We already have this though. Cheap smartphones (either low-quality, or old-and-used.) Restrict it to wifi instead of getting a mobile plan, and only have 2 or so apps on it (a bitcoin wallet and a QR-code reader.) That seems like a good enough first step to me, at least.

You'd think these societies would be cutting-edge enough that they would ALREADY accept bitcoins, along with a variety of other digital forms of payment. From what I've seen though, the truth is quite the opposite; they tend to be heavily reliant on old-school methods of communication and interaction, and not terribly interested in (or even able to) change. Some of their websites are glaring, painful examples of this.

That said, I'm still all for bitcoin-aware members trying to generate interest within the groups. Sometimes it's not lack of interest so much as no one ever bringing something up.



We would probably get quite a bit of mileage out of it if we really could generate interest within a couple of wealth-oriented societies, or even just groups of popular celebrities. High-IQ societies? Probably not nearly as much mileage.

That's... a terribly depressing thought.

Hmm. Personally, I think that's about one of the worst ways to go about it.

First, it requires someone to spend a vastly disproportionate amount of their wealth for what is essentially advertising.

Second, it's not very good advertising. In my experience, you simply can't prompt busy people to explore technical challenges like that. Half of the people given those $100 USB sticks wouldn't believe you and would throw them in the trash. Half of those left would either not have the technical capacity (or care) to extract the money, and would never get around to it. Most of the rest would simply be given to a more computer-savvy friend to figure out, and would curiously be never brought up again by the friend.

But hey, I could be wrong. I wouldn't bet my money on it though.

I agree. However, I believe Bitcoin exposes the truth: that wealth imbalances are primarily the result of political restrictions, not merely capital inheritance.

*slow clap*

+1

*shrug*

Whatever perspective suits you, I guess. The Bitcoin community continues developing, regardless.



What does it matter that it's not a currency? Gold isn't either, yet it's still valuable, and won't be going away anytime soon (despite decades of anti-gold propaganda, no less.) Why is it that if there's not an overwhelming abundance of goods and services available solely for bitcoins, something must be wrong?



It's a digital currency. If you ignore it's key features (pseudonymous transactions, limited amount, decentralized,) then any other digital payment system can do what it does just as well, better in many cases. About the only thing that can be done that's impossible without Bitcoin is storing wealth anonymously without needing a third party (EDIT: and pseudonymously sending it across the planet without a middle-man.) That's it, it really has no other advantage. Because that's the one primary feature set it was designed to have.

The inevitable conclusion is, there's not going to be any trick or secret key, no undiscovered catalyst to accelerate the growth of the Bitcoin economy. Other than in the area of anonymous wealth storage (which doesn't require any real infrastructure,) it's just going to have to grow at the same slow, steady pace as anything else.

(EDIT: Also, private transactions are a potential, Bitcoin-only growth area, I suppose; the tricky part there is that we live in a society where most people don't value privacy very much, except those trying to evade societal controls. Guess that means we should be focusing on North Korea as our growth market?)

QFT.

Krugman? Really?

While I'm not on the bandwagon that bitcoin will "destroy the dollar" or anything similar (the Fed seems to be doing a fine job on their own there,) when it comes to economics, you're usually better off taking the opposite of Krugman's statements and using it as a basis for action instead of his actual Keynesian-centered arguments.

If gold can still survive, be valuable and be considered a viable investment vehicle purely on it's potential as a store of value, I don't see why Bitcoin can't.

This is also where I think those slamming on the possibility of there being alternate cryptocurrencies are off-track. Bitcoin isn't perfect. It CAN'T be. No system can fulfill every possible benefit that everyone could want. Bitcoin fulfills a niche, but let's face it: the 10-minute confirmation time alone means it's NEVER going to be directly used as a mainstream vehicle for in-person purchases.

That said, workarounds to the flaws are already coming about. Other cryptocurrencies are being tested, developed, and explored. Systems integrating Bitcoin (like Gyft cards) are starting to break onto the scene. Systems layered on top of Bitcoin will emerge eventually. It's only been 4 years, and I can already store and spend my bitcoins in ways the inventor probably never thought of. I can send hundreds of thousands buying electronic equipment, or get a gift card to buy fast food at Burger King... probably while I wait in line, no less.

I'm not worried about the state of the Bitcoin economy at all.

Well, that's really the beauty of Bitcoin... not so much that there's a cap, but that the cap is nigh-impossible to overcome.

I think it depends on your goal. If you want to recover your investment, and make a 100%+ return, all by year's end? Well, it's likely too late for that. It's probably too late if you're willing to wait for that return until next June.

But if the goal is to have a private source of bitcoins (as opposed to regularly having to hit the exchanges or BitInstant), either for spending or for long-term investment, I'd say they're still a pretty good deal... provided you put in an order for one rather quickly.

At a BTC price of $100, an electrical cost of $0.10/kWh, a power draw of 5 watts per GH/s, a 1.5% pool fee, and just the listed hashrate, a BFL ASIC hits its break-even point at a difficulty of somewhere around 4 billion. Break-even just means you're paying market price for the bitcoins rather than profiting directly from them, so for someone just wanting to buy a box that lets you pay for bitcoins without an exchange, there's no problem there.

Considering difficulty just adjusted up to 21 million this weekend, we'd need it to increase by about a factor of 200 before even getting to break-even. Since BFL is already actually shipping product... yeah, I'd say ordering soon probably still gives you a good chance to do well if pure immediate profit isn't the goal.

Just going off first glance, you shouldn't trust that site.

 - They're still using the old image for the 5GH/s Jalapeno and 25 GH/s ASIC. You'd think they'd keep up the product stats and details if it was all they sold.

 - They have a single, unchanging bitcoin address right below their "bitcoins only" logo. No reason is given as to why a commercial site would have a static address just sitting there, like they expect donations or something.

 - The store itself has no logo or even a name, apparently (unless it's just "w-stores.") How'd you even hear about this site?

 - They have 3 Jalapenos in stock, but it's going to take 12-22 days to ship? And for a bitcoin value of under $250 USD? Riiiiiiight.

C'mon, the man's had a rough couple weeks, give 'em a break for now, eh?

While all that's true, I think it's pretty much universally agreed that large wallets should only be stored offline (on paper, engraved metal tags, burned to CD, etc.)

Although if you're going to do something clever like engrave your private key on the inside of a silver ring you wear... I wouldn't advertise that fact. 

There's the incident with StrongCoin.

They had a similar setup to Blockchain. They somehow got wind that, allegedly, the thief from the OzCoin hack was storing funds using their setup, and was about to send the funds elsewhere. Rather than alert authorities, or simply pointing out the alleged thief to the community, they changed their website code so that the next time the thief logged in, without even knowing it, the thief sent money to the "rightful owner" whenever he made a transaction. The thief realized what was going on after a few transactions, but by then quite a sum had been "recovered."

Now, was that a successful recovery of stolen goods, as opposed to the willful robbing of a wrongfully-accused customer? We on the outside may never know, but let's assume it was. Doesn't it bother you that that was carried out so easily? What if some hacker had gotten access to the website and done that to EVERYONE who used it? What if the owner of StrongCoin just decided to go rogue and swipe funds that way (and, say, just blame it on some anonymous hacker?) I'm pretty sure StrongCoin's business took a hit after the revelation of what they did.

With Blockchain, you can get a browser plugin that verifies the website code. Ok. But who writes the plugin? Does it auto-update? Does it work in a browser's privacy mode if that mode turns off plugins? Is there a way to write the website code such that it fools the plugin and still tampers with your transactions? These are all questions that, just because they're viable questions for those without in-depth knowledge of how it all works, effectively downgrade even Blockchain's security notably compared to a one-time download of a slightly-older, tested version of an app.

I'm willing to pony up a few bucks to help pay BFL for an ad in all their outgoing Jalapeños....

You're not going to be able to get one in-hand for anywhere close to BFL prices. Demand is just too high, and for good reason... it's not hard to calculate how much a DAY someone can make with one at the moment, and it doesn't look like the next difficulty jump will hurt them all that much.

Your only real options are to pay $2000+ for immediate delivery; spend $300+ and wait in line; or spend ~$100 on a Block Erupter and pay $0.10-$0.20/MHs less than buying a second-hand Jalapeno (your call as to whether that's a decent price or not.)

Keep in mind, fees aren't something you can always avoid. There are fees associated with spending lots of small inputs, so if you've received dozens of transactions of 0.00003827 BTC or similar, it may very well wind up costing more in transaction fees to spend your funds then they're worth, and it won't really matter what wallet client you use. That's just how the system works. 

You don't want an online wallet; that's just asking for trouble. About the closest you may want to come to that is a wallet from blockchain.info; you keep control of your keys, but at any point a hacker (or the website owner, as StrongCoin demonstrated) may interfere with your transactions or worse. Even with a blockchain.info wallet, I still wouldn't keep in it any more coins than you can afford to lose.

If the resource requirements (disk space, bandwidth, and download time) of the Bitcoin-Qt client are too steep for you, at least consider an alternative like Electrum; even an Android wallet like BitcoinSpinner is far superior to online wallets.

Of course, once you have more than a few dollars worth of bitcoins, you'll want to keep the bulk of your coins in cold storage anyway; either stored on an electronic device that has no internet/remote access, or ideally in a paper wallet (or something similar.)