Sorry, my mistake (I've been catching up in the meantime) - I hadn't realised the scenario was a coffee. I guess all I can do is echo the earlier "speak to a tax professional": I doubt HMRC would require reporting a coffee on my tax return, but I genuinely don't know - and the IRS may well be much stricter anyway. Personally, I wouldn't mention that hypothetical coffee to my accountant.

Are you sure? I'm not familiar with US tax laws, but in the UK I'm fairly certain I need to keep track of any capital gains I make (or lose) when I trade fiat.

Curious - "flavour" and "colour" are both fine (no red line) in my Chrome (well, Chromium). (Though, I did notice that "british" and "english" are red-lined - until they're capitalised). You sure your Chrome is set up to use the right locale?


Nope! Red line for "bitcoin" and "Bitcoin".

Regarding 8 (Malleability) - 174,100,000,000 grams of gold have been mined. Total future BTC will "melt" into 2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshis. It's not a straight comparison (a gram of gold can obviously melt down further) but I'd suggest Bitcoin trumps gold for malleability.

Bitcoinwisdom! https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/huobi/btccny

Stealthepixels is good. It shifted from every 30 minutes to every hour recently, and the payouts seem to have gone down (but the withdrawl limit has too) but it's still very generous. It offers a choice of BTC, LTC and USD (through Paypal), which might be useful to the OP.

I'm a little disappointed with Qoinpro - I like the concept (multi-currency faucet - BTC, LTC and several other cryptocurrencies) but as someone mentioned earlier, it's not generous! (it's maybe better if you get referrals).

Not tried the rest, I'll give them a go now!

What is the problem, and who does it affect?


Milli and micro are hardly obscure; they're built into the core Bitcoin client, billions of people across the globe use them already.

But, the most important thing is - no one's "expected" to learn milli and micro. They can - and do - use whatever they're comfortable with. Plenty of people use "Satoshi" already. Plenty of people use mBTC. Personally, I use BTC because it's usually most convenient. Informal, ad hoc conventions will spring up - but they'll do that organically, with communities deciding informally what works for them. They don't - we don't - need a formal convention being imposed.


And who will perform this (presumably non-trivial) task?


I keep hearing about these people who "want" BTC without any reason. I remain unconvinced that they represent anything other than a very small part of the Bitcoin economy, or that they will ever represent a significant part of the economy. I mean, I understand that tourists might buy foreign currency on a whim, but for most people when they buy BTC (or JPY, or LTC, or RMB) they have a reason for it. They either need exactly 7.3 mBTC to buy something worth 7.3 mBTC, or they're investing and have some idea what they're investing in.


Yup, it's a common idiom. I think about "the pounds in my pocket" even when I'm down to only a few pence (I do the same with "euros", even though "euro" is officially the plural). Incidentally, people do spend hundreds, even thousands, of dollars on coins - they're investing in precious metals and are (hopefully!) aware of the value of the stuff they're investing in.


That modest conscious effort? Absolutely - and people are already doing it. It's just that they're coming up with their own solutions, solutions that work for them (even though they might seem bizarre to you and me). I'd like to step back and let them get on with it. A decentralised payment system and digital currency is a great idea - why would I want to centralise any aspect of it?

Are there people who think "I've got 50 bucks! You know what, I've a notion to buy some bitcoins. How much would I get? Oh no! Only 83 millibitcoins I guess I just won't bother."? I guess there might be, but it's presumably a fairly small demographic. Surely most people buying BTC have some reason for buying it - they'll want to buy something that's priced in BTC, or they'll be looking into BTC as an investment and they'll have some idea how much they plan to invest, and how much it costs in fiat, etc. I'd hope these latter two groups would base decisions on more practical matters than perceptions of size.

To be honest, though, I think this is all moot - we will adopt conventions like you suggest, and others. Different groups of people using Bitcoin will use different conventions. Already there's a whole community of people thinking in terms of "Satoshis". I tend to think in terms of BTC (force of habit), but people are clearly starting to think of mBTC. And that's fine! It's all nice and decentralised. The OP suggested a technical solution; I believe that if there is a problem it's a social problem, and one for which we don't need a centralised, imposed solution.

I wonder how true that is for the US? Presumably folk in the US have gone through a couple of decades of bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes? For that matter, surely people in the US are familiar with expressing numbers like this -> 1,000,000,000.000,000,001 <- ?

I guess I just don't buy this "it's too confusing for some people" argument. The first time I bought real estate it involved a learning curve; but I needed to do it (buy a house) so I made the effort to learn the jargon, the regulations and the units used in the locale. If people need to do something, they learn how to do it. And the learning required for Bitcoin, compared with purchasing property, is pretty minimal (fairly minimal jargon, no regulations, the units are familiar to anyone who's bought a hard drive). Maybe I just have more faith in other people's friends and elderly relatives.

No, you're definitely the poster I responded to:

I'm UK-based, so MtGox was never an option for me (in terms of selling or, more recently, buying - I did a spot of trading on MtGox in 2011). I've used OTC trades to sell - this was in 2011, and mostly through bitcointalk. (I have sold on an exchange, but it was UK-based - and it's now closed).

I've been buying BTC recently, and I stuck with the OTC approach and used Localbitcoins.

It seems to me that OTC trades are more expensive than exchange trades, but for me it's my only option (at the moment) and honestly I'm OK with paying slightly more, because I'm investing for the medium- to long-term. YMMV!

Well you asked how they were making their money, and I based my response on that. Not sure what the point of your question was if it wasn't how they make money? Unless... no, that's far too cynical.

Scenario A:

I "invest" 1BTC.

Sufficient suckers investors sign up, allowing them to pay me a "dividend" (or whatever they're calling it).

I keep my 1BTC "invested".

Sufficient investors sign up, allowing them to keep paying me a "dividend".

I post on bitcointalk that they are great, everyone should invest, and this is, like, totally not a ponzi, dude.


Scenario B:

I "invest" 1BTC.

Sufficient investors sign up, allowing them to pay me a "dividend".

I keep my 1BTC "invested".

Not enough "investors" are signing up, I kiss my 1BTC goodbye.


Scenario C:

I "invest" 1BTC.

Insufficient "investors" sign up, I don't receive a dividend, and when I try to withdraw my 1BTC - I can't



In scenarios B and C they obviously profit. The "gamble" (because that - bizarrely - is how people justify these "investments" to themselves and others) is that scenario A applies, but we have no way of knowing at what point scenario B or C will kick in.

Disclaimer: this is a comment on Ponzi scams in general, not a specific comment on btc-arbs (potential investors/speculators/gamblers will need to do their own due diligence).

Absolutely. But... I don't think you'd find too many people here who disparage PMs in the way the video disparages BTC. I believe PMs have a place in a diversified portfolio - partly for the "SHTF" reason you mention, partly to spread risk (BTC's volatility risk, the risk I can't access local exchanges when I need, etc). That said, I'm an expatriate worker so right now BTC plays a bigger role in my investments than PMs.

I guess I don't understand "Google fact" - it still seems a massive jump from "I couldn't find any new analyses on Google" to "the 'bitcoin community' does not want to know what happened".

That's not really a "fact", more your opinion of what other people may think.

I'm interested, just mindful that there's likely going to be a long wait before before we have any news.

How so? Should they instead accumulate a hoard of BTC while running up fiat debts? How will they purchase their merchandise? Pay their employees' salaries? Pay taxes? Pay bills?

Why is this a bad thing? Businesses that accept BTC are going to need to convert BTC to fiat at some point - unless they're fortunate enough to be able to pay all their costs in BTC. They can either do that through bitpay or they can sell their BTC directly on an exchange, OTC, whatever. But at some point they will need to sell BTC to pay utility bills, local and national taxes, etc - perhaps even their merchandise.


I think adopting BTC is exactly what these businesses are doing, and we should support them. I'll worry about them still using fiat when it becomes possible for businesses to function solely using non-fiat.

I hate to be alarmist, but I think the rate of expansion in June 2011 might have been higher than it is now: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-ever.png. The following month, however, saw the expansion rate fall dramatically. Despite that, I don't see that many similarities between then and now, so I'm remaining quietly bullish...

Last couple of times I bought BTC it was on Localbitcoins, which I hadn't used before. I created an account, clicked on a seller's ad, followed instructions to send the seller money, the money cleared within two hours, and Localbitcoins released the BTC from escrow. This is in the UK, which has a bad rep for many things, but is admittedly maybe a bit more progressive than other states. Some buyers/sellers on Localbitcoins require a real name in advance (but they'll get my name when I transfer money to them anyway), but that's as close to verification I've found on Localbitcoins. I guess it would depend, too, on the size of the trade - I keep mine around the 1-2BTC mark, I don't know if larger trades cause AML/KYC to kick in (I'd imagine so).

tl;dr - for the hypothetical businessman or young guy, buying small amounts of BTC in the UK is quicker and easier than shopping on Amazon