They're not actually stocking any products. They're just drop-shipping from a warehouse supplier. That's why you won't see any information about products that weren't part of their massive copy + paste. You place an order with them in BTC, they cash it out into USD, pocket their 100-400% profit, then log into their Amazon account and order the items (with USD) to be delivered to you.
Have you set up a store accepting Bitcoin lately? |
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Why should they accept bitcoins? Aside from you just wanting them to, that is. Who is unable to pay them in a currency they accept but who would pay them in pretend internet coins? Do even five of those people exist?
You're right in your first post, this is a complete waste of your time. But that's not an uncommon theme with bitcoiners.
Oh, look it's a troll! @ OP: Sending them an e-mail would be a good idea. Try to see if you can find someone somewhere, who knows someone who works slightly higher-up in Blizzard, etc etc. I think that Blizzard accepting Bitcoin may be a very nice boost for Bitcoin. |
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Wow... The community really needs to come together to defend themselves against this Asshole. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110708/00564015004/lawyer-trying-to-trademark-bitcoin-explains-his-legal-theory.shtmlMichael S. Pascazi, Jul 8th, 2011 @ 5:11pm Dear Bloggers: If trademarking the term “Bitcoin” is impossible, stupid, ignorant, outrageous etc.; Why all the fuss on this blog, and others? Does any one really care about an action that will never come to fruition? Of course not. But what they do care about, and care deeply, is an action that may come to pass, and moreover, that may hurt them in the wallet. Looking out for number one, pure and simple; that is the name of the game. So let’s not have any illusions about the motives of the blog moderator, and/or the various astute commenters. Now if you care for a reality check (I know that the facts sometimes get in the way of the foul language): In most, but not all, “first to file” countries, a trademark application can be defeated if it can be shown that the mark is so notorious, so ubiquitous, and so identified with a particular entity that, registration to another would be improper. I’m sure the bar stool lawyers out there can understand this. So, is the term “Bitcoin” so notorious in Italy, for example, that when the average Italian on the street hears it, he/she immediately thinks of company zeta, and none other? Absolutely not. The same can be said for virtually every other country, including those with very large economies, such as China. In fact, it is virtually assured that no person or entity can claim that the term “Bitcoin” is identified with them in Italy. Now, thanks to you all in the “bitcoin community”, the term “Bitcoin” is absolutely, positively linked to Pascazi. Wouldn’t you agree? Just check the Internet. How many pages upon pages, posts upon posts link Pascazi to the term “Bitcoin”. Interesting evidence to present to a tribunal vis a vis “identified with” criteria; don’t you think? Moreover, none of the bar stool lawyers or investigators out there in cyberville really know what is going on behind closed law office doors. Perhaps, there is a new crypto-currency under development, one that has a feature to prevent hoarding; one whose money supply attributes are tied to actual publicly reported, worldwide inflationary metrics? Or tied to the Gold Standard? Trade secrets are just that; secret. Perhaps the developer(s) of this new lucre want their currency associated with the term “Bitcoin”? And why not? Because the blogosphere thinks it is a bad idea. To that proposition I reply, as Lt. Gen. Harry W. O. Kinnard did, to a German surrender ultimatum during the Battle of the Bulge, as follows: “Nuts”. By the way, thanks to all for the pages of spilled electronic ink. Could not have afforded it without you. P T Barnum once said: "I don't care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right." Maybe there is more going on than meets the eye? Again, food for thought. Arrivederci. Michael S. Pascazi, Jul 8th, 2011 @ 5:24pm Settled, in a "first to use" country. Amazing. Too bad Torvalds was not represented by the incredible posters on this blog; he would have done better than settled, don't you think? Why not jury verdict for the Plaintiff? It is an easy process; no? Slam dunk don't you think? Throw some words out there about the unfairness of it all, the inhumanity of it all, poor old Torvalds, yada yada yada, and voila you win. I wonder how much Della Croce got to go away? Must have been a pretty penny. Oh, the insanity of it all! Maybe you want to forward some of the pearls of wisdom over to Torvalds from this blog? Maybe he can get a do over? No res judicata in the blogosphere to worry about. Give it a try. Good Luck with that. Michael S.Pascazi, Jul 8th, 2011 @ 5:35pm How about that "The Face Book" idea from those crazy kids up at Harvard. Think that idea might pan out? No Cali VC worth his/her salt will bet on that crazy idea, don't you think? Do you really think that everyone is a lemming doing exactly what the other guys are doing? Is there a better crypto-currency under development? Is there no room for improvement? Might a group of former IBMers be working on such a thing? Well then, somebody better tell those crazy kids up at Harvard to quit their coding because that "The Face Book" thing just won't cut it. Wrong! Don't assume that is the actual lawyer, and not a troll. |
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My "real reason" wasn't an option in the poll, but I voted the drugs thing. The article on Wired about Silk Road introduced me to the idea of it, then I looked it up in more detail myself. I liked the idea of a virtual currency that you can access anywhere and is given instantly to the other person, and I REALLY liked that there is no governing body for it. But my real reason? Mining. I have a powerful-ish PC, so if I keep it going for a month or so, I get about £20. Free cash, baby.  I hope you don't have to pay the electricity bill. |
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Some people here believe the true value of Bitcoins is under $5, and if the inflationary wall at $10 could be breached then it would plummet further. Basically would you sell everything to save what little value you have left?
And how would you determine the 'true value'? |
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Yeah aren't you the one offering math tutoring for bitcoins in the marketplace? Why accept bitcoins if you feel their value will decrease.
Probably because he thinks doomsaying and selling 'what to do in a crash' guides is going to net him more BTC. |
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I've been involved with Bitcoins for over a month now, and here is what I see as issues for beginners. These can all be fixed.
It's difficult to know how and where to buy Bitcoins. I would have probably bought them in early May if someone spelled it out. There's no place that just spells out "Sign up at Dwolla. Go here. Do this."
There is a list of exchanges on the Bitcoin wiki, there are links to exchanges on sites like WeUseCoins (as far as I know). You can't really do much more. There is not a central responsible entity where you can 'buy Bitcoins'. That's the very nature of a decentralized currency. There is a general fear that you will enter the wrong address, or make some installation or configuration mistake that will erase all your coins.
This is inherent to new things that are 'unknown' to people, there isn't much you can do about it... As a good example, look at the installation wizard for Ubuntu and OpenSuSE. It really can't be any simpler than that, and literally anyone can understand it, but because people never install an OS they are afraid of it. The issue is not that they don't understand it, but that they *think* they don't understand it. That's not something you can fix with a simple software update. The best way would be to just educate people, and teach them to not be afraid to do something they didn't do before.. but that's a whole different thing. It's difficult to know whether your Bitcoins are truly secure or not, regardless of how many precautions you take. Maybe it's just me, but I'm always checking my balance to see if someone managed to steal my coins. I am pretty sure that it's an irrational fear, like when you're on a rollercoaster and it feels dangerous but really isn't.
Same as above, it's a new thing. People have to get used to it. Not very much you can do about it. It's unclear that updating the client with a new version will not delete the current data.
Valid point. There is a graph showing the number of coins estimated to be in circulation by year, where the number produced declines more and more. It's unclear that the value of the coins does not also follow this graph, to someone not really thinking about it.
You can't really predict the value of coins, so you can't just make a graph of it. The crucial point here is 'someone not really thinking about it'. The only way you can solve this is by making people think about it. The forums are quite childish in general and make this all seem like some sort of game, or something amateurish that is risky to put money into.
I wouldn't call it childish, but yes, people are playful. That's most likely because Bitcoins stand so far from fiat currency (in the way they work, etc.), that it's hard for people to attach the concept of 'hard currency' to it. Not to mention there are a lot of people here who are interested in the technical aspect, and like playing around with technical things. Again, not much you can do about it. The client needs to clearly say when it is ready to process transactions. It's very confusing to people when only 10k blocks are downloaded and the money won't go through.
Absolutely agreed. And a progress bar (if technically possible) would be very nice as well. The Wiki for the businesses doesn't show the traffic to each one, or people's ratings of them. It's very hard to know which sites are good or not other than randomly guessing.
I don't think this is something bitcoin.org should be involved with. "Customer review" sites typically tend to attract a lot of fighting, slander, abuse, and other annoying consequences, and it would be a bad idea to distract the people taking care of Bitcoin.org and the wiki in general, by something like that. There are already review sites for Bitcoin businesses. |
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Seems things are rallying too fast. Here are some reason why bitcoin could crash.
1. If you trade in bitcoins you still have to find a buyer of them if you want a pizza. Thus you will have to use a service to exchange your money to dollars on their terms. If you drive to a bitcoin meet-up you are still wasting gas to do the exchange. You will have a middleman more often.
2. There is a risk of lost, stolen, or disk failure wallets. Yes you can lose your wallet in real life, but you usually find it under the bed.
3. Shops are slow in adjusting prices, if the price rises and their store might have prices that are 2 months old and they seem expensive. What if prices crash 90% will the shop honor the price? I doubt it they buy all their materials in USD, CAD, RUB, or EUD.
4. There is no record of exchange. What if you buy a car and you go to pick it up and there is no car or address? You are out 10,000 BTC. If you buy something over the internet even for 1 BTC, if they don't send it you are out of luck.
5. The churning of your hard-drive is already annoying to run the bitcoin client. If the economy gets 10x bigger that churning is going to be 10x bigger. Are there any stats to Mb per day you waste on hard disk space? What about bandwidth?
6. In the end you might have to end up using a bitcoin bank anyways where you store your bitcoins to take the risk out of lost wallets. Then you run the risk that the goldsmiths, take your money and spend it loans and blow.
7. There is always the risk of someone destroying the network or finding a flaw and taking the system down. Since BTC could be used for money laundering, it might be a big goal of the governments of the world to take it down.
8. What if people stopped mining BTC, or the euphoria of a deflationary currency would people lose interest in it?
I suppose you say all these are already factored into the price of BTC.
 "But guys! You can't live in that house! It doesn't even have a roof! How can you ever expect that to succeed! This is not going to work, guys! Stop working on it, you can't even live in it!" |
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This is why I have liquidated my position in Bitcoins. There is very little upside going forward. No forward moves of late have any traction whatsoever and demand continues to lag. Way too little upside for such a risky proposition so my advice is to move into dollars. Only a significant change in the economy could alter this forecast.
Are you trolling? |
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Two questions:
1. How do you want to guarantee redemption if there is no central responsible party (because if there were, it would not be decentralized)?
2. What is gold backed by?
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The only problem with this is that it won't work. You should read the tech paper.
That is why I said we should CHANGE the default protocol. And yes it affects the overall network computation power!And as far as I understand from the technical paper. Bitcoin can be taken out if you can afford computation power larger than the sum of the network. I am talking about the worst case scenario. Let us say three of the major pools have been taken over and hacked! then what! a faulty blocks can be introduced!not just slowing the total network computation power due to DDoS. But the whole thing can be wiped out!what I am saying is that we can convert the whole network to one large gigantic pool with all the miners working WITH each others. And the only things that can take this out is to block the BTC traffic all over the internet. So everyone is working in cooperation Yet every one will be still competing for larger share. umm maybe extra digits can be introduced as 8 digits after decimal point might be not enough. Away from how much hard effort to see this accomplished. but what will be the disadvantages of this suggestion ?Bold red text is really not going to make your point any more valid, or your post any more readable. My apologies but is it against the forum policies ? otherwise i do nto think your post is relevant  I have no idea if it's against the forum policies, I'm just trying to make a point that it's extremely annoying and hard to read. That something is not outright forbidden does not mean you should do it. |
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The only problem with this is that it won't work. You should read the tech paper.
That is why I said we should CHANGE the default protocol. And yes it affects the overall network computation power!And as far as I understand from the technical paper. Bitcoin can be taken out if you can afford computation power larger than the sum of the network. I am talking about the worst case scenario. Let us say three of the major pools have been taken over and hacked! then what! a faulty blocks can be introduced!not just slowing the total network computation power due to DDoS. But the whole thing can be wiped out!what I am saying is that we can convert the whole network to one large gigantic pool with all the miners working WITH each others. And the only things that can take this out is to block the BTC traffic all over the internet. So everyone is working in cooperation Yet every one will be still competing for larger share. umm maybe extra digits can be introduced as 8 digits after decimal point might be not enough. Away from how much hard effort to see this accomplished. but what will be the disadvantages of this suggestion ?Bold red text is really not going to make your point any more valid, or your post any more readable. |
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I do agree that having you wallet in your sig is akin to just casually asking every passer by if he can spare some change frankly. You don't expect anything but maybe he likes your outfit? Who knows! It's not really panhandling is it?
First off you're keeping an address in your signature, and not a wallet. Second, it's not really comparable. If you ask every passer-by for spare change, you are actually bugging them about it. Leaving an address in your signature is more like sitting on a chair with a small sign next to you saying 'this is my address', and holding a speech (writing a post). |
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Question: Why does Wikileaks need a lot of funding in the first place?
I thought they outlined their expenses in that parody ad. Where they happily show that they have to buy 20 iPhones (or similar smartphones), to 'really stay anonymous'. Really? Then just buy 20 disposable 30$ Alcatel phones or something. They seem to be wasting money too much, like many other charities and 'non-profits'. |
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Something yet to be brought up:
If coins were lost, only the owner would know. If he told others, there would be no way to verify it.
This means that you can never know how many are lost, so you can never truly change the value of the rest of the coins as if they didn't exist.
The point is there isn't someone who has to 'value the coins'. It happens invisibly. If a lot of coins are lost, as a direct result, less coins will be supplied on the market, and if the demand stays the same that means the price will go up. It indirectly influences supply/demand, even if just on the long term. If there were a central organization that had to keep track and value the coins that were in circulation based on given dollar figures and the amount of non-lost coins, you would be correct. But that's not the case. It is correct that lost coins will not directly influence the (perceived) value of the rest of the coins - that is just an easy way to explain the concept. Lost coins will however influence supply/demand in the long term. |
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But if you are storing information in a place such as that, which is not a part of the BTC world(!!) you are essentially leaving something like gold bars in a storage lockup system. Did you give me that link so I can go and get robbed  Come on, this is not just the same as any other information stored in bytes that there is out there that can be reproduced to no effect! Hey, what about just having your BTCs copied in there and then uploaded by someone else? Hahahaha........ Of course you should encrypt a wallet you upload there, just like you would when you uploaded it to Dropbox or similar storage systems. |
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The estimated date for the last bitcoin mined is somewhere in 2150 something. So we have a while to wait. Also 1 btc is not the highest precision of the currency. They can actually be measured in 0.0000001 btc. So if for instance there were only 1,000,000 btc left in existence, they can actually be measured from 0.00000001 btc to 1,000,000 btc. So in the event that 0.00000001 btc is equal to $1 USD, 1 BTC would be worth $100,000,000 (I could be off a zero). At any rate, there's a lot more precision there than 1. There are 8 decimal places of precision that should be accounted for as well.
Cool,  so for example: say we have 1,000,000 btc today and value is 0.00001 btc = $1 so if 100,000 is lost, we only have 900,000 but the value will be 0.000001 btc = $1 Maybe this would be true...I hope so... If enough people want it to be true, it will be true. That's how supply and demand / the free market works. |
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easy solution for op -> turn off signature. however, I gotta back him in the sillyness about putting a donation address in there. why don't ppl put there bank accounts in the sig? (:
Because it's practically impossible to send 0.01$ to someones bank account if you like his post. That's why Flattr is so popular for blogs etc. (and forums where they have a Flattr plugin). |
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You should keep your Bitcoin folder located on separate external harddrive, then they are less likely to be infected by a virus. Now what about the idea of a paid service for storing everyone's BTCs in a cloud storage system. A kind of distributed electronic bank? Hah, then you're back in the Capitalist world of making profit from insecurity. What would the fees be like for that? Or is it possible we could get a free distributed BTC storage system going using the combined might of the bandwidth/storage power of all BTC clients? Ideas..ideas people! If you are thinking about a distributed 'cloud storage' system... Tahoe-LAFS may be what you are looking for. |
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Then again, their business/marketing model does not exactly revolve around this referal system - whereas that of Tradehill and especially TripleMining does. Which would explain the difference in results.
And what are the plans for the future? How is the operator planning to monetize his pool? I fail to see how a non-profit pool would use an aggressive referal scheme like this.
So it's a scam because its less profitable for the pool owner than the other pools ? Hmm good point Did you see me say anywhere "it's a scam because it's less profitable for the owner"? No, so don't claim I am saying that. I am saying that it doesn't add up. "If it seems too good to be true, it usually is" still works very well as a rule of thumb. So, explain how a pool operator is using aggressive referal schemes when he would not get anything out of it? |
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