I'm not an expert in Ben Laurie's Lucre, but what he describes in this paper is a centralized system.  Yes, of course it can work, but while the technology involved is quite different from traditional central banks, it suffers from all the same issues of relying on a central authority.  As soon as it becomes too inconvenient for that central authority to maintain discipline in their monetary policy, they will abandon that discipline.

Has anyone worked out how many bitcoins you could earn by mining IxCoins?  Just wondering if anyone is spending any bitcoins to buy IxCoins right now and how many bitcoins I could earn by mining IxCoins and selling them for bitcoin.  If people really are speculating on the future value of IxCoins, then perhaps a miner could actually earn more bitcoins by mining and then selling IxCoins than by mining bitcoin directly.  Of course, this might put a little damper on the IxCoin speculator knowing that this may effectively put an upper bound on the potential appreciation in value of IxCoin.

I certainly don't see much value in IxCoins right now.  To demonstrate this point, some people should start IxCoin2, XCoin, YCoin and SuckerCoin...and about a dozen more.  Right now, no merchants that I know of will accept IxCoins...no exchanges that I know of will trade IxCoins, there are no tools that let me see up to the minute values, charts, graphs or get real time trade information.  The IxCoin network is very insecure relative to where bitcoin is today.  And, to boot, the person that started IxCoin decided to generate quite a few for himself before letting anyone else participate.

The only thing of value in IxCoin is that it's an experiment in changing the inflation rate.  But maybe someone should suggest they fix the issue genjix pointed out and start over with a fresh chain to give all people that are interested in such an experiment a fair shake at generating IxCoins.  I don't think such experiments are a bad thing.

However, I do agree with genjix that IxCoin are likely a pump and dump scam rather than a legitimate experiment in fine tuning the inflation rate.  The danger that I see is that if people begin to start alternative block chains with the intention to scam people, it could have a very detrimental effect on the perception of digital currencies in general and that would be harmful to Bitcoin.  Perhaps that is the real motivation behind IxCoin.

The charts on http://www.l0ss.net/ are very nice (so are the ones from OP).  What are the pool luck charts showing?  Is it a comparison of the actual blocks they are finding in relation to what their total hash rate suggests they should be finding?

TraderSteve on the forum sells that watch.  It's probably best to contact him with any questions you might have, but I believe a Swiss company manufactures them to his design and specs.  I believe the movement in the watch is high end...something that a watch enthusiast would appreciate.  But I'm just relaying what he's told us about the watches.

That is on our list.  Cart integration and a phone optimized checkout are at the top of the list at the moment.

Why not put it into the official distribution?  I think all you need to operate a completely offline wallet and make it easy would be an ability to export/import the latest blocks and to export/import transactions (on import, the client would just behave exactly as it would if it had received the transaction from the network).  For the blocks, if the export could just export the blocks downloaded since the last export, it would probably make it quicker to keep the offline wallet's blocks updated.

Wouldn't this concern be solved by a lightweight, non block chain client that connected to some other node that was maintaining and validating the full block chain?  Inv messages make transaction announcement very lightweight.  Also, if you want to monitor the network to assess the risk of a particular transaction never being confirmed (i.e. if there is a conflicting transaction floating about), you not only want to hear about the transaction once, you want to gauge how widely distributed and accepted the transaction is (so, you want to hear about it from a large percentage of the peers with which you are connected).

Smalleyster, I can appreciate that our service may be too expensive for you, but I don't feel you're correctly portraying what merchants are likely to encounter in the way of fees with credit card processors, and particularly merchants that do a low volume of business.

Here's a list of some of the fees that merchants can incur with traditional credit cards: discount percentage, transaction fee, startup fee, annual fee, monthly fee, gateway fee, statement fee, monthly minimum, authorization fee, watts fee, avs fee, batch fee, voice authorization fee, chargeback fee, retrieval fees, bank change fee, ACH return fee, PCI compliance fee, network pass through fees.  And none of that includes the hidden fees on the consumer side.

Edit: forgot to mention the currency conversion and international fees

For Bit-Pay, there is no hidden fee that you alluded to...it is 0.99% for merchants that receive payout in bitcoin and 2.99% for those that take USD (as someone already pointed out 2.99 - 0.99 = 2 ...and reflects the currency exchange risk).  That's it.

Yes, we'll update the FAQ.  At the time we wrote that we wanted to keep the number of merchants to a size we could easily manage (anticipating that support might consume a lot of our time).  Restricting it to the US was one way of doing that.  We haven't had many issues...the primary thing people need is support for various shopping carts.

Yes.

Bit-pay charges 0.99%, Paypal charges 2.9%+$0.30 and that's for US only.  They add an additional 1% if it's international.  They add another 2.5% if there's a currency conversion involved (we're adding an additional 2%).  And if the transaction is for less than $2.00, they charge 5% (plus another 1% for international and 2.5% for other currencies).  And, from what I understand, they have a bad habit of reversing charges and freezing accounts.

I can appreciate that people want things for free, but we are trying to create a service that makes things very easy for the merchant, integrates with their accounting systems, integrates with various shopping carts, enables easy customization to fit with their own branding, etc.  This is not a hobby for us.

A merchant can set prices in either USD or BTC and get paid in either USD or BTC.  Regardless of which currency is used for pricing, if the merchant will accept payment in BTC, we charge 0.99% ...if they elect to take payment in USD, we charge 2.99%.

We pull the high bids from Mtgox, Tradehill and CampBX.  We take the two high bids that are closest and kick out the third.  Of those two, we take the highest high bid.

Yes, we do have a couple that are established businesses.  We will be targeting businesses that could likely benefit from bitcoin's unique advantages and might be receptive to bitcoin.  It's a tough sell at the moment...especially since we cannot in all honestly recommend bitcoin to anyone that isn't technical and doesn't understand crypto and such to handle anything but very small amounts of bitcoin.  Bitcoin is not user friendly, hard to secure and we cannot recommend any online wallet service where the customer does not retain full control over private keys and where the service itself has *absolutely zero* ability to move your money.  So, from a merchant perspective (and remember, the merchant doesn't have to handle bitcoins...we can pay them dollars each day) it means that there is only a really small potential customer base.  Still, there are some merchants that, even understanding these facts, are interested in starting now in order to be prepared for the future.

Yes, we have quite a few...in various stages.  At the moment we're working on a JSON API to enable OpenCart integration (which several merchants are anxious to get).  We've been busy and just haven't had time to make any other announcements about new merchants.  We also want to do something to help the merchants promote their sites...right after the conference I think we'll start working on something along those lines.

You might want to contact Keyur at CampBX.  They have short selling and margin trading capabilities (however I think they need volume to increase before they can enable those features).  That would be a safer alternative for the lender if you trust CampBX (and I think CampBX themselves will lend the bitcoins).  And of course they have collateral requirements & margin call rules.

What aspect of what I said doesn't make sense to you?  The thieves stole money from people that were hoarding bitcoin and are (presumably) dumping it on the market.  The hoarders had taken money out of circulations and the thieves are taking it from the hoarders and returning it to circulation.  Seems logical, no?

Bit-pay actually does this today.  It provides a notification to the user the moment the transaction is received (usually within a few seconds of sending).  You get a little yellow popup box in the lower right of the page informing you that payment has been received and giving you a link to click to refresh the page.  I chose not to automatically refresh the page because I think that would be a rather invasive and disrupting user experience.

Actually, I'd say the number in circulation has likely increased rather dramatically as a result of the heists.  Consider that the thefts were from people hoarding bitcoin and the thieves are likely trying to circulate them and cash them out as soon as possible.

One day, these people will come to realize that in fact, bitcoin does have fundamental value (I say fundamental as opposed to intrinsic ...no, a bitcoin doesn't make for nice jewelry, but the system itself does enable things that are not possible with anything else in existence...and that, is valuable).  I don't know if they continue to spread this misinformation on purpose, or if they are just too dense to get it.