Is there one?

Apart from general bitcoin news, I'd like to keep track of every single new thing that's available for sale for bitcoins... and um... rss is what I use.

Does anyone know of anyone doing this?

What I'd like is a site that looks like the way Opera handles RSS or http://www.notcot.org - basically an illustrated RSS feed of bitcoin products.

This would (preferably) be filterable by category... and um... that's all. Just something where I can see at a glance what's new.

No - actually I asked a series of questions, that you failed to answer.


Let's try them one at a time:


1) Do you really operate out of 132 New Bond Street or is that just one of those rent-a-mailbox deals?

    If you do, how come when I google "132 New Bond Street" there seem to be a fair few Nigerian-style scams operating out of the same address?

Yea - we don't just need it for bitcoin either, we need it for all the social networks and centralised data-silos.

As to impossibility - probably no more so than bit-torrent before it was invented, and as far as I can gather, Bitcoin itself is exactly what you described - only it only records transactions. There may be a way of making a parallel model that stores sha hashes for "verified" data. Dunno - I'm a programmer, but I'd have to go into deep-trance mode for about a week to even start figuring this one out.

With regards transactions (rather than reputation management... oh, and an auction system and affiliate stuff etc)... with regards transactions, then what it probably requires is an API onto a bitcoin daemon - so people with genuine UX talent can turn the client into something that's not going to frighten away everyone who likes reassuring iPhone interfaces. This might already exist... I don't know, but the Pirate Party Founder guy was going on about this as one of the key-requirements etc, so I'm guessing it doesn't.



nope, you'll have to look for that one yourself. There are moves afoot to decentralise DNS though - and I think maybe Diaspora or Friendika are having a crack at it.


We're at war basically - and the attacks on wikileaks highlighted major weaknesses in the system... a decentralised currency is just a part of it. We need to decentralise everything... and the "troubles" that bitcoin had about a month ago were all down to centralisation.

So it's not actually an API - rather a centralised site for handling ebay-style reputations? With an API?

The core philosophy to this looks to me like an attempt to de-anonymise the currency (and I'm not sure that that is a good thing) by putting all participating payments through a central system (and I'm not sure that's a good thing) in a non open-source/transparent way (and we all know that's a bad thing)... for money.


Bitcoin could really do with some system that allows people to build an ecosystem of applications on top of it... but it needs to be something like The Apache Foundation, rather than someone who looks like they're operating out of a rented mailbox, with a website with self-referencing links embedded in the page - presumably to trick google.


What we need is:


Open-Source
Free
Decentralised


And not just for the simple fact that we don't want another MtGox-style, opaque, single-point of failure going tits-up on us... but also because of the spirit of the thing. The currency itself should be optimised for scarcity, the supporting infrastructure should not be.

Well I was criticizing it - it looks really dodgy to me.


Do you really operate out of 132 New Bond Street or is that just one of those rent-a-mailbox deals?

If you do, how come when I google "132 New Bond Street" there seem to be a fair few Nigerian-style scams operating out of the same address?


Why have you got social-links that don't link to anything?

Have you basically just described a nice-to-have API without having implemented any of it? (or actually understanding how you're going to do it?)


Are you intending to build a closed-source, non-distributed system,  on top of a distributed, open-sourced network?


Are you intending to charge for the use of this API?


--

"Well versed in SQL Optimization" - riiight... not really a developer then? Out of curiosity, how come you're based in the UK with all these non-UK spellings?



Sorry... paraphrasing Gandhi is now a hackneyed cliche - it means absolutely nothing... and launching a venture in which you haven't "wasted" more than an hour on the "landing page", reeks of bullshit to me. At the very best it betrays a profound lack of understanding as to how to do web-marketing/interaction.


Any money-related product that uses a picture of an attractive woman to try to... what? attract people?, ought to ring major alarm bells.

It rings alarm-bells all over the place - everything from social-links that don't link to anything, to the stock-photo of the woman in the header, to the admonitions for "investment" (avec typos) to the bad HTML under the hood to...

... New Bond Street? Sorry? I mean London's a funny place... it takes all sorts, but New Bond Street is where all the designer-clothes shops are, and anyone who can afford an office there, can afford a web-designer...

... except, that in London there are these agencies that rent out mailboxes in relatively salubrious neighborhoods, to businesses who are (more often than not) somewhat south of salubrious.

And if you google the address, you get (as you'd expect) a couple of clothes shops, but also a couple of Nigerian-style scams on every page.


I've been wrong about these things before. But... I know what open-source projects look like, and I wouldn't touch a bitcoin API with a bargepole unless it was open-source... and this just has "wrong" written all over it.

If I had to make a cynical guess, I'd say it's someone who's written a description of an API and is fishing for investment money... and just wants to get rich without really knowing what they're doing.

Anyone seen this? bittrust.org

I read an article somewhere describing it as a fait-accompli, but it looks as dodgy as fuck to me.

Yea - Google News was in beta for years... but I instinctively feel it's a different kettle of fish when you've got millions of dollars... in some cases, people's life-savings sitting in it. And I don't think Skype launched in Beta.


I've no doubt the UX thing has come up before. I was just floating the idea of people already invested in bitcoins seeing paying for professional/talented UX people as a a better investment than... just buying another $100 worth of bitcoins.

Ideally this should be set up so people can do their own skins/themes... so (as we're seeing in the rapid improvement of web based market interfaces) the improvements can be ecosystemic. I do think it needs to go deeper than that though - UX needs to be done on the language used to describe Bitcoin... because talented engineers and talented communicators aren't often the same thing.

And I think the client is in need of some talented communicators.

So recently I stumbled into this thing where it looked as though payments were incredibly slow to happen... because I didn't realise that your transaction doesn't show up until you've downloaded the entire blockchain.


If I open up the client, I'm presented with bits of information like "k/hash" and "blocks" and whatnot. There's a load of new concepts that I need to learn - and I'm a techie, and I find them hard-going. They are absolutely not going to find a lot of traction with any of the civilians I know.


So... not wanting to tread on the toes of the people who are designing the current interface - the bitcoin client is really not up to speed on the User-Experience front.

I'm aware that this software is supposedly in Beta - but it's doing what? $300M transactions a year? That's a little too much weight-of-responsibility to maintain the beta-moniker, in my opinion. What this software looks like to me is the user-interfaces that VOIP services used before Skype turned up with something that they'd spent UX TLC on, and wiped the field.

So I was thinking that if we want an uptick in people using BTC, then it might be good to get a company that specialises in UX to do something. Somebody like Clearleft.com, who will actually do focus-group testing etc.

Now this ain't going to come cheap - but if we treat it like a kickstarter.com project (or even AS a kickstarter.com project) then we could possibly raise a fairly healthy sum. I'd be happy to put $100 into it - as an investment because I think that if we do this, BTC will increase in value.

And I don't think it would hurt on the marketing front to have someone with experience and expertise in UX to look at the language we're using to describe this either.

So what do you reckon?

Linux is the Bitcoin of operating systems. I have to use it.

I ran the newest under wine - so you maybe right.

re: "tech-savvy" - LOL, indeed - back in the days when I used to program mass-eprom-writing devices in fuckin BINARY there wasn't so much tech to know. The amount I don't know has grown exponentially since then.

Re: Changing the title:

Can a moderator do that? They probably have a better idea of what the most useful title would be than me.

"What is a white-economy merchant?"


A white-economy merchant is something :

 - in a narrow/technical sense that isn't illegal
 - in a slightly broader sense isn't flying under the radar because it's legally or morally dubious
 - in a broader sense, isn't going to be used as an example of "Why bitcoins should be banned"
 - in the broadest sense, something you can cite to the cynical as an example of bitcoins actually working as a legit means of exchange.

You can tell your mother about it in other words.

The router is a dynalink - not sure what the model number is - various stickers on the bottom with 20 digit numbers that are too small to read.

I did have the same problem with the vodafone dongle, and I don't have the problem if I run the client under Wine - so I'd be mildly surprised if it was the router.


As I can get Bitcoin to run under Wine then... fine.


--

re: exchange-rate/pay?

If the value of bitcoins goes up 10,000 times in the next year it won't cost me any more to use them, only to "buy one"... but I don't think the point is to buy bitcoins, it's to buy things with bitcoins.


--

re: Linux setup.

I'm dual-booting Linux 9.10 and Windows 7 using Grub. For my sins, I'm a developer so do the whole 12.0.0.1 thing - with local web-based image manipulation, accounts/stock-tracking and client-sites... and am (alas) reliant on windows for the giga-tonnage of software needed to do decent video-editing.

So. It takes me about a week to set up a new machine, a large part of which seems to involve copying and pasting things I don't really understand into CLI boxes... until something works - which leaves me with what feels like a delicately balanced card-castle, that's taken about a week to build.

So I ain't going to do anything so traumatic as upgrade my entire operating system. That happens when I get a new machine, or something absolutely catastrophic happens to the current one.

Jesus Christ. I just said I got it to run under wine.

Know what I am? I'm a legit, white-economy merchant. http://www.goldenmeancalipers.com

I'm one of the people that you badly need to legitimise this currency - and I've done my best to evangelise it - take a look at my bitcoin page

http://www.goldenmeancalipers.com/bitcoins/ ( I've changed the last line to prove that it's my site. )


Ok?


Now, the reason I'm not going to change the title is that it will become meaningless to anyone else who has the same problem as me, but doesn't know what an updated-blockchain is.

Yes, I do run Ubuntu, and no, I don't know how to port-forward. I simply have never had cause to do it.

HSBC is my UK bank account, that's why I referred to it.

And my attitude is one that you get from someone who's been banging their head against a brick wall for the last 3 hours.


--


re: "When it is easy for 90% of the population you will have to pay a hell of a lot more."

err... sorry? How is that? I thought this was open-source?

Yes, could do that. Doesn't describe the situation to anyone who doesn't know what an updated-blockchain is though.

Look out the window ---->

See that? That's the rest of the world. That's who doesn't know what an updated blockchain is. Those are the people you want to be using bitcoin.




No idea how to do that. I'm one of those people you may or may not be able to see out the window.

Yea, tried that. No difference.

Well Fuck. A. Duck.

It runs under wine.

Ok

 - I've tried it with my vodafone dongle... (so I'm not using my normal wifi router at all)
 - I've tried /home/nick/bitcoin-0.3.17/bin/64/bitcoin  -rescan -noirc -upnp -addnode=64.31.38.250-addnode=74.82.216.10 -addnode=178.63.62.15 -addnode=173.224.125.222 -addnode=91.85.220.84 -addnode=91.85.220.84 -addnode=173.224.125.222 -addnode=86.5.50.90 -addnode=178.255.199.86  (and innumerable variants therof)
- I don't think I have a firewall running at all. Unless Ubuntu is craftily running something that I don't know about
- I'm not going to upgrade my whole operating system just to get bitcoin to work
- I'm not going to use windows.

Although I guess I could boot into windows, install bitcoin, copy the wallet.dat across, download the blocks and then copy it back.


This is kindof a pain in the arse though - it has managed to download 133905 blocks. It's just jamming up now for reasons I know not.