A couple years back, my son went to comic con in a hand crafted Link costume (he was 10).  It was so realistic (including a working ocarina on which he could play some of the tunes) that when he hung out at their booth playing the new LoZ game to be released that they all wanted promo pictures with him.  good times...

Sure, X is what gets used in front of non government currencies.  Don't have to tell me that.
I even added that to the Wikipedia article on the ISO 4217 myself 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217
XBT  isn't in the standard yet, but as it is in use (as well as XAG for silver and XAU for gold).
Goat was there with the assist by catching it and suggesting the 8 decimal designation.
My understanding is that the Litecoin Foundation is contemplating making use of XLT or LTC for some things.

The question is as user705 succinctly put it, from whence comes the pricing data.
Volume weighted averages are good because so much happens off the exchanges, which for a long time was dominated by Gox, but not so much at the moment.

I am struggling with this issue currently for my http://Http://coldhardca.sh (backing bitcoin with silver and gold) project.

Excellent, thank you for this and for the CRA citations.   CRA and FinCEN don't cover the same ground, but they do have a border. 

I've had some tax advice that runs counter to your barter interpretation, essentially that the unit of account in the transaction for purposes of taxation is going to be the taxed currency value (fiat value) of the bartered good.  And also that you can run into some trouble with having a highly valued account offshore and not reporting it (even if that value is virtual and unrealized).

There are a lot of folks that will say "just don't pay taxes", but when you have a lot to lose and much of that is not highly portable, it is less of a choice.  Paying exactly the right amount of tax and not any more than that is the other way to play, and finding methods along the way to minimize the tax burden by paying close attention to the things that the government wants me to do that I also agree with doing.

For example, buying massive solar power generation effectively reduced by tax burden to almost nothing more than once.  The government likes this because they are spending too much on protecting access to foreign energy (militarily), and it increases the resiliency of the energy infrastructure so if more was made here they might be able to do less fighting overseas and feel safer at home.

Less military, less carbon, lower cost energy for me, AND lower taxes... that was a win for all of us. For any of you miners with high energy bills, the US Federal tax "encouragement" is available until 2016, but there is no cap on the credit and it can be carried forward.
http://www.gosolarcalifornia.ca.gov/consumers/taxcredits.php

VanityGen looks fun and is a nice improvement, I can imagine some pretty funny payment codes coming soon...

There's no SEC S-1 filing for this.  It is a PRIVATE offering.

It may grow up into an ETF someday, but they get the first mover advantage for all of us accredited investors as we won't have to wait for Winklevoss ETF.
I don't know that it opens the door to the IRA investment yet, still researching that.

This is a good thing.
We who work with bitcoin, and use bitcoin or develop for it are not their market.  Not at all, but this opens a different market that most of us would not be interested in participating in because we do know how to do it ourselves and don't need what they are offering.

Consider your typical accredited investor.  We have tax lawyers keeping us safe and finding ways to do things the legal way, we have different types of investments, diversity is highly valued.  Using Second Market provides a tidy way for the tax lawyers and accountants to deal with the investment.

This helps to legitimize a bitcoin investment.  It puts in in the basket of FaceBook and Twitter.  So it is good for Bitcoin, generally.

They are not filing an S-1 with the SEC, but they are using boilerplate from the standard ETF filing.  The Winklevoss twins are forging ahead with that alone still. 
https://searchwww.sec.gov/EDGARFSClient/jsp/EDGAR_MainAccess.jsp?search_text=Bitcoin&sort=Date&formType=FormS1

There are dangers as well.  For example if this BIT fund ever DOES become the Bloomberg ticker for Bitcoin, if it becomes the default pricing mechanism for determining Bitcoin value, there are significant risks associated with that for Bitcoin generally. 

If you are writing code for a telco it could help.  BGP is for the bigger players, but OSPF and RIP are still abundant.
It still sounds like more fun than sitting in a Heathrow lounge waiting on a connecting flight, which is where I am now.

You have a point there.  Most gun use, and all nuclear use, is by government.
We've outsourced our culpability.

For the folks that need SSRI, they can probably be a great thing.  What they aren't is perfectly safe (and what is?).  The list of side effects includes things like suicidal thinking.  They are very widely prescribed and probably do good things for some but not all folks.  They are one of the most prescribed drugs. 
There is a lot of common ground between SSRI and weapons.  Most of those folks that use them do so safely.  Both are heavily regulated.  Both require an authority approval to obtain in most cases (SR excepted presumably, I wouldn't know), and when they go wrong it can make the nightly news.

Where they diverge is when there is some blame game to play in the media.  The reason for that divergence would be interesting to understand but all I'd be able to do is speculate.

If it were "public" it wouldn't be a problem for the trader.  It is a problem for the trader if it is non-public information upon which a trade is made.
Finding a public release of the information would get the traders off the hook, but could still point to malfeasance from the Fed folks that leaked it publicly.

Yes.  That is on the todo list as well.
Great minds think alike.  

These should be done ahead of formal launch at month end.  Maybe by the end of the day.

A little later I am thinking of changing the color of the # of ozt field to RED when the number is close enough to the next higher tier that it would be less expensive to get more...  but we are still doing a few baby steps right now.  No one should be getting 99 pieces...

Thank you!


Logged this.  It should be editable by entering numerals, but the slider control we were using is not good with all browsers so we are swapping it out for an easier way to switch.

It is very exciting to be sure...  With each new problem, it inspires inventive folks rise to the challenges.

My political leanings are more or less negligible, though am admittedly fascinated by the discourse.  There isn't a "party" that I can agree with or that represents my views, so I can't claim to be a libertarian, or anarchist, or any of that.  I am probably not even old enough to have enough perspective or energy for political matters being still shy of my 50th birthday by a few years.  My guiding principle is that more love is better, and am motivated to increase that where I can. 

It does seem like you have at lease some reasonable positions, at least about what could constitute "aggression" from your recounting of those proposals, and it looks at least like some NAP advocates that have a loud voice in the discourse would agree with you.

Those proposals don't seem likely to occur though, and I'd be reluctant to tar one person's beliefs onto another, or even on to the same person over time.  People have minds that change.  I'd venture that there are probably scant few "Libertarians" that would stand by and let that knife juggler endanger themselves if they were faced with such an event....

But I have found that there are many that are far too eager to create laws to solve social problems.  It seems to make little sense to take a single event or single bad action by an individual person (especially one who is particularly bad at making high quality decisions), and on that basis advocate increased law (guns) be applied to everyone pre-emptively on the off chance that they may become a knife-juggler.

Bringing this discussion back a bit to guns and assault.  Most all of the folks who are particularly bad decision makers in the US at least tend to make these bad decisions while under the influence of some particularly harsh psychoactive substances... Selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors being the biggest culprit here.  If one were to advocate a ban, SSRIs might be a more likely target than the particular weapon at issue, but I wouldn't even go that far myself.  There is probably some good purpose for them and they are perhaps simply over-prescribed?  It may not be an all out BAN that is needed, and just a bit more judicious use?

Now that we have started shipping (pre-paid pre-orders only so far) and are about to formally launch into production mode for phase 1 of this project.  It is time for some feedback from you all on our QR link.

For those of you with smart phones, please provide comments on http://ColdHardCa.sh
The page is going through some rapid changes so it may disappear for short periods of time as things are being updated.

Again, many thanks to Preev, and Mike, and Edgar, and Reichart who have all been lynch-pins on the wheels that are making this phase a success.

The goal is to have it facilitate transactions.  Currency must flow or it has no purpose...
Any comment is welcome, what do you love, what do you hate?  What currencies do you want added?

I've admittedly been called worse things than "controversial" myself from time to time.

The Lifeboat folks seem to have the right mission for the right time.  It may also be a timeless mission as we seem to bounce between existential crisis every few months. 
From Fukashima reactors, to politically motivated violence, to managing our atmospheric protection from the barrage of space radiation and balancing that with the heat retention.
With each advance of human capability we lunge forward into a new uncharted region.

Bitcoin is a part of this ecosystem as it reduces friction for our motion and lunges, it increases productivity and personal empowerment.  We desperately need an effective backstop management which is not itself tethered to the things that are sinking the ship, hence a lifeboat, I like the notion.  That they have recognized cryptography as one of the catalysts puts them close to my heart, and I have great affinity for many of their areas of focus.

That they are non-profit, non-regional, non-government seems like the right structure and I've seen nothing bad come out of these folks so they have my support as well.  I wish them every success.

It would be interesting to find citations for either of these, if you have seen them.

We do have guidance from FinCEN on registration fees, but haven't reviewed anything much from them on taxation (which would likely come from IRS instead).

Well done!

We had some fun working out the possibilities and experimenting with the specular vs diffuse reflective properties of silver at different wavelengths to create enough contrasting difference for a QR code reading with enough reliability to be workable (but you still have to consider your lighting and smartphone focal points a bit when the pieces are new and shiny)
Gold has some slightly different characteristics, but we are pretty sure we can make it work without having to resort to enameling or inlay or such like that.  And the experimenting will be fun.

We like the look, and the feel, of gold on its own.

Did you claim these extreme examples of passive aggression were not aggression, or did they?
If it was they, then it looks like you are right and they were wrong about what is non-aggression, at least according to this guy:
http://andrewglidden.com/refining-the-nap-with-passive-aggression/
But again, I am in no way an expert on NAP and the definition of "aggression" may be a moving target for the principle, for all I know.

LOL, good point.  They may be too busy researching the manipulation of the Auction Market in World of Warcraft, now that virtual currency is money, to get around to looking into the largest banks in the world scooping money off the table.