have even odds as well, although I might be wrong about that. |
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Ebay owns paypal and doesnt accept any other payment method or is unlikely too do so.
I don't think the goal here was to use bitcoins to buy things on e-bay. It was to sell bitcoins on e-bay. And they actually do accept other payment methods, depending on the seller's preferences. I doubt bitcoin is going to become one of those though. |
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What if I'm operating entirely within the bitcoin economy? I earn ONLY bitcoins and buy things for bitcoins ONLY. I never touch any $.
In this case, I pay no taxes and the government knows nothing of my activities except that I'm "unemployed". Maybe I could take a part time job (putting me in a low tax bracket) just to keep the suspicion off.
What are the legal implications for this and what are the chances of getting caught?
About exactly the same as using all paper money. I don't know exact statistics, I do know that I know at least a dozen people who operate this way and none have been caught, so the chances (based purely on a very limited sample) should be less than 10 percent. |
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you can sell them at a fixed price or make a start price that seems acceptable for you and you potential customers, but anyways ..
i guess ebay forbids to trade currencies.
bitcoin is not a currency. Currencies are backed by governments. |
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Here are the things I'd like to buy with bitcoins. I don't have a lot of bitcoins yet so even if they were for sale I might not buy them yet, but in the future I would.
herbs, specifically Banisteriopsis caapi, Mimosa Hostilis, and Nicotania Rustica
Shisha tobacco (the molasses coated flavoured stuff that one smokes in a hookah)
malt, hops, yeast and other beer making supplies
Actually the third I can get on paypal without any trouble currently, so I might not go through bitcoin to get them, it would depend on how much bitcoin I had, compared to how much paypal, paypal does not allow the sale of tobacco to be paid for with their service, thus the desire for shisha sold for bitcoins. Nicotania Rustica is also tobacco and the other two are herbs that paypal is likely to frown on.
I expect the market for various sacred herbs could be huge through bitcoin as paypal frowns on them and chargebacks are disturbingly common among purchasers.
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Bitcoins are easy to exchange for paypal, or for giftcards etc. However as an intermediary they become completely unecesssary. More bitcoin direct merchants will make a big difference that being able to buy amazon giftcards or paypal for use on ebay does not (after all, if I use paypal to buy bitcoins, and then bitcoins to buy paypal I end up paying paypal more money, not less.)
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Im my opinion you will be massively wrong.
The DOW will also crash in nominal terms.
Below 1000 points between 2014-2016
Lets bet. 1000 bitcoins that the DOW does not touch 1000 points before 2016. Deal? kiba what you are working on could come handy now. Yes it would. I want a piece of that action (on the DOW will not get that low side) but it is a long term bet and I don't know anyone on the forum well enough to want to make a bet that I wont be able to settle for 6 years. |
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This can be implemented as a separate project. It can be a kind of social network, maybe even similar to facebook, but decentralized. Having a trust system is not the only thing it could provide...
Well, this would be Diaspora. But before it is implemented as a software, I'd like to see some theoretical, almost mathematical/game-theory-oriented approach to this, in order to determin whether or not it is possible, and how efficient it would be. I think, that every person in that network should have it's own small trust list, which is filled manually. And a large trust list, which is loaded from other people, that are present in that small list. This can be done recursively to make a full list. For example: A trusts both B and C B and C trusts D So A should see that, there two of his trusted parties, that trust D I'm not not familiar to game theory, but I think it should work. Basically the idea I outlined. Except that in mine it was not a binary rating system but a scaled one. |
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The government is an organised gang. "Outlaw gangs" at least they have a code of honour.  So does the government. It's the set of laws which they follow. They don't always follow them, they just expect all of us to follow them. This is also true of the outlaw gangs. One is not better than the other, they are better and worse in different ways, partly due to differing codes of honor, partly due to matters of scale. |
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I notice bitcoinmarket is a lot cheaper than mtgox, or at least seems to be. Is this an arbitrage opportunity? Or is it just that the buyers aren't offering the price the sellers want?
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bitcoins are stealable. The thief just has to steal your harddrive.
I can use an encrypted file system. Or I can encrypt my wallet.dat file when I'm not using the bitcoin software. Or I can have most of my bitcoins encrypted on a distant machine, and use only small change for my local machine. And so on... You can. You can do similar things with gold, paper money, and so forth. The fact that you can make it difficult to steal doesn't mean it is inherently any more theftproof than anything else. |
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Not for an IPO, a company doesn't have an established reputation at that point. Some sort of third party organization that certifies that the prospectus of a company is accurate could come in handy. of course they'd need to build up trust as well, but that could definitely facilitate IPO's.
Still, enforcement is not required. Some company could be specialized in "certification" of other companies. They would engage their reputation in claiming that the companies that they certify are trust-full. There would be no enforcement as a general rule, but only as a particular agreement between the certification company and the copany it certifies. It might look like the current system, but there is an important difference : no one can forbid a company to try to introduce herself in the market using nothing but her own self-confidence. Also, the certification market would not be a monopoly controlled by force. It would comply to market rules. Right. Enforcement is difficult and unweildy. The market does not need to serve as an enforcing agent. |
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You are true some, kind of enforcement mechanism is needed to make the companies accountable .
I don't think so. No enforcement is necessary as long as you consider that an investor is responsible from his investiment choices. If an investor wants to buy shares of a company, that means he has some trust into this company. Therefore it's up to him to believe or not in the company's published accounts. Sure, an enforced company would have a better price, since it would be possible for non-much motivated investors to invests in it. But it should be possible for a company to rely entirely on its reputation, and on its reputation only, to have investors trust her. Not for an IPO, a company doesn't have an established reputation at that point. Some sort of third party organization that certifies that the prospectus of a company is accurate could come in handy. of course they'd need to build up trust as well, but that could definitely facilitate IPO's. |
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The government is an organised gang. "Outlaw gangs" at least they have a code of honour. So does the government. It's the set of laws which they follow. |
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I am not a lawyer.
But it looks to me like No, just running Bitcoin doesn't make you a "money transmitting business." To be a "business" you have to be charging people for your service.
If you're running Bitcoin to buy or sell goods or services in exchange for bitcoins, I'd say you're not in the money transmitting business.
However, if I were to start a company in the business of buying and selling Bitcoins, or that was a Bitcoin payment processing intermediary that took a percentage of transactions between buyers and sellers, I'd talk to a lawyer and jump through all the legal hoops (looks like here in Massachusetts I'd need a license and would have to post a $50,000 bond).
Or to put it in more concrete terms: I am not a money transmitting business when I use my credit card to pay for something from Amazon.com.
And Amazon.com is not a money transmitting business just because they accept payments.
However, Amazon Payments, Inc. (Amazon's Paypal competitor) is licensed as a money service business in a bunch of US states.
Bitcoin Market and MTGox might need to worry about this. |
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bitcoins are stealable. The thief just has to steal your harddrive.
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Biggest problem is: Everyone in the world has to use it or it doesn't work at all. You get google on board, I'll call AOL and that should get us rolling  Not true. Everyone that communicates with you has to use it, not everyone in the world. People that don't use bitcoin can't communicate with you. |
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I hope your right, but I disagree about insurgency; on a level playing field bitcoin WILL displace every fiat currency controlled by a central bank. Think about it, people will stop using banks, stop paying taxes, markets will be difficult to regulate when their transactions can't be monitored. They will lose their stranglehold on the economy. Key to the power structure is the control of the money, which is precisely what bitcoin usurps.
Not true at all. Perhaps bitcoin operates purely pseduonymously, but the transactions are still recorded and the goods and services it is traded for can be monitored. Paper dollars are purely anonymous, but they certainly aren't a threat to the government. |
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I haven't seen it yet but I'd really like to see a reputation site where people's opinions can be ranked. So, for instance, Alice can say that Bob is a good guy, and that she value's Bob's judgement highly. Giving him a 10 out of 10 on both. Bob feels that Carl is a good guy, giving him a 10 as well. if Bob is the only opinion that Alice has placed any trust in then she'll also give Carl a 10. Meanwhile if she has ranked Donna as a 5 on her judgement scale, and Donna gives Carl a 0 (calling him a thief) then Alice's ranking of Carl is going to be 6.6 (since she values Donna's judgement half as much as she does Bob's) This would weed out people ranking themselves, since none of their many accounts would be highly valued by anyone else.
Maybe it could be even more complicated  Since Bob having a positive encounter or several with Carl only means that Bob doesn't know he's a thief, not that he knows that he isn't, maybe positive and negative ratings shouldn't be simply averaged. You could rank each of your trusted friends ranking abilities according to how likely they are to give false negatives (think they were stolen from, but weren't) and false positives (actually believing that the laptop got water damage in the mail). This way if a very trusting/optimistic friend made an accusation it could be given a lot of weight. Definitely could be a useful twist. |
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