Is there a public thread or somewhere where I could view the discussions between Gavin and the other core devs about the possible change in block size?

There is blood on the streets, uncertainty in the air, and fear rocks the market like a boiling sea. Prepare your bank accounts, People, it is time to buy.

OpenBazaar Project Lead Brian Hoffman shares his thoughts about the current state of OpenBazaar's development.

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/18782/decentralized-markets-kills-e-commerce-stars-openbazaar/

Bitcoin Magazine's Ferdinand Reyes interviews core OpenBazaar devs Brian Hoffman and Angel Leon

http://www.cracked.com/article_21874_7-ways-my-modern-country-turned-into-dystopia-overnight.html

Signs of the times?

http://www.coindesk.com/day-reckoning-dark-markets-hundreds-illicit-domains/

With the US gov't reaching nout with its fat, well-funded arms out to squash out the TOR darknet network, maybe its time that we switch to i2P for a greater amount of anonymity?

With the takedown of free, albeit hidden, marketplaces which promote voluntary participation, free market competition and quality products and services by men in uniform vested with the "authority" to enact arbitrary "laws" passed down by corrupt, outdated and obsolete goverments, it is the time for us to give our full support to the establishment and development of decentralized marketplaces.

(That sounds so cryptoanarchist that I am creeping myself out.   )


But seriously, time for us to really take serious time, effort and funding to help OpenBazaar be successful.

You can contribute to the code by going to their GitHub page:

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar

You can Help fund their Tip4Commit:

http://tip4commit.com/projects/728

And you can donate directly to the project's wallet:

BTC:   3MXYUBLWNETa5HTewZp1xMTt7AW9kbFNqs

And you can set up your own OB node using the steps from the wiki! :

https://blog.openbazaar.org/openbazaar-beta-1-0-tutorial/

Hope you guys have fun shopping and may all your stores be successful!!!

^ _ ^

Bitwage has released their Bitcoin Payroll for the Individual. News article with details below:

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitwage-unveils-bitcoin-payroll-individual-regardless-employer-approval/

Even if it looks like its only available for the US so far, it's still a great development in the space. KUDOS!!!

http://www.coindesk.com/wc3s-web-payments-redesign-bypass-bitcoin/

The WC3 is planning to standardize web payments, much like HTML and XML are standards for our current web framwork.

These particular statements are particularly concerning:

"The place of cryptocurrency at the group depends on who will come to the group."

"If there is a critical mass of people that can bring an expertise around cryptocurrencies and they can help solve some of the issues, then this is surely something that will be taken up by the group,"

"If, on the contrary, you have mostly the traditional finance industry, banks and networks, then the focus will be to improve credit card payment on the web."

I'm not really familiar with how much influence these guys have about what the industry really considers to be standards, but this still sounds like something we need to get the leaders from the crypto-business sector and the dev teams to get on board with.

Thoughts?

http://www.coindesk.com/bitpay-project-aims-networks-bitcoin-currency/

This sounds like they're trying to build the meshnet we've been buzzing about here in the forums. Thoughts?

With bitcoin becoming a $6bn industry, and OpenBazaar development doing well, we now have an almost entire ecosystem in place, all that's left's the delivery system that could scale up against legacy systems like USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc. Not to say that the existing system doesnt work, but there are those that would benefit from participating in the shipping business, add that to the efficiency of decentralized systems, there is no reason for us to not make a similar implementation for shipping physical systems.

What I'm thinking of is a fleet of volunteer bike couriers who get paid in bitcoins that get released out of escrow after delivery confirmation. Longer distances would then need several stops, each courier dead dropping the package in a mail station operated by another member, to be forwarded to the next station, etc. (All of that assuming the item is a small-medium parcel not weighing more than a few pounds.)

I know that doesn't sound like a well thought out solution, and it's not exactly a white paper, I just wanted to see what solutions other people have made to address this. If there's already an existing discussion about this, please feel free to leave a link as a reply.

Related links:

Shyp.com

A reddit thread about this same topic:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1haxrp/decentralized_anonymous_parcel_delivery_service/

Anonymous Physical Object Delivery:
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~elli/papers/APOD_PETS09.pdf

Like what I said on the title -

Any Pinoys in this forum? What are you doing with your BTC?
Any BTC events you guys are going to? Looking to set one up?
Any BTC promotional efforts?

http://www.coindesk.com/mike-hearn-wins-40000-bounty-bitcoin-core-crowdfunding/

Finally, a way for the people developing the core Bitcoin protocol to get rewarded for their efforts!

I know that there have been dozens and dozens of threads on this forum asking for a decentralized exchange to avoid another MtGox crisis. This is important, and many attempts have been made to achieve it. I believe the answer is here, or atleast, is on it's way.

OpenBazaar, more than being just a market for goods and services, it could also serve as a distributed network facilitating currency exchanges. Here's a proposal on how it could be done:

https://gist.github.com/drwasho/aa6ab79e92f2a876073e

A simple primer to what OpenBazaar is, what it does, how it does it and whay you should care:

http://www.slideshare.net/openbazaar/open-bazaar

There is a primer in the OpenBazaar GitHub page about the possibilities for lending and borrowing BTC and possibly other cryptocurrencies on its platform.

https://gist.github.com/drwasho/2c40b91e169f55988618

I'm not sure if this has been discussed here already, I just want to know what you guys think about it. (and I hope this also gets the attention of people who can contribute more to the project more than I can, both technically and financially)

At present, adding transaction fees to your bitcoin payments are optional, and the main goal for mining is to claim the 25BTC block solution reward. Once the last block has been mined, can transaction fees really support the mining industry?

How many transactions need to include fees?
How much should those fees be?
Would major players in the mining industry pack up and leave after the last block gets mined?

Is there anybody out there who could elaborate on how to set up a DRK wallet on a USB thumbdrive (or any form of portable storage).

I've already downloaded the DRK wallet client on my thumb drive, but the address changes each and every time I run the client on a PC. does the same on different PC's.

Any help is appreciated.
^ _ ^

I haven't contributed anything to the project yet as I'm still learning how to use python and HTML5, but please, for those of you who do have the know-how, or the coin, please support OB's development by either helping develop the code at:

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar

or donate using the donate widget on their site:

http://openbazaar.org/

(I wanted to paste a BTC address generated from that link, but something tells me it'd look wrong...)