Obviously I don't know any of you personally, nor am I privy to your financials or customer data, so the rest of this post should be regarded as the uninformed speculation of someone who's thinking out loud and probably nothing you haven't already considered.

You're involved in a potentially disruptive technology like Bitcoin because your goal is more than merely being profitable enough to pay the bills and keep food on the table. You want to eventually be a household name - a verb. This means you need at least another four orders of magnitude of growth from where you are now.

Your first thousand customers have primarily been early adopters and enthusiasts which are a good to get started with, but won't be enough to break into the mainstream. Mainstream businesses are going to include a lot of people who are suspicious of the technology, or even hostile to it, but there is a phrase that will get your foot in the door anywhere: "Our customers typically see their bottom line improve by X% shortly after signing up with us" where X is suitably impressive. Your press release didn't include any sales volume numbers, which makes me think that number is not nearly as impressive as the number of signups.

The best way to make sure "X" is high enough to really contribute to your momentum would be to make sure your customers know not just how to accept bitcoins, but how to fully take advantage of this new capability by selling into markets which were previously unavailable to them. Some customers are going to "get it" immediately and others will need some help in order to become the success stories that you need to break into the mainstream. This is very important to do because otherwise you'll just saturate the enthusiast market and stop growing. Whatever means you decide to employ it's vital to make sure that your customers learn how to fully benefit from your service as quickly as possible because their success will determine how far you're able to go. Also anything you can do to expand new markets for your customers, like working with partners to get remittances flowing into new countries and/or setting up bitcoin exchanges there will fuel your own growth by increasing the number of people in the world who have access to bitcoins.

There's a local butcher shop here which will give you a chest freezer if you buy enough meat to fill it. I got a 1 cubic meter freezer and I expect the price of meat when I'm done eating it will be significantly higher than what I paid for it.

Maybe they could start their own forum.

This is exactly what Bitcoin needs.

To solve the problem this thread is about it's necessary to appeal to a different group of people.

That's why I like to emphasize commerce over speculation.

Is Lockheed looking to get into the business of money laundering, or catching money launderers, or both?

Refusing to address the question of whether or not laws are effective at stopping child abuse and instead insinuating that anyone who asks the question supports child abuse is despicable behavior and I will not dignify what you're doing by pretending it's a debate.

A good way to do this would be to allow a user to link their bitcoin talk account with their #bitcoin-otc rating and have their score displayed in place of the adjectives

I would answer that if it was a bona fide question instead of a smear attempt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dichotomy

You would have a great point if you'd acknowledge that laws also do not eliminate inappropriate behavior.

I meant BitPay, of course.

On the other hand it would be easier if less companies used Bit* as their name.

I think we should stop asking people to accept Bitcoins and instead ask them to add BitInstant, etc as a payment processor. There's really nothing for them to object to in this case, because using a payment processor insulates them from the risk.

History disagrees: http://www.psychohistory.com/originsofwar/01_killermotherland.html

Is Benjamin Fulford the one who talks about how extraterrestrials are conspiring with the Chinese mafia to bring Wall Street to justice, or is that someone else?

While the exchange rate is so dependent on speculation it is extremely vulnerable to effects like you mention.

One relevant fact that is missing from most analyses of inflation and deflation is the fact that for spending purposes currency and credit are fungible.

The US experienced severe periodic inflation and deflation on the gold standard because while the gold supply was relatively stable, the credit supply was alternatively expanded and contacted by the banking system.

Depressions are normally associated with depression because they are always preceded by a collapse of the credit markets. The question that we should be asking is, "Why does the credit supply keep getting so large compared to the currency supply, and why is it always allocated in such a way that it periodically collapses and causes a depression?"

Saying that we need inflation to avoid a depression is like saying we need to keep drinking to avoid a hangover. The right solution is to stop getting drunk on cheap credit in the first place so that we don't need to worry about currency appreciation caused by increased productivity.

I agree with this from a theoretical perspective but recent events have shown the existing online reputation systems are wholly insufficient for the task.

The cost-benefit ratio for scamming is skewed at the moment because the cost of obtaining a good reputation is too low so losing it doesn't provide a sufficient deterrent.

I've got a plan for fixing it though.

The notion that disorganized resistance is more costly to fight than an army is accepted doctrine taught to military officers.

The objection that we need government for national defense is just bizarre grasping at straws. The teachings of the government's own war colleges contradict this.

Iraq faced a significant external threat in the form of a vastly militarily superior enemy with virtually unlimited resources.

Was government-organized defense more effective or was spontaneously-organized resistance more effective at preventing this external enemy from achieving its goals?