Micropayments of arbitrarily small value sizes are already handled well by online wallet services such a Mybitcoin.com.  A secure cellphone interface, such as is used by M-Pesa, will come much quicker, and be more widely adopted than a cellphone client.  I want an independent smartphone client, but it's not realisticly needed for the vast majority of users.  These 'bitcoin banks' are, truthfully, a partital centralization of the Bitcoin system; but the key is that the user always has the option of switching wallet service providers or using his own client. 

These wallet services will become somewhat ubiquitous, and over time as the Bitcoin economy grows, the current p2p network will trend towards being a form of major settlement backbone; while the average user with a cell phone, wallet services provider (which could easily be his actual cell service provider, as M-Pesa is actually run by Vodaphone) and a cell phone app to securely interface with his wallet service, and not directly to the Bitcoin network.  As this occurs, wallet service providers are likely to develop their own parrallel network to allow them to interact directly, and thus reduce the number of bitcoin transactions that actually must hit the network.  Imagine it like this...

Joe has an account on Mybitcoin.com, and a widget on his phone to let him sent coins to any bitcoin address.  Jane has an account on MtGox, and Ron has a client running on his home computer.  Both Jane & Ron need to send a small amount to Joe, because they are sharing the cost of a dinner out (before their California 3-way) and Joe is paying the check with local fiat currency, and the others are paying him back.  Jane uses her cellphone to tell MtGox to send some to Joe's address.  MtGox immediately checks it's own records to see if that is an address that belongs to a MtGox member.  It's not, so the next step is to reach out across the parallel wallet services network to see if that is an address connected to an account with one of it's competitors for which it has an agreement of mutual settlement.  Mybitcoin responds that it belongs to a member.  MTgox doesn't care which member, only that they have a settlement agreement with Mybitcoin.  So Joe's Mybitcoin account is credited, Jane's is debited, and sometime later the accumulated imbalances between MtGox and Mybitcoin are settled in one, much larger, lump sum transaction.  This all happens before Jane can pull her finger away from the "send bitcons" button.  If both Mybitcoin and MtGox both have a large user base (each is already in the tens of thousands) then most of the transactions between users of each tend to balance out, so settlement would become rather rare.  However, Ron uses his cellphone remote control client (or a native android client) to send Joe theat same amount over the Bitcoin p2p network directly.  Ron doesn't trust wallet services, which is his right, but then must (likely) pay a transaction fee to make certain that Joe will have his coin before the night is over, since Mybitcoin won't credit Joe's account before at least a few confirmations.

I hope that I have illustrated here how Bitcoin can serve as a micropayment currency system into the indefinate future, even though the above scenario isn't yet possible.  The economics provide for the above scenario to be probable.  And the only thinkg that prevents this from happening is a secure and standardized parallel communications network for which bitcoin wallet services can develop theses kinds of interparty trust agreements around.

Maybe, maybe not.  We will yet see.  Regardless, this experiment is only two years old.  You are and early adopter, if you so choose to be.

Oh, sorry.

Well, you know the rules now.  You won't make that same mistake twice, will you?  Relatively cheap tuition at the University of Life.

If the buyer is using his personal client, then yes, there will be a delay.  However, if the buyer is using an online wallet service, such as from within MtGox itself or Mybitcoin.com, then transfer can be instant.  It depends on just how much MtGox and Mybitcoin trust one another.

No, it would not.  Why would that be necessary?  An anonymous user can withdraw fiat currency from MtGox daily up to a $1000 per day limit, while a verified user (such as a business account would be) has no such limits as far as I am aware of.

Can anyone verify if these transactions have fees paid? 

Yes, you can.  But that is not what he is actually saying here.  The vendor can go to MTGox and open a business account, and then his ecommerce store provides the bitcoin address that leads the funds directly into MtGox.  It's not necessary for the sender to have a MtGox account, although that would work at least as well.


To completely eliminate it, yes.

He doesn't, as he is more about the social networking thing.  Still, he probably wouldn't have noticed anyway, because his client predates the rise of the GPU miner and still uses the internally provided CPU miner in the client.  All of his blocks were found before October.

By default, yes.  I'm his only uncle.

Ah, yes.  But those assumptions could take decades to come to fruition.  They have almost zero bearing on what the value of a bitcoin will be next week or next year.

What math?  Are you talking about guessing the 'proper' value of a bitcoin, based upon assumptions of the size of the (non-speculation based) Bitcoin economy?  Because it's a rediculous assertion that you, me or anyone can actually know what that is.  We can't even get a decent guess without first knowing how much trade goes on within such walled gardens as SilkRoad, OTC or BlackMarket.  Just looking at the volume of trade on those currency trading sites like MtGox doesn't tell you anything of usefullness, except that the market price is what the market price says that it is.

Blocks are still being created just fine.  Your problems are not related to a lack of mining power.

From both, but in every case the selection may be severely limited.

All of those classes of products are available via Bitcoin.

I am.

A bear market is a fire sale.

I doubt it, it's still on the BitcoinWatch.com pie chart.  More likely your connection to Slush's servers has broken.

I've got sell orders in the high end and buy orders on the low end.  I'm sure I'm not the only one.  Bear in mind, one can create orders without having the funds to fulfill them.  I'm pretty sure that those don't show up on the order book, but if you have several orders on the low end and several on the high end, you can bounce up and down for a long period of time without ever logging into your account.

... and says, "Hey, Uncle.  I just noticed today that the bitcoin client that I thought was gone from my computer is still running in the dock.  How do I know if I generated anything?"

He's a bit of a gamer, but not a computer geek.  He literally didn't notice that he's had a bitcoin client running for months, and he never turns his computer off.

I told him how to check, and then he told me that he generated three blocks since October.  "How much is that worth, Unc?"