Hi all,

I'm one of the guys behind the Mini. Thanks for your feedback. We are still officially in the "pre-order" phase, but have shipped 3 units already. We are very excited to get feedback from those first few customers, too.


For what the Mini currently is, the price is about as low as we can go, because we include shipping, all the cables and things needed (and we are streamlining the shipping), and a full current blockchain on the flash drive. As technology in the open source boards quickly improves and we start seeing increases in sales, we'll be able to upgrade our base hardware.


We've not run into that particular issue, but we'll keep our eye out, and ask for that specific feedback from customers. Thanks.

We've been working on this project for several months, and have gone back and forth about who our target customer is, which affects our value add that we immediately offer. As bitcoin has been increasingly mentioned in MSM, international markets falter, and regulation has been somewhat clarified, we expect the user base of bitcoin to at least double over the next 12 months to 24 million+. The specific demographic we are targeting is 18-35 yr olds, smart, financially aware, but not command line savvy. That specific demographic gives us room for margin, because what we offer is a tight build of the products together, with a plug-and-play, all-in-one solution. But we also offer the expert something.

That something is what I personally am most excited about, the future of the Mini is as an open source platform (I envision Maidsafe and OpenBazaar running on a Mini). We will be working on an API for the Mini that people can build on top of. I envision a kind of app store/npm in the future. But that is a ways down the road.

We are very sensitive to open source. We will release our code as we go.

Once again, thanks for the feedback,

Ansel

Hello, I'm one of the guys from Bitcoin Mini. I've corrected those tabs. Thanks for pointing it out.

Top 3 Must Read Bitcoin Books for your gift list this season.

New article on Midlands Bitcoin News http://midlandsbtc.com/the-top-3-must-read-bitcoin-books-for-the-holidays/

Join the discussion and help bitcoin spread this holiday season!

We have a new podcast coming out very soon called Beer and Bitcoin.

We are a group of bitcoin folks talking bitcoin and crypto related topics over beers. We have a developer, a marketing professional, an economist, and a sociologist. It's going to be really fun and I hope we can get a lot of listener interaction. We want to be interesting for beginners and veterans alike.

Be on the look out for it, first couple of episodes should be available in the next week. You can find us on Twitter @beernbtc or soundcloud at BeerAndBitcoin already.

Weekly and Daily Bitcoin Transaction Volume, Four Must See Charts
http://midlandsbtc.com/weekly-and-daily-bitcoin-transactions-volume-four-must-see-charts/

Find out what's behind the weekly and daily heart beat of bitcoin transaction volume. He's some charts to get you gears working.


Join the conversation!

Kansas City Entrepreneurs Enable Paying Bills With Bitcoin
http://midlandsbtc.com/?p=513

For the second day in a row we have a story about a Kansas City based company
that is making waves in bitcoin. Bitcoin has gained surprising traction in the heart
of the Midlands, and two entrepreneurs from Kansas City are right at the center of it....

We think this could be a really cool service for people. It is a stop gap measure until
bitcoin is accepted most places anyway. But it could evolve into other services, as
well. Any kind of recurring payments.

Midlands Bitcoin News has launched!


http://midlandsbtc.com

We are concentrating on reporting bitcoin news in, or affecting the States of Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota, what we call the Greater Midlands Area.

Our Three Goals
1) Introduce people in the region to bitcoin, by giving them a very local and approachable experience.
2) Provide a place for local bitcoin entrepreneurs to announce local projects that might not get play on larger outlets.
3) Give developers who are looking for local projects a place they can find projects near them, and connect to others.

If you are in the region and interested in writing about your local bitcoin scene, general news articles, or opinion pieces, email us at news@midlandsbtc.com.

Constructive feedback is most welcome.

True, but... the incentive structure for miners is very complex, and as the block reward halves again and again, the transaction fees will have to go up respectively to compensate and keep the miners mining. That makes micro transactions less and less likely as time goes on. By adding an option to take fees in another asset, btc transaction fees can stay low. The transaction fee I proposed was a 0.1 milligram gold fee ~$0.004.



Redemption would be an problem to solve for the issuer and add to the natural market forces (perhaps a minimum limit, like 1 gram), but that doesn't negate all the added incentives. There is already a gold backed asset on the CounterParty platform, I don't have to start one.

(Imagine BitPay or some future Bitcoin giant, offering a dividend yielding asset share, and all the incentives that that would bring to the mining game. Now add that to tree chains, where smaller miners could mine specific transaction types in each block to target an asset. This is not an elementary question.)

I'm new to the forum, but I wanted to ask a question, that the answer to, may be a big deal. I understand transaction fees and why they are used. I also understand that they are at present less than 1% of each block reward. Can the Bitcoin protocol be updated in such a way to allow transaction fees in other than btc? If miners could accept layered protocol assets (like counterparty/mastercoin assets) as transaction fees, then that would add an incentive to mine and secure the network and allow a whole host of new asset types that represent very small values.

I've been messing around with CounterParty for the last couple of days. What I envision is very small value asset, say a token backed by 1 milligram of gold (~$0.04 in today's value), for this example call it MILLIGOLD. It would be divisible. Instead of paying the transaction fee in btc, which would double the cost to send that one token, you could include a fee, of say 0.1 MILLIGOLD. If enough people trade that asset in each block, the reward could be substantial.

In not extremely technical, but this should be possible with small changes to the Bitcoin protocol itself, right? I think miner incentives will be of increasing importance as we approach the 2016 reduction in reward.

Cheers.