http://www.reddit.com/r/BitSpend/comments/1go95b/updatenews_why_we_have_been_slow_and_taking/

Chase bank and another bank, have both decided that we as a Bitcoin based business are "Too High Risk" of clients, and have frozen/shut down our accounts. We were NOT given notice, and we were simply told "your funds will be sent to you by check within 30 days". This is not something we were ever warned about, given notice of, or even received the courtesy of a phone call from the bank beforehand.

This sucks. I was shopping online and wanted to buy something. I don't carry my debit card with me any more because I usually just use bitcoins via BitSpend.


I think the solution to this is a decentralized BitSpend type of service. Have a p2p app, you sign up as a willing purchaser...someone enters a link to the product they want to buy, you submit your offer to buy it for them for BTC...based on your rating they go ahead and send you the BTC, you purchase it and have it shipped to the buyer.

The key issue there would be the trust factor unless third party escrows could also be coded in.

Some whiners think that ASICs are centralizing everything because they cannot buy one and make a buttload of coins.

But ASICs are the end of the line for hardware advances up until quantum computing, and even then it is so far away and it would be years before the return on the processing power of a quantum computer could match an ASIC.

As it is, several companies are popping up to provide ASIC chips. And they are looking to mass produce these things. Meaning a future of millions of cheap ASICs to be used primarily for mining bitcoins. N00bs will be able to buy an ASIC on Amazon and have it delivered in a few days to be plugged in and run with very little knowledge of mining. Unlike GPU mining or even CPU mining.

This may not be the case right now, but after a year or so there will be tons of ASICs out there. They may even be embedded in other electronics like TV boxes that pay for TV shows via bitcoins mined from your ASIC chip. All you pay is electricity costs. Or free cell phones with embedded ASIC to pay for your service, just make sure you keep it charged.

The only way to speed things up through hardware is just to have more ASICs. There is no next step for a long time.

They are now taking pre-orders for the Trezor bitcoin hardware wallet.

http://www.coindesk.com/trezor-now-taking-pre-orders-for-its-hardware-bitcoin-wallet/


What do you think? Would you buy one? 1 BTC for a plastic case version in November or 3 BTC for aluminum in October.


I am undecided on it. It could be one of those things that I did not know I needed until I use it, but am still unsure. I use paper wallets for long term storage and online wallets for short term spending money. A hardware wallet would be handy as a replacement for using online wallets.

For those who supported Mitt Romney, do you really believe that he would have done anything differently when it comes to the NSA and gathering information on every American to help "fight the war on terror"?




Your choice was not in November 2012, it was in winter & spring 2012. Did you choose the guy who would have put an end to the spying?

Which will you be getting this Christmas?

Also, does anyone know if there would be a procedure to get in as a business to bulk order several hundred of these so we could pool our money to get a shot of the first run of deliveries? 

If so, that would be one of the first trials for my BitPools site.

This needs to happen.

http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/22560500/sushi-restaurant-using-unmanned-flying-drones-to-deliver-food-to-customers#axzz2VvJhjKWB

Someone needs to set up an app that can send bitcoins and GPS information to a restaurant and have a drone with food come and find you.

When you are born you can do whatever you want. When you leave your home at 18 you can do whatever you want. Right now you can do whatever you want.

If you leave your home at 18 years old and go decide you want to celebrate with a glass of champagne in the park. You grab a bottle from home and head down to the park. You pop the cork and sit there enjoying your freedom from the parents.

Then some dude comes up and tells you he does not like you drinking.

At that point you face a choice. Are you more powerful than that dude? Can you continue drinking without him interfering? You may be bigger so you stand up to him telling him that you are a free person that can do whatever he wants. The dude disagrees and pulls a gun. In this anarchist world, survival of the fittest prevails. You are subject to that person's whim because he has more power than you do. He can now use his gun to take you prisoner for as long as he and his friends think is right in their own eyes.

What if you had a gun too? If he pulled a gun you could have pulled one too, perhaps shot him if neccessary. But then he has a bunch of buddies with guns too, and a lot of equipment to come track you down and take you to a cage and hold you there as long as he and his friends think is right in their own eyes.

What if you and your buddies had more guns and equipment than them? Then their buddies would call other buddies who have tanks and helicopters and jets and missiles...

So, what if you had a lot of buddies with tanks and helicopters and jets and missiles...once it was established that interfering with you was not worth all of the lives and fighting, then...then you could sit there and drink your champagne freely.

So when it comes down to it...we are all free. It is just that there are people out there that hold more power than us that will always have control over our lives unless we are more powerful than them. That is an anarchist society.

It appears that the price on most of the exchanges is within around a dollar of each other. This is a good thing. Hopefully volume spreads well to the exchanges.

I was going to go with CampBX but on their FAQ they list USPS and Western Union wire transfers but not banks.

Which exchanges accept bank wire transfers? (Besides MtGox).

I have sent an e-mail to Freelancer.com requesting that they accept bitcoins considering they serve nations all over the world and have to convert currencies all the time in order to pay people. Being able to pay someone or get paid in bitcoins would be a great step forward for people to be able to get off of their government currencies.

Please contact them and let them know how useful it would be to be able to get paid in bitcoins or to pay people in bitcoins.

http://www.freelancer.com/info/contact-us.php


I do realize that there have been bitcoin services similar to freelancer in the past but the amount of projects or developers is fairly sparse.

And if freelancer accepted bitcoins, you could point anyone who wanted to make a few BTC to that site with so many ways to make money.


Edit:
The canned response I received was:

We would like to thank you for taking the time to submit your ideas and suggestions to improve our features and services. Rest assured that this will be received by the proper department.

There are all of these rules and laws about "money laundering" to make it sound so scary and evil like Scarface moving his dirty money.

But what is money laundering anyway? Someone commits a crime involving money and does not want that money traced back to them for that crime, so they launder the money.

So essentially, these are monetary crimes. And since the law enforcement cannot solve the crime or catch the "bad guys" they have to lock down the whole monetary system just in case "bad" money makes it through.

So because some people may use money for bad things and they are too incompetent to catch them, the government must know every transaction that anyone ever makes with money?

Why stop there? Why not have ID checks at every corner of every city of every country so that if a crime happens on one street they can trace the crime by knowing who was on that street at that time? Oh, but those of us who would be against that would be "supporting terrorists" or drug dealers and criminals.

Sure, if someone steals money from someone else it would be nice to track that money down. But is it worth locking down a whole currency because of it?

Only 2 million coins pre-mined. Everything else is the same as Bitcoin except the additional "r".

Enjoy mining.

http://www.github.com/project/britcoin

These things are going to be worth lots of pounds!

Just wondering if there are any betting sites where your odds get better the higher your bet.

Say a 50:50 game with house edge of 2% for a 1 BTC bet while it is closer to 1% for a 10 BTC bet or .1% for 100 BTC bet.

I only know of SatoshiDICE and do not gamble so this is more research than anything.

The Federal Reserve has been around for a century, it took a lot for people to even find out what the Federal Reserve is much less that it should be ended. All of our fighting to get even an audit of the Federal Reserve took two presidential elections with that as the main focus to get a watered down bill passed. The audit showed that they were pouring money to foreign governments and still there is no glimmer in anyone's eyes of getting the Federal Reserve shut down via Congress.

Bitcoin is creating an alternative. It is doing more to the Federal Reserve than has been done in 100 years. We can tell that they are intimidated because they are starting to use their tools to try to stop Bitcoin (The Fed's biggest tool though, besides the media, is war...so do not get too comfortable).

Instead of ending the Fed we are creating a better alternative and bipassing the Federal Reserve. Potentially, this could lead to the end of the Fed as the better alternative wins out.

Could this be the path forward for other government services?

Create a streamlined, open source, distributed service for all communities?

Take fire departments for example. I lived in a county where the fire department was private. They provided the best award winning service of the whole state and every home owner received a discount on their insurance rates because of that fire department. The cost was either $20 a month or a maximum $2,000 for putting out a house fire (which was also covered by insurance).

If we were to take the standard operating procedures of this successful fire department combined with mass purchases to cut down on costs and other streamlining procedures we could probably get that same service offered in many more communities at a lower cost. The towns where they are set up may already have a city fire department but if people are willing to be covered by the new fire department their insurance may go down more than the price per month making adoption easy. And with a fully operational fire department in town, come budget time the town leaders may be more apt to not pay to keep their old fire department going.

And that is just one service that could be replaced.

The key is to have the alternative already available to people before talking about getting rid of the government service.

If your current money is in a bank gaining interest, why would you ever spend your money? Is this a flaw in fiat? Everyone is hoarding their money to get interest on their money so nobody is spending their money. Should we penalize money that has been sitting in the bank too long?

If nobody spends their money fiat will become useless. What are some ways we can get people to spend fiat instead of hoarding it for the interest?

With the services being built around Bitcoin, I could easily see people using Bitcoin without even knowing that they are doing so.

Maybe a website where you buy "points" and you are able to buy things with those points but in reality you are buying mBTC and the site is paying merchants in bitcoins.

Or a bitcoin card that does everything on the back end in bitcoin but the user does not necessarily refer to it as Bitcoin.

Maybe major financial institutions will start moving large amounts of money back and forth via Bitcoin for its compatability and ease of transfer.

If that happened, how do you think the price would be affected?

Wow...it went up a dollar...$266 by the weekend?

Outside of Bitcoin, how often do you switch back and forth between currencies?

There is this image portrayed of Bitcoin that involves hopping back and forth between your main currency and Bitcoin.

But how many people hop between currencies in their daily lives outside of professionals that deal with that sort of thing all of the time.

If I had to hop back and forth between the Peso and the dollar I would have many of the same arguments about volatility and the inconvenience of it.

We need to get past the mindset of buying and selling Bitcoin and move toward one time conversion of your old government currency to your new currency, to be held and used on its own.

Do people in Mexico care much about something like this going on weekly?

The current market cap for Bitcoin is around $1.3 billion. When you buy bitcoin, your dollars are not converted to bitcoin. You are trading your dollars value for value with someone else who has bitcoin. So even if everyone in the world bought one Satoshi at the current price, the money would just be switching hands.

But, when the price rises, those mined bitcoins have just replaced more dollars than previously, displacing dollars thus having less demand for that equivalent amount.

But the biggest thing that could hurt the federal reserve is if people not only switched to bitcoins for their every day purchases...but they also essentially send their federal reserve notes back to the federal reserve by paying off their debts. If the federal reserve is sitting there with a bunch of dollars with very little demand they will have to resort to practically giving it away in the hopes that people will use it. Interest rates would go negative, the spiral of dollar value to bitcoins would begin.

and then asked one of them to produce a Roman coin that would be suitable for paying Caesar's tax. One of them showed him a Roman coin, and he asked them whose name and inscription were on it. They answered, "Caesar's," and he responded:"Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's;

Who's name is on the dollar? The Federal Reserve....Render therefore unto the Federal Reserve the things which are the Federal Reserve's.

Former marine, radio host and political activist Adam Kokesh was arrested at a marijuana legalization assembly in Philadelphia today, according to video and Facebook posts.

http://www.infowars.com/dc-armed-march-organizer-adam-kokesh-arrested-at-philly-pot-rally/?utm_source=Intel&utm_medium=twitter


Apparently he was standing near people who were smoking pot.


An obvious attack because of his planned armed protest in DC planned for July 4th.