Comment survivre et lutter contre un système où notre esprit est envahi par la publicité et où chacun de nos mouvements est en permanence épié et analysé ?

C'est ce que vont tenter de découvrir Nellio et Eva dans mon roman Printeurs, à paraître en novembre. Si le mot "Bitcoin" n'apparait volontairement pas, l'une des solutions de Nellio (je spoile un peu) est de payer… en satoshis.

https://fr.ulule.com/printeurs/

Je vous invite à précommander le roman sur Ulule. Il est possible de commander une version électronique dédicacée et horodatée sur la blockchain Bitcoin (que vous puissiez certifier que c'est bien moi qui ai dédicacé le livre, quand je l'ai fait et que votre exemplaire est unique).

Hello,

I'm wanting to sell the very first Linkedin Bitcoin group (created in May 2011) : https://www.linkedin.com/groups/3934654/

There are 11,400 members and it's growing everyday without doing anything. In the past, I even accepted proposal to publish sponsored posts on this group.

The deal is: upon reception of the BTC payment agreed beforehand in this thread, I make the Linkedin account(s) of your choice admin of this group. I will then remove myself from the group.

Google is currently launching Google Play gift cards but only in some countries :
https://play.google.com/intl/en-US_us/about/giftcards/


Also, the cards are physical: you receive a piece of paper!

But what about a service that would buy a bunch of those cards, that would encode all the numbers in a database and sell them for bitcoins?

It means that you could buy Google Play credits with bitcoins from anywhere in the world, without the need for a paper or anything.

Is there already something similar?

In a parallel world, it seems that Ripple is still existing and got some funding :
https://ripple.com/blog/ripple-labs-raises-3-5-million-in-new-investment-round/

Is there any other activity on the Ripple front? Is there still people buying Ripple for bitcoins?

Flattr is web service that allows to give micro donations to the content on the web ( you can read my description here: http://ploum.net/post/paying-web and a follow-up here: http://ploum.net/post/flattrs-biggest-problem ). Because of a popular request, they are actively looking into support bitcoin to:

1. Allow people to fund their account in bitcoins
2. Allow people to withdraw money earned as bitcoins

They posted the following tweet: https://twitter.com/Flattr/status/350345129267175424 which seems to says that there is still a need for bitcoin services. Point 2 seems to not be offered by any provider so far.

I will ask for more details about what is needed on the Flattr side but, in the meantime, what would be your advices?

This text has been posted first on https://plus.google.com/102072273880684402148/posts/JRsC98Y3Ctv

Given the quick rise of bitcoin (currently priced at $93 each), it may appear to be a bubble.

A bubble happens when a lot of people, excited by the quick rise, buy with the hope to sell at a better price later. People don't really needs what they are buying. There's no fundamentals that justify a high price for the product. They buy because the price increase and they cause the increase themselves.

Bitcoin proponents tend to say that there's still not a lot of business done with bitcoin (which is true). Most of business accept bitcoin as a publicity stunt, not because they believe that there's a huge market. As such, bitcoin has a relatively low value.

And the fundamentals have not changed since the last crash to 2/3$, meaning that it is mostly a speculative bubble.


But I disagree.

Firstly, people now use bitcoin not only to trade but also to store value. As a  store of value, fiat money is the worst possible solution. All the bailouts and the crisis showed us that you can't trust a bank anymore. Bitcoin offers a completely unregulated and very liquid store for money. Bitcoin is then useful not only for trade but also as a saving. Those are not speculators. If you invest in bitcoins to store money (and sell bitcoins as you need money and not selling them all when you made enough profit), you are not a speculator. This means that Bitcoin is already useful. People buy it because they need it, not because of pure speculation.

As for the fundamental, +Rick Falkvinge explained several times that if Bitcoin captures only 1% of the internet trades, each bitcoin should be valued around 10,000-100,000$.

This fundamental is still there and is stronger than ever for two reasons:

1. Despite the huge bitcoin crash in 2011, bitcoin value remained between $3 and $10 for nearly two years. It means that even when there's no hype, no interest, Bitcoin remains a quite secure store of value.

2. With its increasing value, Bitcoin is more than ever a valuable target for hackers. The fact that nobody has been able to trick the system so far and to counterfeit bitcoins is a good indicator of the technical strenght. Bitcoin even has a glitch, a few weeks ago, because of a software bug in a new release: it barely affected the price because the Bitcoin community had an appropriate response. This builds trust. Something that fiat money is missing.


But what makes Bitcoin different and is not taken into account by the "stock exchange experts" is that people are only discovering Bitcoin. MtGox has a huge queue of people wanting to send money and it takes weeks to have your account validated. In that regard, Bitcoin is exactly the opposite of a Ponzi scheme: it's hard to enter and easy to leave.


But Bitcoin is not flawless. The biggest flaw so far is usability. Bitcoin is hard to use. It is extremely easy to be scammed or to lose all your bitcoins. It's completely impractical to use Bitcoin for day to day transactions (is the bitcoin address valid? How to add a comment?) and, in its current form, Bitcoin has no chance to become mainstream.

It is a given that an electronic money like bitcoin will become mainstream in a not so distant future. I foresee three possible scenarios :

1. Bitcoin becomes the backend of an easier system and most of the people don't see bitcoins and use them without knowing it. Nevertheless, bitcoins are very valuable. That's what happened with Linux where most people using Linux are, in fact, using a layer above it (Android). That's probably where Ripple may become useful. [1]

2. Bitcoin itself becomes easiers and some services above make it even more easy. That's what happened with Git and Github. Git itself became easier and Github made it usable by nearly anyone.

3. A new solution appears that completely replace Bitcoin. Like social networks are killing RSS feeds. Bitcoin would become like Napster: an historical forerunner without any remaining value.


If you believe that 1. or 2. are the most probable future, hold your bitcoins. Don't be scared because speculators are moving the price. Just hold and sell your bitcoins when you need money.

But don't forget that 3. is also a possible scenario. So don't invest into bitcoin what you could afford to lose entirely.


[1] http://ploum.net/post/ripple-making-bitcoin-easier-or-obsolete

Hello,

I've tried bitstamp today and saw that you can send XRPs there. I had some XRPs from the give-away so I send them to my Ripple address on bitstamp.

Now, I can't see anywhere where the ripples are. Any ideas?

I know it doesn't make sense to speak about a all-time low as it is basically 0 if we take bitcoins since the start.

But seeing bitcoin raising since a few weeks, I'm wondering: could it be raising without ever falling again? Do you believe that we have now passed the 1$/10$/20$/30$ forever? What do you think will be an all-time low starting today?

(Of course, I'm asking for predictions in the case where there's no major security problem found in bitcoin which seems, to me, the only way to really take bitcoin down)

[Problem]

Problem

Ripple aims to be a decentralized system. But as long as a significant portion of the XRPs is handled by a single entity, there's no way the system can work. Currently, on the 100 billions XRPs, 50% will be given through give away operations, 30% are kept by OpenCoin to fund itself and 20% are kept by Ripple's founder.

There's no way a sustainable economy could grow if, at best, 50% of that economy is in the hand of the same people (OpenCoin and founders). Even 10% is completely crazy. Worst: even if, later, the founder and OpenCoin spend most of their XRP to try to bootstrap Ripple, there's no way they could prove it. Ripple will forever lives under the threat that someone might have 10% or 20% of the entire economy.

If all the technical problems are solved (opensourcing the server, publication of mathematical demonstrations, etc), it would be a shame that Ripple never take off only because the founders were too gready. It is also in their best interest that Ripple becomes popular. It's better for them to hold 0.1% of a 100 mililons $ economy than 10% of a non-existent economy.


Proposed Solution

Bitcoin economy was, at the start, heavily boosted by the faucet. Such a faucet should be implemented for XRPs too. The faucet will give, for free, a given amount of XRPs but only once per IP and once per Ripple address. Sure, it is possible to cheat but I believe that it cannot be done on a large scale if protected by a captcha. This will allows everyone to try Ripple. Some will manage to get 10 or 100 times from the faucet. So what ?

Another thing is that, once you've got your free dose from the faucet, you could still get XRPs by buying them for a fixed price or by giving a cupon code. This cupon code will enable OpenCoin to still make some giveaways. Instead of asking for a Ripple address, they will send cupon codes to people. The fixed price is very important: it ensures that, during the bootstraping, there's always a cheap way of buying XRPs and using the network. It also discourages early speculation.

The faucet will also be transparent: the total money in it will be known and displayed publically. At the launch, the faucet will be loaded with 99% of all the ripples. It will be very easy to check at the start that there's well 9,900 millions of XRPs in the faucet. Transactions will be displayed publically so anybody can check for potential problem.


Details

1. Why 99%?

The more goes on the faucet, the better. I would say that 99% is the bare minimal. Less than that leaves too much risks for a centralization. And, as said previously, the risk will *always* stay. Nobody would ever be able to proove that the risk fades away.

2. What should be the fixed price of a XRPs?

It could be a fixed price in bitcoins, strongly linking Ripple with the Bitcoin economy or a fixed price in any fiat currency. But then, the question is: which fiat currency to choose? [1]  Both solution should then be discussed openly. The price should be low enough so that it discourages cheating but high enough so nobody can buy a significant portion of the market.

Having a low fixed price also discourage the use of XRPs as a hoarding money but reinforces the anti-spam goal. It is in the philosophy of XRPs (at least as described on the wiki).

3. How much should the faucet gives?

Currently, OpenCoin is sending 40,000XRPs to individuals. It means that the faucet will be able to make nearly 250,000 donations (minus the sales). If the price of XRPs should be fixed, the free faucet could decides to give less and less. This will encourage early adopters to try the system.


Questions

1. The faucet will ultimately dry out.

That's the goal. When the faucet is dry, we can make the assumption that there's at least some distribution of XRPs accross a few ten thousands of players. At that point, the experiment may start.

2. The price needs to be adjusted.

A fixed price will introduce some stability and some trust in the system. It will reinforce the idea that XRP is a way to prevent spammy transactions, not a hoarding money.

3. OpenCoin needs to make money.

OpenCoin will receive the money from people buying from the faucet, will keep 1% of the XRPs (minus those already given) and will have its online/consultancy services. If that's not enough then OpenCoin is obviously too greedy to be trusted for launching something that big.

4. Someone could buy a lot from us to control most of the economy.

Firstly, it has to be noted that this power is already in the hand of OpenCoin. So why cannot we trust someone else who would do exactly the same: throwing early money at high risk to gain significant control of a future economy?

Now, we have to think about what it means: the more one single player buy XRPs, the less the Ripple economy has a chance to become successful. Do you think that a bitcoin would worth 34$ if 10 players were keeping 1 million BTC each? I don't think so.

The situation is then exactly the same for any rich player than for OpenCoin: finding a balance between earning money and not crashing the structure by controlling too much.


5. OpenCoin has too keep some reserves, to reinject in the economy if needed.

No. It would means that OpenCoin becomes the government of the completely centralized Ripple economy. There's only two solutions: the Ripple economy sustains itself and is able to survive through problems and crisis or it is not. In that case, Ripple is not the solution we need.

Having OpenCoin as a Benevelent Dictator of the economy is the worst possible thing and is, by definition, the opposite of decentralization.

6. OpenCoin could buy from itself.

See question 4.




[1] Another solution is to propose a fixed price for most currencies (like dollars, euros, …). It doesn't matter if the price is not the same in different currencies: it's a selling price but not a buying price. During that bootstraping phase, the market price of XRPs will never go above that fixed price. Say that the fixed price of an XRP is 1€ and 1$ but that 1€=1.5$. It is more interesting to buy your XRP with dollar but it doesn't mean you will find someone to sell your XRP at 1€.

I find this song particularly adequate:
http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/On+My+Way+Up/4RHifq?src=5

Hello,

I've been away from the Bitcoin community for a bit less than a year, to avoid temptation of short-term trading ;-)

Unfortunately, in the meantime, I discovered that TradeHill shutdown. I still have bitcoins there. How can I retrieve them ?

Thanks in advance for helping and sorry for being several trains late.

Hello,

Juste pour signaler que j'ai contribué un article pour présenter le bitcoin sur Framasoft:
http://www.framablog.org/index.php/post/2011/08/08/bitcoin

Bonne lecture !

When the price was increasing, new people had an incentive to buy.

Now, after red friday, MtGox hack and all the fuzz, if I were a newcome, I would certainly not buy any bitcoin right now.

This lead me to the fact that, maybe, most of the buyer are currently hoarders who already have may coins and want more.

As such, this might be a bad thing for the economy because it means that more and more bitcoins will be in the hand of less and less people, which is exactly what the system is trying to avoid.

In your opinion, who is buying now and what should we do to encourage newcomers to buy?

Hello,

I'm not an economist. I'm not a politician. I'm an usability engineer. What I care about is to make technology easy to use by everybody.

In that aspect, Bitcoin fails in nearly every possible way.
- It is impossible to grasp without spending hours on it.
- It is very hard to use to pay or receive payments.
- It is very hard to make it secure to avoid having your bitcoins stolen.
- It is hard to understand how to buy bitcoin and even harder to ensure you buy at a good rate
- It is also risky to accept it as a payment as you don't know what value it will have in the future.
- Bitcoin transaction requires complex escrow mechanisms (which are handled by VISA or Paypal transparently, most people don't even know what an escrow is)
- It is currently almost impossible to accept Bitcoins in a physical shop (to much hassle)

I had ideas for all of those concerns and there was nothing impossible to solve.

Then, I sat down, and decided to write my ideas, to imagine a solution for those problems. Then I realized that all the ideas were merging perfectly in only one concept: Bitcoin Banks. Then, I imagined this Bitcoin bank and realized that it would be a completely ground breaking technology. It would really put the whole banking/e-payment system in danger.

Well, I believe that ideas are free so I want to share this Beta version of the paper with you:
http://ploum.net/public/bitcoin/bitcoin_banking.pdf
Please accept apologies for the bad English. I'm willing to improve my writing. send me corrections and criticisms.

I'm now looking for investors to build that Bitcoin bank of the future. Unfortunately, this is not a 10,000$ investment. It needs to be big and a lot of work is needed. But I really believe that this is an unavoidable breakthrough we will see in the next 15 years.

And if you find that interesting, a few millies for the work are appreciated:
15SCCTDK9xcZyKFWXsPRXYS9s1m3Mikcxs


UPDATE: if you want to share the link, please use this one : http://ploum.net/post/bitcoin-banking

The goal is to have a rough idea of where the money come from in the current Bitcoin economy.

I received a mail from MtGox saying that I tried to reset my password.

This was not me (this is obvious, the request is coming from a Windows PC  )

But the strangest thing is that if you try to reply to the mail (as they told you to do if you haven't requested the reset), the mail is sent to :
Mt.Gox@w001.mo.us.xta.net

Do you smell that?

I'm trying to get more information about how the current banking system is working.

The cash cycle is somewhat easy to figure out. Merchants bring huge quantities of cash to their bank so their are credited on their account. Banks put that cash in their ATM so when you retrieve money, it is charged on your account.

The only remaining question is what if a bank has too much cash and the other not enough. Is there a market for cash? Or is everything regulated by the central bank?

But now about the bank themselves. The money on your account is only a virtual value in some computer. When you pay someone from the same bank, nothing really happens except an addition and a soustraction in an internal database. In theory, if 10 people have an account with 1000€ in a bank, this bank has 10,000€ (we will ignore loans and debts for now).

Now, what does happen when you send money to an account which is not in the same bank?

It looks like an ACH is used. From what I understand, an ACH is mainly a bank for bank. So each bank should have an account to an ACH.

Is that right?

Who is controlling the ACH?

How can a transfer between two ACH happens?

How could it be controlled that the bank have well the money they pretend to have?

I'm a complete n00b in that field and I'm really interested to know the answers.

Le Bitcoin, après une forte croissance de sa popularité, se trouve face aux critiques. L'actualité avec le piratage de MtGox n'aide pas à donner confiance envers le bitcoin.

Ne nous y trompons pas: tous les projets populaires sont passés par là. J'ai personnellement connu cette période troublée pour Firefox, Linux et XMPP. Le Bitcoin ne fait pas exception et c'était très prévisible.

Cependant, histoire de donner une petit défense au bitcoin, j'ai écrit un texte ou, pour une fois, je n'essaye pas de réfuter les arguments des anti-bitcoins. J'essaye juste de montrer pourquoi on peut croire au bitcoin:
http://ploum.net/post/un-bitcoin-dans-la-tete

I think that the TradeHill referral program is a really great idea. But there are a lot of criticism lately because of people spamming their referral links everywhere.

Having my email address in the leaked MtGox database, I even received 3 personnal emails containing TradeHill referral code.

Is it really TradeHill fault? What do you think about it? And, on a personnal scale, do you think you will make any money with that system? Statistically, if you have 100 referred users, that should cover your transaction fees, which is quite interesting.

Do you sometimes think about the referral code you used yourself and wish you could change it? I personnally used Bruce's code, having registered after seeing his tweet.

Hello,

After 5 weeks and 5 edtions, we hope that the bitcoin community had the opportunity to discover The Bitcoin Sun. But, surely, we are far from perfect and we are trying to improve ourselves every week.

What is your opinion about The Bitcoin Sun right now? Have you any comment you want to share? Why do you read (or don't read) our newspaper? What would you like to see improved?

Another poll was also posted a few weeks ago and we were happy to discover than more than half of the respondants were reading The Bitcoin Sun: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=10798.0