Interest payment received, many thanks.

Yes, it even says | Invoice Currency: BTC |.


I wish I queried about it more persistently. Will do the next time...

I guess the amount I paid over its BTC price was VAT. I paid some additional tax on the contents.

EDIT: Yeah, 18% VAT, 3.7% Import Duty, and a minor Excise Duty.

Yep, I had to pay more tax than I'm supposed to, though it would be the same for USD, albeit with less volatility.

What I was wondering is, what if they asked me what the rate was? What kind of proof could I've used. At the spot I was pondering about suggesting bitcoinwatch, but it is not a generic source and might not have seemed authoritative (anyone can put up such a website). Would be pretty nice if Google did it. They have Esperanto, why not Bitcoin?

Another question is, if Google decided to support BTC conversions, which source would you suggest they use? Anyone can publish any price they want, and AFAIK no one is bound by law to be transparent about it (not that I think it's necessary, but that would be the first thing a legally responsible entity would ask). For instance, if I was gathering an average value from all exchanges weighted by volume, any one of them could artificially inflate its volume to affect the price. Am I thinking too much?

Not at all, the lady just raised an eyebrow while saying Bitcoin and went on calculating. The fact that I tried to obscure it and they told me about Bitcoin is actually a shame on my part. I wasn't expecting them to be so cool about it. Though it was obvious that they heard it the first time.

So I went to the customs office (in Malta) to get the merchandise I bought online with Bitcoin. They ask for a Paypal receipt (?!) or an invoice. I don't have either of them, but they say they'd accept a printout from the web site's order page. In a hurry I get a print out and hand it. They ask me what BTC is. I blabber something unintelligible to get it over with, but they go and check anyway. They tell me it's Bitcoin and the exchange rate is ~2.99. I pay my customs tax and get my box.

I'm pretty excited about this, and interested in others' similar experiences. Also, I don't know from which source they checked the exchange rate, so what do you think should be the authoritative source for government entities? Which generic sources publish BTC exchange rates?

Ah, so will we get a separate address for each new drive?

The way I gathered, it would be more like a pool, since notifying each pledger for 1 BTC every time would be too much work.. I didn't want to miss following my promise, so I thought I could give in batch. I don't want to be the odd one, so if it's a problem please include it as a whole for the first donation.

Sent 10 of my 50 BTC pledge. (d842b178cc31bf55418e211214988f96977471e72f60c1dff8c87acbb0402110)

I guess I was expecting a more enthusiastic response.

I pledge 1 coin per charity, up to a maximum of 50 coins.


I also thought of the DOSBox pledge when I read the OP. The communication was somewhat disappointing at the time.


This one is much better.

I'm almost permanently connected from one of those countries (though with v0.4.0 my number of connections went from ~100 to ~10). So it might be a good idea to add them as well. Who knows, the additional advertisement might also help.

I think it's just miscommunication. MM is a major switch, so there may have been technical troubles. That's why it's a good idea to contribute to and follow the main branch.

Sorry, I deleted my previous post.

@DavinciJ15: I think it's better switch to the default client until there is an update so that there is a synchronized switch to merged mining.

SgtSpike, I don't agree with the core idea (because of the incentive issue, which I think is one of the brilliant things about Bitcoin), but since this has been proposed lots of times before, I have a suggestion. Forgive me if it's redundant.

IMO, the early adopter problem does not exist because of decreasing coins per block, it exists because of constant production. Even though coins generated per block hasn't yet changed, people are already complaining about it. I'm sure people will complain about decreasing production in the following years, if Bitcoin survives, however I think difficulty will still be the dominant issue.

You can solve this problem by keeping the coins per difficulty constant. We can't keep the difficulty constant without changing minutes per block, so what I propose is to award miners with difficulty number of coins (e.g. when I solve a block while the difficulty is 512, I get 512 coins). This way, blocks can still be adjusted to be generated in constant intervals using difficulty, but award per hash will never change. With the advancement in technology, it will probably result in an exponential generation like your proposal, but it will be continuously and fairly adjusted.

Free (as in freedom) Windows OS, though not Microsoft: http://www.reactos.org/

Yep. Namecoin won't help you there.

EDIT: Though it could help, if there was a standard protocol for automation of such payments.

Namecoin is not a domain name system, but a name→value associated array. So there isn't a need for a hack or fork. That's the beauty of the whole idea!

A Namecoin "name" is composed of slash-seperated substrings, first of which is the "application specifier".

The current domain name system based on Namecoin uses the "d/" application specifier, with "s/" OR "dd/" proposed to specify extra domain data. That is, if you register "d/example", the value will contain information for example.bit.

However the chain will be used for other applications, such as keys, personal contact information, etc. and we need a standard specification so that we can link these together (link keys to domains or contact info for instance).

Bitcoin URI's come up as a good addition to a generic "contact info" entry. So, you will only need one name to store, for instance, your company address, skype id and bitcoin address, and applications can extract the info they need automatically.

So basically, when I say "send bitcoin to StoreX", the program will go and fetch the "p/StoreX" entry (or "c/StoreX" or whatever the standard scheme is) from Namecoin and get StoreX's bitcoin address from that.

Standard can be defined so that Namecoin values can import data from other names, which will allow distributing this data and delegating parts of it to other parties. Namecoin is a generic datastore with the same authoritative structure as Bitcoin, and possible applications are endless.

(Edited for clarification.)

P.S. If you happen to want to work on such a standard, I suggest that the best place start a collaborative effort is http://dot-bit.org/ . Check the draft specification for domain name entries.

Well, since they have legal concerns, it's very convenient to state something like this, so that they can say it's unrelated to the organization if shit hits the fan.

I think they just realized that the enemies they can make with Bitcoin are much more serious than the ones they make with Bittorrent, TOR, etc. Besides, people are like abused children when it comes to core issues like money, there is a lot of people who are willing to act against Bitcoin out of their good will. It's hard to assume that the average EFF supporter likes the idea of Bitcoin.

+1

I think few people would actually need that kind of fine-tuning. How about "one payment per day if the balance is above 0.1"? Or every 12 hours?