So from a bank's perspective - if they have what appears to be a valid legal claim (affidavit?) that a transaction was fraudulent, I guess they work on the basis that the merchant will have the relevant information as to who actually initiated the transaction and so is best positioned to follow it up. That's ridiculous. Dwolla interacted with the party that supplied the money and the party that claimed the transaction was fraudulent, they are in the best position to figure out pusue the claims. The merchant had no contact whatsoever with the money source except through Dwolla. The merchant didn't necessarily ever interact with anyone. The fraud claim must be that the person who initiated the transfer (who interacted only with Dwolla) wasn't authorized to perform the transfer by the person who owned the funds (who interacted only with Dwolla). Who does the merchant follow up with? Two people he interacted with only through Dwolla? I don't see anything in their user agreement that says that can reverse transactions. Dwolla has gone, in my opinion, from useful to useless. I'll raise my opinion of them a bit if I see what information they provided when they reversed a transaction. If the released literally all information they had from both contacts, I'll revise my opinion a bit. Sure - In this case - Dwolla is the merchant. (edit: the customer effectively purchased 'dwolla' - so I agree with you.) |
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...the financial industry who has first access to the free money and who controls the printing press.
Is it really reasonable to think of it this way? Sure - the financial institutions lend out 'money' which has just been created - but they have to pay it back to the reserve system. (effectively destroying it) They get to charge a higher interest rate than the reserve in order to fund their operations - but the principal (the money that was just 'created' by entering it into the system at loan-initiation) has to be repaid. So.. they make money (interest difference) on lending out money that wasn't theirs - but this because they are entrusted with the job of ensuring that the new 'debt money' is going to an entity who will do work in the economy to produce that value (plus some). They take a risk and have costs in doing their checks on the entity taking out the loan. Seems fair enough no? As much as I think the financial industry is a flawed and dangerous beast at the moment.. I still don't see how this is 'free money' or 'controlling the printing press'. |
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So from a bank's perspective - if they have what appears to be a valid legal claim (affidavit?) that a transaction was fraudulent, I guess they work on the basis that the merchant will have the relevant information as to who actually initiated the transaction and so is best positioned to follow it up.
Now I know most people like the idea of collecting minimal information about customers - but given the way the banking system works, isn't it in the best interest of the exchanges to collect enough personal/business information that they could follow up with a debt collection agency/credit reporting agency if necessary?
Ultimately there may be ways to get your BTC more anonymously (face to face etc) - but I don't see that it's necessary for exchanges to treat incoming fiat transactions as if they only need an email address as identification.
It's a slight privacy concern that an exchange has more personal data - but if you're using bank accounts etc to transfer funds in/out you're not exactly anonymous from a law-enforcement agency anyway - and really.. do most of us need to be anonymous for bitcoin acquisition/offloading purposes?
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I'm not mentioning them to family lately for a different reason. I mentioned them when they were trading a few dollars higher - and a couple of family members insisted I buy some for them. A bit more rallying and I can mention them again perhaps  I imagine bitcoins could be convenient in a lot of households where someone shares a bank account and/or credit card and would rather not raise unnecessary discussions by using them for online purchases. |
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If it outgrows your letterbox, don't worry - they're highly divisible.
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Cant do standing orders if no BTC was in there to begin with.
It's a handy feature of MtGox actually. Set up your sell order and if the price is right it executes when your BTC deposit arrives. Similarly - even with no USD - you can place a sell order and a buy order such that if you manage to sell - you may then have funds for your buy order to execute. That you didn't know about this feature suggests the possibility that you put the order there and didn't realize it was still in place. |
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July 23, 2011 - Drew Wilson - IFPI Announces Agreement With PayPal to Cut Off Pirate Sites http://www.zeropaid.com/news/94617/ifpi-announces-agreement-with-paypal-to-cut-off-pirate-sites/(IFPI = International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) From the article: "Other sites have opted to simply stop using PayPal altogether and simply use other methods like Flatr and Bitcoin to name two examples." " In fact, this is great news for competitors of PayPal because it means more reasons to move away from PayPal to them in the first place. The only entity I see losing out in a deal like this is PayPal." |
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As a counter argument to this.. what would happen if it was *really* easy to convert to and from all existing fiat currencies?
If at a touch of a button on your smartphone you could cheaply convert a portion of your fiat paypacket into BTC for an online purchase, and if merchants could similarly convert out of BTC to their own currency cheaply and quickly .. then the price of a bitcoin becomes irrelevant.
People wouldn't care if one day 1 BTC = $100 and the next it's $10 if they're only obtaining them to perform a purchase.
Even if lots of people are using them this way - what pressure is there for a high price?
Ironically - the more governments try to clamp down on exchanges and make conversion harder.. the higher the price, because everyone then needs to hold some BTC and drive up scarcity.
If conversion is cheap and instantaneous - nobody needs to hold BTC and they'll still work for facilitating trade even if worth relatively little each.
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This is obvious and unimportant.
Of course companies dealing with bitcoins could be required to give information to law enforcement.
If you don't want things tracked - don't send bitcoins directly from any online service which can be tied to your identity.
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I'm concerned that the high fees for microtransactions will impede the distribution of bitcoin and limit it's application.
Why can't some portion of the fees for microtransactions be paid in a cryptographic 'proof of recent work'?
(prove your client has done x seconds of calculations, after some recent block)
At the moment the fees aren't as a percent of transaction value. By shifting to requiring part of the fee to be paid in computational work, and the rest as a percentage fee rather than an absolute - it makes spamming the network impractical, and fees fair for low values.
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To put the 0.0005 in perspective..
At current rates of just under $14/BTC - It equates to about a 2.7% fee if you want to throw someone a US quarter.
or.. for those who heard about bitcoins 'low fees' and are just getting started with bitcoin and to try it out, get their free 0.001 BTC from the bitcoin faucet..
it's half their wallet.
Clearly the fees are high for small transactions - and as miners are currently well rewarded by the 50 BTC block payout, it's not for that.
Apparently the fees help stop someone spamming the network.. although.. I don't see why a 'proof of recent work' can't be required in each transaction to help prevent this.
(something based on the current difficulty level which will take some 'average' computer about a second or two to compute)
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I heard MtGox is reputable & opened an acct, hoping to buy them there. But I can't. I need to "add funds" in first. (Why can't I just do that with a bank transfer to MtGox?)
So why can't you? I just added funds via bank transfer. I'm curious as to why this was a problem for you. |
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The part that concerns me is the rollbacks...
It was the right thing to do. Invalid trades due to glitches/fraud are cancelled on normal exchanges too. Happened on the Nasdaq this year. and the adjustment of the Bitcoin value.
What 'adjustment'? The mtgox price is a function of what bids and asks people have placed. Do you have evidence that it's otherwise? |
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The price of BTC doesn't matter. $5 or $20 it really has no effect. People sell based on usd/euro etc... No one locks in prices at a set BTC. If you sell a $20 item for 1 BTC or 4 BTC it really doesn't change anything. The person buys the bitcoins, sends them, the seller cashes them out. At $5 and at $20 it's the same process. It's always been discussed that 50-80% of miners leaving wouldn't really change a thing. Day traders, investors, people playing the exchanges don't matter. All those people could fuck off right now and people would still be buying BTC, using BTC, and sellers selling the BTC.
Which is why there's no collapse. The people powering BTC, the people using BTC, don't give two shits about how much it's currently worth on the exchanges. There's APIs now that auto convert USD to current market value BTC. Does the API, buying, seller really care if it's $5 or $20? The API just converts it to the USD value and sells the item.
If anything BTC hitting $5 would get rid of the short term for profit miners who are drama queens every time the price fluctuates because they're in a panic to get their money back from their investment. It also gets rid of the people treating BTC like gold bullion.
BTC was never created to be a collectible. It's a virtual currency. Letting people can exchange goods and services. So Jimbo in Poland doesn't need a bank, visa, mastercard, or paypal to sell his homemade bellybutton lint sculptures. He can accept BTC from every corner of the planet. People seem to think that having people profit off of the investing, trading, mining is the core of BTC. It's not. People using BTC as a currency is the core of BTC, will always be the core of BTC, and those people don't give two shits what the current market value is.
They login, buy btc, spend them, get their shit. Whether it's $5 or $50 doesn't change anything. If all the people holding BTC like it's gold bullion cashed out, the people who are using the currency would still be using it the next day, the next week, the next month.
It's true that the price of BTC is irrelevant for trades where it's converted seamlessly at either end.. but in practice there is a fair overhead in both fees and time for conversion. (I'm sure it varies from country to country - but for me it's a couple of days + 5% or so) Once there are significant number of merchants accepting BTC, it seems to me that ironically, the market value of BTC could go up if governments start to make difficulties for the exchange points. The smoother the flow in and out of BTC - the less need to hold a fat wallet. |
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