I was looking at starting up a site that would sell bitcoins through credit card transactions as a US based business. Not wanting to run into immediate regulatory problems I gave FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) a call. It took them a couple of weeks to get back to me but the answer was yes that business would be required to register as a Money Service Business.

What do you think about a site allows users to attach identity to a bitcoin address? It allows users to trade anonymity for trust. One could verify different pieces of identity such as email, phone, facebook account, physical address, id, etc... and earn a score for what they verify. The information would be kept secret while the score could be looked up by anyone. A buyer could see that "oh, this btc address has verified their home address with this third party, so I can find out where he or she lives should I get ripped off." Would you use this service to look up btc addresses? Or use it to verify your address if it allowed you access to better rates or trusted merchants? What about if you earned some BTC for each point of identity attached?

Someone today made the comparison of BitCoin to Hawala: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala I'd actually never heard of Hawala before so my knowledge of it does not extend any further than that wikipedia article goes. So, I'm curious to know if you think -- is that comparison is accurate? Why or why not?

Looking at the reports of massive growth in the exchange rate from BTC to USD I am left wondering if we are in the middle of another bubble. It makes sense that there is a lot of speculation with the hash rate change and ASIC's coming out. What do you think? Is it likely that we will crash to under $5 in the next year?

Long story short, if you send me 1 BTC and a private message I will send you a VIP link to the apple store where you can buy their products at a 10-20% discount. This offer was used and verified in one of the newbies threads here.

It seems to me that there is demand for a service that would sell BTC instantly through credit card transactions. I understand this had been tried in the past and fraud ran these folks out of business. I'm considering giving it another go and am curious to get your thoughts. I'm not talking about a full exchange. Just credit card transaction -> BTC.

Here are some of the thoughts I have -- and a LOT of questions. If anyone can help I'd appreciate it. Most of these things are to help make the service less attractive to fraudsters. That means trading anonymity in a lot of these cases -- which I have mixed feelings about. Anyway, here goes:

* Which payment processor and banks are going to allow things related to virtual currencies? (Stripe is not able accommodate)
  - some people are able to do this in virtual games now right?
* Any idea which laws would apply to this kind of a service?
* How effective do you think limiting the maximum transaction to 10BTC / account / day would be at limiting fraud liability?
* Phone verification?
* Blocking proxies? No tor or reverse dns with VPN in the name.
* Forcing 2 factor auth with a fob mailed to a physical address?
* Requiring address verification and cvv code with the payment processor.
* Verified by Visa already exits...
* Sliding scale commission based upon the current amount of fraud
* Limiting source ip and users to countries that will pursue fraud
* Why aren't the existing exchanges doing this?

I'm really interested to talk to anyone that tried this in the past. It would be great to have an easy way for someone completely new to BTC to sit down at a computer and within 10 minutes have their first BTC in their wallet.

What was your best experience with BTC. Your most epic win.

Mine was betting my last BTC on the 1.5% odds on SatoshiDice only to find that I actually WON! Very lucky.

Hi, I have a private discount link into the Apple store online. You can get as much as 25% off that new iPhone 5 or macbook pro. I will send you the link for 1 BTC. Shoot me a message here.