Surprised drug trade is even being talked about, still.

The case for OB is really, really clear. Go here, think about some things around your house, maybe something you make for a hobby or business, and see what Paypal/eBay'd charge you.

Just to throw out some examples (fixed price auction, no add-ons) for the exceptionally lazy:
$6.99 jams & jellies business = 21.46% fee per individual unit, 14.33% per six-pack
$10 Playstation code = 18.9% fee per unit, 14.1% per $50 card
Fujifilm "Instant Minis" = 16.12% fee per 20-pack, 14.34% per 50-pack.


Until you start selling items over $3500 each, the fee is >10%. Is eBay really providing enough service to justify 10%, much less 14-22%? Absolutely not, unless you count their customer acquisition costs, which is really just a fee to raise barrier to entry for better products; feeding the beast.

Let's look at two widget businesses.

Jim's Widgets sells 500 units of CheapWidget each month @ $5.99 each.
Bill's Widgets sells 250 units of PremiumWidget each month @ $25.99 each.

On eBay, Jim would be losing out on $685 in revenue from his $2995 potential. Bill would be losing out on $987.50 revenue from $6497.50 potential. Those are pretty massive losses. Medicare/SS taxes don't even come close to that %. OTOH, OB charges nothing; zero; 0%; $0.00; BTC0.00000000.


It seems completely reasonable for people selling to give a 2% donation of revenues to the developers, and 2% to a dedicated customer acquisitions NFP which literally just spends money advertising OB. This would still be a %fee lower than eBay charges on $20,000 items. On, say, $20, this is practically robbing the OB team compared to current solutions. What OB lacks (like pretty much all FLOSS software) is a good way of making donations painless and fair on the user's part. Right now, you can't just say, "oh, I want to donate 2% of all sales to Jim, 2% to Bill," right? Same problem Core and Armory have and why developers are now answering to higher powers, which, while it may not necessarily turn out bad, is clearly inferior to consistent decentralized donations.

Nah. You're just getting old.

AFAIK, there's no way to distinguish between telepathy from Jesus vs. Satan posing as Jesus. I don't even think telepathic dreams have been seriously studied yet. A sleep study using electrode caps while collecting details from those who've been communicated with by who they're claiming as Jesus may help us determine which Jesus dreams are legitimately from Jesus and which ones are from Satan or the army of darkness trying to fool us. For example, if Jesus tells Jim to burn down his church and eat his room-mates, we can probably safely assume that was not Jesus but a mind-raping imposter. If there's a difference in stimulation, it may help us reliably determine what Jesus wants us to do, barring listening to drainage pipes after asking the gurgling/whispering noise to identify itself for indisputable confirmation.

Alternately, it would be helpful if Jesus issued keys so we could verify his telepathic messages. By not doing so, I sometimes wonder if Jesus disapproves of crypto-tech. As an aside, I have a folder full of game mechanics which came in a dream and are so ambitious, I'd need to study for over a decade to implement them. I'm not sure if Jesus communicated them to me, but one I'm particularly fond of was a schematic for "Nice Onion Guys."

*ahem*

Jesus' "Nice Onion Guys"

*Full city-level zoom-in for each tile. (think DF)
*Region-level, ~200 tiles. (also DF)
*"Paradox"-level, with different countries shown, apparently tile-less.

Onion guys are human less their heads, which are blood-less vidalia onions, and
their hands, which are green growths capable of rapidly shooting out from
their body and going into other onions to do a terribly gory "drill" attack.
They always go for the heart. NOGs never use "third-party" armor and weapons.

Nice onion guys never get anything for free, but give freely. They don't get
things for free because they insist on giving value for value received. This
makes up the game's economy and also permits a kind of in-game "nice" slavery.

Nice onion guys always want more land to grow themselves in. This justifies the
combat system. NOG is real-time. The player initially plays as a baron, commanding
one tile in the region.

NOG is magic and goofy in the city and region level. This is juxtaposed with an
ultra-serious-seeming "Paradox"-level game, played on a real-world map where proper
countries (with extra-authoritarian names) exist, and only "misery" is shown
(wars, death counts, combat progression, government control over regions),
which is absent from the city- and regional-level views where it's always
"fun" and creative.

In both single-player and multi-player NOG (hotseat MP?!), you can progress from
being a baron to controlling multiple regional tiles. When you command more tiles
than any other regional PC or NPC, you become a duke and can push expeditionary
forces out into other regional tiles. As duke, you must secede from your
current kingdom (always involves combat, with the duke usually at a disadvantage)
to progress in the game.

As king, it is impossible to ever see the city or regional tile views, but all
stats are made up entirely from that real data which must be managed by PC or
NPC barons and dukes. Kings manage war, bonus management (water, sunlight,
other growing conditions), slave trade, disaster mitigation and relief,
and international treaties.

In the city level, there are resources you'll need... wood, stone, clay... to
build houses, store food, alert systems (to "wake up" all NOGs when combat is
imminent), and for other such buildings which increase gathering and improve
NOG combat readiness. Otherwise, the only currency is NOGs and their sprouts.

Combat is sort-of sharded. The map converts from a pixelated-looking thing to
a very high-saturation and colorful "HD" map where you control your NOGs. NOG
combat is primarily a morale-managing affair and doesn't take long due to how
terrible NOG combat is. Combat plays a bit like hide-and-seek, where you want
to catch enemy brigades off-guard with your own so you can "shoot" your growths
out before the enemy can react. The map ends when one person's military surrenders
or dies out.

Do you guys have anything you'd like to say about the Tor fork?

Remittance market's so damn difficult to tap into because they're inherently "foreign." I don't assume people paying remittances have a lot of time on their hands. Seems like there's not really a route for Bitcoin awareness to spread outside word of mouth.... maybe producing materials in multiple languages which could be passed around might help. It's definitely a place for grassroots, but it seems like it'd need a massive push. For example, US-Mexico remittance would need offices in both countries organized as non-profits, where they help people send and receive money without fuss and fees. ATMs and ATMs with internal user wallets could be immensely helpful here since it could allow this non-profit to only need to exist for a few years as a kind of stop-gap while also being an educator.

The best bet might be a NFP talking to employers in appropriate areas about how they can help their employees get more out of their paycheck, and how the employer can build good will in the process. Mass mailings targeting employers might also be cost-effective...

I was thinking about the influence of factories on culture at work, mostly as it related to religion. It's basically impossible to adhere to any kind of modesty/repression-demanding religious ruleset in a modern US factory with American-style management, and I was wondering if it might've helped lead the decline of Christianity in the US more than the free flow of ideas.

Probably the best chance of a mass adoption trigger exponentially increasing price and user base would be a major outsourced payroll company offering all employees the option to take a percentage of their pay in BTC by default, especially because the change would trigger HR sending out communications alerting everyone to the change along with an explanation.

This thread is confusing. I don't recall when it was discovered, but...

^PG

(No, it's not a weird irony bot)

Probably. Do the people there make eye contact while walking past, speaking, or having sex? We don't do that shit here.

Commodities fell like a stone, at least (propane company's so worried, they've started offering bonuses and fee waiving for locking in price for a year). Guessing people panic selling stocks toward the beginning of the year would've panic-bought commodities. ... Oops.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. Who still tolerates salaries? I don't think I'd ever trust a company not to screw me over on that.

Apparently, Air Force decided to remove the requirement on the same day as the article came out. http://www.airforcetimes.com/article/20140917/NEWS/309170066/Air-Force-nixes-help-me-God-requirement-oaths

No - I mean you should get the loan in USD through someone here. This used to happen all the time because BTC was (and still is, even compared to the "good ole days") volatile. I'm sure there're still lenders willing to do this. Alternately, a lender might be willing to give a USD-pegged BTC loan. If I had the spare USD (... unless you can wait a couple months ) or thought the loan amount was small enough where you could probably take the hit of BTC sky-rocketing, I'd be interested in this.

*shrug* Hodlers gonna hodl. So long as the coin isn't needed for life expenses, it doesn't really matter how long it takes the hodl to fodl; it's in a (mental) vault. Traders are short-term and I assume they more-or-less balance each other out, where their influence is really more in creating stability than manipulating any long-term trends (unless there's a significant number with large stakes about to be burned).

I was thinking about going ahead, but then I read this. How would you pay back if price sky-rockets? I ask as someone who had a $20k debt when BTC was ~$10, and now have ~$500k in debt I probably won't be able to pay off before dying. You should probably go for a USD-denom loan with a bank, CU, or even WU/similar transfer.

1) Country adopting radical austerity measures
2) Country seizing wealth (Cyprus 2.0)
3) Hyperinflation in a Western country, esp. US
4) Germany leaving the Euro or OPEC excommunicating the petrodollar
5) Default by Japan, UK, or other major economic power
6) Crypto-only mainstream "killer app" gaining major popularity w/ marketing blitz through traditional media (esp. television)
     6a) Coverage of BTC ATMs (within 25mi radius) of >75% of at least 3 major economic powers
7) Extreme distrust in government; ebola/MERS/etc panic, weapons bans (US), production nationalization, climate change collapsing/destroying infrastructure

Not really sure we'll see some particular, magic "trigger event." More likely a gradual change, I'd think.

I've read a few beef shippers' threads on the forum over the past year and didn't see their threads bumped since, but didn't realize we had someone doing significant BTC business -- awesome! I'll point him over here right away. Thanks for the tip!

One of the cool things about FLOSS is you can do anything with it - similar to what we see with how Bitcoin's led to all these different altcoins, but where the "altcoins" can change things around to add major differences in functionality (rather than just, say, changing the mining algorithm and adding bonus blocks)! What it is may not be what it becomes, and some people may wish to try integrating some form of centralization. Personally, I'd love to see a large market of forks (there're already some forks), including experiments introducing centralization so long as they're open-source. Some kind of curator system (maybe the dev simply hard-codes "curator-tagged" pubkeys into the client who're the only ones allowed to list items and who collect a tiny %fee on each listing) which can exceed the level of verification eBay and Amazon do (almost none) would be awesome. I'm sure a great number of people would be willing to pay more not to have disputes resolved, but to participate in a market where disputes are far less likely due to "legitimacy verification" before the seller or product's allowed to be marketed. Open-source allows us to have many different stores implementing their own policies, resulting in a decentralized market where the best policies can thrive including both semi-decentralized and fully-decentralized implementations. I mean, the media's talking about this project like it's the next Silk Road, but I really don't think that's going to be the major takeaway from this project in a few years -- I think this is going to be talked about as the thing which finally eliminates the misery of eBay by pushing it off to the footnotes.

It makes me kind of glad we've had such a lame auction platform market since BitMit closed doors, because now everything's right for this (and resulting forks) to blitz the market and kick ass.

I recently started work for a major dry ice company primarily supplying the MidWest, Central South, and East coast of the US, as well as parts of Canada (however, shipping can be done outside this range). Knowing some businesses are looking to "complete the circle" and purchase their supplies with BTC, I thought this could be of some interest, particularly for our meat industry (Omaha Steaks is currently the largest purchaser) and'd love to be able to put together a compelling set of documents for corporate with a list of real companies which'd be interested in making purchases in BTC. Our dry ice pellets also make an excellent, environmentally-friendly cleaner for heavy-duty objects using dry ice blasting, particularly in knocking oxidation and any other unpleasantness off pipes and metal connections quickly and with far superior results to air or water blasting, and being much cleaner than many conventional harder blasting methods (and unlike most traditional hard blasting methods, dry ice blasting can be done inside the factory).

Dry ice shipped is considered food grade and is generally in a purity range of 99.95-99.98%. All of our containers are thoroughly cleaned and sanitized each time they're returned (and they're sometimes returned with the most bizarre stuff inside, from doritos to whiskey to gold bracelets) with strict quality control measures in place on the line.

Dry ice typically costs <$1/lb, with less-processed types generally being cheapest (list of cuts for producers, list of cuts for consumers). For large orders in our operating range, CCPI can use its own trucks to ship directly to you and minimize shipping costs.

Some side-notes: I'd suggest trying to get poly-sealed or naked blocks if you can -- Kraft bagging is a nightmare and it's difficult to determine if the ice broke during wrapping or packing, while they'll all stick together once packaged (in which case, you'd probably be better off with a naked block). The airport cuts are cheap (they're reformed from scraps), but tend to be more ugly/deformed/non-whole and have unappealing bagging. High-density ice is generally a good option, though they probably won't tell you about it unless you ask -- they tend to be fully intact more often (and prettier in general) and you can use less to cool more for longer, saving on shipping.

No. TBF does some solid stuff, including offering legal assistance. Some highly-integrated members do controversial stuff, including calling for increased regulations. I don't see how it could be portrayed that Bitcoin is negatively affected by TBF in a truly significant way, and I don't believe they're a net detriment to Bitcoin. That said, there may be better ways of going about handling the "macro" and "real" issues with Bitcoin (legal, PR, "setting the agenda," community organization) - but if there are, that should probably be the focus, not destroying something else.