Here's a great article from Transaction World: Have you been tracking the Google wallet? ISIS? Paypal? Fuggeddaboutit! If you want to see the most exciting developments currently underway in the payments business, look to India. Even more so than in China, India is where the action is right now.
All the new technologies coming out in the U.S. get such hype that they are hard to ignore. There’s virtually a daily update on gossipy tidbits about Google or speculative stories about how Apple will take over the payments world. These are all fun to read, but these initiatives represent incremental improvements in the payments process as we know it today. Even self-proclaimed payments revolutionary, Square, is just another gateway to the processing world – an aggregator of micro merchant demand that no one thought amounted to much. While Square’s numbers are impressive in the aggregate, that model has a long way to go to prove the skeptics wrong. Square aims at the 10 million or so micro merchants in the U.S. It’s interesting for sure, but look at what India has to offer as a comparison.
Two things are key the to rapidly advancing payments infrastructure in India: the rising middle class and a robust and ubiquitous cell phone population. According to recent government figures there are 865 million active cell phones in India. While cell-connected ‘roving’ payments have never really caught on here in the U.S., in India, the cell phone will be the payment platform of choice for merchants and consumers alike. But the market is different than the U.S. in important ways that can’t be ignored. You can’t just impose our way of doing things on India and expect that to work.
For example, despite the growing economic clout of the Indian middle class, credit cards as a payment instrument are limited. There are only about 18 million active credit cards in India today – and that’s down from 27 million in 2005. Down 30% in 6 years? That’s one of the only sectors of the Indian economy that’s NOT growing by leaps and bounds. Why not? After all, credit cards in the U.S. are a key feature of our economic lives.
The answer lies in a variety of places, but foremost among them is the fact that India is and has been for thousands of years a cash-based economy and almost everything is prepaid. Cell phone and television are two good examples of staple services that are almost entirely prepaid.
I had just posted a similar article describing how in Nigeria, the Paga mobile network has a network of 550 agents that accept cash and then load the funds into the subscriber's mobile wallet. That then allows payment for prepaid services, such as cell phone and other prepaid services. The link to the article is in here: - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=63687.msg958729#msg958729And continuing on the Transaction World article, it appears the same reliance on cash occurs in India: More promising technologies exist and are taking a significant hold. Solutions that we don’t see here in the U.S. make a lot more sense in the Indian culture. They are simpler, mobile solutions that allow consumers to gain control of their money with a non-cash virtual currency.
What India needs is simple financial tools that allow people to perform basic daily functions without a lot of friction or cost. Paying bills is just such a function. Given that India is an all-cash economy, bills for basics like cell phone, satellite TV, power water, etc. all have to be paid in person and in cash. - http://www.transactionworld.net/articles/2012/april/money_guy.asp |
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He would rather pay me more to cover Paypal fees than spend the time to figure it out.
Well, there's the saying that you can recognize a pioneer by the arrows in his back. There has never been a decentralized digital currency before, so nobody knows what to make of it. There's nothing wrong with taking a conservative approach with something new -- that would describe the majority of the population. Fortunately, those reading this thread don't fall under that category. We are the part of the population that sees the potential. We see the day that we don't need to give PayPal its pound of flesh. We know that some day this will pay off where sending a remittance to family using bitcoins is a better alternative to sending fiat in one country and having it arrive as a different fiat currency in another. We know that some day we'll be sending bitcoins, and those bitcoins will be of value to the recipient and thus spent or saved, but not exchanged into fiat. There's just this sizable gap between where we are today and how we envision the future. But we know how to get there. Notme's inquiry is a perfect example of how it starts. Then some day this guy will have been given the same request over a half dozen times, and then he might not be so quick to dismiss it. |
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Here's an interesting article about Paga in Lagos. Nigeria. It is a mobile payments network that uses IVR: He dialed a colleague's cell phone number in Nigeria and punched in the amount of money he wanted to transfer to her from his Paga account, followed by his PIN number. After a few moments, a recorded voice confirmed the transaction, while a text message alerted his colleague about how much money had been sent. The entire process took about 35 seconds. There's no charge to pay bills or add cell phone airtime, but mobile money senders are charged a fee based on the amount transferred.
- http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/oviosu_mobile_2012.html - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=63687.msg958729#msg958729 |
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Interesting article about Paga in Lagos. Nigeria: The business officially opened in early 2011 after receiving approval from the Central Bank of Nigeria.
Paga now employs 68 and has more than 42,000 Nigerian customers who can transfer money, purchase airtime credit, and pay bills with their cell phones using the system. Investors in the company include Timothy Draper, founder of global venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Draper is an investor in CoinLab (Seattle, WA). He dialed a colleague's cell phone number in Nigeria and punched in the amount of money he wanted to transfer to her from his Paga account, followed by his PIN number. After a few moments, a recorded voice confirmed the transaction, while a text message alerted his colleague about how much money had been sent. The entire process took about 35 seconds. There's no charge to pay bills or add cell phone airtime, but mobile money senders are charged a fee based on the amount transferred.
Sending as an IVR (interative voice response). There was an IVR wallet project that was abandoned and then open sourced, but nobody continuing it. - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43734.0The company has a network of 550 agents, typically mom-and-pop merchants who already run grocery stores or pharmacies. Customers can go to those agents to deposit cash into their Paga accounts, and then conduct mobile transactions using those funds. The company also has a partnership with several Nigerian banks that accept Paga account deposits. So far, Oviosu said the average transaction size is modest, about 3,000 Nigerian naira, which is the equivalent of about $20 U.S. That's where bitcoin growth can go from nothing and explode into ubiquity in a short while. Here, each of those 550 agents earns a commission for accepting cash, as a trusted partner in Paga's network. But with bitcoin, there can be 5,500 agents, 55,000 agents. etc., ... each acting as an independent exchanger. Because they don't need some mobile carrier's permission to be an "agent", this will be a necessary prerequisite for Bitcoin's growth (yet at the same time its biggest reason for succeess over competing, carrier-based approaches). - http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/oviosu_mobile_2012.html |
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I am not quite yet ready to open it up to active development, though my timeline is about 2 weeks from today.
Good. the allinvain thief, mybitcoin theif, bitcoin7 thief, bitcoinica feb 2012 thief, bitcoinica (linode) thief, bitcoinica (rackspace) thief, etc., should all be shaking in their boots by now. |
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Heh, ... certainly you had provided them color photo ID, birth certificate, first pet's name, first pet's spouse's name, and your favorite color before you could withdraw your funds though, right?
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Any help how I can do this, without using an external service like blockexplorer?
Lots of interest in doing this exact same thing. There's going to be a lot of SatoshiDICE copycats, I suspect: Related: - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3896 |
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I've seen the link... I'm looking to sell though A buyer for a coin like that might want an escrow, or even to buy it in person. Are either of those methods acceptable? |
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There's no method to recover password. At a minimum, there should be a link that explains what a user should do ... e.g., send an e-mail to support or whatever.
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Thanks to a post on Quora, - - http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-paypal-and-dwolla/answer/Sam-Ohara/comment/993142I've learned that Dwolla's terms of service have changed in another area as well, unfortunately: (4) Funds in the Veridian Holding Account are held in a pooled account. THESE FUNDS ARE NOT ELIGIBLE FOR INDIVIDUAL INSURANCE, AND MAY NOT BE ELIGIBLE FOR SHARE INSURANCE BY THE NATIONAL CREDIT UNION SHARE INSURANCE FUND.
- https://www.dwolla.com/tosI hope I am understanding this correctly. This means that, just like with MF Global, if the CEO orders your funds to be applied for use in whatever manner of his choosing, regardless of whether or not that action was legal, individual account holders have no guaranteed access to those funds. This is unlike PayPal, which uses pooled accounts with FDIC pass-through protection (up to $100K USD per account): - https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/fdic-outsideIn other words, don't park your funds at Dwolla like you would at a bank. |
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If that still doesn't give you a solution, then you might try pywallet to export the private keys and import them elsewhere.
I've done that (re-download block chain), but those transactions still show. With a clean memory pool after restarting and them not existing in any blocks in the blockchain, I don't understand how it would even know about those transactions to show them anymore even. To get a look by someone who might know the details of how this can happen, would you consider posting this issue in the Technical Support board? - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=4.0 |
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Correct, both parties need to sign up at WalletBit with their email as stated in the press release.
You could easily make it so that the wallet has a bitcoin address to receive coins, and so that the user can send to a bitcoin address. There's really no technical reason for not offering that, right? It does have an address to receive funds to, or did you mean something else? Oh, so I am misunderstanding Kris' statement before? It can work where I send bitcoins from my cleint (e.g., bitcoin-qt) to a Bitcoin addres for the WAP wallet for the recipient? (i.e., standalone user) |
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I guess go back to the beginning.
Step 1. Make a backup of wallet.dat
Step 2. Remove every file in the bitcoin folder except for wallet.dat
Step 3. Launch bitcoin and let it download all the blocks again.
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If that still doesn't give you a solution, then you might try pywallet to export the private keys and import them elsewhere.
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I'm open to suggestions.
I'm thinking that in addition to the invalid transactions (which will never confirm) that you might already have the valid ones that arrived, and just are overlooking because you also see the invalid ones. [Sorry, re-reading your comment, you mention "many times". So guess not.] Those invalid ones are invalid. They'll never confirm. Sorry. But if you got the valid ones, then your only problem is in trying to remove the invalid ones (there's a procedure that will do that). |
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