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I can't say as I've ever seen one...I'm certainly not aware of any (legitimate) reports of someone being robbed by a double spend. I suspect many people new to bitcoin have attempted a naive double spend attack however (where you open two instances on the same wallet and try to spend at the same time). I'm not sure if you would want to count that as a double spend attack since it's utterly ineffective if you wait for one confirmation or if you monitor the network for a few seconds after receiving the transaction.
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I liked Jeff Garzik's suggestion that major financial hubs would be ideal locations for bitcoin conferences. NY, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Dubai.
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I like the idea that this can make bitcoin truly anonymous (and that's just one small piece of OT!).  To better understand what FellowTraveler is talking about I recommend listening to this radio interview first: http://agoristradio.com/?p=246++1 Agreed...very good interview. Bitcoin+OT+Ripple is very powerful stuff. Is there a white paper that describes the core protocols of OT in a very simple and straightforward manner? I imagine at it's core, OT is very simple...but videos of GUIs and interviews obscure that simplicity. Satoshi's white paper gave me that clarity about bitcoin...is there something similar for OT? |
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Hoarding is not the problem...not spending is the problem. Hoarding and spending are not mutually exclusive things. You can very easily be both a hoarder and a spender of bitcoin and both things are good for the bitcoin economy.
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I hate to say this but this still suffers from all the issues that previous suggestions for point of sale stuff has, in that it takes a great deal of time comparatively to confirm the transaction is actually valid. People aren't going to wait around for a quarter of an hour after buying a stick of gum to wait for a transaction to verify.
People also aren't going to bother spending hours of their time or thousands of dollars trying to execute a successful double spend just to steal a pack of chewing gum. Accepting without any confirmation in such a circumstance is probably lower risk than letting people pay with credit card. This is a great step forward and nice video. When the time is right, we'll want to integrate this (or something like this) with bit-pay.com. |
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I think it is good for gambling (games) and speculating, it's purpose for buying goods is too small, it will become buying friendly when workers start getting paychecks in btc, until that happens it is not complete economy edit: I just negotiated a btc related project to be paid with paypal, with a guy that is "one of us" I do own some btc, but they are harder to get than to spend, that is why I rather store them for later... So, even I, who sees where the problem is am not doing anything about it... we r doomed I don't understand this...why would you not just by bitcoins on an exchange and use them to pay the person? This is quite simple and even if you want to accumulate bitcoins you simply buy more bitcoins on the exchange and use some of them to pay the person and keep the rest. I generally buy a few bitcoins every week so that I have some to pay people with but don't allow my balance to fall. |
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I'm going to start coding support for the Bit-Pay API into Coin Cart tonight! Great! let us know if you have any questions. Houston, we have a problem! I just tried signing up an account over at Bit-Pay. I can't get pass page 3 on the 4 page sign-up process. Reason: The IRS tax number is needed. Serious? Please PM me. Thank you, in advance. We need that before we can process USD ACH payouts...it's not needed if you're taking bitcoin payouts (I supposed we could make that clearer in application process). |
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HAHAHAHA that's hilarious. so does then the chinese government already know about bitcoin? and their already making a subtle stance against it?!?!? holy crap this is awesome there are so many implications someone tell a credible news source to make an article out of this and blow it out of proportion!!!
hey anything new and bitcoin related can be used to spread awareness and then raise google trends and then raise the price no?
Yes, this would be a great story...make it well publicized that China is once again violating basic human rights and restricting free speech by censoring bitcoin. Imagine then what the story will be when/if any western country tries to do the thing.  |
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What bitcoin needs in the way of an alternate coinage is a way for any individual to issue their own currency. Such a currency need not require proof of work to secure the block chain...block creation could be left to the issuer and verified based on a digital signature (for that matter, block creation could be managed by several people or entities using secret sharing or multiple signing). This would offer every individual an ability to issue their own cryptographically secure and pseudo-anonymous currency. Their currency could be in the form of an IOU for some other currency (ie. bitcoin, gold, dollars, etc). Building on top of that, a trust network where people decide to what extent they trust another individual's currency could be established. For example, Bill might decide to trust Bob for as much as a $1000 IOU. A routing protocol (akin to BGP) could then be used to find paths through such a network in order to transfer wealth using these privately issued currencies, very much like RipplePay. With a few more pieces added, it's conceivable that you could have a completely decentralized mechanism of exchanging virtually anything for bitcoin.
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Speculation and the huge variances in value of a Bitcoin actually detract from the usefulness as a transmission currency and make it more difficult for people who want to use it as such. To trade effectively in Bitcoins, I must adjust my prices in real-time and sell the coins immediately after receiving them, incurring a loss equal to the current market spread. If the spread is larger due to speculation, I lose more. If I wait a while to sell my coins I may lose or I may gain, depending on the whims of the market. This unpredictability is a problem for web shops looking to cash out in dollars in order to re-invest in more stock, for example.
With bit-pay.com, our merchants can set prices in USD (and soon other currencies) and receive payout in USD...if they elect to receive payout in BTC, they receive whatever price they set minus a flat 2.99% (which is substantially lower than the total fees they would likely incur with credit cards and no chargebacks to boot). They are not exposed at all to the volatility of bitcoin (however we would certainly prefer more merchants to accept bitcoin payout instead of USD). On the other side of the coin, (sorry I couldn't resist) it's good for my customers when the price of a Bitcoin is going up, but bad for them if it's going down. Such variances in price would make it exciting, but somewhat of a gamble to shop on a site that accepts bitcoins but pegs the price to a fixed dollar amount, as you could literally watch the price of an item change price every time you refreshed the page and wait for the best time to buy.
Setting prices in a more stable currency actually helps stabilize bitcoins prices...consider that when the value of bitcoin falls, people have to spend more bitcoin to purchase the same goods and services. To the extent that the demand for the good or service remains constant, this increases the demand for bitcoin and thus counteracting the decline in value. On the other side, as the value of bitcoin rises, you get more for your bitcoins and (again assuming relatively stable demand for the good/service) the demand for bitcoins is lowered. As distasteful as it is to have to set prices in some other currency, I think it's a necessity in the near term given the volatility of bitcoin. Perhaps we need mechanisms to set prices in gold or silver terms for those that find fiat currencies distasteful. |
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Have a look at https://bit-pay.com. We have a basic shopping cart feature that doesn't require any programming or hosting of bitcoin. We also have a payment API that makes it easy to integrate with shopping carts (and ZenCart is one of the ones on our list to do). |
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I've said this before, but I think it's worth repeating. Growing the bitcoin economy is very simple. Dedicate a portion of your earnings to buying bitcoin every week (however small that may be doesn't matter). And never sell bitcoins on an exchange if you can possibly help it. Instead, use those bitcoins to buy stuff (or pay people). I think if everyone tried to do this, it would be the most effect way to grow bitcoin usage. Trying to explicitly market bitcoin to people that may not know or care about it can backfire (but countering anti-bitcoin propaganda is important).
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Our JSON API is now available along with command line utilities that provide an easy to use client interface. The command line tools can be used as is, customized or as examples for people that want to integrate directly with the JSON API. The documentation is here: https://bit-pay.com/downloads/bitpayApi-0.1.pdf(we've also updated the FAQ to clarify the question about international merchants) |
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The Bit-Pay.com payment API is now available. It is a JSON API that enables you to create invoices and receive payment status updates. It also comes with command line utilities for creating invoices, fetching invoices and receiving invoice status updates. Should be very easy to plug into most shopping cart software. Full documentation is here: https://bit-pay.com/downloads/bitpayApi-0.1.pdf |
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Bit-pay is now available to businesses in the United States  I'm from canada and want to price in btc and CND$ I think bit-pay is internationally available if you choose to receive your payments in bitcois and not in USD. That is correct...despite what our FAQ currently says. Regarding the decision whether to do it yourself or outsource the payment processing, someone ultimately has to implement it. I certainly don't discourage anyone from managing and hosting it themselves if you have the time and the skill. For bit-pay, our goal is to make it easy and secure for merchants that choose to outsource their payment processing. We will also provide integration with a number of third party shopping carts as well as accounting systems. And, we handle currency exchange for merchants that want to accept bitcoins from customers, but need to receive dollars (and soon other currencies). We payout a merchant's entire balance once per day (subject to minimums) via ACH direct deposit or bitcoin transaction (for bitcoin, we may soon offer an option of paying out hourly if there is a minimum balance). We are not a wallet service and do not allow merchants to accumulate a significant balance in their merchant account (which also means that at any given point in time, we typically have very few bitcoins in our online wallet). |
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The API for bit-pay.com is almost done. It is a JSON API and will come with a few client side utilities that wrap the JSON API. Shortly after that we'll create an OpenCart plugin (it's the #1 request we've had for cart integration).
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I just gotta say this thread is awesome. Where else can you get a discussion of a cool new and artistic bitcoin site, website monetization, bot arms races, and Tarantino films all in one shot (and for the record, I really liked Death Proof...the other one not so much).
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So basically, at current Ixcoin difficulty, in the time it takes me to mine 1 Bitcoin, I could mine about 1000 Ixcoins and sell them for about 2.4 Bitcoins. Nice...if that is true, then it should get arbitraged away *very* quickly. I think if I had any IxCoins I'd want to sell before that happens. It's not too often that you can more than double your mining yield like this (but again, it's probably a good idea to act quickly). It's not any different than the brief periods of time where namecoin is more profitable than bitcoin, really. Check out http://tvori.info/bitcoin/charts/ if you're not familiar with this phenomenon. Specifically go to the "all time chart" at the bottom and watch the relationship between the green line (BTC profit) and the blue line (NMC profit). If we had several more popular and well-known forks we might see network hopping as widespread as pool hopping is today. As long as you can determine (in real time) the BTC value of NMC/IXC/whatever and the difficulty of each network, it's trivial to determine where your GPU will make the most cash. For the record, I do expect the profit differential to be arbitraged away quite quickly, but we probably won't see a stable exchange rate until we see a stable difficulty. Every increase thus far has been a factor of four (currently at 4096) and block times have been well under a minute. With the exception of the brief times when NMC mining is more profitable, NMC seems to have a stable value of 0.03 BTC or so, meaning that it's usually worth about 68% of what you'd get for the same time/equipment mining BTC. We're still in the "initial climb" phase of difficulty with IXC, but I'd expect a similar result once the initial climb is over. Only time will tell of course. As for the "value" IXC adds? I'm not so sure that too many exist, certainly less value than namecoin - but one look at the trade volume on bitparking's NMC exchange compared with the actual number of .bit registrations should tell you it's as much a speculative commodity as bitcoin. Speculators in NMC are betting that its potential as a DNS replacement will make it more valuable in the future, and with IXC the bet is that hitting a deflationary curve earlier than BTC will increase its relative value as it will be deflating while BTC is still inflating. If nothing else, trading BTC for IXC or NMC and then trading them back goes a long way toward anonymizing non-generated BTC since the IXC and NMC exchanges don't deal in regular fiat and therefore don't care so much about who their customers are. Excellent Analysis. So I think you could say that for a new digital currency that offers nothing that is perceived to be inherently more valuable than bitcoin, the upside potential is no greater than bitcoin, while the downside risk is far greater. Of course, if the perception changes, then this dynamic would invert, but that is a substantial hurdle to overcome. |
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So basically, at current Ixcoin difficulty, in the time it takes me to mine 1 Bitcoin, I could mine about 1000 Ixcoins and sell them for about 2.4 Bitcoins. Nice...if that is true, then it should get arbitraged away *very* quickly. I think if I had any IxCoins I'd want to sell before that happens. It's not too often that you can more than double your mining yield like this (but again, it's probably a good idea to act quickly). |
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