how many 5870s do you have and where are you located?

The HTC phone is no longer available.

I'll let the OLPC B2 go for 20 BTC shipped to Europe, 25 BTC to US. Only for the remainder of this week

If we can assume agents are honest, we can at least assure a zero liability system;
- Agent A (sender) tells Agent B (receiver) to lock $100
- Agent B sells $100 of btc from market and tells A how many coins that took (X)
- Agent A receives $100 from client and sends X coins to Agent B
- Agent B gives $100 to other client

So now Agent A is +$100 and -X BTC, Agent B is -$100 and +X BTC. Say coins increase in price, Agent A can request X coins back from B at $100 and net will be 0 (except for the transfer of the $100, which may be factored as a fee)

Why do this? Why wouldn't B just sell the coins instead? Because this is not a "make money fast" scheme, this is a value transfer service. And you that because you know it works both ways. There should be an expiration on this agreement, of course, so if within 30 days A doesn't decide to exercise the buy option, that's that.

I believe a simple solution is to have an "agreement process", a hand shake on the transfers. So you have a client wanting to send €100 to my geographic region, we agree to do this (regardless of exchange, you say you'll receive the €100, I say I'll pay the €100 which I must already have) and that's that.

You ask me for a redeem code (which in fact closes the deal) and I give you the code + the bitcoin amount to be paid, based on bitcoincharts weighted averages (24h? USD because it has the most volume?) which you'll then proceed to send to me.

What I do with the coins is then my own responsibility, and if the market is going down I'll sell my own coins before you send yours, or if the other way around I'll set a stop order for the rate we agree upon, whatever.

The only caveat is I can be completely wrong and make a bad move, loosing most of my coins / cash. A rogue agent could decide to cut the losses and not deliver the transaction, disappearing from the act. So we need a 'warranty fund' to protect the sending agent and the client, which would be the initial deposit you spoke of, I assume.

Could work...

Yes, that is unfortunately very true, although I see two major things having impact that may very well change that; the publicity deriving from an EU wide ruling stating Bitcoins are Currency, and the need to change the very definition of Currency on their own rule book and, from that, the attention an 'alternative currency not managed by any central government' would attract to all the struggling or embargoed countries.

There is good potential either way, though I'd personally prefer bitcoins to stay in the "shadow" for a bit longer.

Well, this could be a real downturn for the open exchanges, but could just as well come to assert one of bitcoin's advertised strength, the non centralized, pseudo-anonymous nature of it. So exchanges could no longer easily exist, it would be much more expensive and complicated, but actual person to person transactions could still exist as they do now, and things like #bitcoin-otc could very well become the central point for unofficial exchanging the btc.

It would certainly put a (temporary?) brake on the bot driven speculation.

I go through pretty much the same thought process recurrently, but I don't think that's the itch we are trying to scratch here. You mention buying bitcoins with cash, whereas in this system proposal bitcoins are an inner and undisclosed part of the system, at least to the client / user. This is a means of using bitcoins as a transport, not as a product.

Though a well trusted network would go a long way if also accepting to sell coins for cash... just sayin

Maybe S3052 could help manage the initial deposit fund and even guide the agents on to the most profitable route to handle the coins received... I'm sure we could get to some kind of arrangement.

Well, I could do the VAT exempt thing too, but unfortunately you can't run a company without a real accounting expert around here, and that costs money Still, I'm sure there are many options, you are right.


No reason for it to only work with well balanced nodes, as you can always buy through the existing methods (transfer, WU, PP, etc) if you need to move cash into coins. There would be very little risk, assuming the nodes trust each other.

Speculating with the coins used on the transfer is a great recipe for disaster imho. Not all of us are good traders, most of us are simple emotional persons which, without proper training and a definitive plan will only feed the sharks, as I'm sure many noticed recently :p

Anyway, how would you and I go about starting this? We'd just agree to buy and sell coins from each other with the promise to delivering the the proceeds of the selling to some person, physically? I'm game for a little experiment, but I'd like to have the actual network shielded from the forum. Basically a network of peers is needed, and we should keep these only known amongst themselves, then when someone needs to send cash they'd post/email/pm one of us (and I mean you ) who'd forward to the closest person geographically?

I would love to see the old and trusted members of this forum to step forward to build the agent network! Again, I'm game.

Will you send to Europe? I'm travelling to the US soon and could use a local phone to prevent roaming charges. I could just buy a prepaid SIM while there, I'm sure, but this could work too

If you think about it from a business standpoint, at least based on how it goes around my geographic area, you'll have to charge VAT to your clients because you are selling them "goods" (code in piece of paper). And you pay taxes over the profit you make, so in order to "keep it real" you have to get invoices from those that sell you the codes, and these will be in whatever currency the deal is completed in (BTC isn't officially exchanged, so are we talking barter?). It's easy to see how this can become over-complicated if your business is not to be known as transferring the value, be it in fiat or codes. If you are reselling you have to buy them, and all needs to have proper paperwork.

But forgetting about the legalities of this, and believe me that while I'm playing devil's advocate I am *really* interested in this, here's something that could help in balancing the books across agents; future options. I have a client that wants to send €100 to the US, I ask you how many coins that'll be and  you say 100.0. While this price may or may not be realistic, I send you the coins knowing that:
1) you will send the €100 to the recipient
2) you agree to buy me the same amount at the same rate, so I can ask someone on your physical surroundings to just send the €100 back to me if all you do is get bitcoins at very low prices from me

Ok, you really think that sending money from the US to Iran is the same as mcd selling burgers in both US and Iran? Well, I wish you the best of luck with that

Seriously, though, you can operate legally on *each* country, I'm sure. If all you do are internal transfers you are home free, bar whatever prohibitive taxes and regulations your country might have, but sending money abroad is not the same thing at all, I'm sure you'll agree.

So I'd be an agent, someone would give me €100 to transfer to the US. I would log into the 'exchange network' where every peer is known and trusted and would find an agent that was close to the transfer destination. I would already have both bitcoins and cash balance on that exchange somehow (like a closed mtgox) and would ask to sell €100 worth of bitcoins to that agent.

The other agent would receive €100 worth of bitcoins and would then proceed to deliver the €100 he already has to the recipient.

Each agent would have to have some cash and some bitcoins to start with, register in the 'exchange network' and agree to buy and sell coins at whatever exchange rate is set there. This exchange rate could very well be 0.0001 or 1000.0, so as long as everyone agrees to use it, but obviously to prevent greed taking over people it should closely follow the external exchange rates.

Now, what's in for the client? No nonsense transfers, very low fees, quick as can be.
And for the agent, there should be a simple fee structure, this is not something I can just make up without giving a little thought, and might be a deal breaker if a structure that is both cheap for the client and interesting for the agent can't be found.

The exchange is the "central" point of this whole endeavor, and we might actually be better off with something more distributed, but I can't see how, bar trusting everyone, we can do without some central handling of the fiat part.

And keeping it legal or not is, at best, a matter of opinion. If you mean 'US' legal or 'EUR' legal, that might be possible. Both legal at the same time, slightly more complicated. Worldwide legal? No way that is even remotely possible!

I was trying to find an excuse to give the glbse a try. Thank you for coming up with a completely "out of the box" way!

I'm holding a handful of those 'stocks' now, so I'll just wait until my conscience kick in, I've always thought of horse racing as animal brutality. But anything to make the bitcoin ecosystem thrive

The device interests me, the price does not. If buying in the US I can get a new one with an invoice I can write off on my business accounting and 1 year warranty for ~100btc (refurbished by apple, new elsewhere). But I'm in Europe so this isn't all that interesting to me. I am on the market for one such thing but the price has to make it worth my while.

I understand yours is pristine and has extras, I'm not saying it is not worth what you ask, but in the case where you don't find interested parties and are in a hurry to sell, I'll bid 80btc, shipped to Europe (that's roughly $400 atm).

Yeah, I'll gladly sell you both (2x2GB), shipped to US for 5 coins (less than $25), to make it a round number You can probably buy memory not certified for Mac for much cheaper though.

I'm not paying for link displays, but I'm willing to pay for someone to buy one of these for me and ship it to Europe Any takers? Will pay in bitcoins.

Maybe... I'm not bidding any more until I know what the end time is

Wait, what time is it there? I assume you got no bids on your chosen timespan...