tubro, good point about the protection cost.

Bitcoins really have no initial "printing" cost, as traditional currency does.  USD costs approximately $0.096/bill, regardless of denomination.  So, taking that into consideration, let's look at bitcoins.

If we WERE using $50,000/day in electricity (which isn't possible at the moment, but I agree, could be a possibility down the road if BTC value and mining difficulty were to even out), then it would be costing approximately $0.001 per $1 USD worth of bitcoin to protect the currency.  Or, put another way, it would cost 0.001 BTC per 1 BTC to protect the currency.

At that rate, it would only take 96 days to "catch up" to the cost of printing a single dollar.

Again, I don't believe that our collective electrical costs are anywhere close to $50,000/day... I would guess around $10,000, based on a slightly higher average electrical rate than my own.  So say it is $10,000.  That still means just 480 days to catch up to the cost of printing a $1 bill instead.  And I am certain that most bills stay in circulation much longer than a year or two.

So I would agree, it does seem like a terrible waste compared to printing USD at least.  I do not see any practical fix to this though - hashing and securing the network takes power, and there's just no way around that.

Haha, good point. 

Maybe a link to your feedback profile on the website, and say something like "If you believe this casino is too legit to quit, please leave positive feedback for us at <linky>."

*shrug*

I agree though, it would be hard to get people to leave feedback for you.

Ooooh, I love the reflection of the bitcoin though.

It looks good on the web, but I'd have to agree, I am not sure that it would stand out enough in the "real world".  Black background with a yellow/orange text would look best.

Still two more feedback prizes to be claimed!

Seriously?  Why?  That's so lame...

Sorry, I just stole the second most hits spot from you. 

Still 3 free 0.10 prizes left for the owners of the accounts on which 3 new feedbacks are left!  I'll do the payouts all at once once I have 10 legitimate feedbacks posted. 

I had to ban a couple of people from the system for abusing it, and I am working on fixing some vulnerabilities exposed by fabianhjr's site audit.  These updates should help to prevent people from creating multiple accounts and feedbacking themselves with them.  Certainly open to other suggestions and bug-finding from other people, so let me know if you have any comments to make about the site!

Yeah, it's true.  With difficulty jumping 60%+ this time around, and projected to jump another 50-60% the next time around, and possibly again, it'll be much more profitable to dump the monies into bitcoins themselves, and hope the value of them goes up.

Yeah, I get a lot of traffic from strategic postings in the minecraft forums for my own minecraft website as well.  Getting around 2000 pageviews/day now, so hopefully someone will be interested in advertising on it once the advertisement slot is approved.

Thanks for the free audit fabian!  VERY informative, and definitely gave me a list of things to work on.    I will call on you again once I get those resolved for a more detailed audit.

As others already said, you should be suspicious of ratings - they are a guideline only.  But, you cannot rate yourself, and I do have ways to detect people self-rating themselves.  If you are suspicious of anyone's rating in this way, I will check it out in more detail.

I do GREATLY encourage people to leave ratings with specific websites and URLs, if any.  Specifically, I am thinking of "for sale" threads on the forums.  That will help give some verification to the transaction behind each piece of feedback, and hopefully make some of the legitimate feedback pop out more.

I am also thinking about revealing the names of the people giving ratings, to help people "self-verify" that another person's feedback is legitimate.  I would appreciate feedback (lol) of whether I should make use of that feature or not.

Lol, yeah, I'm completely out of any sort of loop that would provide me with a fake ID.  I think the bitcoin crowd on this forum would constitute the sketchiest crowd I converse with, so that's not saying much.

That's a dang good idea... I might take you up on this when one of my websites is popular enough to warrant it. 

Fake ID for beer eh?  Underage?  Good luck with that...

Nope, it just means you need to get another!

New registrations on bitcoinfeedback.com have slowed to an unacceptable level, so it's time for a new promotion!  I can't afford to do another 0.25 BTC promo, so it'll just have to be 0.10 BTC this time, sorry!

The NEXT 10 people to receive feedback, as of the time of this posting, will receive 0.10 BTC each, sent to the bitcoin address they have attached to their account!

http://www.bitcoinfeedback.com

I think it uses some sort of moving average.  Maybe a 24 hr average.  So over the last 24 hrs, there has been 12.6 blocks/hr found.  We should see that number drop in the coming hours, and even out to the new blocks per hour average after a day or two.  Alongside of that, the difficulty ratio will also change, since the difficulty is ultimately determined by how many blocks/hr are found at the current difficulty level.

Why are you against pay-for forums?  They have better support, better plugins, better features, etc.  I can understand wanting to save money on small-time forums (I have a couple of phpBB forums myself), but when you are as big as this bitcoin forum has become, there is no reason not to consider paying for decent software.  Especially since the phpBB captcha features are so quickly and easily overrun.

DERP, I suppose what we're getting at through the course of this conversation is that BTC is a currency in its infancy.  There are really only two reasons one should use it as a currency at this moment:

- You dislike centralized/governmental currencies, and would like to see bitcoins replace them all, so you are willing to put the effort into making as many transactions with bitcoins as possible, in the hopes that it will help stabilize and promote the currency.
- You are a speculator, and are actively using it to make money through speculation, investments, and other related transactions.

It is a HOPE that bitcoins will achieve the same or greater level of usage and usability as something like gold does.  It's not there yet, not even close.  But it is growing stronger and more usable every day.  It's just not to the point where it can compete with other currencies out there, but it CAN compete with other currencies if more and more people keep using it.

BTW, there is a way to physically exchange bitcoins too - look at www.bitbills.com

You need to check out www.mtgox.com if you think there isn't ample opportunity to speculate in bitcoins.

Why not pay in USD?  Uhhh, good question.  I think the idea is that USD is an inflationary currency controlled by the government, and not many people here like the idea of their money being devalued at the whim of the government.  Also, anonymity, though you already mentioned that that wasn't an important factor for you.  Also, easier to do.  You can send USD with services like Paypal, but it can be complicated, and you can get chargebacks as a seller, etc.  Mostly it's the lack of central control - that no one else can add money to the supply at any time.  It's completely secure in that manner, in that there will never be more than 21 million coins in total.

Why not pay in gold?  Because not very many people accept straight-up gold as payment anymore.  Because it is difficult to know the exact value of the gold you hold.  Because you have to go through the whole process of selling gold, getting your gold verified, getting a goldgram, sending said goldgram, etc.  Bitcoin is EASY.  You just copy/paste an address you want to send bitcoins to, enter the total number to send, and bam.  You're done.

Back of a stamp?  Well, basically what I mean is, your entire private key for your wallet can be stored in a very small digital (or analog, if you choose) space.  I was kind of making a jab at the Mission Impossible movies though, where they store some sort of digital medium on the underside of a stamp on a postcard.

You can use a service like clearcoin to ensure the seller delivers.  If they don't, you can have the funds refunded to your account.  Of course, this poses a risk to the seller as well...