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Do you have to pay to make your order valid?
On the walletbit checkout page, there was a countdown timer (about 7 minutes). That must be for their UI since the bitcoin transaction won't confirm in that time. Last time around it seemed liked they gave you a long time to complete your payment. That was a gigantic cock-up though so maybe it will work differently this time. |
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I managed to complete an order this time around. Hopefully they actually ship me a working device. :-)
do I need to have a customer login, or something? I cannot "add to cart". Not sure, I created a Avalon ASIC Store account beforehand but I don't know if it's required. I created a walletbit account but did not sign-in since I see no way to pay from my own wallet if I do that. |
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What's the "secure card" thing that comes up during walletbit checkout? I get some letters and fields above them and whatever I do I get a "Secure Card incorrect" message
That happens when you are signed into walletbit. Last time around there was no (obvious) way to pay from your own wallet. If you sign-out and checkout again then you should get the option to pay from your own wallet. Bad interface. |
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I managed to complete an order this time around. Hopefully they actually ship me a working device. :-)
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Avalon should have just done an auction format. Give people a few days to place bids, using 2 of 3 escrow to lock in coins, then take the top 600 bids. They could have a per-customer (shipping address?) limit if they wanted to ensure that the units were spread out.
That would have been nice. And as long as they are evenly distributed -- perhaps 3 per postal code + IP address location, or somesuch. Spreading them around would be a good idea (what's good for bitcoin is good for mining hardware vendors). If they wanted to do a fixed price then they could have generated a payment address for each interested party. Email people those addresses with instructions (where to associate shipment details with that address, exchange rate, tell them to disclose a refund address). Pick the first 600 to make it into the blockchain. In the case of ties, refund. Regarding refunds, I'd like to know how they intend to refund when walletbit didn't ask for any refund address. The bitcoin protocol is one direction but it seems to me that it would be a very good idea to get and address you can refund to in the case of epic meltdowns like today. |
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1 order with placeholder amount. I don't trust sending $1500 to an address generated by a failing web site. If Avalon cancels my order and places me in the back of the queue I'm not sure I will re-order.
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Team Avalon, can we call this launch off already?
That would have been the professional thing to do. Put up a static web page saying "sorry, we have trouble, launch postponed until <datetime>'. Then test with staging site to make sure all the kinks are worked out (don't forget to multiply quantity by price, for example). Don't use wordpress for a site you are expecting to get hammered. Ideally, you could build a client side Javascript shopping page that directly submitted to walletbit. The whole thing could be served statically, even a VPS could serve thousands of hits/second. I could implement such a thing in probably about a day and I don't consider myself a Javascript wizard. walletbit fails too. No tracking/order number, as far as I could see. Their interface is confusing. I created an account hoping it would give me more tracking for something went funky. When I tried to order from Avalon, there was no way to pay with my own wallet. When I finally decided to log out, the option to pay directly to a bitcoin address appeared. |
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How does it work exactly? Will I end up with a separate steam account for the game or will the game show up in my existing account somehow?
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So if you think there's a chance bitcoin prices will be 10 or 100 times higher in the next year or three, maybe CPU mining now isn't crazy.
Still crazy since you would be better to buy bitcoin using exchanges (ie. more bitcoin for same money). CPU mining is only useful for testing, playing around, etc, at this point. |
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Is there different software for miners?
Most people use the standard version but not all do. I'm pretty ArtForz has his own version and others do too. |
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I don't think so. There are many reasons to prefer bitcoin as a medium of exchange. I hope forum discussions can focus on the "medium of exchange" issues and less on philosophy X, Y or Z. Remember that other bitcoin users may not have world-views aligned with you and they don't have to in order for bitcoin to succeed.
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I think bitcoin could be quite an interesting platform for experimental economics ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_economics) and behavioral economics . Instead of using traditional currency in experiments, researchers could use bitcoin. Having the ability to run experiments over the Internet (not having to exchange cash) would be valuable. I don't have any contacts with people in the field but maybe one of the forum members does. It would be cool to have bitcoin mentioned in scientific research papers. Dan Ariely might be interested. |
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Attempting to brand someone as a kook only works if there's something kooky going on. Bitcoin is exactly what it claims to be. One might find a security hole in it, but that's about all you can credibly do to discredit it.
For the layman, I submit that bitcoin sounds no less kooky than Time Cube (okay, maybe a little less kooky, at least the website styling doesn't burn your eyes and people write in grammatical sentences). My point is that the average person doesn't understand science and much of what they believe is based on faith. In fact, that's really true for anyone, scientifically inclined or not. I didn't prove to myself all that I believe, I have sources I trust. Witness the continuing popularity of pseudoscience in popular media (astrology, natural healing, etc). People don't always believe the best sources, they have their own personal trust "network". For many people, they will believe bitcoin works only when told so by someone they trust. Telling them to read the design paper will get you nowhere. I'm pretty sure this will happen naturally, it will just take some time. |
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Payment processors can bring value to the bitcoin economy by facilitating ever lower transaction fees, increasing trusts, etc.
I doubt that sounds very appealing to them. Bitcoin is like a disruptive technology as explained in "The Innovator's Dilemma". I'm pretty sure the big players in a bitcoin monetary system are not going to be related to the traditional players. The traditional players are just too hooked on high margins to adapt. Also, I have to wonder how many non-technical people just will not be able to accept that bitcoin could work at all. If you don't understand the cryptography then you have to take it on faith that the system could work as designed. It's easy for them to brand bitcoin advocates as kooks (see "Time Cube"). |
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It would be nice to have a test network with a low difficulty (maybe just a single node) that could be used to validate miner implementations.
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Any model but more powerful than 0.3 N*m
I've ordered from here before: http://www.phidgets.com/products.php?category=23I have a very high torque motor and their USB based stepper controller. They are in Canada. I don't know anything about shipping to Russia but I might be willing to buy in CAD and ship for Russia in exchange for BTC (if that makes things cheaper). |
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Here is my attempt at a non-technical introduction of bitcoin. My goal is to explain to someone not interested in the cryptography or software aspects of the system why they might find it useful as a currency. IOW, assume the cryptography works, the P2P system works, the mining system is not vulnerable to attack, etc: what properties does the system have? This is a short, relatively non-technical introduction of bitcoin, a
digital currency. I'm not going to explain the inner workings of the
system other than to say that it based on a form of applied mathematics
known as cryptography. The system does not depend on a central
authority.
Let's explore the properties of the bitcoin system, assuming it's
mathematical foundations are sound. First, the number of coins in the
system is fixed. Over the next twenty-odd years coins will be slowly
created on a pre-determined schedule. After that time, no new coins can
be created. Currently about 6 million coins exist. There will never be
any more than about 21 million coins created.
This fixed schedule of coin creation is one of the properies that makes
bitcoin useful as a currency. People would not like to accept coins as
payment if it was easy for others to create new ones.
Another useful property of bitcoins is that they are easily divisible
into smaller units. This is a useful property of a currency since it
allows transactions of any value to be completed.
Finally there is property of bitcoins that make it quite unique as a
currency. The system allows transactions to be made between people at
practically no cost. To make a transaction, the seller provides the
buyer a special number identifying a digital wallet. The buyer uses
this number to transfer coins from their wallet to the sellers wallet.
It takes about 10 minutes for this transaction to be cleared by the
system. After the transaction has cleared it cannot be reversed.
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Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse here. I did read a lot of the old forum postings regarding the risks of deflation (i.e. appreciation of bitcoin vs other commodities). I'm not scared of the "deflation spiral" bogyman. In fact, I find it assuming how vehemently some people will argue the "deflation is bad" side without providing any real arguments (except perhaps appeal to authority).
However, it seems to me that too much deflation (or inflation) is quite inconvenient if you want to use BTC as an accounting currency. An example of the problem is prices of goods in stores (virtual or otherwise). If the value of BTC changes too fast then people will be forced to constantly adjust prices to match. Keeping a set of accounts would seem to pose similar difficulties.
I'm curious what other people think. One thing that makes me somewhat optimistic is that after the initial growth period the deflation rate should slow down and end up matching the growth rate of the economy trading in bitcoin. Is this going to be a serious problem during the initial growth of bitcoin as a currency?
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