Indeed.

I watch japanese anime a lot.

Amongst my prefered animes:

- Claymore
- Excel Saga
- Elfen Lied

And many more, but those three are the ones I have in mind right now.

Oh yeah I totally forgot about Ripple.  I'm not convinced about it being of any help for a decentralized currency, yet it can definitely be used for decentralised trading.

Ok that makes sense.  It is true that the "contact" part was a bit tedious.  We didn't know exactly if we should chose to use regular email or internal biddingpond messaging system.  It was a bit confusing, so I understand getting rid of this part could be beneficial.

The thing is that when I had make this auction, I didn't know about this new feature you've implemented, so I feel like I am a bit put in the corner.

Right now in my auction there is a part saying "Payment address: xxxxxx",  and there is NO INDICATION whether this paiement address is mine or yours.  I think it is confusing for the buyer, especially since I didn't know I should warn the buyer not to use this paiement method.  Basically now if I wanted to stick with the old method for this auction, I just don't know how I could, since I can't edit the auction message and say something like "do not use the bitcoin address below, I'll provide you a bitcoin address via biddingpond's internal message system, in due time".

What I will do for this auction is that I will try your new method, after all as a seller I don't have much to risk, since if I don't receive the bitcoins, I'll just don't send the gold coin.  I've just realised that

So, to sum up:  ok, I'll try your new method for this auction.  Depending on how well it works, I might use it in the future too.

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I see no reason why we should discuss this in private, as this might be of interest for other people.  If you're concern is about me being really the same "grondilu" as the one on your site, then I sign this message.

Now, please explain me why I should use you as a third party, when so far my auction went fine by giving directly a bitcoin address to the buyer.
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Biddingpond, on second thought I'm not sure I see any real advantage in using you as a third party.

I have to think about it, but for the moment, what could I do to remove this "paiement address" from the auction page?

Most of us like the idea of a decentralised internet, and thus I guess everyone would be happy to see a P2P trading system.

I doubt however that we should expect a technical solution to do so.  Rather, we should encourage people to provide their own currency exchange service.

I personnaly sell bitcoins on a small, cheap website that you can see on my signature.  I accept cash in the mail and bank wire.  So far it works quite well.   I initially decided that I would only SELL bitcoins, because I was hoping that other people would do just as I did, so if I want to buy bitcoins, I could just by some on their website.  This is one of the reasons why I self-published the source code of my website.

So, I hereby encourage everyone to do exactly what I did.  The code is public domain.  Just use it or modify it anyway you want.  In order to have it work, you need:

* a webserver or a host that accepts CGI.  If you chose a webserver on your own machine, I recommend you use thttpd.  It is WAY simpler than apache to configure.
* some knowledge in bash.  My code is not very complicated, and after a bit of time reading the bash manual, you'll understand it easily.
* if you selfhost your site, you may need a domain name.  You might you no-ip.com, or any other solution.  You can also consider using TOR hidden service (just google those three words).

That's all.  Once a lot of people host their own currency exchange offer, it would be easy to organise some kind of federation.  Basically some bots would inspect those websites and publish best bids/asks.  A full order book could thus be reconstructed.  And then we'll have a nice decentralised trading system.

Ok, seems fair enough.

Damn it I totally forgot about this upgrade of your website.

Had I remembered, I would have been waiting a bit before making my recent auction for a gold coin.

I hope the transition will work fine.

PS.  What is this "paiement address" about??  This is NOT one of my address.  Please explain.

Tu parles de bitcoin en général ou de cette vidéo en particulier ?

Dans le second cas j'en doute, et dans le premier j'ai déjà écrit une dépèche bien trollesque sur linuxfr.


http://linuxfr.org/news/connaissez-vous-les-bitcoins

I think it is nice to promote bitcoin, but it is not essential. 

To explain it I'll try to explain why bitcoin is usefull, even if it is used only by three people.

Let's picture too old friends, Alice and Bob, who spent a lot of time together during their youth.  As friends, they help one another some times to times.  Whether it is Alice lending her car to Bob for an evening, Bob watching Alice's kids, Alice helping Bob in repairing his bike, whatever.

Usually they help one another for free.   They try to keep this relationship quite balanced.  If, for some reason, it seems to Alice that she helps Bob more than Bob helps Alice, at some point Alice might be reluctant to go on being helpful with Bob.  She might consider that she'd rather spend her precious time with her kids, her husband or whatever...

With time, Alice and Bob get to take a different life path, and they see one another less and less often.  They are still friends, but now it is more and more difficult to convince for one of them to give help.     Anyway, they don't really want to do it for free:  they want some way to ensure that their overwhole relationship will be balanced.

So they start a basic monetary system.  Just for the two of them.   They use a dedicated book, and they write a number in it each time one of them give a favor to the other.  There is no concern regarding centralisation, since they are only two people involved anyway:  each transaction is necessarly seen by everyone in the "network".  Although Alice and Bob have now a little bit "less friendly" relationship, at least it's more efficient now, and it's more adequate with their relationship that was becoming less friendly anyway.  Had they stayed the best friends in the world, they would not have needed the book.

That the first thing to know about money:  it allows collaboration between people who respect each other, but don't like each other enough to accept to give or help without expecting anything in return.    Money is definitely not something for christians 


Anyway, imagine now that Carl, an old friend of both Alice and Bob shows up.  They all used to be best buddies in kindergarden

They would like to include Carl in their help/service/favor relationship network.   But now, suscpicion can appear.  Say Alice makes a deal with Carl:  they both write the transaction in the book, but Bob doesn't have to be there.  So Bob has to trust Alice and Carl not to do anything smelly that would eventually force him to return undue favors to one or both of them.   In other worlds: trouble begins. 

I think you get my point.   Alice, Bob and Carl could just use bitcoin.  It would provide them a reliable way to account for the favor/services they provide one another.

This is basically why I think bitcoin doesn't have to be mainstream.  It doesn't matter if only a few thousand people use it in the world.  It will still be usefull as a money, mainly because one of the service provided could be currency exchange, thus allowing the bitcoin community to interact with people outside of the bitcoin community, just because bitcoin would allow them to help one another to do so.

Say Alice wants to buy something in a shop which accepts only dollars.  She has very little dollars because dollars mainly belong to banksters thanks to B. Bernanke.   But she has bitcoins and the support of the bitcoin community.  Some people in the community do have dollars.  The more they are, the more likely it is for them to gather enough dollars to buy the stuff Alice wants.   Alice will gain a favor if she gets those dollars.  Such a favor won't be free:  it will be measured by the bitcoins she will give in exchange.


What I am trying to say here is that currency exchange is really the most important service you can provide for the bitcoin community.  We should focus on that, much more than we focus on promoting bitcoin (although promoting bitcoin is fine, but not essential imo).

Indeed, this coin is sometimes nicknamed "angel" and is one of the nicest of the napoleon series.

Yeah I understood that too after about 30 seconds.  Most efficient delayed joke ever

I know it weights the correct weight, and looks exactly the same as many others, but there is no way I can prove it on line.  You just have to look at the photos and video, and consider my selling history:  so far no one has ever complained about receiving a fake coin.

PS.  Also:  good quality fake coins of that size are very rare.  The only I know of are actually filled with platinium (they were minted at a period when platinium was cheaper than gold), and are now much more expensive than real coins.

Here is a small video of the coin:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xhstcm_20ff-napoleon-type-genie-3e-republique-a-vendre-sur-biddingpond_lifestyle

I haven't watched the whole video, just enough to get the idea I guess.

I want to say this:

whatever one can think of this guy's initiative, I'm pretty sure that after doing what he did, he probably didn't feel depressed anymore.   And that's good enough.

Not exactly.  My idea was rather of bitcoin being called "bitpoint" and presented not as a currency, but rather as a "worthless" symbolic token to reward textual contribution on any web forum.

I guess you know several forums on the web, which use a "points" system to reward authors.  Basically when you like a post you can give it some points, the total of received points is displayed, and this allows readers to get an idea of how pertinent is an article, without even the need to read it.

I wonder if the success of bitcoin would have been greater, had it been introduced/marketed as such a solution system.

Yeah rigth, and the solution to this, is to print some numbers on some pieces of paper.  Seriously I don't understand your way of thinking.  At all.  What am I missing?

I've watched the video with my french subtitles, and it is ok, really.

Keep in mind that french people are used to read french, and german people are used to read german.   It's not because those languages are a bit longer than english once written, that german and french people read more slowly than english people!! (well, I hope not anyway).