You could try micro-investing on the bitcoin stock exchange the GLBSE - https://glbse.com/ |
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GLBSE's Market page is sorted by "Total Vol฿"
Volume is not Market Cap though  Here's the real deal, courtesy of yours truly: AS AT AUG. 2nd, 2012 # Holding Shares Value Market Cap
1 GIGAMINING 40,000 1.1370 45,480.00
2 BITBOND 88,138 0.4450 39,221.41
3 TYGRR.BOND-P 28,743 1.0140 29,145.40
4 BIB.PIRATE 16,238 1.0230 16,611.47
5 BDT 10,000 0.9990 9,990.00
6 MOVETO.FUND 7,794 1.1390 8,877.37
7 YABMC 54,278 0.1520 8,250.26
8 ZIP.A 9,930 0.7760 7,705.68
9 FOO.PPPPT 5,989 1.0320 6,180.65
10 COGNITIVE 7,870 0.7680 6,044.16
11 BFLS 6,395 0.8780 5,614.81
12 CPA 46,501 0.1020 4,743.10
13 SYNERGY 24,500 0.1850 4,532.50
14 FPGAMINING 5,040 0.8990 4,530.96
15 PPT.DIV 9,000 0.5020 4,518.00
16 PPT 36 120.0000 4,320.00
17 BMF 4,155 1.0000 4,155.00
18 BFLS.RIG 4,459 0.9250 4,124.58
19 PUREMINING 20,000 0.1900 3,800.00
20 PPT.B 3,000 1.2450 3,735.00
It'be interesting to see how the table changes now with all the PPT's going off the market. |
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You will find out ... in the longer-term. I think Pirate may have managed to slow the acceleration down a bit like he has before but the long term trend is definitely up tho maybe after a bit more correction but I'd like a bit more stability like from March 2012 to June 2012. |
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http://mobilemoneyafrica.com/bitcoin-will-revolutionize-how-africans-transact-rudiger-koch/Rudiger Koch, IT Consultant,Intersango Ltd, London.
He will be speaking on Bitcoin at the MobileMoney WestAfrica summit on March 5th & 6th in Lagos.
What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a decentralized electronic cash system using peer-to-peer networking, digital signatures and cryptographic proof to enable irreversible payments between parties without relying on trust. It is also the name of Satoshi Nakamoto’s implementation of the Bitcoin protocol (aka Satoshi client), which is released under the MIT license.
How is it different from other means of transfer or exchanges?
There is no central clearinghouse and no company or other entity owns the Bitcoin network – it is completely decentralized. To appreciate the magnitude of this, one has to consider that experts deemed it impossible to solve the “double spending problem” without a trusted entity until the release of Nakamoto’s seminal paper. Hence there is no possibility that Bitcoin can fail because some organization fails. No entitiy can inflate Bitcoin. Bitcoin is here to stay.
Bitcoin is completely open and because of that it enables business in ways proprietary solutions can’t. For example, there are no vendor lock-in and royalties. In a way, Bitcoin compares to proprietary solutions like the Internet compared to proprietary networks like Compuserve or AOL in the early ’90s.
Does it work globally?
Bitcoin works wherever there is full access to the Internet. It may also work where access is limited or through gateways or proxies like mobile phone network providers usually offer. Currently Bitcoin is limited to Smartphones, pads and PCs, but we’re working to bring it to low cost cell phones.
How can it benefit Africans?
Bitcoin offers Africans multiple and unique ways to lower or even remove the digital divide. There is more to Bitcoin than just reliable, cheap and very fast transfers to and from anywhere in the world. At a certain adoption rate of Bitcoin, network effects will ensure that it will dominate world wide online payments. If Africans are quick enough to act, they can put themselves into the driver’s seat of that development and play a similar role in the Bitcoin network as the USA is playing in the Internet.
How is Intersango different from other Bitcoin Exchanges out there?
Intersango is the market leader of Western European exchanges. It has it’s own implementation of the Bitcoin protocol, libbitcoin, and participates actively in the definition of future Bitcoin standards.
The security of Bitcoin?
The security of the Bitcoin network has never been breached. As so often, the weak point is the user. The ironclad principle that Bitcoin transactions are irreversible can turn against a user if the wallet gets stolen or is lost and there is no backup. A user has to follow certain principles as with their physical wallet, such as not carrying around a lot of cash in their day to day use wallet, say, on a mobile phone, but storing large amounts with banks or in offline wallets.
More about the management of Intersango?
Donald Norman is CEO. He teamed up with Amir Taaki in April 2011 and has been the organizational force of the group. He has made Bitcoin Consultancy into the most trusted bitcoin operators and has become an advocate of bitcoin outside the community.
Patrick Strateman as CTO with a speciality in IT security, has led the way building up Intersango over the course of 3 months.
Amir Taaki developed the original inspiration for Intersango, a site named Britcoin to bring bitcoin to the UK. Additionally, he is heavily involved with developing bitcoin and is the maintainer of libbitcoin. Amir has been a big contributor to the bitcoin community since its early days of a $0.06 exchange rate. He has been developing free software fulltime for 10 years.
What should Africans expect from Intersango in coming months and years?
As a Bitcoin exchange, we are interested in wider Bitcoin adoption. Expanding Bitcoin based trade between Europe and Africa will expand our business. We will therefore continue to advocate Bitcoin in Africa because it is Africans who have most to gain. Most importantly, Africans need local exchanges. We will support these local exchanges in every way we can. Our sister company, Bitcoin Consultancy, can provide commercial technical support in this area.
What should delegates expect at the Mobile Money West Africa Summit in March?
I will focus on how Africans can directly benefit from Bitcoin and name some existing obstacles to adoption and show ways how to remove them. My presentation should give the audience the knowledge to get started and a direction to integrate Bitcoin into their business.http://mobilemoneyafrica.com/bitcoin-will-revolutionize-how-africans-transact-rudiger-koch/
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I think it's important in that it says the cash value of most e_payment transactions is going down while the bitcoin transaction fee's cash value is going up. Tho I don't think the cash based e_payment processors could reach bitcoins value for a long time or possibly ever.
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No but it's about online payments and online to offline payments. So thought it of interest in the bitcoin sphere.
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 http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/18/payment-data-is-more-valuable-than-payment-fees/We are in the midst of a great revolution the payments space: anyone with a phone can now accept credit cards; online-to-offline commerce is allowing online payment for offline purchase and significant friction is being removed from the consumer purchase experience thanks to mobile. All of this innovation (read: competition), combined with government intervention, means that payment fees are falling, threatening revenue streams for incumbents and startups alike in the payments space. But a broader opportunity exists: using the data of payments to build a more valuable, more defensible business model, one not dependent on fees. The result will revolutionize offline commerce and online advertising.
Today: It’s All About Fees, and They’re Heading Towards Zero
Payment companies make money by charging fees to “process” a payment from buyer to seller. Square charges 2.75% (or $275/month for volume up to $250K/year). PayPal Here charges 2.7%, as does Intuit GoPayment. Groupon and Amazon are both supposedly working on their own dongles, and prices will continue to fall, especially as these new devices create “one-sided” networks without significant defensibility outside of switching cost and inertia. “Pay with Square” is a potential game changer, as the millions of Square user accounts can ONLY be used with Square. But basic “acceptance of credit cards” is becoming a commodity where prices will keep going down.
Competition between payment companies is only one leg of inevitable downward pricing pressure. Government intervention is the other. Not too long ago, the Australian government decided that payment fees were too high, so now most Australian merchants pay less than .5% for credit card swipes, a fraction of the cost here in the US. The European Union is likely to enact similar legislation. The Durbin Amendment of Dodd-Frank and the $6B+ (pending) Brooklyn Settlement are US-based government and civil attacks on the business of payment fees. Many of these fee-cutting regulations help intermediaries like PayPal and Square short term, by reducing their cost (owed to the Visa/MasterCard infrastructure), but eventually it limits what they can charge, too.
Wherever fees end up, most merchants will still dislike paying them. They are a “cost of doing business” that every merchant has an incentive to bring down. Payment companies generally aren’t delivering new customers; they’re taxing the flow of existing ones. Google effectively charges 20-30% to deliver a customer (if you back out the cost-per-click to percentage of realized sale) to an ecommerce merchant, yet merchants are competing to hand Google more money because each dollar “in” produces more than a dollar “out.” Payment companies charge a fraction of Google, but are often despised (witness the lawsuits and legislation) or treated with promiscuous disrespect.
It comes down to something rather simple: Connecting the bank accounts of buyers and sellers will never be as valuable nor defensible as connecting buyers and sellers. Google delivers customers at the top of the funnel, and payment companies serve the prosaic, but necessary, task of shuffling funds at the end.
Tomorrow: Payment Data Will Revolutionize Commerce & Advertising
As society goes increasingly cashless, payment companies will have a larger business, and a more valuable one, in closing the loop for offline transactions and helping deliver customers. The data they possess is without equal; did somebody buy something? How much did he spend? What did she buy? Paper money cannot be tracked in this manner. In order for Online-to-Offline commerce to take flight, every merchant needs an ability to track online/mobile action to offline purchase, and PayPal Here, Square, GoPayment and others could provide just this for a whole new class of small merchants.
Imagine that Wendy’s, or even a local handyman, wants to advertise on the Internet. What’s the point? What does a click, or an impression, really mean? It’s clear what it means online, since every click can be measured to “action” (e.g., purchase) for an ecommerce company. Who can tell Wendy’s, or the local handyman, if that online advertisement worked?
In an increasingly cashless society, the answer is pretty clear: the payment infrastructure. Tracking that purchase back to the originating source (Google? Yelp? Patch? etc) is known as “closing the loop” and will revolutionize offline commerce and advertising alike.
The million-plus merchants walking around with Square, PayPal Here, and GoPayment dongles want more customers, and these dongles provide a means to “close the loop” and let those merchants acquire more customers, remarket to those customers, understand those customers, and do everything that ecommerce companies have taken for granted for over a decade. Legacy POS systems were poorly integrated and insufficiently verticalized, often requiring a merchant to have separate relationships with every player in the payment chain (hardware vendor, merchant bank, CRM system, etc); moreover, they were priced out of reach of the sole proprietor.
Beyond closing the loop, payment companies can utilize data from existing transactions to generate more transactions. Companies who maintain a direct relationship with the consumer — such as American Express, PayPal, Square, Discover, etc — are in the perfect position to serve as an Amazon recommendation system for “everything.” You bought a tennis racket at Sports Authority? How about tennis lessons with Saul the tennis pro, at a discount thanks to your purchase of a tennis racket, only redeemable with the same payment instrument? You weren’t searching for Saul, and you wouldn’t want an unsolicited email from Saul, but seeing an advertisement for Saul shortly after buying a tennis racket (say, on your purchase receipt) would likely produce a response. It’s a way to preeempt search for a large class of “secondary” purchases (e.g., charcoal after buying a grill; tennis balls after buying a tennis racket, etc), in a “pull” based way.
None of this is to say that the fees charged today are wholly unreasonable and unconscionable; they’re just not long-term defensible as more parties offer the same conduits to existing credit card infrastructure. I have $40 cash and five credit cards in my wallet right now, so any merchant wanting to charge $100 for some widget can either get 97.25% of $100 (if using Square), or $0. That’s an easy decision and shows why things like Square and PayPal Here are hugely beneficial to merchants and consumers alike. But longer term, as those fees continue to compress to the benefit of merchants, the larger business will be in applying the data of payments to the benefit of merchants, consumers, and payment providers alike.
Image via stevendepolo http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/18/payment-data-is-more-valuable-than-payment-fees/ |
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I was in mind of bitcoins continual prises rises. Current fees of ~$0.005 are payable without regret by anyone in the west who can afford to pay for DSL. Although if BTC rises to $100 a coin that's a 5% fee on a $1.00 transaction. So then bitcoin loses its advantage on cash.
Mandatory fees on low priority tx likely would be lowered to be ~1 cent IF Bitcoin rose > $100 (just as they were when BTC rose above $20) . Still please point out to me where online you can spend $1 and pay less than 5 cents in fees? Even at 5 cents per transaction bitcoin is cheaper than any digital payment platform on the planet. So IF mandatory fee wasn't lower AND Bticoin rose to >$100 AND user was unwilling to wait for a high priority transaction AND the mandatory fees on low priority tx weren't lowered AND the user wanted to spend only $1 AND no off blockchain solution for micro tx existed .... Bitcoin would still be the cheapest solution. BTW "cash" isn't free ask any successful business that deal in cash between the banking fees, disbursement fees, shrinkage (employee theft), risk of robbery/loss, and counterfeits cash isn't free. Even if it was free it can't be used online. UK online banking. Transactions from £0.01 up to £10,000 a day for free. Yes the accounts are free tho a lot of people pay overdraft fees or late/returned payment fees. edit: And I'm not here trying to pick a fight with the bitcoin guru early adopters just discuss the benefits and/or pitfalls of bitcoin as a micro-transaction currency compared to cash. |
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No I don't. I just think bitcoin could grow a lot faster if it was available to all people not just wealthy people or early adopters. Pure hyperbole bordering on stupidity. We are talking about fees in the fraction of a cent. Fees lower by magnitudes than ANY OTHER payment system on the planet even those designed for low income consumers (which ironically tend to have the highest fees). The idea that a fraction of a cent fee will keep users away in droves is just ridiculous. So users turned off by the 1/20th of a USD cent fee on Bitcoin transaction will do what instead? Pay 10x to 500x as much using PayPal? That is your logic? There may be many thing holding back Bitcoin adoption by the masses but fees aren't it. I was in mind of bitcoins continual prises rises. Current fees of ~$0.005 are payable without regret by anyone in the west who can afford to pay for DSL. Although if BTC rises to $100 a coin that's a 5% fee on a $1.00 transaction. So then bitcoin loses its advantage on cash. |
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Then the next p2p alt-coin who can sort out the blockchain bloating will. No it won't you just have utterly unrealistic expectations of a transaction system. There is a real cost for processing transaction. Currently the subsidy hides a lot of that but in time the true cost will need to be borne by the participants. Switching to a different coin doesn't magic that away. You seem to think if in some hypothetical future if the avg bitcoin transaction costs a penny it is the death blow to Bitcoin. Compared to what? Noting else even comes close. Even centralized payment networks have significantly higher costs. Dwolla? $0.25. CC/PP? $0.30 + 3% Moneybookers? 1% Liberty Reserve? 2% ACH? ~$0.15 Hell mailing a check costs ~$0.50. MPesa 1% to 3% (min ~$0.05). Bitcoin was never going to be free. Never. Satoshi paper talks about low cost transactions and Bitcoin can deliver on that. Free* is just something you made up in your mind and the economics don't support it, they never have and they never will. * also includes fees so negligibly small as to essentially be free as even billions couldn't support the network. No I don't. I just think bitcoin could grow a lot faster if it was available to all people not just wealthy people or early adopters. Maybe OT's systems or walled-garden wallets can offer suitable cheaper transactions in the future but bitcoin is no way near mature/stable enough for that kind of adoption at the moment or in the very near future. |
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The best thing to come from bts&t shutting down will be no more idiotic threads on the subject.
If only that were true. I'd bet a whole Bitcoin that even after "pirate" winds down and we stop hearing from him, that every time the market moves any significant amount we will get a wave of speculation that he is behind it. With a market capitalisation so small it's easier for any well connected vocal and/or wealth person(s) to manipulate the market. |
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Yes I've heard of OT and it sounds very interesting but I don't think bitcoin is stable and/or high value enough yet to spawn OT spin-off's of value of it yet. Maybe an OT system based on bitcoin would be appealing if you had enough satoshi's you could import/export them from the OT system. Making it preferable to other commodity based OT systems due to bitcoins characteristics. So maybe the future of micro bitcoin transactions are to happen within walled-garden wallet environments but still I don't think bitcoin is stable/mature enough yet for large scale micro-investment in walled services for a long shot.
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I don't see how that's possible. Miners wouldn't sell below cost, and there is a minimum demand because of Silk Road.
Miners wouldn't mine and SR is through-put not input. Yeah I do think $1.00 is a bit extreme but not a steady $7.00 which we expect to be thin. Thus raising the price. So low prices like $1 would be inherently unstable and quickly correct (unless Bitcoin's true value was $1, which I doubt). Then the dealer would have to sell those coins to live the life of Riley. So increasing the sell side of the order book. I also don't know bitcoins true value tho it has been bubbling up very fast recently. This is just a slight correction by Pirates manipulation and he has manipulated the market before to lower the price recently. Maybe he has enough funds to do his own business now and is just lowering the market to buy back in to pay his depositors. Although one thing is for sure Pirate doesn't like the price continually rising fast. |
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it could still really collapse to sub $1.00 levels very easily for a long time. I don't see how that's possible. Miners wouldn't sell below cost, and there is a minimum demand because of Silk Road. Miners wouldn't mine and SR is through-put not input. Yeah I do think $1.00 is a bit extreme but not a steady $7.00 |
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The list goes on and on, plenty of evidence that he's willing and capable of manipulating the market for his needs.
Well isn't it about time he was banned from the major exchanges. This market manipulation bullsh*t is only possibly because bitcoins market capitalisation is so small. For we all love bitcoin and >$10.00 coins sound expensive but with a market capitalisation of under $125,000,000 we should all admit we are all geeks, this is a hobby, love it too much and that it could still really collapse to sub $1.00 levels very easily for a long time. Tho I'll still be a bitcoiner |
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I use blockchain.info/MyWallet to send amounts down to just BTC1.00 that I have often only just received so have to pay the recommended "default" BTC0.0005 like satoshi dice. So once btc/usd>$100 that's $0.05 on even a $1 transaction or 5% fee. I understand the need to stop blockchain spam but wouldn't having the lowest fees possible help the adoption of bitcoin by people transacting sub $1.00 amounts often as btc value rises. Last time before I give up forever. As I pointed out the mandatory fee (which isn't required on all tx just low priority ones) was lowered to the current 0.0005 when BTC was $20. Considering lowering it to 0.0001 when BTC is sustainably >$100 probably makes sense. That keeps the fee below 1 US cent. However the point you seem to be missing (over and over and over across multiple threads) is that the mandatory fee doesn't determine the actual fee. 1) Mandatory fee is only required on low priority transactions. Simply wait long enough and you could pay 0 BTC on your $1USD equivelent tx. Tada. The mandatory fee being 0.0005 or 0.0001 doesn't really matter if you don't pay it. 2) Users are paying fees HIGHER than the mandatory fee. Gavin change suggested above will only accelerate that. Transaction volume increasing will only accelerate that. There is finite space in a block and tx processing does require some amount of real cost. It is entirely possible the mandatory fee could be cut to a single satoshi or removed completely and you STILL would have to pay a much larger fee simply due to competition (or wait days or weeks for your free tx to finally get processed). = small amount sent quickly after receiving | Yes ? Not everyone has or will have a large amount of coins sitting idle long enough like you. mandatory fee doesn't determine the actual fee = It is for MyWallet and the default setting in Wallet-qt needing changing for every transaction after it has failed after hours of waiting. So much for bitcoin selling its self for free and instant transactions? Not everyone is an early adopter with high vale wallets like yourself who can afford to pay. Most new users to bitcoin will only have fractional bitcoin wallets and wanting to send them often after just having received i.e "low priority transactions". OK if I have just received BTC0.01 or even BTC0.0010 how long do I have to wait to send it for free? Then bitcoin is not a quick payment method. Once BTC=$100 BTC0.01=$1.00 not really a micro transaction. High bitcoin Tx fees may be suitable for you with your large transactions or with coins you've had sat idle for a long time to enable a micro-Tx but it'd be better for bitcoin to be able to operate as a micro as well as a macro currency for everyone not just the people with large idle balances. Yes I understand the bitcoin blockchain is bloating and also that you usually make large transactions or have a large balance sat around long enough to enable you to make free speedy micro-transactions but that's the only new thing your telling me. Billions of people live on less than a dollar a day. Yet mobile phone proliferation is growing in that demographic. Hence possible bitcoin adoption. Users are paying fees HIGHER than the mandatory fee. Gavin change suggested above will only accelerate that - I'd rather have bitcoins market capitalisation made up of billions of sub dollar accounts then just leave it to the early adopters with mega-wallets and a few wealthy investors to form the the market capitalisation of the network. I think were both looking at this idea/problem from totally different standpoints as I too feel like I'm repeating myself to you. Yes the current model works for you and so does a higher Tx but I'm thinking of people coming at bitcoin with just change in there pocket or like $50 monthly wages in the developing world. Not just early adopters waiting for some big investment from the wealth elite. Maybe if bitcoin is shaped by enough people like you it won't become what I suggest. Then the next p2p alt-coin who can sort out the blockchain bloating will. |
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