The Atlanta Bitcoin Consumer Fair is proud to announce the "Where's Satoshi? The Ultimate Bitcoin Insider Reference Contest"  The person who names the most insider references in the scene (http://bitcoinconsumerfair.com/identify-the-bitcoin-references/) will win a free ticket to the Atlanta Bitcoin Consumer Fair April 17th and 18th along with 2 nights hotel stay. In addition, the winner can purchase as many companion tickets as they want for a 51% discount. Note, there are 51 insider references in the scene. You need not name all of them to win, just name more than anybody else.   For more about the contest check out the link above.

  If you don't think you'll win, now is a good time to get your ticket. Purchase before March 1st and enjoy early registration pricing. Get an additional 10% off when you pay with BTC. http://bitcoinconsumerfair.com/registration/

Can someone explain how this happens?

335275 (Main Chain)    2014-12-21 19:16:35    00000000000000000f4656f29e1e4a25d93ff9f8c7f87fe352979d707255d615
335276 (Main Chain)    2014-12-21 19:16:28    000000000000000009b568b45be21664352b90e1bc587f324009abcf9b51d11e

https://blockchain.info/blocks/1419167263187

It appears that block 335276 confirmed 7 seconds before the previous block. Is this just a matter of miner's clocks being out of sync?

[Speakers:]

I'm co-organizing the first Atlanta Bitcoin Consumer Fair to be held in April, 2015 in Atlanta, GA. The Fair's focus will be on consumers and merchants and in particular, in-person payments at physical retailers. We plan on having a Vendors alley with over 100 vendors selling things for bitcoin (think arts and crafts fair). We will also have exhibitors, bitcoin kioks, and speaking tracks for those in the payment and technology space. We are looking for speakers, vendors, exhibitors, sponsors and of course, attendees. We will really be marketing and pushing this Fair to Bitcoin newbies, consumers just getting their feet wet and wanting to learn more about this exciting technology.

Speakers: Some of the speakers will be announced in the next week but we're looking for high quality dynamic speakers on the business and technical sides of Bitcoin.

Vendors: If you sell things for bitcoin, you need to be here. We expect to have 1000 participants with bitcoin wallets loaded on their phones. We want this to be the largest collection of people buying and selling things for bitcoin in the world today.

Exhibitors: If you sell services to consumers or merchants or payment processors, this will be the place to be.

Sponsors: Get your message out to the Bitcoin community. Several sponsorship opportunities available.

If you're interested in any of the above, please contact me via a direct message on here or at bitcoinconsumerfair@use.startmail.com

Interested in attending? Sign up for the mailing list at http://www.bitcoinconsumerfair.com or follow us on Twitter @bitcoinconsumer

We look forward to seeing you there.

I'm using a mobile app on Android (1ncemail) that launches a bitcoin URI to make a payment to acquire more address aliases. It automatically opens my MyCelium wallet but I want to pay from my Blockchain.info wallet. 

Anybody know why Blockchain.info doesn't register it's acceptance of the Bitcoin URI in Android? any workaround?

Jason

One of the major privacy flaws of credit cards is the ability of merchants to link transactions to a single purchaser because of the uniqueness of the credit card. This can also facilitate cross merchant linkability by a data broker who compiles information from multiple merchants.

I know bitcoin supports easy creation of new addresses and you can have a unique address per transaction but I'm wondering about the feasibility of such and how it could be done transparently. You have two costs associated  with having multiple addresses. First is the transaction costs of your time in setting up and managing multiple addresses and secondly the fee paid to miners when funding your address with the appropriate transaction amount. Also, while having individual addresses for each transaction might obfuscate the consumer at the transaction level from merchants linking accounts, a merchant could certainly dig just under the surface and see that if A sent .53BTC to X1 and X1 paid the merchant .53BTC for one transaction and then in another A sent .21BTC to X2 and X2 paid the merchant .21BTC in a second transaction, both transactions are most likely the same person.

I have an idea for one way around it but it requires a 3rd party. Any other ideas?

[and the transmission]

Many of the financial regulations stem around whether or not you're transmitting money (or stored value) to someone other than the original party. This appeared to be the basis of the Casascius coin letter (see http://rjcesq.com/?p=26). 

The FinCen regulations, for instance, define the term "money transmission services" as "the acceptance of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency from one person and the transmission of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency to another location or person by any means."  The burden then is on you to validate to prove that you're not transmitting the money to another person.

Though this is pure legal speculation, I'd like to suggest the possibility that proof of the private key of a bitcoin address might be sufficient to prove your sending it to your customer and not acting as a conduit to transmit from your customer (who is paying fiat currency) to someone else. This could be done by having your customer transmit an odd amount from the recipient address or (?) signing a message with the private key.

[I do have a technical question about the latter. Can a bitcoin private key be used to sign a generic text message that can be validated using the public address? If not, ignore my second idea and focus on the first.]

Given the continued publicity around stolen Bitcoin, I thought it might be worth examining the possibility of recovery from future possessors. I'd actually like to get into a full law review article on this topic. If any lawyers would like to co-author this paper with me, please get it touch. I've written a preliminary blog post on it at http://rjcesq.com/?p=15

Does anybody know of any mobile apps that are using bitcoin to facilitate in app purchases? If so, how seamless is it integrated with any mobile phone wallets? If not, is there a technical reason why not?

Please don't take this question wrong.  I'm a big proponent of digital and cryptographic currency.  One of the problems for years and why efforts such as DigiCash failed has been the lack of a clear problem that digital currency was solving.* I'm just trying to see what people on this board think,  what problem is Bitcoin solving, in your eyes?  And, as a followup, is there sufficient demand for the solution that is Bitcoin?


*Digicash failed for many reasons, such as the bad business decisions of David Chaum but even if he had done things right, there is no guaranteed that it would have succeeded. 

It seems to me that Bitcoin at present is problematic because it lacks an economic ecosystem.  In other words, there isn't much economic activity save buying and selling in Bitcoins and a few outlier services where one can earn minimal or buy with Bitcoin.  To truly succeed, Bitcoin must reach sufficient levels of acceptance to allow people to live wholly within the Bitcoin economy.  Currently consumers spending Bitcoin must purchase Bitcoin with fiat currency and then purchase their product and service then the accepting business must turn around and sell those Bitcoin in order get fiat currency to pay the electric bill.  This is completely inefficient. 

The question is can a non-Bitcoin based business transact solely or primarily in Bitcoin? By non-Bitcoin based, I mean the business merely uses Bitcoin as a medium of value exchange and doesn't exist to promote or sell Bitcoin related products or services.  Can such a business exist without the necessity of it's customers acquiring Bitcoin prior to purchase and the business immediately cashing out into another form of currency?