Nice!  I have something similar from a couple months ago, and indeed they are great for educating others.

Received .07 btc!

I think you should rename them from "discount payments" to "dividend payments"... discount sounds like I'm losing something, whereas a dividend is easy to understand.

Do you not do not exhibit the exact same behavior in your own affairs? Will you pay $5 for a sandwich if you can get the equivalent for $4?

Yeah that... or it's just a large successful company trying to earn revenue and mitigate losses.

That's the wrong lesson to learn. The correct lesson is, "be careful." And another good lesson is, "don't store lots of money with someone you don't fully trust."

ewallets are fantastic for small amounts of bitcoins, but large piles of savings should be properly stored on your own backed up wallet.dat in multiple secure places.

It's important to remember that every place you store bitcoins has risk. Holding a wallet.dat has risk of user error/negligence, which can be worse than the risk of an ewallet provider running off with your money. And there are things preventing ewallet owners from stealing everyone's money, 1) long-term profit motive and 2) genuine good character (which is the majority of business owners).

Yifu - on the transparency page (looks great btw!) please mark my work as pro bono. I won't be requesting compensation.

My compensation will be if just one angry socialist discovers Bitcoin and comes to learn what free market really means 

It's important for people to understand that exchange rate risk has been virtually eliminated by at least one company, Bit-pay.com.  They are an ideal candidate to provide the merchant solution for any sizable business. They enable the business to receive the Bitcoins automatically converted into USD instantly.

Some might say, "well then what's the point of accepting btc at all?" And the answer of course is that this is a gradual process. We need to help companies step by step. Show them that bitcoins aren't scary. After they are used to the Bitcoin world, some will opt to keep a portion of earnings as Bitcoins. But again, this is is a gradual process.

Also, the most likely way someone can claim this bounty, is if someone has a personal/professional connection to a decision maker at a medium sized business. Who do you know? Who do they know? Set up a meeting and discuss. Describe the advantages of Bitcoins from a merchant perspective (no chargebacks, lower fees, acceptable from anyone anywhere - even Ivory Coast and Ukraine).

OP - thanks for setting up this ambitious bounty!

Agreed, great article. Wonderful writing and narrative.

The rapid price increases in America are very easy to explain, and in fact this was made clear to me on a recent doctor visit.

The problem is that the patient (customer) is not the one who pays for the service. There is a disconnect between customer and merchant. This disconnect enables the incentive of a company (hospital/doctor) to raise its prices to go unchecked. The doctor can prescribe anything, run any tests, and generally "over-service" the patient, because the patient wants "all the health he can get" and isn't paying the cost directly. For the most part, it's paid by the insurance provider or an employer via the insurance provider.

This singular dynamic is the primary reason healthcare costs in America seem "unrestrained." The incentive to reduce costs is gone, or almost gone.

I had understood this conceptually for a while, but on a recent doctor visit it was made terribly clear. I went to get a prescription. Before the doctor would prescribe the drug, he said I needed to take some blood tests and other types of analysis. It sounded a bit excessive, so I asked him, "How much will all that cost?"  You see, I cared about the cost, because I don't have insurance. I have to pay for the services I receive. The doctor said the tests would cost roughly $900-$1,200. I gasped! He looked surprised at my question, and asked, "don't you have insurance?" I said no. He looked more surprised, paused, and then said, well, I guess we don't need to run all these tests. He crossed some things out on the clipboard, and said, "okay, just these three tests are required. The cost will be about $350.

So I paid for those tests, and got the prescription.  If I had been a "normal client" with insurance to cover every expense, the cost of acquiring the services would be over a grand. But when the discipline of a price-conscious customer is added to the equation, the cost dropped to $350. Remember that when insurance companies pay your bills, their costs are distributed amongst all their policy holders. That is why insurance premiums keep rising - because doctors and hospitals have no incentive to control what they provide for a given demand.

This isn't the full story of why prices are rising, but it is a large portion of it. Insurance should not be paying for normal medical expenses. It should cover only catastrophic events, and people should get used to paying for the services and goods they demand. The overall price of health in the country would fall, or at least stabilize.

It is not a coincidence that those industries with the most government distortion are the industries in which prices are out of control (college, healthcare, war, etc.)

Logos of his caliber for 8 BTC IS "really cheap."  That's an amazing deal and I hope everyone here takes advantage of that.

Zaise - are you still offering this?

If you read the article, he was actually speaking with him face to face. He had emailed him to set up a meeting. So, an awkward silence at that meeting was quite possible =)

You can give coins to random people by email address. Use BTCinch.com They're in beta, but PM me your email and I'll show you (goes for anyone who's curious).

Try tracing any property "back to the commons" and you will find it is quite impossible to do. The chain of property ownership is flawed and fallible. Yet for the vast majority of property, there is no contention as to its owner. Nobody out there claims ownership of my computer, nor my car, nor any of the things I have. In those cases of a property dispute, that is a good role for courts.

And I have no interest in contributing to the upkeep of your commons. If it is of value to me, I'll pay for it voluntarily. What you advocate is the forced surrendering of the product of one's efforts, and I think that's immoral. For the same reason that slavery is wrong, partial slavery is wrong.


In biblical times, they did lots of screwed up shit    It's fine if you want to say privatization of the commons is theft... indeed I don't know of one universal way by which "common" things rightly become private. We can dispute that. But once something is known and agreed to be private, without legitimate contention from another claimant, then it ought to be respected as such. And no, animals have a terrible understanding of private property. Animal behavior is more akin to socialism, where force is used to achieve various ends... and perhaps that makes sense in the animal world, where most resources are not produced, but instead taken from the earth. Humans produce their resources and as such have right to claim them privately.



I respect your opinion, and I won't use force on you to convince you otherwise. Sadly, you won't extend the same courtesy to me... if you disagree with me, you'll vote to plunder, whereas no matter how much I disagree with you, I will not plunder or encourage others to do so on my behalf.

I've had much more stolen from me by the government... and of course the government theft will continue. At least with bitcoin, people can educate themselves and be prudent with whom they trust. A diligent person can be relatively safe with bitcoin. A diligent person has no such benefit when it comes to matters of the state, social engineering, and economic planning. 

YES YES YES!!!  Hey jump in IRC #operationbitcoin   That's where we've been organizing. Someone else is making a similar system to yours, and that's the ultimate goal.  Please join the discussion I'd love to see what you made!

And FYI - the QR code points here: operationbitcoin.org

Roughly $2,500 in coins themselves. Am buying more every month.

Don't invest any money you can't afford to lose. Bitcoins are wildly speculative. You should assume they will go to zero.

Thanks for the proposition, I might throw a coin in if a group put a fund together.

What kind of amount are you look for for the sponsorships? If we were given a set price that might be more easily digested.

Not really. It's more like, "I choose not to steal from or hurt you, and I hope you will afford me the same courtesy."

Or to put it in your terminology, "I won't fuck with you, please don't fuck with me."

Amazing that it's such a radical position  

For some people, "cashing out" happened when they got rid of their fiat currency for something better. For some people, there is little desire to exchange this valuable currency for the play-money of governments.