I know I used Mt.Gox once, but I can't remember if I left any funds with them, so I haven't bothered trying to hard with account recovery. But I'm not sure so I thought I better have a go.

I also can't remember what email I used to register with or username! Oh dear.

 Perhaps you can help me whittle it down a bit.

1) When Mt.Gox send a `Thank you for registering with Mt.Gox` what words do they put in the email so I can search my emails to find that, to determine which email address I used

2) Is the username allowed symbols like $ & _ in them? Or is it just numbers and small case letters. This will help me be more sure of my username.

3) I'm in the UK, but I think I only used the site last year... so I don't think I could have used their UK bank deposit system because that didn't exist. For account recovery they are asking for "<11>Send the account number(s) and amount(s) you used when depositing into your Mt.Gox account." what is this referring to? Does it mean the account number of where the funds were coming from? I'll have to figure out how I did it.


 I had my phone stolen and I think stuff like this must have been noted on it. Albeit encrypted, let this be a lesson to me!

[I wondered what it would take to go direct to VISA instead.]

 When travelling cash is often king. It would be great to have access to the visa/link ATM network.

Already prepaid cards are available especially for this from people like fairfx.

Certainly too there are other firms like Entropay and Paxum/Payoneer that can be used for this goal too, but the fees in all examples are very expensive:
https://www.entropay.com/entropay-fees-straightforward-charges-no-surprises
https://www.paxum.com/payment/fees.php?view=views/fees.xsl

There are banks in America and the UK who charge no fees for withdrawing cash and use the reference conversion rate (I wonder if there's any in Russia or China like this). The problem with these of course is that you have no anonymity and all your cash is in one basket. I have even seen situations where more than the balance has been taken, sending the user into debt. This is where cycling cards like virtual credit cards would be useful.
There are other companies especially for people who can't open bank accounts... I feel it very harsh that these are the very people who have to pay the highest rates! Some have to pay per domestic cash withdrawal and on purchases!

Before Bitcoin was invented I wondered, why isn't there a egold to cash card? It's a global market I thought, surely a bank in Panama etc could offer this?

With some research I found that there were people offering them but it was all very dodgy, and how it works was very hush-hush.

One way a cash card might be able to be achieved is to write a card with virtual (debit) card details... but this sounds sketchy, especially as we don't know much about the virtual card system.

What I'd like to know is how do these cards work? What does it take to be a reseller?
I have a gut feeling that if one has a bank one can do it... but visa/mastercard can block it at any point.

One way I can think to do it would be expensive and without any anonymity - register as a credit union and purchase cards for members from ...I forget the name of the company now... they were associated with Caxton......
 but unfortunately these cards charge ~£3 per withdrawal. I wondered what it would take to go direct to VISA instead.

I'd just like to know more about how things work (would be nice to know what happens to our money when it comes out the wall right?)

 but like most things related to banking, all the information is hard to come by, either for security of due to the people who know keeping the info to themselves because they profit from it.

 I'm just researching because my traditional bank charges no fees for withdrawing cash worldwide.

If the same thing was available as prepay I'd switch. At the moment the best I can find is about $2.50 per withdrawal. Can you beat that? Also, what about identity checks?

 I remember finding a website where you can put an offer to exchange a currency you have for another.

It was pretty basic; no automatic pairing and the reputation system was pretty basic.

 I can't find it or remember what it was called... can anyone help me find such a thing?

 I've read a few articles saying the driving forces between value increase have been:

- international trade,
- illegal trade
- merchant use
- speculation

Well hang on! This is completely forgetting about why I personnally bought a load of Bitcoins - I love it.

All these infernal speculators and none of them ever consider love and passion for a project as a driving force.
I'd say that's a driving force - hope. People want to believe in something.

That's the first thing.
The second thing I see missed in these analyses is personal utility. A migrant worker can send funds home without WesternUnion or whatever. Travelers a no longer reliant on the VISA & Mastercard ATM networks, travelers cheques or cash. Paypal users... well we all know about that.

Love and hope I think can drive BC price to any level, it just depends on how brave people are feeling. If a law is passed somehow destroying it in one country, do people soldier on?

And that's the difference until now - was that crazy bubble spike pure speculation? I don't think so, the price that lead to it I don't think was.

That's what I find striking now about reading the grassroots opinion from the new investors and more mainstream media - they care and look at the price as a source of data, when really it is a reflector of data. Thus, the market looking into itself can find no new knowledge. To that end Bitcoin has really made the woes of capitalism clear. They are so obsessed with greed they can't see see the humanity behind the price.

When I read the news that BC was 200x more now I should have been unreactive. Instead my eyes spun like fruit machines. Very enlightening.

Could bitcoin be used for a lot more for democratic processes?

Could bitcoin be used to inspire something better?

This could turn into a meandering stream-of-consciousness thread but here goes.

The first thing I notice is that:

- identity isn't absolutely possible because everything in life is always changing, but a working compromise is
- sure, the number of bitcoins and transactions is distributed but the number of nodes is not. That is, there is little control over the number of nodes. Perhaps a major flaw but let's stay on topic.

Lets say we have a island community with no ties to the outside world (for arguments sake). Without tax for services people start donating for things like fire, police, much as jewish communities do. If this was done with bitcoin this would allow for new developments because of the nature of the system. Micropayments can bring markets to smaller areas. So instead of having to choose one fire service, the possibility of more possibilities is now possible! :p Internal accounting can be used to document ones goals but the difference is that this can be directly linked to the world.
Can true democratic leadership be created this way, where people pay directly for their services? The key is leadership and then we have a problem. For a society we need to share or not. You can't have it both ways. But could bitcoin do a better job of it - an overtly capitalist system rather than the present (increasingly less) covert system.

To be exact, most people when they think of democracy, think of each vote being ties to a single person. If a rich person manages more than one vote then it's capitalism not democracy. Does bitcoin change this as we think it does? Like I said, because identity is constantly moving thing that doesn't exist, no it does not. However, a better compromise than the current system is possible.

Let's imagine this island community is now making transactions, the money being used to vote on changes. What is the difference from the system we have now? That is, the system is abused so that voting is used to make more money. In that sense there is no leadership in a capitalist society.

 I think bitcoin could be used for help more things because it has value like money. For example, in a company employees generally don't trade salaries to get the best desk. But why not?
The force of circumstances means that if things `want `to be a market perhaps they should be allowed to be so, and encouraged.  Ticket touts? -legalize and encourage. The market, if working well, goes in and ultimately fixes the problem. In the case of ticket touts the distribution and faulty pricing structure is fixed (the vendor is outsourcing the problem but really they could profit more by auctioning...). I got a feeling if the antitrust powers were much more effective that could be the biggest impact on the world than anything else. That's the thing, capitalists want it both ways - to have the freedom for their profit but others to not have that freedom. Time for technologies like bitcoin to shake that up. A market can be applied to pretty much anything. Think about this in the next political discussion. Somewhere in the argument (and the problem) there will be something that isn't traded properly. It seems markets don't come naturally to people. The markets need support, but for that we have to recognize either how useful they are or turn our backs on them. Is it that in the same way that knowledge flows like water so do market forces?

So this is my philosophy:
That one has to work with the market, never against it like protectionism and communism. And that problems related to the market, like herd mentality, monopolies and elitism are actually caused by gaps in the market where the market does not operate.
Thus to correct these problems we have to support the market in the areas that are causing problems. For example, doctors are too expensive - drop the training requirement to less than so many years, allow foreign doctors. For example, phones are too expensive - drop the minimum needed to be a network operator, and so on. It can sometimes be hard to identify what area the market is causing a problem but I am developing a gut feeling that this can solve any problem potentially and that it is only human nature that holds it back. For example, when we buy something we don't think about where it came from or what effect that action has had in the world.

I doubt I am the first to think this. Is there a name given to this liberal market philosophy?

Or indeed, is there a name given to the idea that instead of censorship (which doesn't work), the answer is to flood the offending knowledge with more information (aka propaganda, which costs money, but is more practical).

What if we were all subcontractors and not employees? Every small action with a price.
What if instead of voting for people, we just pay directly to get things done through pooled investments?
Clearly that is not who we've been raised to be. Think about it - tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor. Where's the freelancer or business option?

Ultimately capitalism is the thing beating every other philosophy if it is given a chance, including bitcoin. If money is to be accepted, why not go further with it?


Ideas:

- try running an experimental network where the number of nodes slowly increases along with the money supply, or something like that. Whoever discovers a new node permission gets to bind it to their ipv6 address... incidentally.... where can I bid to own an ipv4 address outright?

- a network running on something that isn't the internet would be good! Like bluetooth or wifi dead droped cashing networks. Or ultra low bandwidth packet radio

- the blockchain needs to be improved. That is, it is unwieldy now and the ideas above involving more clients are wiped out by this. If it looks unwieldy now imagine how bad it would be if the stock exchange was bitcoin only; it would be unworkable

- the almost instantaneous speed of transactions is fantastic. Already lots better than standard banking where physical cash deposits are often used for used cars! That's a key feature and I can't help thinking it could bring bitcoin into something major somewhere in of itself

- there should be more experimental networks forked and inspired from bitcoin. For example, the ability to choose to be anonymous or not. Not being anonymous has advantages and different uses. Being more anonymous has advantages too. Running bitcoin not on top of tor/i2p is really neither one thing or another; you feel you have anonymity but really you do not.

 Problem:

You wish to pay a friend with Bitcoin.
 
You have saved your password for MyBitcoin.com except for the last 3 letters into your mobile phone memory to save time,

 but the Bitcoin address is still very long to type in.

How can this be better?

 Barcodes.

There are 2 sections to this problem:

1) Generate a barcode for a bitcoin address.

2) Read a barcode using a mobile phone camera.

There are apps that can read barcodes (http://scan.jsharkey.org/) but what I'm looking for is one that runs in the background and types in the barcode number into the webbrowser. I haven't found that yet. Here's a starter on how you might make that:

You don't need an Android phone to make an Android app. See this article:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Run-Android-Applications-on-Ubuntu-115152.shtml

You can run an emulator on your linux or Windows box straight away, including using a PC connected webcam (see http://scan.jsharkey.org/ )

Somebodies already on the barcode scan API:
http://code.google.com/p/zxing/

It should be a simple feat to use that for copy the results from zxing into the copy/paste buffer for easy copying into the web browser.

2) Making your own Bitcoin address barcode.

Here's the list of barcode types useable with zxing:
    * UPC-A and UPC-E
    * EAN-8 and EAN-13
    * Code 39
    * Code 93
    * Code 128
    * QR Code
    * ITF
    * Codabar
    * RSS-14 (all variants)
    * Data Matrix
    * PDF 417 ('alpha' quality)
    * Aztec ('alpha' quality)

I'm now looking up how to make these....

 Now we have Android on the way this could be much more feasible.

I think better to have a completely separate network this way than trying to shoe-horn Bitcoin into this. A completely new design. 

 The main difference here being the intermittency of the network.

However, such a network would be as interesting as Bitcoin because it would be completely separate from Bitcoin. In fact, it would be usable in places where there is no internet... or phone system.

 Have we heard of any attempts to make a cell/peer-to-peer/`mesh?` network over bluetooth like this?


The usefulness of such a network and the fact that this doesn't exist says a lot to me about how pervasive centralization is these days. Big opportunity to make changes here.

 I can never remember my bitcoin address and how to find out with bitcoind

Would be nice if there was a command to show the address, or something clearer

 thanks!

Anything we could/should do to prepare for deep packet inspection? Random port? More? If it's to be done with a breaking feature that should really be done at the same time as making that bootstrapping thing smaller.

Perhaps there should be switch to make a Bitcoin payment anonymous or very open. I mean, imagine is all banking was open by design? Just a thought. That way, if you had, for example, a network similar to Bitcoin but where authorities can see what is happening quiet clearly then if the anon one gets shut down at least you still have the open one still going, but at least you still got rid of the bank problem.

Decentralised development. Perhaps a mirror to freenet might be good. Also, getting into other languages in different countries is important; completely separate development there too. If USA gets shut down perhaps .ru continues because most English speakers are ignorant to Russian, for example.

So, what languages do we have here in the house here?

 
 If we had a filetype, such as .bitcoin,
we could have that filetype open bitcoin to send a payment without needing to copy and paste the address.

 You could have the payment to info stored in an xml file:

- amount to pay
- address to pay to
- comment (this could be used to identify the product or tip in the case of a flattr type setup)

 Of course, the file would have to be rigorously checked to avoid abuse.

Bitcoin relies on me being able to run it so...

hosting. That is, VPS.

What is the best service money can buy

- physical backups via DVD mailed to a specified address
- reputable
- reliable

Then again... one can always put an old computer in a corner in a relatives room.

I just want to see some discussion on it because in effect this is like how banks were years ago - looking after ones resources. Now I think I should know more of the details on that.

For example, I run my bitcoin on a machine with other things going on there. It could be better. I wonder if I should put effort into improving it. I could do this by renting a VPS... or then again go the whole hog and co-lo. But to colocate a machine just for bitcoin is over the top... backing-up the wallet or not....

Lots to think about.