the cards in the picture are great for use in retail stores, and retail stores have their own methods of preventing charge backs. eg use of pin numbers in store.

obviously if you have fully set up the legal paperwork involved with becoming a company to then offer products to businesses then although im not endorsing the expansion of the black market side. there are many shops in towns that dont sell drugs but they sell paraphernalia related to drugs, which you can start looking into as places that would offer bitcoins.

other independent stores
EG  
independent geek shops that sell custom computers parts and repairs. where people can buy bitcoins to then get web hosting without credit cards, simply by paying cash instore.

and then expand to walmarts 7-11 once you can show there is a demand for the retail giants to also have them on their racks alongside facebook credits.

just be careful that the cards can be activated, validated and deactivated live as retailers in some countries do have to offer a refund of some form within a reasonable time. so retailers would need to be trained and have a simple system to ensure that people dont just steal the cards off the shelves (as they need activating). They aren't used instantly then requesting a refund (validating) and if a refund is processed (deactivated). Purely to ensure that there are no losses by the retailer or yourselves.

places like walmart wont even meet you for a consultation about using you as a supplier unless you can show honest transaction volumes which would in their eyes be deemed as enough demand to use their valuable shelving space. They know a 7 inch area/rack can net them X amount of dollars a week offering itunes cards or facebook cards so to be accepted to be on one of their racks you have to show you can net them a reasonable profit.

so i would start with the small independent stores

great media story and all legit bitcoin businesses should take note of fox news, bloomberg, BBC, most recent positive press of bitcoin without much highlighting of the 'red light district' places (SR) to use bitcoin

this is where i think mtgox is starting to get it right, with all the DDos and issues where it cant handle the strain of the community when activity starts. they are improving their infrastructure. as said in the interview "nascent infrastructure" meaning starting up, not yet fully developed. i would like to soon see many or all legit bitcoin businesses have "established infrastructure" which can cope with main stream demand.

and by this i dont just mean a well known brand name thats been around a few years, i mean robust systems and servers, as it made me laugh where thousands of people in 2012 were relying on blockchain.info which was being run on a mac mini.. great for starting up, but now its time to up the game and get things more robust.

and with that ill leave you with this to think about.

this is why instead of just investing £3k in coins to hoard by buying through blockchain.info/bitinstant at a 5% loss due to their fee's (which is atleast a £150 chunk loss). forcing you to hold for a 6%+ rise just to break even.

if you bought £3k of stock. then you sell it at the market price at the 10 minute interval the customer is at the checkout stage, with added profit margin ontop of course. which if you convert 100% back to fiat the same day through bitpay would mean you have more then £3k purely on the profit margin of product selling.

or then hoarding the coins means your already in profit.

or just convert the % of coins that would get you your £3k and leave the profit margin as coins, so the coins have cost you nothing. Thus rinse and repeating the process to get essentially free coins while keeping £3k as physical stock/fiat to counter the daily price swings.

+1

thats the smart plan. buy $3k of stock and sell it for bitcoin, whether its T-shirts, mugs, gaming equipment etc.
which is the best and cheapest method into bitcoin as it gives you coin, and at a profit percentage, compared to buying through exchanges like bitinstant at an initial 4-6% loss. then keep profit and use x% to sell for fiat and rebuy more stock.(if you chose to continue increasing investments)
you will rake in more income then mining plus with bitcoin rises you wont have to cash out as much each time, and the % you decide to keep as coin becomes worth more.

and if there was a mega price drop. then merchant tools would auto adjust at the 'checkout' section to ensure that you get more coin for the dollar value of the stock you sell.

EG today you will get one coin for over $65 dollars of stock. but if tomorrow the price dropped to $12each you would get over 5 coins for the same stock amount.

lol i laugh at these posts about making everything tax related voluntary.

you do realise that everyone is using bitcoin clients that were provided to them for free. but how many of them that want a voluntary tax system have donated a days wage to the creators of:

this very forum you enjoy using
the programmers behind the bitcoin clients you use.
the free charting services such as clarkmoody/bitcoinity.org
IRC
(if mtgox, bitpay, bitinstant, and all other exchanges did not have fee's would they voluntarily pay a 0.5% donation on every transaction... honestly)

while saying 'if you want something you'll pay it'. many people are against DRM technologies that ensure fair payment to the workers who offer the service/product.

so i ask this, how many of you can with deep honesty say that you have paid your fair share towards the creation of EVERY product which have been provided for you.

don't reply to me saying you have, just to look like your a hero. as i know many will just reply saying they have just for free fame, without actually doing any donating. i do not need to know the answers, it is a question you should ask yourself and to think about with yourself.

to think deeply and honestly about your own actions while being in the bitcoin community. have you paid a voluntary donation for EVERYTHING that you have used which has been provided to you for free?

now imagine your actions were repeated in the real world.

easy rule to live by...

dont offer a person bitcoins for fiat for over $1000

so do $500 a day for each person and you don't have to worry about KYC Fincen rules.

just be sure you double check that one person doesn't create multiple usernames just to get around your daily limits

this was why copy and paste / qr codes were invented for. to avoid keyboard errors.

im not one for being a grammar nazi to forum members posts. but to a legitimate business website that meant to show a bit of professionalism. bitpay needs to double check a few things.

its a great service, but little things like this can make merchants think twice about using them. and by merchants i mean proper multinational corporations and not the 2000 hobbyists that were already bitcoin community members beforehand.

i don't even know why people are trying to reinvent the wheel..

again

satoshi's is SAT for short.

its been this way for years, so this thread is meaningless.

and now for a game of spot the difference



bitpay is a great service, but the little things do matter

many precious metals do know of bitcoin. because they are savvi enough to already be looking into alternative investments away from the banking system.

what you will find though is alot of PM's are bitcoin fud spreaders, all because alot of the banking sheeple are thinking about bitcoin and no longer thinking about gold and silver. banks are selling their PM to manufacturers to make motherboards and windfarms, making less demand for consumer bought PM. because the manufacturers have a decent supply, banks dont want it, they want platinum now, leaving private PM owners left with alot of supply but no demand.

so those holding PM are seeing less people wanting PM so thats why the prices have gone stagnant and are not moving up.

so they will do anything to drive demand up again, by spouting how silver is nearing its natural supply sooner then gold. and all the propaganda about how bitcoins are bad for your economic health. purely because they want to ensure they have future demand to sell the PM at profit.

ask yourself if your making money. why get emotional to try created fud about something else that strangers you will never meet are interested in.

ask yourself if your guaranteed to make profit, why get emotion asking others to buy PM to create competition and more supply which in future will hurt you when you want to sell. the answer:

those that shout its time to buy are usually the ones that are about to sell. so if you see someone that owns something and is really trying to get you onboard too. ask yourself, whats in it for them right now

as Mjbmonetarymetals says


its out the scope of HMRC at the moment.

they have to investigate it more. EG is bitcoin a raw material to be used later to create a secondary product, has anything VAT inclusive been added to create bitcoin to increase its value as the new product called bitcoin. and alot of other "VALUE ADDED" tests

bitcoin itself has a value yes, but it has not been a previous product where its current form is a value added version of something before.

the only time bitcoin would be VAT inclusive is if the bitcoin was part of something. EG (great example)

casasius coins.

when a shop heats up a pasty or a ready meal for you. the meal is then VAT full rate due to the service of heating it, adding value to the raw materials. yet frozen/fresh veg, etc are VAT free.

i cant see bitcoin as being a value added product going by their tests. so while at the moment its out of scope. i believe in the future it will be vat exempt. (except physical bitcoins)

i see in the future when the block chain is too big to manage and all the other blah that people panic about passed their lifetime. people would just leave their coins in a bitcoin address fully verified and then they would dispurse out physical notes or metal coins backed by the verified bitcoin.

thus not requiring the need for miners.

that is one low tech slution.

there are MANY solutions to the problems. so dont worry about 40 years time. just think about the next few years and base things off a "5 year plan" where you change strategies or investment idea's as things change.

its a pyramid disguised as social networking.

check out zurker.co.uk

crowd funding.,,,
cant get in without an invite....
average investment size $40.....

"28,966 members have earned a stake in Zurker either by referring their friends.."

see the pattern you put money in so the person who invited you gets his referer bonus... then you get paid by refering more people...

in the end someone loses. and the guy at the top closes his doors..

and for that... i'm not gonna sign up....

1.Yes
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92969.0
http://printcoins.com/colors
www.bitaddress.org then click paperwallet

2.yes
http://bitchocolate.com/ - they dont contain private keys. but they are bitcoin designs made of chocolate

3 flaws:
1 no proper domain/hosting
2 looks amateurish
3 a warning to everyone DO NOT USE THE PASSWORDS OR NAMES YOU WOULD USE ELSE WHERE

i am not being too negative with the last point, that should be standard internet etiquette. but bitcoin developers need to start putting a bit of professionalism into ready to use services.

going by the game dragons tales SATS are the abbreviation..
1sat=0.00000001BTC
here is how they work 100,000sats =1BTM(bitmill 0.001BTC)
1000BTM=1BTC

i posted the idea before in many different threads but here we go again

wouldnt it be great if people took escrow to another level....

people deposit coins while taking a morning shower
the coins get confirmed by the time you walk to your nearest starbucks.

starbucks shows their QR code and now starbucks knows they are receiving 100% confirmed funds.
the end. now walk away with your coffee. no 10 minute waits

the behind the scenes

think of the escrows database/service like mtgox. depositing coins into mtgox and using a mtgox code to move your bitcoins to another member(by changing the database ownership/balance of coins NOT moving across the blockchain). so starbucks can instantly withdraw proper confirmed coins to wherever they want or trade them instantly for dollar.

the service doesnt even have to use codes which a customer gives to starbuk. instead starbucks just has a QR code generator that has something like this encoded into it:

STARBUCKS-TXID12345-0.005BTC

the customers web app on their phone scans the QR Code, sees they need to pay starbucks 0.005BTC and they just press pay

i think magicaltux or bitpay should make a bigger thing out of their API so that places like starbucks can accept bitcoin without the waiting around/double spend threats.

my brain fart is now over.

bloomberg is a big news source for the business people..

mentioning its used to buy pizza's etc and without the SR propaganda.. this is a BIG positive sign

2 words


CHA CHING

i mean no disrespect to any genuine people joining the community, but im not going to shout out how its easy to spot clones as then they would use the info to disadvantage giveaway's main purpose.

all i would say is there are many ways, but if i spotted them, then some people were just being too obvious.

to all those genuine community members i do hope your litecoins help you learn about litecoin, allow you to experiment with making transactions/trading. and help your future profits grow.

enjoy