How did you come about all those ideas? But what I don't understand is why would you want to do away with the free-market -- why so much emphasis on the public workers to make your plan work?

Simple living in its best form!
Love the look of those houses in the pictures.
Can we make them available for rent in BTC?

Your reasoning sounds about right. However, I would also include miner's equipment depreciation and other operating costs. At the end, miners would pretty much make a stable return on the general ledger rows that they make available for public use, whereas the public (merchants, consumers, etc.) would increase the applicability of those rows to real world trade by increasing their use throughout the daily exchange of goods and services between themselves. Eventually, miners will eat away (via transaction fees) all of the existing rows to make them available for public use once again at some future date (but perhaps at a higher cost, provided that bitcoin economy grew)... And a circular dependency continues, so to speak.

Very unlikely to shoot up again, especially as I'm slowly beginning to provide eye openers, here and there (still in a hint form though). The third link can be especially useful for the GOLD 2.0 fanatics.

Andy Warhol once said, "They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." This quote pretty much describes what I think the bitcoin community should focus on, rather than blindly worshiping the idea of bitcoin being nothing more but a debit card. We all know that it doesn't take much to issue a debit card, so why rely on the issuers of debit cards (Mt.Gox et al.) to lead bitcoin development?

One problem that I see with utilizing the already available tour guides as partners is that they may not be the right fit for the tech/programmer/sys-admin culture formed around bitcoin. So the connection between a trip curator and a customer may not be there to begin with, which can make the trip less relaxing for both, and especially for the customer. Someone like me, on the other hand, who has already been fully immersed into that culture, can offer a curated trip that's properly polished, so to speak. Does it make sense?

It seems that your concerns are mostly about the lodging, not a "trip curator" per se, right? But if we were to separate the two as different services, what would you say can be used to establish credibility for a "trip curator", given that he/she will essentially be your travel companion throughout the trip, making sure that you have nothing to worry about other than what to order next, out of all available options? Any suggestion is appreciated, especially in the form of spitballing.

At least a buyer has multi-signature transactions to fall back on in case of product/service misrepresentation...  Any idea on how effective/useful this feature really is -- how hard is it to find a trustworthy third-party in the bitcoin community?

Totally agree about that... Do you have any thoughts regarding what would constitute as enough credibility for a service like that? Say I had great feedback as a guest (not host) on airbnb, would that be enough? Or can I merely set up a legal business entity on the US soil? Perhaps, in addition to all of the above, it would help to team up with someone who has an established OTC rating in this community? Basically, what would be your list of things that can make a service like that look credible enough for you to try it, provided you were the first customer?

You seem to be missing the point... BTC prices are already discounted when you factor in what the speculators think BTC is worth in terms of other currencies. Basically, the cost would seem to be much higher if you were to buy flowers in FIAT (i.e. Exchange Rate x Price in BTC) than if you were to buy them in BTC (i.e. Avg. Mining Cost x Price in BTC). Everyone wins in the long term, other than the speculators of course.

It’s no secret that bitcoin miners pay, on average, less than 5 dollars to generate a single bitcoin (that is, of course, if they don’t rely on the legacy mining rigs to generate those bitcoins). We can also expect that speculators will continue to treat bitcoins as GOLD 2.0 investment, thus bidding up the BTC/USD exchange rates well above a miner’s average cost. As you can already see, there’s a great opportunity to explore here, thanks to our passionate speculators.

Here’s a best-case scenario:

A bitcoin miner decides that he’d like to send flowers to a girl of his dreams (or maybe even to his wife), and luckily for him, there is a local flower shop that would gladly accept BTC as a form of payment. But, instead of relying on the speculative exchange rates, the flower shop decides to price the flowers according to what he feels would be a fair trade, say 10-20 percent above a miner’s average mining cost per bitcoin. This way, regardless of what the going BTC exchange rate may be on any given day, the flower shop will keep BTC-based prices of flowers quite stable.

Why would the flower shop be interested in keeping BTC prices stable? It’s simple, really!

The flower shop believes that BTC is a better form of currency than the one being provided through the fractional reserve banking system. So, instead of favoring the latter, the flower shop decides to contribute to BTC’s popularity as a currency by slowly transitioning its own operations to a purely BTC-based business, with wages and other operational expenses paid in BTC.

But since the flower shop suppliers do not accept BTC just yet, the flower shop would need to keep at least some operating capital in FIAT. This means that some of the earned BTCs would initially be converted into FIAT, but at speculator-driven exchange rates. (Hmm... it seems that the GOLD 2.0 speculators are in fact the VCs of bitcoin economy... Who would have thought? Perhaps there is still hope for a purely BTC-based economy, after all.)

Do you see where I’m going with this?... Comments?... Questions?... Concerns?

That's the idea!... Throughout my travels I came to a realization that living among the locals is much better than commercialized tours, provided you are into having great time while in a foreign country. Likewise, I had a blast being a host myself (back in Russia), where I would take my guests on a wild experiences that they have never had before. Because of this, they usually would have much more to say about their stay in Russia than "Oh, it was nice."

That's the feeling I got from that conversation.

Besides, you can tell a lot about a culture by its music.
And I have heard some wonderful music from Colombia.



Looks like my OP needs to be improved, or you would not have asked me about my trip to Colombia (I'm yet to take a trip there).

I was merely trying to find out whether the bitcoin community, and miners in particular, would consider a travel service where every trip to some fun and interesting part of the world was curated for them according to their tastes. Basically, a "trip curator" would immerse the travelers into local cultures and activities of the foreign country, while making sure that everyone on the trip have everything they need to feel comfortable and enthusiastic.

Well, I have to warn you, with BTC as a currency you will get to keep all of those things (except for the debt part).



Could you please define what you mean by control?
I may have another surprise for you when it comes to bitcoin.

It doesn't mean that bitcoin is "not designed for micro-payments"... He merely clarified what would happen to certain transactions if txn fee is not included. Remember, the goal is to eventually have fees assigned to pretty much every transaction in the block chain.

Interesting... Do you remember where he had said that?

I can't seem to remember ever reading such assertion.

Well said, indeed!!!

Make sure that you have at least one big-enough miner as part of your community. This will ensure that there are always plenty of bitcoins in circulation among the dwellers. You know, those transaction fees are really nothing more but a way for the system to self-recycle the bitcoins that were previously seeded into the bitcoin economy.

It was a reference to bitcoin base units, not bitcoins per se.

Here's an interpretation of why I said what I said.

Mind you, it's only a hint.

Not after today's sell out. Then it will be at least another 2 years of drought, as after the 2011 crash.

Don't undersell yourself, that's all I'm saying. We need to establish BTC prices the right way.