I believe you can import your aes.wallet.json file into Armory.

Next time, as a counter-argument to "only criminals need anonymity" mention the Target credit card data breach, and the economic cost of identity theft and the fraudulent use of credit-cards that resulted.

Do you have a backup procedure in place for buyers/sellers, in the case that you or your website disappear?

For instance, would you be able to provide a flat-file HTML document with javascript that allows buyer and seller to recover the private key without your site?

Might I suggest adding a link near the donation button that would let an uninformed, yet curious reader to read up on and perhaps acquire bitcoins?

"ongoing investigation"

From what I understand, the Silk Road server, even though operating in a foreign jurisdiction, was infiltrated then seized by US Federal law enforcement.

The operator of Megaupload might also beg to differ with you.

http://bitcoinexaminer.org/mizuho-bank-defendant-lawsuit-mtgox/

Is there precedent for this?   It disturbs me that the bank would be held liable, since the implication is that a bank must intensely scrutinize your business because they will be held liable, sort of like blaming ISP's for enabling sharing of copyrighted material by their customers.   It will give the banks another reason to avoid bitcoin-based businesses.

I stand corrected.

It's not a duplicate transaction, the miner just assigned the outputs of the each of the mined blocks to the same address.  The reward from each block was 25 btc, the address now contains 50 btc.  It looks strange because blockchain doesn't indicate multiple mined blocks as the input.

Just throwing this out there, but Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia.

It seems to me that a bitcoin-based auction site would be a killer app for bitcoin.

Obviously, eBay/PalPal currently has this market locked down.   However, I think that the eBay/PayPal system is designed to be over-protective of the consumer, I think it is ludicrous that a buyer can claw back a payment from a seller a year later.   With a payment system that soft, it's a wonder that any seller sells at eBay.

How hard would it be for a bitcoin-based auction site to start eating into eBay's business?  Such a site would not be able to compete with eBay/PayPal's level of consumer protection,  but could provide an escrow service and build a sterling reputation of being a fair arbiter of disputes - but ends with All Sales Final when escrow is released.

Would sellers be attracted to such a site, and would buyers follow?

For an independent merchant without the best credit, you end up having to go with a payment processor that will do your transactions at a higher rate.  Tack on per transaction fees, monthly charges, and low volume sales, it's very easy to hit 10%.

Sub 2% is possible for a convenience store selling branded gasoline -- the oil company gets sweetheart deals on card processing through the pumps and can pass that on that on to the store.

Yikes!  I hope you keep frequent backups on hard drives that old.

As long as the legal uses of bitcoin out perform some jurisdiction's illegal use, I think the an initial shady perception of bitcoin will help adoption.

When Nancy Reagan said "Just Say No", do you think ILLEGAL drug usage went up or down?

The statists (the people that put the Patriot Act/KYC/FineCEN regulations into effect) will make the same arguments to regulate bitcoin as they do cold hard cash.

If past history is an indicator of future history, the implication is that US exchanges would be socialized.   Right or wrong, the US government socialized the losses of the US financial system in 2008,  and if bitcoin is a significant part of the economy, then the losses from a failed bitcoin exchange would be distributed to US taxpayers.  Right or wrong, an exchange with this kind of insurance would increase consumer confidence.

Submit the signed transaction to the merchant.  Merchant sends the transaction to the largest mining pools, who acknowledge that it is a valid transaction, which gives the merchant a higher probability that funds won't be double-spent before being confirmed.  The purchase would have to be a limited amount to minimize a potential loss.

I'm not sure what you're saying here, because I assume credit card payment processors and merchants are separate entities.  I'm sure there are exceptions.  One provides a service (processing transactions) for a fee for the other.   The differences in fees can be large as well, my local mom & pop store pays nearly a 10% fee, while some large merchants pay sub-2% fees.  The payment processors are acting as escrow agents, in that they make good on a fraudulent transaction.  The fee is a reflection of the credit-worthiness of the merchant.


It took a while for mom & pop stores to switch from mechanical charge plates with triplicate paper copies to electronic systems for processing credit cards as well.


The validity of a bitcoin transaction is dependent on the number of confirmations in the blockchain.  If I sell you a car, I'd probably wait for at least 6 confirmations before releasing it to you.  A person-to-person transaction or a large purchase should also be validated in this way.

For small purchases, you can't make the customer wait around.   Either it can be done with an ubiquitous escrow system using a bank-like institution that escrows the transaction and worked very much like the credit card processing system, or the merchant will assume a risk that some portion of bitcoin transactions turn out to be double spends, just like they assume a risk that a small portion of cash transactions are done with counterfeit money.

There are way to minimize that risk, such as a POS bitcoin system that requires that the customer transmit a copy of the signed transaction to the POS system.  The POS system is connected directly to the largest mining pools, and considers the transaction valid if all the connected mining pools acknowledge receipt of a valid transaction.

debit/credit cards are supported by fees that the customer doesn't pay directly.  This is done by having the merchant sign an agreement to not pass on these costs to credit card payment system users.  Small merchants must pay much more than bigger merchants.

A merchant will see the economical advantage using a lower cost system with fewer fees, and could provide a discount over credit card users.

Customers will be attracted to the anonymity and the ability to do person to person transactions -- like pay the babysitter.   The anonymity may be required in a situation like buying something at a pawnshop.  You might fear that if you use a credit card, the shady guys working in the back will come find where you live and burglarize you.

When monopolies and cartels form.

Small example:  It used to be common practice for a highly valuable engineers to jump between tech companies, by finding the company that was willing to pay him or her the most for their services.

It seems that the largest tech companies (the ones that had the ability to pay the most for this specialized form of labor) formed a cartel to drive down these wages.

http://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/

IMHO,  I think there will be a point at which btc to the USD will be less volatile.   If it is around $1000/btc, then eventually people that use both currencies will think in terms of some unit, such that the milliBTC (with perhaps a more friendly name) is worth around $1.