If it is a dutch company, they probably can anyways accept SEPA transactions - from nearly any european country. You can find a few details (and criticism) about Sofortüberweisung on http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofort%C3%BCberweisung

Depending on their product they might be able to let their customers wait 1-2 business days until their accounts are funded...?

I guess I'll join in as soon as at least a second 100% MtGox independent exchange (e.g. Bitstamp) is added. I really don't like the MtGox centrality in a lot of Bitcoin businesses.

As it was already said - once your connection to MtGox is cut for more than a few seconds you're in trouble.

Also I hope your backend servers are on a different network as your website - if someone DDoSed your page, can you still operate and only customers are pissed or can you get heavy losses out of that because your backend is on the same server and you miss the latest price jump?

I am not too familiar with shorting etc. but I think it should also be possible for you to calculate daily (as you pay out daily instead of continuously) the total limit the platform has before becoming a bucket shop and you can update this value even with every transaction logged.

I am of course not in a position to try this out, but are you for example denying ridicuolously huge positions that are just too big for the platform, meaning are there uppler limits as well?

Anyways on topic: as you can see there was already a popular platform for shorting (Bitcoinica) - but it ended up in tears, lawsuits etc.
Now a lot of people still would like to do these kind of trades - BUT there is a lot of mistrust going on and it's also quite hard to on the one hand do security right (Bitfinex' idea of only watching incoming transactions but creating outgoing transactions only once a day on an offline computer is a very good idea for example), on the other hand due to it's nature these platforms also have to deal with fiat - and that's also something where a lot of regulations come into place (Bitfines seems to be/want to be registered in Hong Kong).

Anyways, all the best to Bitfinex or whoever ends up being the next Bitcoinica, but one small error and it can also end like the last Bitcoinica!

Vermutlich ähnlich wie mein Argument - von mir aus soll er seine Gedanken absondern, wenn er möchte. Dann aber doch bitte im passenden Thread, statt einmal quer übers deutsche Forum.

Entweder man schafft es, seine Beiträge rauszusplitten bis er es merkt, dass sie oftmals nichts zum Thema beitragen oder man kickt ihn eben ganz.

Redefreiheit heißt eben NICHT die Freiheit immer überall alles Beliebige von sich geben zu können. Möge er im Offtopic vor sich hintrollen, wo ihn seine Fans lesen/ärgern/anhimmeln können und dort seine Bauernhofpredigten halten. Wo er auftaucht, schränkt das oft eher die Freiheit derjeigen ein, die eigentlich das Forum hier nutzen wollen und zwar in meinen Augen in einem stärkeren Maß als es seine Freiheit betrifft (die er woanders passender ausüben könnte). Daher übrigens bin ich auch einer der 8 "Ja" Stimmen da oben, da das noch am ehesten einer der beiden für mich akzeptablen Lösungen ist. Zwar die extremere, aber wenn die Moderatoren so wie bisher weiter tatenlos zusehen...

"'I am a true libertarian!', he said and proceded to take a shit in the middle of the highway" - Anonymous

You're kinda describing the way Guild Wars 2 is working - WoW was never and probably will never be built around an item shop and gold buyable with fiat money/BTC.

In GW2 you can buy "gems" via PayPal, credit card (and maybe in the distant future BTC too?!). These can however only be spent, not cashed out again.

Again, you're underestimating the amount of gold that already exists in a game with close to 10 million active players and probably a lot more ex-players that could reactivate their accounts. Also Blizzard alone has higher revenues in Quarter 4 2012 (http://investor.activision.com/results.cfm) than the current (record high) market cap of whole Bitcoin at the moment and probably exclusive contracts with PayPal. Why should they even care?

Yes, it's probably possible to come up with something to fund ingame currencies (just like it's already possible to do so via PayPal and co) and maybe even to get money back (see Diablo III) in BTC - BUT this game will not and probably never be World of Warcraft.

Another thing to note is: If it is even remotely possible to get a net+ for playing a game, you'll have quite a few intelligent people coming up wiuth any way possible to hack, cheat and bot the hell out of it. Just think for example of a page where you can play chess against another human - both players pay 0.1 BTC, the winner then gets 0.19 BTC (0.01 for the house). Whoever plays without a strong chess computer doing the moves for them will have a VERY bad time on that page. For this to work either it needs to be impossible to get a plus (e.g. you can't withdraw) or the game needs to be only solvable by humans (very hard to do and still be fun) or the loss needs to be calculated in (e.g. you have far higher ad revenue and paying 5% of that to players is better as it draws in more players) or you need a hobbyist community that won't work on large scale and can handle disputes themselves (e.g. a private server on a LAN party where the server operator can enable the "Bitcoin tournament plugin" where everybody pays into a pot and then gets returns and you get 1% of the money wagered there for providing the service).

The account exists, the guy is probably(?) real and he was indeed advocating for pirateat40 and trying to push a scheme with 2% interest per week, maybe to get funds for his platform. The last 2 parts are for me an indication that someone did NOT do their homework in an very obvious field (risk management).

Also as there is no way of seing how many BTC + USD are actually on the platform (at least I haven't seen anything) the danger of it secretly becoming a bucket shop is real in my opinion, all it takes are a few whales.

They would be using a third (Gold, BTC + transfer currency) currency that is both 100% pegged to both sides of BTC and WoW gold?

Also - what would be the benefit for Blizzard to do something like that (handing out money to players for things they themselves have 100% control over?) besides creating a money sink in-game that costs them actually money outside of the game?

...then 5 BTC can cover 50k * 10k = 500 million gold
The current gold cap per character is at 1 million - 1copper

I don't think Blizzard releases stats on how much gold is in circulation on each server but it might be possible to scan auction houses for bids and successful buyouts for example as a minimum baseline. I believe however that on one server there is FAR more than 500 million gold distributed between characters.

Let's assume that there are 5 billion gold coins stored in player accounts on an older, big server, these could be 1:1 mapped to 50 BTC.

According to http://www.warcraftrealms.com/dbstats.php there are ~500 servers with about 100 million total chars (who on average would own just 50 gold each)
Just to 1:1 map all their gold to satoshis, Blizzard needs to own 25k BTC.

This does still not solve the issue that in this model 1 gold would be worth 1 satoshi then, while currently it is worth 20k satoshi --> if you open a market where players can buy and sell their gold for BTC (or even exchange at a fixed rate) you either promote selling gold for USD still (you get 20000 times more money if you sell 10k gold for 11 USD) or crash the economy (it is 20000 times cheaper to buy gold for BTC than to farm it yourself using the cheapest slave labour/bots possible).

All in all my points are:

1) 5 BTC are probably NOT enough to 1:1 map all the gold on one WoW server.
2) If Blizzard wants players to be able to exchange gold to BTC and vice versa at fair prices and be a market maker in this, they need 25k*20k BTC - far more than ever will exist.
3) If Blizzard just wants players to get a token amount of BTC as a gold sink(?) they still need half a million USD to give away to players(!) at current prices for this little project. It's far easier and cheaper to invent something else as gold sink.
4) Transaction fees... "I want to sell gold for 20000 times under market price for these Bitcoins and then above THAT I have to pay transaction fees that can buy me half a continent ingame?!"

Sorry, this just doesn't work out. Neither for the players, nor the gold farmers nor for Blizzard.
There is a minecraft server though for example, where you deposit 0.1 BTC for signup and then can earn some Bitcoin back by playing (50 satoshi per block or so).

Der Code dort ist vom November 2012.

Naja, laut https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=129878.0 verwendet I2P wohl auch zu große Adressen um ohne größere Umbauten im Netzcode in mainline anzukommen.

Bitcoin-QT hat übrigens Support für TOR.

A different aspect:

Is 5 BTC per sever enough?

Let's see:
5 BTC = 500 000 000 Satoshi.
1 piece of gold in WoW = 10 000 copper pieces (the "satoshi" of WoW) (http://www.wowwiki.com/Money)

Total economy for 1 server: 500 million/10k = 50k gold pieces.

Sorry, but that's NOT enough by a fair amount I fear. Even if 1 WoW copper is worth just 1 satoshi (just a quick check: 10k Gold is ~10-15 USD. Let's say 0.5 BTC at current prices... if 100 000 000 copper = ~50 000 000 satoshi --> 1 copper is worth ~2 satoshis at current prices) there is a LOT of BTC needed just to cover 1 server.

I guess gold farmers have enough competition to have competetive prices, so the work to acquire that gold is somehow well reflected in the price. This means that Blizzard would need to buy probably a couple dozen millions of USD worth of BTC (maybe over time from players wishing to exchange BTC <--> WoW gold or from exchanges if more are withdrawing gold).

What might be intersting would be to take Open Source games and integrate Bitcoin there, can also be in the form of an item auction house for example.

What you're looking for is a slave who likes to be micromanaged, not a partner.

Good luck, maybe since "50 shades of grey" more people found the secret submissive person inside themselves?

In the EU for example, most big US (especially internet) companies pay low single digit taxes by structuring their companie(s) in a way that one is in a place with low/zero taxes for intellectual property, another is licensing the "IP" to them and does not make a taxable profit by that etc. (quick google: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/dec/03/amazon-google-starbucks-tax-avoidance)

All in all Amazon pays <12% tax. I don't think switching fully or partly to Bitcoin would even remotely pay off evading these. Other internet companies have even less incentive.

Sorry, but Bitcoin might work for you as tax evasion instrument, but not for a big company that can afford just building itself around tax evasion in the first place.

These "predictions" are also just pulled out of someone's ...behind!

Difficulty also follows the BTC exchange rate - if Bitcoin tanks hard vs. the USD a few miners might stop their rigs and diff could go down as well, so buying limited time hash rate is also a bit of a hedge. Still I wouldn't advise anyone to buy hashrate for 9(!) months at once.

What I meant is keep the teramining shares but sell e.g. 3 3months contracts. These can be paid from the Teramining income but are not that long and thus limit the uncertainty a bit.

In the end you're just betting on the difficulty development in the next 9 months with this (no matter if you buy or sell) - a LOT of unknown factors in there and honestly not something I would recommend to ANYONE besides gambling.

Why mirror Teramining by the way? You could offer shorter (1 month?) contracts that might be easier to price with that hash power in your pocket as well.

Ich würde es auch toll finden, ihn einfach auf die Trollwiese zu schicken (= Beitrag raussplitten), wenn er wie üblich vom Thema abbringt - gleich wie Akka gelobe ich Besserung und werde mich wohl auch wieder in's englische Forum zurückziehen. Kompletter Ban muss ja nicht sein, kann aber von mir aus auch gerne erfolgen.

Die Community hat auch ohne ihn genug schräge Vögel...

Afaik the only client supporting BIP32 currently is Electrum. I didn't do too much research though.

They should short USD towards BTC then to enter a world of joy?

Bitfinex sounds nice... but then again there are some concerns - most of them mentioned in http://bitcoinmagazine.com/bitfinex-bitcoinica-rises-from-the-grave/

It might be interesting to play the metagame though (listing a fund on an exchange site that deposits to bitfinex)

Shave head, tattoo QR code, regrow hair --> profit!

You can host an instance of ABE (Alternative blockexplorer) yourself and since it is opensourced you can also improve it for display on tablets.

As I get it - you tell blockchain.info an address where they should forward all payments and the users just get one-time addresses from blockchain.info so they can be distinguished from each other. Right?
Why not use BIP32 instead? This would also create a LOT of unique addresses, but you can keep the main key to yourself (even offline).

Also a bitcoin URI might be nice for people with desktop clients additionally to that QR code.

Is it possible to withdraw as well, or is this rather a one way money sink?