Thanks repentance, I just remembered another two

*) Being able to shop for web services around the world instead of just your own country. Being in the US, I would be restricted to registering domain names and buying VPS services to USD-taking companies here in the states. But now that a lot of web service places are taking BTC, I was able to shop around and buy from a cheaper place that's not even in my country.

*) Usenet, an internet discussion and bulletin board system that has existed since the 80's, has recently had a lot of pressure put on it by VISA, PayPal, and other such financial services, being effectively banned from accepting payments, because it hosts copyrighted materials as well as general web discussions. Now the only way to buy NTTP access in a lot of places is to use Bitcoin. Now, granted, not a lot of "average joes" use NTTP, but I'm sure there are plenty of old neckbeards who still have fond memories of the service and rely on it for their discussions.

Then, of course, there's any other service that has had a run-in with financial restrictions because the politics of one country don't agree with them. Like Wikileaks for example.

^^ Not useful for "average person," because even though you can retrieve it, you can't really use it in a lot of places, and have to go through an exchange to convert it to local currency. VISA still beats Bitcoin in this.
For the answers here, think "What can someone do with Bitcoin that they can't already easily do with something else."

Storing money offline and retrieving it elsewhere with internet access IS useful for people traveling in and out of restrictive regimes that ban transporting currency across the border (Back when we left USSR, the max anyone was allowed to carry across the border was $300. Imagine, a family with two kids, moving to US, only allowed to bring $300 with them. There are still countries like that, sadly)

That is a question that I come across quite often. For example,


To be fair, we understand the currency, it's inner workings, and thus its potential quite well, but while we profess how great it is, with $'s and stars in our eyes, we likely forget that the people we are talking to don't know or understand everything that we do. So, I think we should come up with some examples that answer the question of "why would an average person care" (or re-paste them from older necro threads). Here are some of mine:

1) It lets you send money overseas cheaper than using a bank wire (FIAT > BTC > BTC > FIAT has way better fees and exchange rates than bank wire, Western Union, etc).

2) It lets anyone open a virtual bank account without needing access to a physical bank. For example, some banks charge fees and require minimum balances for accounts, which may be prohibitively expensive. Some areas around the world don't even have banks other than in far away big cities. And in some cases, it's easier to just create a new Bitcoin wallet to store money in, than it is to drive down to a bank, fill out forms, come up with profs of ID, wait days for them to be verified, and another week for your account to actually be ready to use (especially if you're looking for a small business account).

3) It lets you accept payments online easily and way cheaper than with VISA, PayPal, or other such services. Heck, you can even just get a bitcoin address from MtGox or any other exchange, set up your account to instantly exchange any received BTC for local currency, and you're done.

4) It lets you accept payments over e-mail or any other service that can transmit text (even photos, as seen on girlsgonebitcoin). Some sellers may not have the means to build a website, but can still send out an invoice, asking to send payments to a specific address. (i.e. someone living in a poor country who only has access to an internet cafe, or someone who just doesn't have web skills).

5) It lets you accept tips or donations using any website. You can upload videos to YouTube, photos to Flickr, posts to a blog, music to Soundcloud, art to Deviantart, or comic strips to GoComics, and to accept donations all you need is to include a string of text in the description. No need to set up any money-accepting plugins, set up any bank or financial accounts, or rely on features provided by the service being used.

5) It lets you send money to places where PalPal or other money transmitting services are blocked, for example Russia or India, and is much cheaper for sending money to family in other countries. Even if that country they can't send money to is US, as in the example of the parents in Iran sending $2,000 to their college student son living here.

6) It lets you send huge sums of money overseas quickly and cheaply. If you were in US and you needed to pay $1,000,000 for a shipment from China, using normal methods of wiring money would take two or more weeks, and will cost more than $25,000 for the transaction. With Bitcoin, it takes a few hours, and costs $12,000 or less.

7) It lets you send micropayments better than anything else out there. It's easy and practically free to send $0.01 to anyone else using BTC, but would cost about $0.25 for just the fee to use the USD/EUR system. Any micropayment system that uses USD/EUR would have to sit on top of a larger system that stores all the money in a single large account, and all micropayments would have to be done as accounting entries within that account, instead of money actually moving around (i.e. you have to fund the system with a large payment, do your micropayment transactions, and withdraw when your fund is big enough again). This means micropayments using USD/EUR are restricted to only within specific services (i.e. your pre-paid micropayments fund that you use to pay for news articles can only be used within that news website)

8) It lets you create programs and services with their own bank accounts (the software stores value, as opposed to value always being linked to a real world person and a real world outside-the-service bank account). The Reddit tipbot is an excellent example of this, and would be impossible with USD/EUR, since to build it using FIAT, someone would have to open a real world bank account under their name (with all the forms, proofs of ID, etc), set it up to accept money transfers from others using PayPal, VISA, or something else, which will charge fees, have nasty exchange rates, have to keep to strict AML regulations, and be restricted to certain specific countries. Plus it would have all the micropayment issues mentioned above. With Bitcoin, all the "banking" is done with software, requiring no permissions, and no single programmer's name has to be linked with any bank accounts.

9) It lets you instantly fund USD/EUR based accounts around the world. The small LLC I started up keeps a BTC cash account for minor business expenses, and my business partners around the world will have Bitcoin funded VISA debit cards (as soon as Bitinstant releases them). That way, all the money is stored safely in the business vault, and if they need to pay for any business expenses, no matter where they are on the planet, or what their home currency is, I can fund their cards from home within 10 minutes. That's impossible with ACH, wires, or whatever else is out there.

10) It lets you link a payment account to a contract using address signing. For example, Person A agrees to buy Person B's debt. They write up an agreement contract, and instead of signing it with PGP keys, they sign it with A's and B's bitcoin addresses. Then money is sent from Address A to Address B, and any repayments are sent from Address B to Address A. That way, Person B can't claim that they never received the money, and Person A can't claim that they are still owed more than they really are, since all transactions are publicly verifiable on the block chain using the very addresses that were used to sign the contract. There is no need for any legal disputes of who owes what, since the blockchain keeps both parties honest (I actually did this already).


If you can think of anything else, please add it to the list.

Kendo restricts me somewhat by teaching me to attack only specific targets, as opposed to swinging wildly, but it does teach me to make very fast, powerful, and precise strikes, return into a defensive position as quickly as possible, and most importantly, builds up my stamina, so I can keep whacking away, or if need be, run like hell, much better and for much longer periods of time than just some random dude with a stick. Frankly, I think just getting in shape puts you at a much higher advantage with any martial art or melee weapon than the average person.

Keep your shitty politics out of my troll thread!

I doubt that, too, although they DO have a huge issue with anything that resembles FY;GM, which wouldn't give them anything they feel their needs entitle them to. I'd say "I wonder why that is?" but honestly I never cared.

Actually, I would agree with you on this, too. Voting is turning into a rather pointless endeavor, with winning being largely decided by who can outspend the other with negative advertising, or who can make voting as hard as possible. And if you think the solution to this escalating problem is to vote for change, just reread this sentence again.

Trust me, they wish they got paid. A lot of them are very poor. A lot are also living at home, and thus have time to dick around on the web. If they were being paid, whoever was doing it would be getting a rather shitty return for their money, as their attacks on things are largely unsuccessful, and at most just somewhat annoying. Even Anonymous, a group of unpaid volunteers, does a vastly better job at attacking things than these jokers.

At the risk of totally destroying any semblance of social respect I may have had, I'm going to say that the skills I have learned in those dancing classes have allowed be to dance very gracefully when I played daggorhir in college.

Hey, all you guys claiming that AnCap may lead to things like big powerful companies using their strengths to bully the little guy, keep two things in mind:
1) It is MUCH more expensive to bully someone and take things from him by force than it is to trade with him and have him give you money/materials by his own choice. If, say, WalMart started to use military tactics to take out the competition, not only would that cost them way more than just beating them in the market, but it would kill their profits, and almost everyone would boycott them, and hired guns , or private security firms, don't work for free. Which leads me to point...
2) In a society without government that includes corporation-written laws that protect those corporations by supplying them with essentially free military and police forces, it would be VASTLY more expensive to piss people off when those people can take up arm and just come after you. Presently, we have oil companies in various parts of middle east (not really we, per se, but global oil companies), and those oil companies are not being very good guests. The locals are letting them know that they don't want them there on their property, usually with guns and bombs, and the US military is providing those oil companies with free protection, using our own troops, because "oil is vital to national security." Same deal is happening in Africa, and other nations are using their millitaries to protect their corporate interests in other parts of the world. In an AnCap society, there is no such protection, so you either spend a ton of money on security and sleep lightly with a gun under your pillow, or you play nice with everyone.

^^^ This. Beat me to it. Just need to add...


You don't have to pay to be able to vote. Those earning below minimum wage would be able to vote just as much as those earning a lot. Billionaire Sheldon Adelson's vote counts for 1 vote, just as much as a retired old lady's who is living only off of SSI. So, no, political corruptions lead to dictatorships. What's happening in China was actually what started as a dictatorship, which is now slowly being eroded away by capitalism.

Anything that leads to blood, guts, and glory

You do realize that only a small fraction of people here invested in pirate, or preordered from BFL, right? I mean, how many people complained about losing money from pirate, and hedged with Matthew? 40? Out of 60,000 registered bitcoiners? How many preordered BFL devices are there? Maybe 275, with many people making multiple pre-orders? I suspect the ratio of Bitcoiner idiots to those who are just minding their own business, discussing things that have nothing to do with scams or general dumbfuckery, is about even with the ratio of sensible and rational goons to those who are the idiot loosers who make up the majority of that forum. Seriously, you have Three-Phase, ymgve, and maybe even greyhawk, who have some sense and understand what's going on, in a pool of retards who are all just "Bitcoin is dumb! Bitcoiners are dumb! I said what everyone else here thinks (even though I have no idea why)." F'in bunch of retards....

No, just missing going to my Kendo/Iado classes.

...only because sword fights look way more epic.

That is all.

Just FYI, a typical McDonalds restaurant makes about $160,000 in revenue per month.

Back to the topic, it seems you have now thoroughly[/q] argued for the point that businesses can set their own wage floors, based on the quality of service and products they want to sell, and possibly even save money due to increased employee competence, decreased turnover, and increased sales volume, and that those wage floors they set can be even higher than the "officially" set ones. Which is exactly what we were arguing - that the free market can set its own wage floors, and they will not be close to zero, since a business can be much more productive by paying living wages and having happy employees.

So... why do we need minimum wage laws again?

Yeah... no. They're not paid shills. They are just morons stuck in an echo chamber, who never grew out of highschool. Just think of them as the obnoxious kids from the "cool kids" table who live only to harass and annoy anyone who is different in any way, for the sole reason of getting positive feedback from their own little group. Seriously, read their forum, and you'll notice how every other post is "Haha, they are so stupid, right? Guys? Right? Yeah, I'm cool cause I think like you." It's pathetic. Want to know how the secret to beating them? Whatever they are attacking, just own it. Be proud of it and don't let them faze you. If they notice that they can't attack your weakness and can't pick on you, they'll get annoyed and move on. Also, just remember that those cool kids at school usually end up with really shitty lives. SA is no exception (crappy, dead-end jobs, living in the middle of nowhere, REALLY boring lives, and generally poor, with completely ignorant misunderstanding on business or finance. A bunch of them are Occupy types) And Bitcoin will survive without and despite them, as has everything else they ever attacked. You can laugh at them when they march around protesting about how early adopters got an unfair advantage over them.

OK, now that you have established that, you'll need to explain your premise that employees getting paid higher wages leads directly to better quality and lower priced burgers. How does that work exactly? I.e. what's the math?
Then explain if you believe that raising the minimum wage again will make others' (e.g. McDonald's) burgers become better quality and cheaper, too.

You must be really old. No one pays for porn any more  Seriously, though, what about the people who earn Bitcoin using their web business, and then pay their software developers, and domain and VPS hosts with Bitcoin, and then those domain and VPS hosts use Bitcoin to buy their server hardware? Does that (which already happens) make BTC a currency?


Every currency in that example, including Bitcoin, would need to be exchanged to the local currency to be useful. I think the point is that it would be easier to trade it for local currency, or barter with it directly, than try to convince some random bank to accept to trade your suspicious foreign paper into local money.

McDoubles are 99¢ here. You can get a McDouble and a McChicken for 99¢ each to make a huge McChurger for just $2.00.



I guess prices are just more expensive where you live.