how i see it. is this

in the US it is illegal to hunt animals.....
in the US it is illegal to wire transfer large amounts as a business on customers behalf.....


.... unless you have a licence.

i believe this is the first step towards thailand adopting the same bureaucracy of the western world. adding licences and regulation.

at the moment there are no licences for money transmission but they do ask what is the money being transmitted being used for, which there is a limited amount of purposes allowed. EG sending funds to family members. foreigners sending funds home. etc.

there was a company that had a mining pool that anyone could join and all hashing rewards went to buy goats for charity. this was a very noble idea until the maths came to reality. the mining pool was quoting that it cost in the region of $120 for a goat.


yet the reality is that it only costs $25, through the same suppliers that the guys doing this project intended to use.

this basically meant that hashing power was only 20% affective of helping the world and 80% at making profit for the project/pool opperators. and the name of the people behind this noble cause that turned into a sham



coinlab

also to add while ASIC miners were selling off their 1.6BTC a day mining income for $90/btc($144) quite happily, knowing they are getting an income higher then national minimum wage per week.

miners are now seeing difficulty jumps and beginning to hoard or at least rethink a fair value for their coins. along with the remaining GPU farmers and those eager investors in spring time that got coins for over $200, they will all start to put a minimal sale price in mind of $120 upwards.



.............possibly

speculation can be anything if it sounds plausible

this is alot more acceptable intro into bitcoin for us UK folk. in comparison to an amir taaki attempt anyways.

fair play to the guy from carpediem

i would prefer him to say "bitcoins are everywhere on the network, they are not in one location. what you do have though is your private key to access your funds on your computer. this key is cryptographically secured, and with the bitcoins themselves not being stored in any one location, goverment entities cannot freeze or steal the funds from any one location."

16:00:-
i face palmed as soon as he brought silk road into the topic.. she wanted to know about college. he should have just said "yes, meet up with someone locally and exchange bitcoins for FIAT to pay college fee's"

i don't think it is the law at all. if anything i think it is the banks of thailand agreeing to make any wire transfers to known bitcoin exchanges, be classed as high risk. it would be more at aiming to stop businesses from getting money transmitter licences within thailand to set up exchanges.

there is nothing stopping people going to an ATM withdrawing their baht and meeting up at a local bar/coffee shop to do a paper fiat for bitcoin exchange.

just be careful trying to do wire transfers from a thai bank into places like mtgox/bitstamp

the bitspend system only truly works with websites that dont lock the delivery address to the bill payers details on the method of payment.

how they work is fundamentally you hand them bitcoin. they cash out they then use fiat on the website. they make it seemless by having a reserve in the institutional bank account which they use for purchases, which then gets refilled a few days later once the online exchange transfers arrive at the bank.

its the same as me buying stuff with FIAT debit card and the reimbursing my bank account by selling out my bitcoins.

the merchants never know it was a bitcoin purchase, so they never get any info about demands of their business from the bitcoin community, the merchants dont do anything special that is in anyway related to bitcoin. thus oppertunities to say

"hey amazon do you realise you process XX amount of bitcoin trade per day, it may be of benefit to adopt it internally as a payment method" become a missed opportunity.

anyone that does these services it might be worth keeping a tally of how much trade certain merchants receive, allowing PR guys within bitpay or bitcoin foundation, the community or yourselves to approach these merchants, showing them that there is a demand and customer base worthy of them offering bitcoin direct

i totally laughed at this one. i guess you missed the latest SEC news on pirate@40. he has been caught, charged and has a court date.

imagine bitcoin offering a escrow service that would release the funds to the merchant 28 days after the transaction. knowing that most deliveries are done before that time. allowing any discrepancies to be dealt with within that timescale. the escrow service would charge a couple percent for the privilege of managing the funds between the two parties.

now lets think of a name for this service.. hmmmmmmmmmm.. a credit card company......

and that's why you pay %fee's for credit cards.

if you want to risk not using a escrow service then just hand over bitcoins direct to retailers
if you want to risk not using a bankcard service then just hand over paper fiat direct to retailers

fiat(the victorian/wildwest days of just paper transactions) is no different then bitcoin. the only difference is that fiat banking system developed tooooooooo many rules which it calls security precautions, yet cause more problems then solutions.

as soon as you start laying down rules about what should and shouldn't be included. you go against freedoms.

it should be an unwritten rule, more of a moral guidelines.

EG as soon as you say people have the right to own bitcoins. this can be abused to say that stealing someone elses coins is ok, thus they now have coins they have a right to own.

much like having the right to healthcare, they feel they don't have to work for it or pay government taxes, they just feel like its a birthright to not contribute to government funded schemes, yet grab the benefits.

this is the mentality that thieves that are starving feel they have the right to steal food purely on the presumption that they have the right to live and the right to feed their children. not thinking about getting a job to earn funds.

although a bitcoin charter, wont truly become legal rights to then be abused, i just used the examples above to show how people treat their 'RIGHTS'

well here is something just for laughs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UFcHLWMd9s

well using easy numbers, lets say 12million. if you own 1.2mill coins you own 10% of the circulation
120,000=1%
12,000=0.1%
1,200=0.01%
120=0.001%

i was thinking about this in a scenario.. unless you have coded live price changes into the video segments to account for price fluctuations of bitcoin.

will you be doing what 'normal' home shopping networks do? meaning showing a fiat price.

the one thing i truly hate is that we all shout out that bitcoin is its own economy, yet they have it latched onto dollar pricing. which for asians, europeans, and the rest of the world is a bit racist.

so please don't be placing dollars on the adverts. bitcoin is international, we should see bitcoin prices set a daily figure so that people in the morning can order at lunch or afternoon without seeing bitcoin prices change. all because of the dollar/bitcoin variance.

many people trade altcoins to bitcoins or non dollar FIAT to bitcoin, so its time we moved away from pinning bitcoin to dollars. especially pinning the prices to the centralised MTGOX valuation of dollar->bitcoin

bitstamp has finally surpassed MTGOX trading. so i hope i don't see people shout out "but MTGOX is the value of bitcoin". bitcoin is its own value, merchants can set their own prices based on what they presume to be of value. not base it on centralised prices of the stockmarkets.

this is why car fuel stations vary in price for the exact same product, (car fuel).

i truly hope this home shopping network becomes the pivotal moment we stop acting like MTGOX sheep

and thats where the problem lays.. lies...

my UK bank manager knows fully about bitcoin and knows i trade bitcoin which to my surprise, over a year ago when first talking about, they are actually ok with it. as long as i stick to the limits etc. and thats still the same even now

BUT.....

those that LIE and say they are selling advertising or vouchers, and then when some scambag tries requesting your bank to refund them due to bitcoins(yes chargeback scum are not limiting their scumbaggery to paypal). your bank will start questioning why you lied about the purposes of your trades, and indeed believe the scambag's accusation that you defrauded them. causing you to then be investigated.

so please have a proper conversation with your bank manager and be honest about the purposes of trade.

a prime example is blockchain.info who from what i have read, told their bank they sold pre-paid advertising... now look, they no longer provide UK transfers direct

well untill people in space start producing things to sell to earth, and then want things on earth sent up.. then there would be no need for a medium of exchange.

at the moment these space flights are 'all inclusive' whether you work on the space station everything is taken care of for them. or that champaign glass on virgin galactic is included in the ticket price. so right now its not something people need to dwell on. use your brain power on expanding bitcoin on earth today. not the theoretical possibilities of decades away

just use the governments own statistics against them.

in the last 4 years, millions upon millions of dollars have been seized in relation to drug offences.. in the same time............. 11btc have been seized

simple sweet and to the point, just like how google v1.0 use to be when everyone loved it.

although im not american i have tossed around the idea in different threads that instead of one company paying millions of dollars for every state, they set up franchises under a group name.

for instance lets use bitinstant name as an example.

instead of the three main CEO's paying all the licences. they take on 50 franchisee's to own the territory of the state they are from. the franchisee's pay for the licence of that state and get to do business within that state and obviously when all 50 states are licenced can work together with their colleagues in other states to cover the whole country.

then things like bitinstant ATM's can easily be introduced as the licences already exist and each state franchise maintains, installs, and monitors the ATM's within their state.

then things like bitinstant debit cards can easily be introduced as the licences already exist, and each state franchise maintains and distrubutes cards to customers within that state.

then the bitinstant customer service can become local so business and customers can contact someone within their state.

this can expand on to other things like bitinstant courier services where each franchise is a bitinstant distribution centre for that state.

the list of possibilities can expand where each element(state) works together due to being under the same umbrella, while keeping costs for individual franchise business owners low.

why have 50 companies all needing 50 licences (2500 licences) when they can all work together.

lastly people may say 'but this is not decentralised.

well, bitpay, bips, campBX, bitstamp may start a franchise scheme to reduce costs and compete, . all opening franchises under their own umbrella brands. that way its not one company monopolising the market. but still having all the FIAT side of regulation covered. aswell as having 'staff' nearby the state involved with certain transactions to keep everything maintained.

when accepting visa/mastercard you have no choice but to use a card processing service to ensure transactions complete. you can set up a system where you accept bitcoins and then pay them as wages to employee's thus making it fee free.

you could take your bitcoins, find a localbitcoins trader and transfer to fiat that way, thus being fee free. bitpay is just a optional extra, not an essential tool to transact with bitcoins.

there are far more ways to accept bitcoin for free and still get your FIAT. atleast your not stuck with card processors and forced to pay upto 3%.

i would however agree that the transaction fee's added to bitcoinQT client transactions should not exist just yet. as the 25 bitcoins shared amongst hundreds of miners is more then enough. the combined quarter of a bitcoin for transaction fees shared between the same miners is not really a noticable 'bonus'... yet from the people using bitcoin the transaction fee's are noticeable.

EG 25BTC/100 miners = $22
0.25BTC/100 miners=22c