(Sorry about my limited Germany, have to reply in English)

Hi, I have used bitstamp.net purchasing small amounts of bitcoins and withdrawed each time my bitcoins successfully. I am in no way affiliated with them, and haven't withdrawed any euros from them, only deposits & bitcoin withdrawals.

Works well. However volume is very small.

Purchasing small amounts of marijuana via postal service is not very risky. Even if you get caught the result is maybe a small fine.

Of course using drugs in the first place isn't very smart, but if you are going to use them, ordering them from silk road would actually be safer than buying them from the streets. Don't have to deal with shady people.

I think it would be not very wise to publish any data for Silk Road guys - I guess they are in this for the money, and they make money by taking cut from each sale. Anything else is just a waste of time.

I guess that silk road guys/other drug sellers are not very interested in promoting bitcoin itself or its value. For them bitcoin is just handy money laundering method - if something better arises, I guess they would move to it.

It should be also noted that the values published by finley are false. He admitted using web proxy for accessing tor, and was somehow getting wrong numbers. It appears that using web proxies for tor hidden services is not recommended.

Also there isn't any way to get numbers like "users online" from silk road (unless you are silk road operator yourself).

OK, so I had to check it again now and there 1611 advertisements in the drugs section. Two days ago it was a little under 1500. So about 150 new advertisements in two days.

If the current growth continues, it is very interesting phenomenon. Let's see if law enforcement can do something about it. According to the wikipedia the site has been online from february, and I guess the LE should have known about it for at least 4-5 months.

I guess you are looking at the silk road discussion forum numbers, which are separate from actual Silk Road. The actual silk road doesn't disclose those numbers (I didn't see them anywhere).

The silk road forums and actual silk road are entirely different sites. You need to create separate accounts for the discussion forums. I would guess that most people who are customers on silk road might even not be registered on the forums.

Well, I don't know. I have visited it couple of times just for interest, and the amount of drug ads went from 1000 something to almost 1500 in a couple of months. (last time checked couple of days ago). Let's see if the trend grows.

I haven't used tor before, and I think the effort of getting to the site is easy - you just install tor browser bundle, the address of Silk Road is in wikipedia easily found with googling.

I also checked the feedback of one seller - he had 100+ pages of positive feedback. From my software business I have learned that only about 1-10% of my customers leave feedback in app store/android market. This is very different market of course.

Also it is very hard to estimate the amount of sales on silk road - you can estimate it by following the feedback, but i think feedback isn't required. (Somebody correct me if I am not right)

Speculators also like to think that the silk road business will increase bitcoin price - that is actually not the case, at least the effect isn't that big. Silk road and the sellers don't need to hold their bitcoins. During the escrow process the funds are hedged to dollars. Also probably now most sellers just sell their bitcoins as soon as possible, because of longtime downward trend.

Hi, I'm still coming. Maybe I can pay my share tomorrow at the meeting? If I understood right, we are going by train and somehow we get some kind of group discount?

Haven't booked actual conference ticket yet, will do it as soon as possible...

Most people find it too difficult to use bitcoins, therefore I'm not surprised that there is a lot less conversions than with paypal. Paypal is easy to use and people are used to it.

It is free world, everyone is free to create their own "ShitCoin" or whatever.

Maybe in the longer run, someone will invent a better cryptocurrency, and I think it is a good thing. Then people will move slowly to the new cryptocurrency.

I'm in. I hope I understood everything correctly, using my limited German knowledge + google translate

I will be there - bald, beard and earrings.

Ich komme da. Ich habe Ohrringe und Bart

Yeah, it supports NFC too. It's an excellent app, I frequently check for updates.

I used to think that NFC is the way to go (and I still think it will be the future), bus since I have been using the excellent Android Bitcoin Wallet (https://market.android.com/details?id=de.schildbach.wallet) using QR codes, I have came to the conclusion that QR codes are good enough.

Actually, the benefit of NFC or other technologies over QR codes are pretty minimal: QR codes are fast, easy and you can start accepting bitcoins with them by just printing your QR code out. It takes from me no more than 5 seconds to scan a QR code with my android app. I would argua that paying with QR codes and bitcoins is faster than cash.

Any plans for a new meetup? I just recently moved in to Berlin and would be interested in meeting local bitcoin enthusiasts. Leider spreche ich nicht viel Deutsch...

Actually I minimised/changed the project pretty heavily, and it turned out to be that connects freelance translators and those who want translations to be done. Stay tuned

Also django-bitcoin is pretty much usable now, so if you want to create your marketplace/escrowservice/bitcoin-powered bittorrent site/whatever, you can do it more easily now!

The Hackathon is over, thanks to everyone who participated! We had very great participating ideas, including:
- bitcoin offline wallet (winner #1)
- bountychest.com bounty hunting web site, earn bitcoins through bounties
- bitcoin powered web site for freelance translators + django-bitcoin module (winner #2)
- sms gateway to buy bitcoins
- put bitcoins to a nfc tag with android wallet
- rfid tag powered children's storybook + nfc mobile app (nokia's ideasproject winner)

Sorry about rude words man, maybe I'm just in a bad mood. But seriously move this thread to marketplace section.

Move this to the right section, asshole. This forum gets shittier every day.

Location change: Because the renovation at Aalto Venture Garage is heavily delayed, we have to keep the hackathon at Desing Factory, which is right next to the Aalto Venture Garage (Betonimiehenkuja 5).

Also I'm happy to announce that Mt. Gox will be sponsoring the hackathon. I guess everybody here knows about Mt. Gox, the biggest bitcoin exchange in the world