If bank transfers don't allow chargebacks, what holds people (like MtGox and other exchange sites) from using it?
Ok, they are not as international as credit cards or paypal, but they may be an easier option than LibertyReserve for those who live in US, don't they? Both could be kept as means to fund an account...

You can see the number of posts per month here http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats

The big jump was on July, since then it's been steady it seems.

That was my suggestion. Before accepting money from a particular account, try to check whether the person on the other side is the real owner of that account. Asking for some documents like IDs and passports is one way to go.

Only allow limited funding at the beginning is also an option.


That's weird, because it seems this whole chargeback thing is particular to US and maybe other countries, but in some places credit cards and bank transfers can't chargeback*. So, the insurance costs are already diluted in the service fees, which are high but not "too high" to stop people from using it...

*Not 100% sure. But, for example, bitcoinexchange uses bank transfers and it seems so far they haven't had problems with chargebacks.

Merchant checks what merchants wants to check.

BullionVault for example, once you perform your first transfer from a bank account of yours, they won't allow you to fund your bullionvault account with any other bank account.
Why can't the same thing be done for credit cards?


Those are criminal sites, I suppose, right? These criminals not only would need to have access to the private data of the credit cards, but also photos of the IDs of these CC owners... not impossible, but difficult.



And also, what about an insurance? Why can't it be done?

Of course they are.
The state not only uses the dollar printers in order to manipulate the interest rates for their demagogic purposes, but they also use it as a financing source, since the debt bounds that expire in the hands of the Fed aren't payed off by the Treasury. They do finance their activities through the printing of money.

Another thing such sites could do is require some identification from those willing to open an account. Since CC and bank transfers aren't anonymous anyway, that wouldn't be more of a privacy loss than the means of payment itself already is.

So, for example, the site could require those opening an account to provide some photos of their ID cards or passeports. After receiving the first bank transfer/CC payment it would match the ID with the source of payment and then, for security/privacy reasons, it could delete such photos. This would involve manual work, but if the site grows enough, then automatic recognition of some types of ID pictures could be implemented.

This wouldn't stop all sort of scams but could strongly limit them.

I don't understand it.

Okay, so US credit cards and bank transfers allow chargebacks. Got that.
But why it seems that we here are the first ones to have issues with that? It can't be. There must be some sort of insurance that people selling through CC and bank transfers could hire in order to protect themselves from chargebacks.

A site selling bitcoins for CC would only need to dilute the cost of such insurance in transaction fees or whatever source of income they come up with.

Why can't it happen that way?

I know it, you don't need to tell me.

Hello all,

I believe most of you are familiar with the Seasteading Institute.

For those who aren't, it's a project to build inhabitable sea platforms with the intend of funding new countries. You may know more by accessing their site or by watching this nice talk Patri Friedman gave in the first Brazilian Seminar of Austrian Economics, hold by the Brazilian Mises Institute.

IMHO, this is the most important project in existence for libertarians. If we could ever fund an independent city, based on libertarians principles, this would be simply amazing. Even if we don't manage to create a truly libertarian place due to other nation governments' threats, I think it's at least possible to create a place with more freedom than anywhere else in the world.

I've been trying to convince them to accept bitcoins donations. But I think that better than talking I should try to do something.

So I'm organizing a donation here. As soon as they start accepting them, I'll transfer all the funds to their addresses.

For those willing to contribute to this amazing project, please flip your coins to 194qHQhV1r48xoLu5vMP4A54ekdvGfcEGW

Thank you!

A condominium is a voluntary contract. It only bounds those who voluntarily accept it.
There's nothing voluntary in the state.

Well, you know, if you don't find a proper contact, you can always send an ancient letter, made from paper.

They have a postal address on this page you linked.

Bitcoins could be really useful to them. Good idea.
I don't know the answer to your question though, sorry.

It is open source.


Everyone would see it.
I don't think any code would ever be accepted to an official release without some peer verification.


How?


I think you're talking about the overflow bug. You'll find lots of discussions about it here in the forum.


No.


The difficulty to generate blocks would raise proportionally.


No one, it's P2P open software.

Excuse me for my ignorance, but isn't the difficulty there exactly to prevent what the topic author fears?

If computers get a billion time faster, difficulty gets a billion time harder...

What's the issue? There's a maximum possible difficulty for SHA-256 ?

What?
Keep thy moral to thyself.

There's nothing "immoral" to gambling, if you take any non-subjective moral (ethics). And it's not bad to bitcoins either!

What worries me is somebody who thinks he can claim what's legitimate for somebody else to do with his own money and his own money only.


"Bad aspects" to you! What you call a vice, for others may be amusement. As utility is subjective, what you say ("does not product something useful") makes no sense. If gambling is what Joe wants, that's something useful to him. Stop wanting to impose your personal values on others.


    

Understand something, really: nothing can be stolen by consent. This is contradictory in terms. Not understanding the difference between lack of consent and presence of it is like saying sex and rape are the same.

Speculators are not stealing anything. Speculators are just people who try to predict future prices, aiming for profit. And, as always, profit adds wealth to society. Even the profit of a speculator.
A successful speculator is someone that correctly predicts price fluctuations. So, for example, he buys when a certain resource is less scarce, and save it to sell when it's more scarce. The action of the successful speculator helps to flatten price fluctuations, since he buys when the resource is more available (pushes up a downward price) and sells when people are lacking the resource in question (pushing down an upward price).
Interesting to note that the inverse also apply to failures. A speculator that fails will make things worse. As anyone that has losses, he'll be destroying wealth.

Memorize this: The more successful anyone is in pursuing profit through voluntary means, the more this person will help society.

It would be nice to see a BTC/gold chart...

Since I know bitcoin watch, every time I access it the average blocks per hour counter is closer to 10 than 6.

In the euro zone you have the chance of buying through bank transfer with bitcoinexchange. But it has the same problem you mention for cash-in-the-mail, you're not sure what will be the price when your transfer reach their account.

I've suggested them (and bitcoin*cash could do the same) to add a price prediction feature, trying to estimate what the price will be if your transfer/mail arrive just after all other orders already done and which weren't received yet. It's a prediction that may not be verified, but at least it's better than nothing.

The main problem with dollars, as already said, is that conventional internet payments (CC, paypal) have charge-backs, while bitcoins don't. I wonder why there aren't insurances for that yet.

The clients will replace their chain by the longer. And if there is no hardcoded snapshot, the entire chain could be replaced.


We definitely have a different understanding of requirements here, then. There's no way I can see the possibility of losing all past transactions as a "feature" for a monetary system. Imagine... All your money could get lost, and not only yours, everybody's money! That's a vulnerability, for sure. The fact that an absurdly enormous processing power is required for such attack is already a pretty good protection against it, but why not adding extra protection like hardcoded snapshots of the chain? It's like someone said, if done for old blocks, that's not a problem at all. It should not be done on recent blocks, of course.

You say that the (minuscule) possibility of all transactions done since the very beginning of bitcoins being completely lost is a feature? Dude, that would be a catastrophe! It better never happen!

It seems you don't get why there is this "larger chain wins" rule. As far as I know at least, this rule only exists to solve "chain splits" as quick as possible.
Suppose node A produces a new block practically at the same time node B does the same. Some nodes receive block A, others receive block B. We have now two different chains, A and B. That's bad, we should have just one. So, to solve it, we assume that the first chain to get bigger first will replace the other. So if sub-network A produces a block before sub-network B, all nodes in B will ignore their chain and accept the larger one from A.

That's the only reason I see this rule to exist. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I understand, this rule was not create to explicitly allow someone with super-computer-power to rewrite the entire block chain.