1) A lack of faith in central banks and their long-term control over government currencies

2) A desire to hold currency that has positive expected value when more efficient means of production are discovered.

That is all.

-bgc

http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=14&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

Thoughts?

-bgc

So, buying and selling bitcoins is way tougher than it should be. Part of the reason for this is that the ways of getting money to an exchange all take too much time, and this is because the exchanges can't accept credit card because of its reversible nature. What is the level of interest in an exchange where you have to 'sign up' with a significant, notarized process acknowledging your intent to use a credit account to fund your account, and made it slow and manual human-in-the-loop to set up or update your payment information. The intent behind this would be to give the exchange operator full legal recourse to prevent a charge reversal from sticking, and to allow clients to move significant amounts of money without paying wire transfer fees. Additionally, an exchange like this wouldn't have the time-lag of money getting to the exchange so it should find true market price faster than existing methods of exchange. As an additional layer of security, all bitcoin funds could remain entirely offline, and you would queue up your daily withdrawal, allowing another point of gating to prevent fraud.

I view this kind of thing as being useful for those who would want to start selling bitcoins at their existing point of sale (e.g. coffee shops), large wholesalers like tangible cryptography or mike caldwell, and people who wish to do smaller scale local selling.

What's the level of interest?

-bgc

Supposing that pirate was interested in cyclically shorting bitcoins in a day-trading sense, it could make sense for him to borrow significant amounts of coins. Additionally, if he can induce panic selling as he moves to cash, he can essentially profit off of the fear/greed cycle. If he is legitimate, then some percentage of his coins are almost definitely in USD on the exchanges right now, and must be bought back over the next week.

Thoughts?

-bgc

Does anyone else look at the ask side of the orderbook and view it in terms of 'mining-days' (7200 BTC increments)? If so, what do you find interesting about this kind of a view of the market?

I have used and love Jeremy West's spendbitcoins service... but it's clear that there's an inherent difficulty faced in servicing requests when counterparties (e.g. Amazon/paypal) can delay processing. Additionally, because Jeremy lives in Australia and I live in the US, there's sometimes an entirely reasonable, but still unfortunate time delay for orders because it's 0-dark-thirty in the morning in Australia when its mid-afternoon here.

Because of these reasons, I think we need more services equivalent to the spendbitcoins service. These could be franchises, or simply competitors, but the key property should be geographical distribution: ideally one each in the US, UK, Germany, and perhaps Brazil & Russia. This allows for decentralization in legal environment as well as normal operating hours.

Thoughts?

-bgc

So, I have a half-technical half-systematic question. As I understand it, bitcoin uses a cryptographic proof of work with a most-work-wins approach to double-spend resolution.

What are the implications of black-holing any double-spent coins? Obviously this would need to be transitive. And probably there would need to be some maximum time delta after which presenting a double-spend to the network would not cause coin destruction.

Thoughts? Clarifications where I just have the wrong idea?

-bgc

I will be traveling to chicago soon with my wife and would be interested in buying Chicago transit passes and GoChicago city passes for bitcoins. It's a little too late for shipping them to me, so if you're interested we would need to meetup at Chicago O'Hare at ~2 PM on July 4 to make the deal. If you're interested, PM me to sort out the details.

-bgc

[The Manhattan Project - Minion Games]

Obviously I have ulterior motives because I'll be selling board games for bitcoins soon, but I'm also interested in what games you've found to be interesting. A brief non-exhaustive list of recent favorites for me:

• The Manhattan Project - Minion Games
  A worker-placement game with some similarity to deck-building games like Dominion. Has a good amount of strategic tension, and a decent market mechanic. I'll be selling this one in June
  2-5 Players
• Dominion
  If you haven't played this, you should find a friend who has it or buy it immediately. It's a deck-building card game where you play with 10 out of the 25 included card types forming a stock that you buy cards to build up your deck with,
  eventually purchasing victory point cards. It'll be a long time before I'll be able to have enough volume to sell this one
  2-4 Players
• Drakon
  This is a currently out-of-print tile-laying dungeon crawl with a kind of 'programming a path' feel to it. It's a great game... several of my coworkers are addicted to it, and I may or may not be
  2-6 Players
  
• Doge
  This is a truly great partial-knowledge simultaneous staged reveal election game. The strategy is intense, and while there's
  relatively little luck involved, the fact that you don't know what your opponents are doing adds a lot of surprise.
  3-4 Players
  
• 7 Wonders
  A multi-strategy victory point game with several different ways of scoring points that interact. Plays really quickly once you learn it, only 18 moves in the game and then you tally up score. Mechanic is card selection and passing decks to your neighbors, so there's tension between taking what you need and preventing your opponent from getting what they need.
  2-7 Players, but 2 player game uses a 'dummy' 3rd player, so more like 3-7
  

What are your favorites? Do you know of any small game shops that you would like to buy from with bitcoins? I'm looking to become a bitcoin-only reseller and could possibly work out an arrangement with them allowing you to get your board games with your preferred currency, hopefully even at a discount.

Selling Minion Games games to start out with. http://www.miniongames.com/

Details here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83111.0

Hello all,

Maybe some of you, like me, just can't get enough strategy board gaming! If so, good news!!!

Soon you will be able to buy board games for bitcoins!

Shortly, I will be starting a bitcoin-only strategy board game business. I plan on initially only selling Minion  Games http://www.miniongames.com/, but if things go well I will expand my inventory and sources.

Price-wise, I'm aiming for 4% off retail plus $8-10 for shipping at MtGox weighted average prices. If you live in or visit the DC area, you can purchase in person and waive the shipping. I'll group orders to minimize shipping.

At the time of writing, MtGox weighted average is 5.10 USD/BTC so the estimated prices reflect this

The games in my initial offering will be specifically the following

Estimated shipping in continental US: 1.75 BTC

*ALL PRICES ESTIMATED*

• The Manhattan Project: ~9.4 BTC
• The Manhattan Project - Nations Expansion: ~1.13 BTC
• Kingdom of Solomon: ~9.4 BTC
• Venture Forth: ~9.4 BTC
• *when it comes out* Tahiti: ~6.6 BTC

Of these, I've only had the privilege of playing The Manhattan Project, and it gets solid marks from me and from several of my friends. Its monopolized the last several of our game nights.

I don't have any established buy/sell rep, but am looking to establish it. I'm willing to use escrow for the first several purchases, but ultimately I plan on it being a 'you-send-first' with the understanding that I'll fully refund in case of a problem.

I'm going to start out with no online store-front, but hope to have one up shortly after establishing there's actually demand for this stuff.

I'm still in the laying-plans stage, so this is the time to help make this service something useful or more useful for you. Throw me your ideas, tentative orders, desired stock, whatever. =)

-bgc