I realize that this is something I probably should have asked several orders ago (it honestly slipped my mind and it's never been an issue), and I apologize if this has been asked before, but is Amagi at most two steps removed from the mints? I gather that the company has a supplier but are they buying direct from the US Mint and Royal Canadian Mint, for things like Silver Eagles and Silver Maple Leaves respectively, are are there other suppliers up the chain before getting to the mint?

Pretty much every seller will tell you that it could be up to a day before tracking data shows up. Generally that's on the shipping company, not the shipper's end and it may very well be reliant on actual pickup schedules from the shipper. I don't know how Amagi's system works but the way many do, and I'd be the first to say it isn't ideal, is that the email is sent when label is printed but the time between when that happens, it gets put on the box, and the box gets picked up and scanned as picked up by the shipping company could be quite long. The last step being the key one where delays would happen because presumably they're getting a few pickups per day.

You can bitch and moan about it all you want, but any company that tells you that the tracking data will be on Fedex, UPS, or USPS's website instantly when they mark the shipment as outgoing is flat out lying to you.


Edit: This is especially true of late in the day orders from many smaller companies. If your order is late in the day it may not be actually picked up until the next business day so give them at least that long before you start crying foul. Again, that is because many places don't get pickups 24/7.

Someone who can't afford to invest in the used Nook market.

To quote Wikipedia:

"Volume is the quantity of three-dimensional space enclosed by some closed boundary"


The reason that it's mm³ is because it's a measurement of 3 dimensional space.

I agree. A lot of people who comment on bitcoin really need to read up on the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Just because B happened after A, that doesn't mean that A caused B.

What I meant by trust without utility is a system where you can buy bitcoins, they could be held for a limitless amount of time, to take it to the extreme lets say they could be held by a third party for an infinite amount of time (which is more or less true if you give someone an encrypted wallet for which you only have the key) but when you wanted it back you could only get your money back an it was useless for anything else.

Bitcoin isn't like that of course, since you can already get many other things including other currencies and metals, but it's utility is still incredibly limited which limits its value.

I'd add utility to that. I realize that there is no utility without trust since nobody will use even the most useful method of exchange if they can't trust it, but if you have trust then without utility it is still useless.

There is a large block of unspent bitcoins that are some of the first generated coins in the block chain, if one of those were spent then you'd know it was Satoshi or someone who was around at or very near to the beginning. It's impossible to tell how many actually belong to Satoshi but that would at least give a good indication.

There's a Z variable as well which is the time between the end of your wait time and when a confirmation has come through, thus closing the window of opportunity for a double spend. You don't know what Z is but by attempting to estimate it, which can be done by figuring out how often a block is generated and the time since the last block was generated, you can assess the relative risk of a double spend happening between your wait time ending and the the transaction being definitively confirmed.

You don't have privacy though. Unless you're doing an in-person transaction you don't have total privacy when it comes to the "real" to bitcoin transaction, or visa versa, and your bitcoins are entirely traceable to the point where if someone knows info from a single (unwashed) transaction, they can trace it back to pretty much every transaction you've made with an address and even in some cases other addresses you use.  That also makes buying real world products with bitcoin high risk, since any shipped product still requires real world information which is stored on a server which could be hacked which would tie every transaction you made/make to your real world details.


People have been saying the same thing about gold and silver for quite some time. Who knows, it may happen at some point, but in the meantime the diehards didn't sell when it went up and they won't sell until they really have to personally (at which point the price will well below it's peak) or until not just the dollar but most viable alternatives (if the dollar collapsed we'd probably switch to the Canadian Dollar before gold as an acceptable currency) stopped working, at which point they'll have a head start on everyone else but it won't really matter since society will have pretty much collapsed anyway making the majority people who are poor, starving, and don't have precious metals to trade.


Volatility is actively preventing adoption of bitcoin, both because it hurts its real usability and because of the PR effect, mainly nobody except for techno-geeks and crazy people are going to buy into a currency that drops 46% in a day. Also, merchants aren't going to accept a currency that changes so much as to risk rapidly devaluing any sale that they make below their costs which is why many of the merchants that currently accept bitcoin are places like Amagi which deals in metals, or mining companies, which are speculating in their own way on the adoption of bitcoin.

They might have to hold onto them until all the appeals are exhausted, otherwise they could be stuck in a situation of having to pay the cash equivalent (either for the price that they sold it at or the price that they are at when they lose the appeal, although the latter seems less likely).

How would faking the sale work? They'd say they sold them and hold them for operations? That strikes me as questionable compared to just buying new "untainted" BTC to use. This is especially true since BTC is very traceable by design so unless the FBI is willing to launder the money through a mixer, which would be difficult, time consuming, and expensive (since each mixer takes a cut) it would be useless for operations.

I have to agree with you n your last point. They'd go for a discount which would make someone a quick profit since they could, and if they were smart would, immediately turn around and sell them as the market will bear on MtGox.

I'm guessing that Cosmorph is either editing and that's triggering the cooldown, I don't know whether or not it does, or reading through a page and then replying to multiple comments in quick succession.

Someone mentioned before that css hiding (such as through the CSS element ABP extension) could be used to remove the bottom advertisement. Unfortunately only the title of the company is within that element, to hide the whole advertisement you have to hide an unnamed element with much wider parameters. I know that the people have little incentive to name the element, and thus make hiding the advertisement easier but I felt it should be noted in case that starts causing problems for people.

TradeFortress's comment is true but misleading. From what I've read and what the Adblock Plus people say about it, only the really large companies are asked to pay to be added to the list and they still have to meet all the criteria. That still makes it pretty shady but a lot less than just saying that you have to pay to get on that list.

I'd suggest Jack and Jill but having your protagonists fall down a hill makes for a bad example. In crypto I guess it would be the equivalent of sending the key exchange to /dev/null (another overused example trope)

I haven't been tipped anything yet. That being said I haven't started any threads or added anything more than my POV on various issues to discussions that have been going on. Don't get me wrong, I'd be very happy if I ever got tipped but the people who write long posts that answer questions and provide a lot of useful information and the the people who dig up and/or write articles and treatises not only on bitcoin but on currency economics deserve the money more.

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) would be proud.

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True, there is a very strong bias to the status quo. If you are who I think you are then you'll get what I mean when I say that it's a lot like the old days at FPC.


There is a certain amount of truth to that but then we get into the design point of view. Why have an arbitrary limit of 8 places on the protocol in the first place, when technically a much larger limit would have been possible, if only to circumvent it later on. I realize that this brings about the idea of an originalist design version adaptation argument but even if Satoshi couldn't foresee this being a problem, and I don't see how they couldn't, I'm not sure this breaks the system to the point where such a change is necessary, much less desireable.

People should stop saying that a billionth of a bitcoin which is 8 places from the decimal, also called a Satoshi, is the smallest unit possible now.  That may be strictly true on a purely technical protocol level but if the Qt client and the main mining software is in effect limiting confirmations to a certain size then that essentially screws bitcoin over as a micro currency, especially if it skyrockets in value again.

Blacklisting by address is idiotic by the way. Unless you are purposefully trying to block a site that can't or won't change up it's address because it has to keep a known public address, and why would you, it's utterly pointless and a waste of time to even propose because it serves no legitimate purpose and is trivial to get around.