FYI, I was at Capital Coin and Bullion in Austin yesterday and noticed they had a bitcoin sign up.  Not on the outside door, but by the counter.  I asked and one of their employees is "the bitcoin guy" but it looks possible to do business there in bitcoin.  Standard disclaimers apply, YMMV.  In addition to the gold and silver products you'd expect from a store with that name, they also cater to the "prepper" community and have shelf-stable food and ammo.  Perhaps other things too; I didn't have time to stay and chat but that was what I noticed.

http://capitalcoinandbullion.com/

No business or personal relationship, just a satisfied customer.

Is anyone throwing in the towel yet and quitting GPU mining?  Perhaps with extra GPU's to spare?  I'm not looking to mine but I am building a new gaming machine and would consider a used card for perhaps 1/3 of original retail price since it's been overclocked and run at scorching temps.  Anyone interested?

Hello everyone, I am a (semi) old-timer now finally delurking in the forums.  So forgive the low post count, but I've been around since 2011.  To save time and a lot of typing, please see my initial thread in the newbie forums, herein included by reference:

#include https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=161785.0

What I am trying to do is found the first "bitcoin town" (but not actually in a bunker), the next "Silicon Valley" or whatever you'd like to call it.  I think it's possible to achieve a "bitcoin critical mass" (to be bitcoining terms left and right) in a small enough local economy with enough users.  I personally have been evangelizing bitcoin to everyone I know, who knows me and trusts my opinion.  While this isn't a terribly large group, I have been quite effective so far and many people have started trading dollars for bitcoins, some in quantity.  Those people are now telling their own circle of friends and word is spreading very quickly.

I live in a small rural central Texas town of about 6,000 people.  The name of the town will become public knowledge soon enough if I'm at all successful.  The reason I think this location is ideal is that we have a community that will be (somewhat) self-sustaining during the coming... (ahem) "large societal adjustment".  If it's not obvious to the esteemed users of this forum that things are about to shift radically then I'm not going to go into a long winded argument.  However, imagine a scenario in the near future of a complete banking shutdown combined with civil unrest.  Empty grocery store shelves.  Any major city is not someplace you are going to want to be.  Ranch country where real estate is available and the folks close to you actually produce some of their own food is several steps better.  No location is ideal and certainly this one isn't either.  As always, everyone should do their own due diligence.

My next step is going to be to run a bitcoin advertisement in the local paper, basically just as a public service announcement.  This will help prime the pump for all the people I don't know personally and/or haven't talked to yet, so they will have heard of bitcoin and some will start educating themselves.  The more people buy bitcoins here and the faster they buy in, the more bitcoins will be in the town economy when the banks close and bitcoin trade becomes the local economy.  I want to be as prepared for that day as possible as a community.  My own personal security situation is not so good that I can ignore the plight of my neighbors; the best solution I can think of is to try and save the whole town.

My question is, how many bitcoin users have made plans for an "alternative" location if/when their current one becomes untenable and also, how many might consider coming to a location where bitcoin was a significant part of the local economy and the town would be able to (somewhat) continue operating an economy even in the midst of an economic crisis in the nation as a whole?

The reason I am very actively promoting this right now is that, as with all things bitcoin, there is a first mover advantage.  The first place that becomes the "obvious choice" and starts to build up a local bitcoin economy will become the default location.  New bitcoin users will come, bring their bitcoins, and the local economy has the chance to flourish even in the midst of very bad times.  Just google the "Miracle of Worgl" for an example of how this was done in Austria in 1932-33.  The town of Worgl is about the same size as this town is.  I don't know that the model would work as well for communities either much larger or much smaller.  Even if economic times don't get as bad as I fear, then the side effect of new businesses coming to the community would still be a large net benefit.

Existing bitcoin business owners- where are your backups or hot site?  A big city?  Hmmm.....  Real estate and the cost of living is very cheap here.  I'll leave it at that for now and see what discussion ensues.  As I mentioned in my previous thread, I believe bitcoin has attracted some of the very best minds on the planet and I want to see what they have to say.

Alonzo,

Thanks for that reminder, you have a point.  I lived through those "bubble" days not as a speculator, but as an employee with retirement funds in the stock market, only to see my financial future pretty much go up in smoke between losing jobs and the market plunge.  Indeed, mania is what a top looks like.  I did some long and hard thinking after reading your post to see if indeed your argument might be correct and this might be "irrational exuberance" and probably a market top.  The conclusion that I reached is that although there is indeed a mania taking hold, it's only the 0.1% of investors that have actually heard of bitcoin that are starting to become manic.  When this number climbs above 50% then I'll start to get worried.  For now I still think we have only just entered the second phase of adoption, which is when the initial more-or-less linear curve of early adopters starts to give way to an exponential curve as each person spreads the word and the number of adopters multiplies with each time interval.  This will, of course, give way to saturation as eventually most of those to whom bitcoin will mean anything have heard of it and either accepted it or rejected it.  But given the number of blank stares I still get from even the fairly-well-informed people I know, it's still early on in the game.

Luke,

At the risk of being overly wordy in replying to my own thread, I would suggest that the answer to the question everyone wants to know "when".... is "soon".  That's about as precise as anyone can be.  Think about it, if you'd known about the banking system years ago and then saw a newspaper from March 2013 with the current headlines, you'd know that the collapse was imminent.  We've been boiled slowly and the normalcy bias is strong, but things have now taken a decidedly dangerous turn and these topics are beginning to filter into the mainstream consciousness.  You're seeing it yourself.

What will the final warning signs be?  That's easy, just open a browser tab and check the news.  It really requires very little to get from where we are now to outright instability.  Personally, I'd give it a matter of months, probably sometime this year, when the banks in the US close for the first time.  Of course, I've thought that for a while now and I've been surprised that the band aids and duct tape have held it together for this long.

In the sense of "when should I begin pulling money out of the bank and consider moving to a rural area", again that's an easy one to answer.  The best possible time was several years ago, when you could have sold your city real estate for a good sum.  The second best possible time is now.  Remember, the people in Cyprus didn't get any advance warning (although the warning signs were there to see for those who were paying attention).  I personally "panicked" about 10 years, although going broke after the dot-com boom was definitely a precipitating factor in moving "back home" to our family land.

DirtyGold,

I suspect that the author of the quoted article hasn't actually used bitcoin personally.  While the confirmation delay is true, the initial transaction notification is near-instant like email (typically about 2 seconds).  For most small transactions this is good enough.  Especially for things like retail point-of-sale where you might have customers in line.  For buying larger or more expensive items there aren't usually people waiting in line and a 10 minute delay isn't a deal killer.  For depositing into OKpay, they wait for 6 confirmations so that's roughly an hour.  You wouldn't want to wait that long if you're waiting in line, but to make an online purchase I don't mind planning my life an hour ahead.

The single most powerful argument in favor of bitcoin isn't words, it's a demonstration.  Most people when they see it used, begin to "get it" immediately.  Why can't all money be this easy?  When I set new users up with a blockchain wallet, I zap them some pocket change as a demonstration.  If they have an android phone, I do this phone-to-phone so they see both the phone and the computer update, all within a couple of seconds.  If you already have a wallet address, post it and I'll send you some pocket change too.

The real reason it's hard to obtain bitcoin is that it's so superior that nobody really wants to take fiat for it.  At best, guaranteed fiat like cash or bank wire works, but inferior reversible forms like Paypal and credit cards are right out of there.  I also act as a broker and will sell people some of mine, but I'm not trying to cash out of bitcoin for fiat so I then go do a bitinstant transaction to refill as soon as possible.  As long as I do this quickly enough I'm not taking much risk of the market moving in price.  I charge a suitable commission to cover my cost and risk and I explain this to new users.  I'm also happy to show them how to fund through bitinstant, coinbase or other methods themselves if they prefer.  Of course, those times I need a little fiat in my pocket all I have to do is choose how much bitcoin to buy as a refill, if I buy less than I sold then I keep the fiat difference.  Right now I'm deriving a decent side income from this as a business, enough to pay for lunch out most days at least.  And remember, this is only in one small community.  There's a lot of room to grow the user base.

The growing transaction volume will, in time, present a significant challenge to the system.  With blocks only every 10 minutes and the blocksize limited, we will sooner or later run into problems keeping up.  The system is going to have to grow and evolve to meet the demands placed on it, but I'm confident that bitcoin has attracted some of the best minds on the planet to bring the innovation required.  If bitcoin ultimately fails, its deficiencies will be corrected in the next system until we have something that does succeed.  I know other crytocurrencies exist, but right now bitcoin has such a market lead that it's basically bitcoin's race to lose.  Unless there's a major problem with it, most of the money seeking a new virtual currency home will find its way into bitcoin because it's more widely distributed and mature than any of the alternatives.

Again, thanks to everyone for the replies.  Debate is a healthy thing and anyone who is so hardened in their ideas that they aren't willing to listen to contrary points of view has a problem, in my opinion.  It is a sign of intelligence and maturity to consider that you might not know everything and be open to new information.

That said, I think the ultimate argument in favor of bitcoin adoption by the masses, in the near future, is that THE TITANIC IS SINKING.  Just ask people in Cyprus if they wish they had known about an alternative, ANY ALTERNATIVE, prior to their money being stolen.  Bitcoin has flaws.  It's not a perfect system.  Perhaps others are better, and as time goes on its limitations will become more clear.  Hopefully with the collective intelligence and effort of the community we can overcome the limitations as they appear and make it a usable tool for the masses in the future.  However, right now it's the "least worst" alternative currency system in existence and as such the leading candidate for the masses of panicked people concerned about the safety of their assets to panic into.  No doubt gold and silver will get some of the money flow, but gold and silver don't enable modern electronic commerce to continue the way bitcoin does.  In the above-referenced article regarding the small IT business in Cyprus, they didn't say that they were planning to start paying employees in gold or silver, they planned to start paying in bitcoin.  Why?  Again, I think it's obvious that as a payment system bitcoin has tremendous advantages over the precious metals, while also acting as a store of value.  Also, it's hard to argue with the fact that as an investment, the precious metals might have an appreciation potential of 10-20x in dollar price.  Yes, gold and silver are heavily manipulated and suppressed and ample evidence exists to support that theory.  Market demand will eventually overwhelm the price suppression scheme, leading to some fantastic gains in dollar value.  But on the other hand, bitcoin has an ultimate appreciation potential of perhaps 1000x or even more.  There could easily be another 10-20x appreciation just this year.  Also, just try crossing any border in the near future with large amounts of precious metals (and the definition of large amounts is changing rapidly).  Bitcoin alleviates all those problems.  If you're a panicked investor or even regular joe looking to get out of the banking system AND you're informed about bitcoin enough to understand these things, where are you going to put your money?

The fact of the matter is that we will find out soon enough which of all the theories is correct.  The crisis of confidence in the banking system brought on by the debacle in Cyprus is, in my opinion, a bridge too far.  I think the fuse has been lit, and although it will take a while to play out in all its facets, ultimately now the public has been put on notice that they can't really trust the system any more.  If trust is destroyed, why use a bank at all?  I personally came to the conclusion more than two years ago that the banking system was untrustworthy, so I set out to find alternatives.  First I started banking like an illegal alien, cashing all checks at the originating bank if possible, asking for cash whenever possible, getting money orders to pay bills.  I obtained a prepaid debit card and began to use it for all online purchases, funding it with cash immediately prior.  I don't leave quantities of money anywhere except in my personal possession.  I still have a traditional bank account from before and it occasionally comes in handy, but mostly to me they are just a check cashing service and it irks me every time I have to wait for a check to clear before I can withdraw the money.  When the banks close they will get very little of my assets.  As a side note, I also did the mental arithmetic early on that this lifestyle necessarily leads to having significant quantities of cash or other assets in one's personal possession.  I have a legal state-issued concealed carry permit and the only place I am not armed is the shower.  Anyone wanting to "acquire" my assets will have to do it the old fashioned way, at considerable personal risk.

My research into money and the banking system led me to an understanding of fiat currency and fractional reserve banking.  It became apparent to me that the whole thing, all of global finance, is just one massive ponzi scheme pulled over the eyes of humanity to blind them from the truth.  It is destined to fail, and like all ponzi schemes will fail shortly after the redemption requests begin to exceed new money inflows.  This happened in 2008 and of course the money pumps were turned on to keep the ponzi going, but this is not without side effects and consequences.  Now we are seeing the beginning of the endgame.  Hopefully most everyone on this forum knows all this already, so I won't rehash it any more.

But my research also led me to bitcoin.  I was stunned.  I spent a good two days back in 2011 just trying to wrap my mind around the concept so I could get an understanding of how it worked.  I scrounged every last penny I could get my hands on to buy in with.  Literally: I cashed in my change jar $50 and $100 at a time and bought bitcoin with it.  Now I'm pretty pleased with how my spare change has done.  I started mining too but only came out slightly ahead versus my initial investment on that score.  For the first time ever, instead of being chained to the deck rail of the sinking Titanic, now there was a LIFEBOAT to get into.

Now we're at the place where Joe Q. Public is close to where I was several years ago.  The banking system is looking shaky and more people are slinging around terms like "fiat currency" and "fractional reserve banking" in conversation.  Even out in public now it's not uncommon to overhear conversations like this going on.  So the ground has been plowed and is ready to be planted with the seeds of knowledge that people need to hear.  What I'm doing is trying to save as many as I can and hopefully have a whole (small) town with the nucleus of a functioning bitcoin economy before the banks close here.  All I can do is plant seeds, but right now the bankers and the evening news are doing a great job of watering them and helping them grow.  I want this town to be a "bitcoin Mecca" to coin a phrase, one that will continue to function in the collapse that's coming.

I am now contemplating running an anonymous bitcoin public service announcement in the local newspaper, something like "Haven't heard about bitcoin yet?  Go to weusecoins.com and find out!"  I want to prime the pump and get people ready.  My personal friends and family have already heard all this from me directly, but there's a bunch of other folks here that haven't.  Some of them will google "bitcoin" or visit the weusecoins website and begin educating themselves.  Perhaps not many, but each one that begins learning is a seed that's growing and will then reach out and touch their circle of friends, family, and associates.

If my experiment in "bitcoinizing" this town is successful, then perhaps eventually some of the other bitcoin early adopters might prefer to relocate to a place where they are wanted and appreciated, and their bitcoin assets will stimulate the local economy at a time when most everything else is falling apart.  I want to become the "Zimbabwe" in my earlier example and emulate the historical example of the "Miracle of Worgl", which occurred in Worgl, Austria from 1932-1933, in the middle of the Great Depression.  This town successfully dealt with unemployment and poverty by issuing a local currency even while the towns around them were suffering badly.  The experiment ended when the central bank shut down their currency, and they went back to being just as miserable as everyone else.  For more information, see:

http://ingienous.com/?page_id=6673
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rgl

Here in this small rural Texas community we have significant agricultural production, so as long as the farmers can keep farming the town will be able to eat regardless of how bad the economy gets.  I personally eat our own home-grown pork, beef, chicken, and eggs.  It's free range, grass fed, hormone free beef.  I can look out my window and count my cows and decide which one will become dinner next.  So all of you other bitcoin people that enjoy your city lifestyle, what will you be eating when the banks close and the grocery stores go empty?  Dried beans and rice?  Perhaps you might consider a move.  Here your bitcoin might buy you a real steak dinner, for the moment at my house if nowhere else.

I'm peripherally aware of the BFL issue but I haven't taken the time to get informed in detail.  I don't know that it would be a big problem for the market price, since those dollars already weren't spent buying up bitcoins but went to BFL instead.  If that amount came out of the market now it would certainly cause major problems, but it's only money that never went in, in the first place.  Or am I missing something?  If my central hypothesis is correct (see the OP) then there is plenty of new money headed toward bitcoin very soon.  The major media mentions this week can't hurt.  As I write this the "bitcoin bonanza" story is still front page news on cnbc.  With the potential user base of "bitcoin aware" folks doubling rapidly, I think that within the year most people in the US will have heard of it for the first time.  To use a line from the Matrix, "it's going into replication".  The bitcoin user base will now be best displayed on a log chart.  Eventually as with all new technologies the exponential phase will end as saturation begins, but if I'm right that could be as soon as this year too (the beginning of saturation, not the end).

I sincerely hope more players than Avalon are eventually able to start shipping ASIC's and ratchet the difficulty way, way up to secure the system.  If an investment of a measly few million bucks is enough to control the system right now then we have a big problem.  The miners (hopefully) knew from the beginning that it was a competition dominated by economics.  I started getting bitcoin by mining soon after I found out about it.  I took what money I could scrounge and bought 2 5850 cards.  I was pleased with the ROI and the cards paid for themselves but not much more as the difficulty soared.  I would have done much better by buying coins outright at the price then, but I thought mining was interesting and I'm not really sorry.  I learned.  Hopefully others have/will have a similar experience.  I still have the 2 cards and they are good for gaming, I wouldn't have spent that much on a "frivolous" purchase just to play games with.  I'll soon be building a new PC and perhaps I will find someone who is interested in exiting mining with a top-end card to sell for a good price.  Market economics at work yet again.

Yes, you bring out some more good points.  My main worry is that bitcoin has now reached step 3 on the "Gandhi Acceptance Curve".  I.E. "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."  It is foolish to think that the existing banking system (and government) won't eventually perceive bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as an existential threat.  Obviously, the easiest point to attack the system is at the fringes; the exchanges.  Just imagine a "Kim Dotcom" style takedown of all the major exchanges, who suddenly find their DNS domains seized regardless of where they are located physically.  Until some major exchange begins operating Silk Road style, through Tor, Freenet, I2P, or some such then we have a point of severe vulnerability.  Eventually I predict that they will all have to do so.  Game theory suggests that there is almost certainly a "black Friday" or "black Monday" or whatever day it is, coming to the bitcoin system when the authorities launch a coordinated attack.  I hope to spur more discussion about what to do now to begin to prepare for this before it happens to ensure as much robustness as possible.  Right now if Satoshi Dice by itself is stressing the system then it shouldn't be hard for authorities with money as no object to create ridiculous transaction volume and spam the blockchain causing an effective DOS attack on the network.  Or for that matter, just flood the network in an attempt to saturate bandwidth.  How resilient is the network right now against this kind of attack?  Has any testing been done?  I don't know the answers to these questions, but perhaps someone who does can chime in here.

I think the best thing that can be done at this point is to spread the word and help the bitcoin ecosystem grow as big as possible as fast as possible.  Bureaucratic inefficiency will ensure that the regulation process will always be a step or two behind, and hopefully the technological innovation can always stay a step or two ahead.  But make no mistake, it is a chess game and the objective is checkmate.  As has been said so many times before, the more actual real world businesses that accept bitcoin, the less the risk that the exchanges represent.

By way of example, let me include this reply I wrote previously in a private email to a friend:


1.  You're in Cyprus, and you have EUR10000 in the bank and BTC1000 bitcoin.  The authorities close the banks over the weekend and threaten to take 10% of your balance.  You now have EUR9000 in the bank (which you can't get into) and BTC1000 in bitcoin which you can.  The bitcoin price in euros is about EUR57 right now.

2.  You book a flight out of the country because you think things are going to get worse.  Thankfully you kept enough cash on hand to do this.  At the airport, the authorities are checking luggage with a metal detector and seizing gold and silver.  Maybe you will get it back someday, maybe you won't.  They also have cash-sniffing dogs.  Since you're not carrying gold and silver or large amounts of cash, they don't bother you.  Perhaps you go to stay with relatives in Turkey.

3.  Upon arrival, you find a local bitcoin dealer using your smartphone and cash out a small amount of bitcoin back into euros for immediate expenses.  Then you open a local bank account and begin a larger transfer of bitcoin back into euros using an online exchange with a lower commission.  Eventually they reopen the banks in Cyprus and you are able to transfer the remaining EUR5000 (after the bank failed and was reorganized) into your new account.

4.  Six months later, the authorities have now found out about bitcoin and they are not happy that they can no longer steal from the people at will.  You get a visit from a stern-looking men with the government tax authority, who tells you that your online activity indicates that you're a bitcoin user, but that your assets were not declared.  You realize that you should have been smarter about the internet and how to use it anonymously (Tor, VPN connections, etc.) but you apologize that you forgot to do this when you entered the country.  He demands that you declare your assets now.  You say that you have BTC0.5734 on your phone (which by then is worth about EUR300) and you show your phone as proof.  He demands to know the password so this can be verified.  So you give him the password to your "spare change" spending account that has BTC2.5734 and log in to your computer and print out an account summary.  You do not reveal that you have another account (with a different password) that still has BTC870 in it, now worth almost EUR500,000.

5.  Every time there are new bank runs, new capital controls, or new money printing the price of your bitcoin keeps going up.  Everyone in the world wants some.  Things aren't so good in your new country by now, and your relatives all wish they had bought bitcoin back when it was only EUR57.  Since they need money right now, they offer to sell you their house for bitcoins.  By now a lot of local merchants are starting to accept bitcoin directly, but since they are officially "illegal" now, you have to know who to ask.  All of them are so glad to finally be able to get their hands on some bitcoin at any price, since all the major online exchanges are either shut down or have moved to really out-of-the-way foreign jurisdictions.  The largest exchange is now in Zimbabwe, where bitcoin has become the official state currency.

6.  You're in Turkey, and you have EUR10000 in the bank and BTC870.  The authorities close the banks over the weekend and threaten to take 10% of your balance.  You have EUR9000 in the bank (which you can't get into) and BTC870 in bitcoin which you can.  The bitcoin price in euro is now EUR200000.  The European Central Bank has started printing money like crazy and now nobody wants euros any more.  All the other central banks have been doing the same thing too.  The price of everything has reached unbelievable levels and hardly anybody has a job any more.  Your relatives are doing ok only because they now have some bitcoin, thanks to you.  You own their house, their car, and all their assets, but at least all of you have food and clothes.

7.  Your whole family books a flight out of the country because you think things are going to get worse.  You are able to make arrangement with the authorities in Zimbabwe to immigrate there, since everyone in the world wants to but hardly anybody has bitcoin.  This costs you BTC100 per person in your family.  At the airport, the authorities are checking luggage with a metal detector and seizing gold and silver.  Maybe you will get it back someday, but it's highly doubtful.  People are being very clever about how they hide even small amounts now.  They also have cash-sniffing dogs and all electronics are scrutinized for bitcoin apps.  Since you knew this in advance, all your coins are in 2 "brainwallets", where you have memorized the passphrase that generates the bitcoin private key.  A small amount in the first one, in case you are forced to disclose it, and a much larger amount in the second one.  Since your family doesn't look quite as poor and desperate as everyone else, you are able to get through security with only a good-sized bribe to the security guards, who know that you must have bitcoin even though they can't prove it.

8.  Upon arrival in prosperous Zimbabwe, you are taken by limousine to the "new citizens center" where you are treated like royalty.  With the whole world economy in ruins, the only places that are able to operate are those that have bitcoin.  Africa, due to its mobile phones and history of bad governments, was an ideal place for bitcoin to take off and now it's the only prosperous continent on the Earth.  Since the supply of bitcoin is forever limited, all the bitcoin you bring into the country's economy will forever give them a larger share of world commerce, so they are only too happy to solicit new citizens with bitcoin.  Bitcoin is accepted seamlessly everywhere and your money can no longer be stolen or devalued by the government.  You are now so wealthy your living expenses are just pocket change and your whole family can enjoy the best of Africa.

Thanks for all the replies.  I suppose I should have de-lurked long before now, but I try to follow Abraham Lincoln's advice that "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than speak and remove all doubt."

@Vladimir:  excellent point.  I wasn't seeing the money transfer that way.  Obviously the money goes SOMEWHERE, fiat only gets destroyed when debt gets paid off or defaulted on.  If the fiat gets redeposited into someone else's bank somewhere then as far as the banking system as a whole is concerned, it's a wash.  When people start cashing out stocks to buy bitcoin it might be different.

@AnonyMint:  yes, I read your other post and it left me thinking about your points there.  In the long run it could indeed be unhealthy.  I don't think anyone has raised this issue before.  In my opinion, this kind of open discussion about bitcoin is part of what makes it so powerful, all of us together can be smarter than any of us individually.

@itsunderstood:  the logical first adopters (for these second-tier folks beyond the early adopters) are the people I do business with.  I fix computers and sharpen knives.  I'm already sitting at people's computers doing service calls, and most of the people are my long-time clients who know me pretty well and trust my opinion.  Many of them are also local small business owners.  So far I've already done one service call paid with bitcoin.  I had to get the client set up with bitcoin and sell them some of mine first, but I'm looking upon that part as "pro bono" work.  The businesses I'm hoping to get set up are the ones whose services I personally use and I do some bartering with already.  As in, my barber, my chiropractor, and probably soon my mechanic, I think the CV joints in my car are starting to need replacing.  None of those own "chain store" businesses or have real point-of-sale systems requiring payment integration, so for them deciding to accept bitcoin is as easy as making the decision to do so and have me help them set up a wallet (again, pro bono).

Did you see this article over at Zero Hedge?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-29/caught-cyprus-crossfire-small-businesses-suddenly-zero-cash

(excerpt)
The most of circulating assets on our business Current Account are blocked.  Over 700k of expropriated money will be used to repay country's debt. Probably we will get back about 20% of this amount in 6-7 years.  I'm not Russian oligarch, but just European medium size IT business. Thousands of other companies around Cyprus have the same situation.

The business is definitely ruined, all Cypriot workers to be fired.  We are moving to small Caribbean country where authorities have more respect to people's assets. Also we are thinking about using Bitcoin to pay wages and for payments between our partners.
(end excerpt)

So far the business owners I'm dealing with don't really have other employees, mostly very small service businesses.  The concept of paying wages in bitcoin is probably a few more steps down the road, as the workers are going to have to want that as an option.  What I'm trying to leverage immediately is to get paid for MY services in bitcoin, and the only way I can do that is get all my clients set up with wallets and as bitcoin owners.  Once they get started and begin educating themselves, I suspect the idea of expanding the use of bitcoin in their own business will occur to them all on its own.

I'm also beginning to prepare for when the banks here begin looking shaky and my main client comes to me wanting to begin doing the majority of their banking (and perhaps payroll) in bitcoin.  I'm thinking of suggesting a dedicated bitcoin workstation in a separate office, running linux, bitcoin-qt and the armory client.  Also with a dedicated local printer and webcam/scanner for paper wallets.  Here's where suggestions from people with more experience and technical familiarity with bitcoin would be helpful:  should there be just one workstation that is online 24-7 to maintain sync with the blockchain, or also an additional one that is offline only for generating private keys?  As a consultant, I want to be able to suggest the highest degree of security that is also practical and cost-effective. 

I am a medium-term bitcoin user, having first jumped on board with mining in 2011.  I no longer mine, but I did accumulate a nice collection of bitcoin at a pretty low cost of entry.  I'd like to address a little of what is currently happening and about to happen with bitcoin.  I'm sure this is obvious to many of you also.  Right now what's happening (IMHO) is that we're entering the next phase of the technology adoption curve, where the initial early adopters are beginning to tell others and word is beginning to spread.  Again IMHO, this is likely to lead to a further 10-100 fold expansion of the fiat price of bitcoin in the near future.

Let me give you a personal example.

Since the start of this year, as the price rise started, I reached the personal conclusion that I needed to begin spreading the word about bitcoin among my circle of friends, family, and business associates.  After all, how would it look if in future years I am bitwealthy and my relatives are not, simply because they didn't get on board sooner.  Really there are only two possibilities with bitcoin: either it fails, or it takes over.  It is a superior form of money, as presumably everyone reading this already knows and I don't need to discuss.  Since it's now gone through some of the early growing pains and not failed, my conclusion (again, probably shared by a lot of early adopters) is that it's now ready for the next steps.  Not ready for the mainstream yet, primarily because of the volume, but ready to take a few more steps.  Now, add to this the fact that the writing is on the wall for the mainstream financial system.  None of us want to see our friends and family get Cyprus'd, especially not if it's preventable.  Back in 2008 the options for wealth preservation were primarily hard assets, including precious metals.  I invested in some years ago and have been pretty happy with how I've been protected against inflation, at least.  But they don't represent an opportunity for significant multiplication the way bitcoin does (when viewed as an investment).

Essentially, you are doing a disservice to everyone you care about if you don't have a conversation with them about bitcoin.  I present it in a low-key fashion.  I'm not trying to twist anyone's arm to invest in what is most definitely a high risk investment.  I make it clear that it could fail tomorrow or go down significantly.  However, the upside is beyond fantastic.  No investment like this has probably existed in the whole history of the world.  Maximum loss: 100% of your initial investment.  Maximum gain: possibly 10,000,000% of your initial investment.  If the probably of bitcoin failing is anything less than 99.9999%, then mathematics dictate that it's a good investment in exactly the same way that lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math.

Here's the response: EVERY LAST PERSON is interested and wants to invest.  I have turned one bitcoin user (me) into more than 10 new bitcoin users who all want to invest at least 1,000 USD into bitcoin.  Many have already done so.  This is just within the last three weeks.  Now those people that I told are telling their own circle of friends, family, and business associates and word is spreading like wildfire.  Among intelligent adults who can do math, it doesn't take long to arrive at the conclusion that the best strategy is to put at least SOME assets into bitcoin.  Those whom I told first are now sitting on 100% or more gains over the last few weeks and can't believe it.  There is a tremendous amount of money out there currently drawing 0% (or near enough) interest that people are DESPERATE for any investment opportunity with a rate of return.  Even the POSSIBILITY of a rate of return.

Here's my prediction: the seeds have been planted and word is spreading like wildfire.  Right now the number of "bitcoin-aware" is probably doubling every week or two.  I know that it normally takes new ideas a long time to go mainstream, but I think many people are unaware how much monetary repression is out there and is affecting people's lives worldwide.  As I tell people, my generation (mid 40's) cannot retire.  The math doesn't work.  There is no low-risk investment out there that yields enough (after inflation) to build a nest egg.  On the contrary, all relatively low-risk investments have a negative real rate of return.  Only a fool would think that there will be anything like Social Security by the time I would be eligible for it.  So, I have gone renewable and sustainable in an attempt to live as cash-free a lifestyle as possible.  If I don't NEED money it doesn't matter so much if I don't HAVE money.  I have been fairly successful at this over the last few years, but not everyone lives on rural property and has the option to grow a garden and raise animals (for starters).  But back to bitcoin....

Yesterday something interesting happened.  I heard from a business associate that they were now planning on cashing out a $50,000 CD that's paying virtually zero interest and putting all of it in bitcoin.  Now, if this was someone retired and that was their whole life savings I would discourage it as far too risky, but this is someone who can afford to put that kind of money at risk.  Keep in mind that this was someone who hadn't heard of bitcoin two weeks ago.  I have at least one local business in town buzzing where almost all of their employees are getting in.

Now let's do some math.  Ten times more bitcoin users, each investing 10 times more money, gives 100 times rise in the bitcoin price.  However, price is set at the margin so it's not really that simple, but you get the idea.  Also, more and more people are beginning to see the writing on the wall for the financial system and are beginning to move not just out of greed or a desire for a higher return on investment, but out of fear that somewhere else is going to be the next Cyprus and this show has a lot longer to play.  Those who study understand that fractional reserve banking is the definition of a ponzi scheme and will fail when it can no longer expand.  That point was reached in 2008 and only running the money pumps at ever-increasing speed has kept the Titanic afloat since then.  Again, old news to everyone on this forum I hope.

Here is what has begun to happen.  A TSUNAMI of money has begun to move into alternative assets.  Anything that looks like a lifeboat will be swarmed with passengers from the sinking Titanic.  Bitcoin is going to get a large share of this, because unlike gold and silver that will hold their value and go up (probably a lot, but by a limited amount), bitcoin is going to MULTIPLY by 10x, 100x, or even 1000x.  Sooner than you might think.  Obviously this is just one opinion and I can't claim to know, but I'm watching this psychology take hold day by day among the people I'm talking to.

And then there's the other side of the bitcoin (so to speak....).  Which is that as all this money flows OUT of banks, brokerages, and stock markets it's going to make them weaker and help catalyze the very thing that bitcoin is designed to work around, which is the failure of the fractional-reserve, fiat currency ponzi scheme.  Bitcoin could literally be the thing that brings down the system.

I also have an ulterior motive.  When the day comes that the banks close here in the US, I have some hope that enough bitcoin "critical mass" has been accumulated here in the small town I live in that we can go bitcoin and keep functioning, at least somewhat.  I have read news articles about hard-hit towns in Greece rediscovering the power of local currency.  Now imagine if that local currency was bitcoin, so all the towns using "local currencies" could trade with each other as well!  Within the next week, I hope to have at least two local businesses set up to accept bitcoin.  There's now a small town in central Texas with probably one of highest bitcoin adoption rates per capita of anywhere on the planet, and all with just a few weeks of effort by one dedicated bitcoin enthusiast and evangelist.  Let's see, 10 in a town of 6,000 is about 166 per 100,000.  Next week it'll be higher.  How good can you do in your location?  If you value your friends, family, and business associates, talk to them right away and let them know about bitcoin so they can get on board to reap the maximum reward from (A) the protection of being insulated from inflation, theft and bank failure, and (B) the rapid appreciation in price.