Here's my post in the marketplace. Clicky if you want to see me at work!

Also, I contemplated making another thread about this, but the thread IS called "Ease of Use". What's the typical waiting period for a transaction to show up, and then how much time does it take to be confirmed by 2-3 people? From a theoretical POV, say businesses in my hometown start accepting BTC as a form of payment, and the local government starts taking it as well. (YAY!) If I'm standing in front of Mr. Hot Dog Vendor with my BTC ATM card, how long will I be holding up the line waiting for transaction confirmation?

I'm an experienced Ruby and Ruby on Rails developer, and I'm just looking to make a few extra BTC on the side. I'm comfortable reading other people's code and building sites from scratch. I can do everything from an extremely simple site with little/no moving parts, to a complete database(SQL or NoSQL)-backed highly-concurrent server with complete unit and integration tests, and a design from scratch or the theme of your choice from a place like themeforest.com or templatemonster.com. (Let's be honest: I can do design from scratch, but you'll probably have more fun AND be more cost-effective if you went with a template. ;-) )

Examples of work:

http://www.ioofpa1032.org - Minor coding, but this is the latest design I did from scratch. WIP.
http://lifeviz.beta.westarete.com - Lead developer. WIP.
http://coolblue.com/ - Lead developer.
http://www.statecollegefitnessconsultantsinc.com/ - Lead developer.
http://altoonabustest.com/ - Developer. One of my first Rails sites.

Keep in mind, I have a full-time job already, so whatever work I do here will only be for a few hours a week, and will probably be more expensive than other developers here with more free time. I'm VERY good though. 

Last point: I'm learning node.js on the side (javascript development), and would be willing to do a website in it for much cheaper if you need something with a crazy amount of concurrency, if you're willing to let me experiment with it as a form of learning. Just an idea.

FINE. 

Yeah. Should I have seen results by then?

And I was only CPU mining then, on nights and business hours when I wasn't using my computer. I was still surprised that I didn't make anything. If you see much better results with GPU mining, I'd be willing to give that a shot. Especially if you see more frequent returns in a pool with a GPU miner.

Haha, if I didn't have a job tomorrow morning (which only pays me in USD, semi-sadly), I'd take you up on it. My goal is to have enough bitcoins in my account by the next minor US holiday (maybe Easter?) to distribute enough bitcoins to my friends, which will force them to open Bitcoin accounts. And then they'll say "What do we use these for?" And then I'll tell them I'm actually buying them a round of drinks, but it will cost them X BTC each. Tada, that's the gift! Throw in a little random paranoia about the value of the US dollar dropping, and we'll start using it on transactions with each other. In theory.

…for 10 BTC I'll attempt to grow a beard.

Man, good luck with merchant services. I have a horror story about a bug I found in a bank's processing service that I'll tell later.

A) I tried that, but it told me my bitcoin address was invalid. I sent an email to the site owner, and I'm waiting for a response…
B) Haven't heard of that, and I'm pretty familiar with IRC. I'll hop in, thanks for the tip.
C) I saw that website first, and thought that was probably the easiest way at first. If it's more popular for large volumes, then I'll keep that in mind when we're ready to really start using BTC for day-to-day transactions.  


Thanks for the tip. I'll stay away from that then, it looked pretty ridiculous. Hope no one here takes offense to this, but it looked like a money laundering operation.  

I can do a mail order for the going rate for 10 BTC tomorrow at noon EDT, if I don't get a response from other exchangers. And thanks for the introduction!

No. But the first couple of links I found had credit card processing. I guess that's what I'd like to see for bitcoins, instead of things like sending money orders to home addresses or paying shady websites in foreign countries so I can pay a ton of transaction fees. Hey, I have experience with Shopify, Authorize.net, and other payment gateways… anyone want to take credit card payments for bitcoins? You can pay me in bitcoins!



You spelled 'witcoin' correctly, right? The social networking site? Looking at it now…

Hey all. I found out about Bitcoins about a month ago, and I've been sharing the idea with my friends since. They all think it's a good idea, and I've nearly convinced them to start using it to make tiny, simple transactions with each other.

But the last thing they need to trust the bitcoin economy is a test dummy to try it out… introducing yours truly. And from the very beginning, I can't figure out how to actually get bitcoins.

I've been trying to generate bitcoins for a month with no success. I did some research on bitcoin mining, and joined a pool for a little bit, but didn't stay for more than a few hours to actually make any profit, because I wanted my computer back. And I don't have enough trust in the system to spend a ton of money building/buying a mining rig so I can still use my primary computer. So mining is still out for a while.

So now there's buying bitcoins. I've spent a few hours now creating an account on Mt Gox, trying to figure out how to create a Liberty Reserve account, then trying to find some kind of exchanger so I can get money into it (and lose transaction fee), then get funds (and lose transaction fee) into LR, so I can get funds into Mt. Gox (and lose transaction fee there), so I can get bitcoins into my wallet (and potentially even lose a transaction fee there too?) Ladies and gentlemen… what the f8ck?

So the last option is just providing a service and receiving bitcoins for payment. I would actually be cool with that, except my service (I've been a web developer/programmer for several years) is usually pretty pricey. I would be willing to work at a crazy reduced fee just to get bitcoins, but I don't know if I can do a block of work small enough to get the tiny amount of BC I want.

Really, for right now I only want to get 10-20 bitcoins, which I can distribute amongst my friends, and then I'll trade them beer for the bitcoins back. I'm waiting on emails from several exchangers who supposedly do paypal transactions. But the problem there is that I have to tell me friends that you have to "know a guy". I'm waaaay more trustworthy of complete strangers than my friends are. But I don't want to be the exchanger for them!

Why is it so damn hard to get BC? Wouldn't adoption of BC skyrocket if this process were much easier?

Thanks to anyone who read my rant. As payment for listening (and because I have no BC to give), here's my frustrated/sad face:

EDIT: I'll shave my face for bitcoins!