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I read some rumors on how Dwolla is about to invest heavily in bitcoin. Something about the CEO Ben Milne being overly impressed by bitcoin.
True or false?
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I know, I would pay the worlds best programmer to make a decentralized curren.... dangit, fell for another cyclical thought pattern. hey guys I thought we already reached over 150k blocks? is that not enough proof?
that aside, perhaps it would be well spent on something like open transactions, and then buying some physical precious metals and becoming the first issuer of OT precious metals - being available in some physical location so that people can cash out/cash in. just make sure the issuer understands that it is more profitable to not rip people off in the long run.
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a post to clear things up. I did not make the thread intending to attack anyone, such as owners of exchanges. I just wanted to spark some discussion on how to get rid of what I find is a bottleneck to many things in life.
in effect, what I am proposing is to fire your bank, and use that cash to buy bitcoins yourself instead of pay someone to hold it and transfer it to complete the btc/cash exchange.
I feel this post is needed to clear things up. I certainly did not start this thread with the intent of offending anyone or making enemies.
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Because many of us have families and jobs working 50+ hours a week. I don't got time to track down some stranger and arrange a meet to exchange cash for coins.
Now if there were Bitcoin ATM (which have their own usage density problems) where I could exchange between USD and BTC I would use those but given they don't exist the exchanges work.
I guess I have to capitulate to this argument then, because my family and my 50+ hours a week job will eventually catch up to me trying to refute it. |
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People have money in banks. They want Bitcoins instead. They have to get their money out of the bank. Most users still would use online exchanges, which are distant to them. So they use bank transfer methods available on the exchange to transfer the money. Now they can convert their holdings into Bitcoins (which can be quickly transferred to your Bitcoin wallet), and finally be free of the old fashioned banks and nation-state controlled currencies. Hooray!  no, now they have linked their bitcoin address to their bank account. |
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Because if you transfer cold hard cash as a business in any significant volume you will get arrested for money laundering. Even if you check documents and ID, but end up with bad money, you will go to prison. I strongly recommend against those services unless they are highly regulated and following KYC laws.
Not because I support high levels of regulation, but to protect people from going to jail needlessly.
"those services" is it really a service? are you confusing this with running a cash to bitcoin exchange? Will I go to prison if I exchange bitcoins to my local currency if I do not check IDs and check if it is what you call "bad money"? |
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Back in June, after a bunch of hashed passwords got leaked from mtgox I thought it would mean the end of using banking service based bitcoin trading. It does not even make sense to transfer funds from a bank account to an exchange, as you obviously ruin the anonymity part of bitcoin. You also have to rely on the exchange, for not disappearing with your funds.
Yet, several months later, it is still the most used method of purchasing bitcoins. Even after several exchanges have had their bank accounts frozed, people still keep using this system. There are some services like tradebitcoin.com which should make it easier to establish contacts (even though in a city of over a million, in a country which there are thousands of bitcoin users, I still cant see anyone with an ad up...).
Its kind of difficult to get ripped off doing a face to face exchange of BTC to cash, at least for amounts less than say $500. You meet up with the person in a public cafe which has wifi. One of you puts some cash on the table and their btc address, the other makes the transfer. As soon as we see one confirmation, the cash moves to the other side of the table. Not only this, but you get to meet another bitcoiner and perhaps have a cup of coffee with them.
Why isnt this widely used?
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The safest way would be to meet some bitcoiner in person and exchange some coins for your national currency.
The typical exchanges are not a good idea, as you link your bank account to the address you withdraw the coins to. Some exchanges have "lost" all the coins, others have had the password of its users leaked.
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This is awesome. I will have to check if there are any laws against these here, I wouldnt want to pay for it and have it seized by customs.
Would you ship to Europe?
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I am not sure exactly how this is done but it is possible to find the IP of a node which made the transaction. If you are lucky enough to not end up with a Tor IP or anything like that, you might have found the IP of the person you are looking for.
Apart from that, when transferring coins you do not necessarily end up holding the same coins. An example is when using online wallets - the coins are withdraws from the online wallets, and not always the same address you sent the coins to.
So if you do not manage to get the IP address easily, you would have to figure out which of the addresses in the blockchain belong to e.g. MtGox or any other online wallet service, then provide some legitimate reason for them to give you info of the user (which you probably will need a court order to do). If you are lucky, the user you are looking for bought them from an exchange which will easily hand out the info.
If, however, the coins go through a couple of addresses before they get cashed out at an exchange, the user you end up catching has plausible deniability - what if those addresses the coins have gone through are not owned by this user? Again, you would need to prove that they hold all of the private keys for all the addresses.
This is my take on it.
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If Bitcoin ever becomes big (let's just imagine) Bitcoin already is quite big. It takes at least a week to figure the thing out, yet has become the worlds largest distributed computing network in its two years of existence. |
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Well you definitely have to measure your strength and compare what risks are viable in this virtual realm. Are you a significant threat to them so that they consider stealing from you a bad idea?
I don't believe people would be cautious until a few got burned anyway. Let's hope people learn from these happenings.
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A lot of people are talking about how the falling bitcoin prices is making money evaporate, as though Bitcoin is somehow eating up life savings. The only thing that is evaporating is electricity and overheated GPUs, everything else is just changing hands. If you draw an imaginary boundary around all of the people playing the bitcoin exchange game and consider all of the real dollars that they have put into it, there is no sinkhole where dollars are disappearing into. It's just they have redistributed there wealth between the players. It's like playing poker at your buddies house, you came to the table, made a bet, and someone lost and someone won. The people who bought at $30 lost, and the people who sold at $30 won.
Similarly, there was no money tree when the price was ramping up. If you made money, that was late adopters putting cash into your hands. A purely speculative commodity trading environment (which is pretty much what Bitcoin is if you get rid of mining and the constant flux in how many people are playing) is just another type of poker. You are gambling on the actions of other individuals who in turn are gambling on the actions of you and everyone else. In a sense it's more pure than poker because if there is no fundamental value then the game is purely psychological. There is some data to be studied in looking at how many people are joining in based on media attention and whatnot. But I think that the sheep are the minority, and most players are out to make personal profit.
Also, why can't I post anywhere else yet. I've been stuck in this stupid forum for too long.
There might be some positive things with the price drop. People holding thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousand bitcoins, can definitely make the price go up. Until they found their 1000% profit is enough and start selling, and the price starts dropping. I guess that is what happened by the end of July, accompanied by the mtgox password leak, mybitcoin going down and losing coins, and that polish exchange accidently deleting 17k BTC. This raises the question, how many private keys are lost? Either way I am not concerned of the price, I simply do not consider bitcoin an investment. I can keep $100 on a reliable exchange, and buy bitcoins when I need them. Merchants can set up a system to auto adjust prices and instantly transfer to an exchange to sell the coins, to make sure they don't lose on the fluctuation. Luckily I can make use of free SEPA transfers. I hope more options become available so people are only subject to a 0.5% conversion fee at the exchanges. |
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Bitcoin or their own bitcoin blockchain be a solution, however implementing this with your average citizen is troublesome. Although I would find it worth the effort. They're going to go through tough times if (or rather, when) they go back to the Drachme anyway. But are they interested in a currency like bitcoin?
Greece has been doing bad for quite a while now. That country has seemed deeply corrupt to me for as long as I remember, and politicians seem to get away with doing bad things throughout the years.
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