"Not Applicable" would work well for that.

Of course it's a "fake" (a stock image with generated text). I didn't claim otherwise. In my post I mentioned how people can make their own.

Anyway, I wish I had that much hair.

Sorry, but I just couldn't bring myself to use the requested three apostrophes at the end of the message. Click on the image for more fun with this.

1995. Home internet was common enough by then (for the geeks who would be the Bitcoin early adopters). Sure it would take a while to download the block chain on a 56kBaud/sec modem, but we were used to waiting for things back then. I remember taking many days to download Linux distributions, one floppy image at a time.

With any bank account in the UK, the risk is that you get reported for suspected money laundering. The banks are supposed to report even a "whiff of suspicion" and are not allowed to tell the customer that they have been reported.

If I were operating a business like this, I would do it through a business account with a trading bank (not a building society), and I would make sure the bank understands the business model. That's all the bank cares about, and they ask you all this kind of stuff when you open the account.

For advice, I would ask an accountant. They deal with banks and the taxman every day, and they know exactly how the system works.

Unfortunately, doing it that way will cost a bit, because you'll be paying the accountant by the hour while you explain the subtleties of Bitcoin to him. I would consider describing bitcoins as "barter tokens" because I think they will readily understand that.

For an alternative approach, have a careful read of Nanaimo Gold's payment options page:
http://www.nanaimogold.com/payment_options.php
and see how he has managed to avoid the need for incorporation, business bank accounts, accountants, lawyers, etc., while still accepting only "hard" payment for bitcoins. Of course an accountant will never recommend that kind of approach, because it doesn't provide a slice of the pie for the establishment.

The most interesting thing in that article is the implication that Visa now accepts a one-in-25 false positive ratio. It used to be one percent or less.

Does Nationwide classify your account as a "business" account? I thought Nationwide only offered personal and charity accounts, in which case they may object to you using it for a business (if the business grows large enough for them to notice).

Happy to be an outlier!

I see people paying a small amount to a bitcoin bank in return for it guaranteeing to look after their coins safely. Something of 1% per year perhaps.

Earning interest by depositing your bitcoins in a bank is going to be unlikely while their value is rising and while there is not a big enough bitcoin economy for lending to be particularly profitable.

It took 200 years for the concept of "leap years" to be accepted outside of catholic countries. It took hundreds of years for the pound sterling to switch to decimal currency. There are still a couple of countries that haven't embraced the metric system. And it was a few hundred years after the concept of "zero" was formulated before it was generally accepted. More than a century after "votes for women" were introduced in New Zealand, it's still not completely universal.

So yes, it may take a while. On the positive side, change probably happens faster in the internet age.

For sure you're correct. In particular, an increase in difficulty doesn't necessarily correlate to an increase in the popularity of bitcoin, because it could just be due to generators becoming more efficient.

But I reckon a sustained decrease in difficulty would most likely occur at the same time as a decrease in popularity of bitcoin.

Your business is legitimate if you have real customers who receive value from your business that is worth at least as much to them as what they pay for it.

Your business is legal if you operate it according to the applicable laws.

A business can be both legitimate and legal, but it's important to appreciate the distinction.

Gotta save your effort for when it's really needed. As long as Bitcoin keeps growing, as it is now, there's no need for evangelizing. Just let time take care of Bitcoin's success automatically.

If the difficulty level drops twice in a row, that would be a signal that the tide has turned and that active promotion has become desirable.

Because we don't want to end up in prison?

OK, you win. I sent the coin to the address in your signature.

It would be a good way to transfer coins between friends where trust already exists, and where there is no need to write the transaction to the block chain. It may also have some application to sending coins over ad-hoc networks where the block chain is unavailable.

You're not kiba's model for his sat0shi drawing, are you?

Woo hoo! I just generated and won my first fee, all of 0.02 BTC. Feels good, though.

But of course there's no way to know that it is a lost key that was generated. It's more likely to be a key that someone else still holds but hasn't yet used to spend the associated bitcoins.

Anyway, the odds of that happening are so microscopically small that I'm not going to lose sleep over it. Also, I understand that a distributed system like Bitcoin can't have a central way to prevent duplicate keys, so I accept it on a philosophical level too.

It will become illegal just as soon as it can be detected. The detection doesn't even need to be reliable.