hi there guys, i want to play about with ripple and XRP so i am looking for some great deals on XRP

i have 2BTC to give you for a reasonable amount of XRP.
i will also do deals of BTC in smaller denominations EG 0.1BTC

and being honest here i will ignore any offers of under 80k XRP for 2BTC (or multiples of under 0.1BTC for 4k XRP)

but i will only do this on offers i see as reasonable. so PM me your offers

hi there guys, i want to play about with ripple and XRP so i am looking for some great deals on XRP

i have 2BTC to give you for a reasonable amount of XRP.
i will give out amounts of BTC in smaller denominations EG 0.1BTC

and being honest here i will ignore any offers of under 80k XRP for 2BTC (or multiples of under 0.1BTC for 4k XRP)

but i will only do this on offers i see as reasonable. so PM me with your offers

i am not sure if this has been posted before but the great guys at bitinstant doing their great stuff yet again at a bitcoin symposium/liberty forum in new hampshire recently

part 1-part 2-part 3-part 4-part 5-part 6-part 7-part 8

taking the idea of the governments(of many countries) solar panel grants where people agree to have solar panels installed in exchange for free electric and the possible extra cash rebate due to excess production..

but doing it Avalon ASIC style.
imagine your most favourite grandma, or a neighbour that has been through a bit of hard luck, where both would never dare to ask for a free hand out which they feel that they have not earned or has cost others, their hard work and sweat to earn.
and heres the idea.. Putting an ASIC in their house and you give them a rebate in return to cover the costs and giving them a bit of income ontop as a thank you.

now some maths 4 based on todays figures of difficulty1, BTC price2 and known Avalon outputs on pools3
currently Avalon ASICS are yielding 9.12BTC a day(63.84BTC/week). which is $270.86 PER DAY!($1896/week)
which may go down to 5BTC a day (new monthly batch) and down each month theirafter as new batches are released.
hopefully the bitcoin value will increase as the costs of production continue to rise to counter the drop in daily yields.

An Avalon ASIC costs 50.5BTC (under 5 days income and its paid off)
based on a high $0.21c/kwh electricity it will cost $3.12 a day($21.84/week) to run the unit

so lets say you give rebates of atleast $44 a week minimum for 12 months. starting maybe alot higher at first due to the income still being relatively high. (EG starting at $250 a week, decreasing as difficulty/BTC value decreases(hoping it doesn't))

i know that many people will reply with "why don't you just keep all the units and get 100% profit yourself" to which i refer to the title and first couple paragraphs of this idea.... a charity

but now you have got the crux of the idea...... now discuss..........
positive media coverage it will bring.
better life for people around you.
growth of a new charity/business as demand expands.
aiding the network security by having more miners per population to reduce chances of 51% attacks
any other issues/positives that can come from this.

appendix
1http://blockchain.info/stats
2$29.70http://blockchain.info/charts/market-price
39.12BTC(payments over 24hours)http://hhtt.1209k.com/user-details.php?user=1MngEke9hbW2RYGnw27r5QgS1TXLC68TV6
4http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

[you are though still liable to income tax, aswell as those in your family if you gift them the coins if an individual or corporation tax if a company]

EDIT: to highlight a point that may have been missed further down: you are though still liable to income tax, aswell as those in your family if you gift them the coins if an individual or corporation tax if a company

but to clarify the point on capital gains tax that has been asked many times on different threads. in the UK, bitcoins are free from capital gains tax, because they are an asset(personal possession) which is under the CGT threshold of £6000 each.

now the long answer to explain why

bitcoin is: a personal possession asset
remember an asset is a product that stores value. such as art, antiques, your car. Things that cant really be used or changed into anything else but its sole purpose. it is an end product.


what bitcoin is not:
bitcoins are not a commodity.
remember a commodity is a basic good/raw material used in commerce for the production of other goods or services.
do not get confused by the stupidly named method of making your asset being called mining, to think of them as anything like gold.
bitcoins are not a division of a percentage of ownership of a company (shares)
bitcoins are not a division of a percentage of ownership of a product a company holds (stocks)
bitcoins are not the purchase of government debt (bonds)

unless a single bitcoin (set of satoshi's) gains the value of £6000 EACH you don't have to worry about capital gains tax. you can own as many assets and sell as many assets but as long as the individual value does not exceed £6k each your safe from capital gains tax.
EG i can have a picasso, a Monet, and a Rembrandt (paintings) and sell them all to one buyer at the same time and they would not be classed as set. unless they formed a well known grouping OR gave them much more value sold together then the combined total of selling them individually.

bitcoins do not come in sets. as there is no finite amount of bitcoin units to say you have a complete 'set'. there is no general term for (EG 500BTC) groups that everyone is aware of or comfortable to use in daily conversations that gives a set group of bitcoins more value selling them as the group then the combined value of selling them individually.
so treat a bitcoin as a sole asset or a 'set' of satoshi's.

so unless 1BTC or 100,000,000sat 'set' became £6k each, you have got no worry's about capital gains tax. just worry about income tax if your an individual or corporation tax if a business.

speak with an accountant for a more deeper explanation of assets or read this
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/cgt/possessions/basics.htm

hope this makes sense

edited parts to make it simple to understand to the lay man

please consult an accountant before taking ANYONES word as gospal

the name of the group has not been decided nor have the members. but the main thing is to work out what is needed to get litecoin expanded in both uses, population using it and merchant acceptance.

yes its a group more aimed at the community then what bitcoin foundation is. and yes its not going to be a sheep of the bitcoin foundation.

there are going to be IRC 'townhall' meetings where ANYONE can join in. and talk about the needs, desires, idea's to bring growth to litecoin.

here is some more details
http://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,997.0.html

hope you all turn up (there will be chat rules to deter trolls/argumentative/abusive users so stay up beat and help expand litecoin)

a few people are collectively developing a website to organise the mainstreaming of crypto currencies for merchants.

the idea so far is this:
* a single place for everyone to submit idea's of real world merchants they want to see accepting crypto currency.
* the whole community voting on the best merchants to concentrate on first, and work down the list as things progress
* gather idea's for PR and other activities to successfully get merchants to adopt crypto currency.
* include activities like interested parties/ established customers of the merchant to email the merchant simple questions "do you accept bitcoin? will you consider accepting it in the future?" to spark the merchants interest, due to customer demand.
* use all gathered information for a respected representative to then have meetings with the merchant. (no person is a candidate yet but imagine established PSP guys like bitinstant or bitpay or other great PR guys to be doing the meetings)

other idea's is to get lists of the 2000 merchants bitpay already has, and other crypto currency accepting business listing all in one place.
to list any special offers these businesses have for crypto currency customers.

now for your input. please reply with other idea's of what you would like to have on this website that will aid the mainstreaming plans.

pre-empting some replys
why dont we just use this forum?
we want it to be a separate space for a more organised and structured way to gauge the communities idea's, thoughts and plans of main-streaming our beloved currencies, away from the other topics of scams, silkroad chatter and other things. there have been attempts to highlight potential businesses on these forums in the past, but the single voices get drowned out amongst the other members, with their thoughts and opinions who side line the topic (in other words trolls).

please do not reply, with negative thoughts. we want idea's please.

i ask this as some businesses are trying to figure out a way around the 10 minute confirm times by atleast seeing the transaction history of the customer

i see on blockchain info that it does list transactions even without a confirmation. is there a way for EG satoshi dice to check the senders address for any other transactions that they have sent within the last 5 minutes before the satoshi dice received theirs and decline the payment for instant use if there was more then 1 unconfirmed transaction within 5 minutes prior to the transaction.

meaning that customers who only do transactions with atleast a 5 minute gap from a previous transaction elsewhere will get an acceptable instant use acceptance.

i think instead of getting people to read though wiki pages and thesis's of MIT grads and other people to work out the mining and client functions it needs to be simplified
maybe a weusecoins mini series should be developed getting more and more detailed as you progress through the video 'episodes'

addressing matters such as what function a miner contributes to the network and what a node client contributes to the network.

many newbies and non tech savvi people have these questions, i have been asked these questions and these are question i too had once i got past the first part of downloading a client.

who confirms transactions? miners or node client wallet?
what does a node client wallet do that a webwallet service (no blockchain download at user end) does not do?
is the only use of a node client wallet to spread the blockchain to the masses to ensure government cant just take down a single source IP of the blockchain/ prevent a DDOS attack on the blockchain to destroy bitcoin?

weusebitcoins is a entry level video. there needs to be a intermediatory video that gets a little more technical without all the hundreds of pages of reading just to answer a few basic questions to aid newcomers adoption of bitcoin and understanding of the principles.

this will help people realise the differences and make a proper decision on whether they want to use the QT wallet or other wallet services as well as get answers to the 'how do you make coins" mining questions

bitcoin->FIAT debit cards will be a great way for individuals to utilise drop shipper services. Thus reducing the costs and workload for bitcoin merchants.

excuse the explanation, this is more aimed at getting the young entrepreneur's wishing to start a business to realise they do not have to pre-buy stock and then resend to customers at extra costs/workload and to highlight to bitpay/bitinstant the importance for merchants to know/request the exact FIAT amount they will receive and let the bitcoin be the variable amount.

what would be required by bitcoin debit card providers:
an API system to allow individuals to send a fiat value they NEED to receive on the card, and the API reply gives a bitcoin value after all the card issuer fee's are added. ensuring the debit card receives the requested FIAT value if they advertise the received inflated bitcoin price, so that the fee's are deducted on the bitcoin side.

the individual sets up a website with product lists that their drop shipping supplier has, with prices in bitcoin which are adjusted at webpage loading(via api) to show a bitcoin value that is the suppliers FIAT price converted to a bitcoin value and a commission fee added(for the individuals profit)

the individual would inform the bitcoin debit card provider (bitpay/bitinstant) that they want to keep the 'commission' as bitcoin. and have the FIAT amount requested at the API put onto card as FIAT to ensure they can pay for the goods. this can be done by the individual adding a set % ontop of the API received bitcoin value and informing the card issuer that the same % should be kept as bitcoin. it gets more complicated to manage if different products have differing commissions.

the bitcoin transaction is done on individuals website. and they get the customers delivery address and product order list.

the individual goes to the suppliers site and simply inputs their customers delivery address and ordered products and pays with the fiat now received to card. and thats it..
the individual has just made some bitcoins (the commission) without having to worry about delivery or packaging or having storage to hold stock.

stage 2 would be to get their drop shippers to then accept bitcoins to help with the mass expansion 'movement' the bitcoin community needs and making transactions more automated not requiring the bitinstant/bitpay card. Simply passed onto the the drop shipper by the web server automatically and bitcoin transferred using a hot wallet that only holds funds for the 1 confirm needed. which would then decrease the bitcoin 'cost' as theirs less middle man fee's inbetween from card issuers

although you would at first think that the national minimum wage LAWS prevents employers from paying their employee's pennies per hour.

have you ever thought that the use of national minimum wage LAW was to prevent people being paid in non government fiat.

what i mean to say is governments are requiring a business to pay atleast £6.19 $7.25 etc BY LAW instead of allowing businesses to pay in groceries, gold bars, or other forms such as bitcoin.

can someone clear up the matter of the ability for businesses to ever pay workers in other forms LEGALLY. as this page on the UK government site clearly states that only accommodation provided by the employer can be use to subtract a very small part of the FIAT wage and no other benefits such as cars, vouchers or other forms of payment can be subtracted.
https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-accommodation

so look into amercan and other countries laws on minimum wage. as from what i can tell on the UK point of view. paying someone in bitcoin is not paying national minimum wage, even if the value of the bitcoin exceeds NMW value.

So businesses in england can be sent to court for breaching employment laws if they only paid their employee's with cars or bitcoins

i was bored while trading so had the TV on and TV Drama called the goodwife was on. yep a drama, not a documentary or news event.

but its promenent story line for that episode is bitcoin.

i know its last years episode but i did not see any big notes on here mentioning it.

if you want to watch it online. there are sites such as watchseries.eu which will link you to places that stream it.
search for 'the good wife' select series 3 episode 13. and i recommend gorillavid, putlocker or sockshare for the least annoying advert popping up streamers with good bandwidth speeds.

requirement: bitinstant debit card (when it arrives)

Arrange a meetup of all of your local bitcoin friends to go to a bar. Get their orders and ensure the bar manager sees them all use their phone to scan the QR code on the debit card. And then hand the debit card to the bar manager.
explaining:
this is a special debit card that people top up via their phones using the smart barcode on the front(QRCODE for the smart ones of us). just takes 10 minutes and saves going to the ATM, plus theres no large fee's
let him take the transaction so the first round of drinks are paid for.

Tell him to keep hold of the card as that is your bar tab for the night. People continue QR code scanning to pay for their drinks throughout the night and the manager keeps swiping the card to debit out the fiat. and u just type in your pin number.
he is getting paid, so he is happy.

At the end of the night tell the manager that the debit card is specially for a community that may return with or without you.
Tell him you will pay the card fee for him to register a card at bitinstant.com to be delivered to him where he can register it in his company(the bar) name and have his own pin number. For bar use only. so anyone from the community can just drop in and pay. AND you will also make that bar your regular meet-up destination which would drum up further business for them.

no techno waffle required.

anyone else with easy ways to get places to accept bitcoin?

sorry i dont have legal waffle and testimonials, guidelines or laws to quote, but this thread does concern legal issues with withdrawing funds and a easy way to ensure you are not frozen out due to other people.

although i use my personal details as i have nothing to hide. It has been highlighted that OFAC checks are hurting innocent people by freezing their funds because they use PO Boxes etc linked to criminals who also use the same PO Boxes or mailing services.

so i suggest even if your trades are all legal and you just don't want to for instance, be stalked by strangers on the internet trying to steal your laptop to get to your coins, thus using anonymous address.

Do a OFAC check to make sure that the mailing service that you decide to use is not linked to criminal activity. and to check that your name is not similar to any known criminals.
http://sdnsearch.ofac.treas.gov/

you don't want your funds frozen because of other peoples actions which you are not physically involved in. so do the check first.

bitcoin is in a 'catch 22' where it prospers because its anonymous but it wont become regulated because its anonymous. if it became regulated the userbase would jump ship. instead it is left stuck in a 100k population only able to get small businesses onboard for miners to spend their earnings on. very hard to get bitcoin to mass market to compete alongside fiat. (yes i said compete with. not overtake or remove fiat as thats impossible)

and litecoin is just the same in regards to tax evasion, capital transfers. but it doesnt have a major desire for anonymity due to the lack of drug users. so it is less so stuck in the catch 22 bitcoin is in.

it is possible that bitcoin would get regulated. the drugs business runs off, userbase decreases. and then slowly builds up as a regulated, consumer friendly virtual currency. But that is alot of hurdles to jump.

where as litecoin is like a clean slate for the crypto world that want a proper real world alternative to FIAT (in a few decades after many stepping stones are dealt with ofcourse). never to replace FIAT as that will never happen, but to atleast work along side of fiat.

when speaking to merchants, they still have a few main objections to accepting bitcoin from the pretence of just the crypto community using their service, (ill talk about non tech savvi consumers further down)

1) easy non headache solution to getting their fiat for stock/wages
2) media propganda puts them off..
3) no loss of value if the exchange value drops from the time of product purchase to the time they get 'after hours' to cash-up and cash out of BTC.

so bitinstant prepaid card for bitcoin would solve point one and point three. and the same goes for litecoin if bitinstant made a litecoin prepaid card too. same also goes for any virtual curency so lets say, facebook credits if there was a option for a FBC to FIAT. a merchant would accept anything if it was easy to manage and there was a population demand for it.

litecoin already solves point two as there is no bad press, its just like bitcoin but gone back in time a couple years.

i never said that tomorrow litecoin would be a mass market virtual currency for consumer. it involves stepping stones. i and many have found talking about bitcoin to merchants, a hurdle(reasons above). but then slipping into the conversation, litecoin as the clean alternative and a possibility of a crypto to FIAT automated exchange to a debit card gets there interest.

lets address the regulated/consumer protection thing.
trying to get BTC regulated and removing / reducing silkroads presence is not an easy task. so isnt it just easier to start with a fresh slate and make a few notable real world businesses being the flagships for that crypto. to then encourage more business, instead of dealing with drug propoganda and go against what bitcoin is all about in the first place.

just like bitcoin when it gets to the point of non tech savvi consumers using it for wages/groceries you are right it does require many steps to get price stability and regulations in place along with other needed stuff. which BOTH currencies are not in any way, shape or form ready for the non crypto consumers to handle.

but the baby steps are to atleast get some businesses to adopt Litecoin for us tech savvi, crypto lovers to spend our mining earnings on, just like bitcoin done a couple years back. the businesses themselves would pay the crypto instantly to a debit card at a fixed value using the live price of the time of product purchase/crypto deposit to debitcard provider.
Meaning they are safe from large volatile changes because they never keep the crypto in their hands for long.

the difference is that if a crypto currency was to become regulated i know those druggies and anonymous loving users would not want it to happen to bitcoin because that is what bitcoin is all about, anonymity. so litecoin would be a positive solution to them. they could continue doing what they have been doing for the last couple years without their fears of regulation and enforcement agencies.

basically learning from bitcoin, and overcoming objections with actual solutions for both the anonymous lovers and the businesses.

but then again i am talking about litecoin on a bitcoin forum so i take favouritism from anyone with a pinch of salt as its expected.

im not sure if charlie thinks bitcoin is going to be the mass market thing in a few decades. or they think both wont ever get beyond the niche market of mining earning being spent meaning no non tech savvi consumer use of it. or if they just don't want anything to do with litecoin purely on bitcoin favouritism.

but it doesn't sound like charlie likes litecoin much.

i will just add this to my lengthy waffle. The 50+pages of troll statement about the foundation objectors.. i understand the thread you think i refer to. but i did not limit my numbers to just that single thread. i count many threads with objections to the foundation which total 50+.

before i explain how, i want you to understand the difference between centralised and controlled.

centralised is where there is one main value indicator that everyone uses to make trading fair for both parties. in fiat terms the value "use to" represent gold value. which banks decided.

the banks decide value and governments control how we use it with laws and taxes.

luckily there is no 'control' but there is a centralised value for bitcoin

so back to the point. bitcoin is centralised but not controlled. i say this as the huge majority of people trading base the value of bitcoin on MTGox prices. so lets treat mtgox like the national reserve.. just without the gold inside.... lol

imagine a bitcoin world where people did not trade based on a FIAT value conversion but based on TIME. i said it in another thread but il say it here,

in medieval times a butcher would spend half an hour preparing a succulent beef steak, and would trade it for half an hour with a prostitute or for 2 flagons of ale.

in modern terms without thinking about the FIAT value imagine a days wage allowed you to go out in the evening to a bar, get so drunk you score with the ugliest woman you see and get a fast food meal at the end of the night.

again forgetting about fiat value. imagine we traded based on how many bitcoins we mine in one day being able to get that same evenings experience, or thinking that buying that gpu is worth 5 days of bitcoin labour.

reply with thoughts

i have a VB.net program set up that has a fully working webcam viewer and a QR code reader.

it does it using some Dll's i found.

now my problem.... the dll for the QRCode reader is a irritating evaluation version which keeps changing the first character of the scanned qrcode to a number.. (which incriments slowly obviously as some form or time trial)

does anyone know of a open source .net method of reading QRCodes or has a non evaluation Dll for my vb.net program to reference.

why does anyone have their webservice/shop URL as the webserver where their wallet is?

isnt it easier to just have some website code on a hosting site (even a free hosting site) not physically attached to their home webserver. which just API calls something like blockchain.info to validate payment received.

even easier to have the home webserver setting up deposit addresses and imports the addreesses to blockchain.info's watch only wallet.

thus as their are no actual funds in the blockchain.info (watch only) wallet. nothing can be stolen.

the hosting site uses the watch only blockchain.info wallet to grab those fresh address lists to display to new customers and then watches for a transaction received.

thus no actual interaction between hosting site and the 'offline' wallet (containing funds.)



shouldn't something like this be a standard practice to prevent hacking?

also the 'offline' wallet holding computer would not need to be set up as a webserver at all.. it would just need to API call the watch blockchain.info to update the watch only list of addresses.

i only use blockchain.info as an example. i think their are probably other ways of doing it

i got soo pee'd off with having to download the blockchain 2gb of data on the standard client i thought id make my own client just for quick transactions and balance checking using (at this point) a fresh bitcoin.info wallet and the API's associated with it

http://i47.tinypic.com/2hwi3va.jpg

i was wondering if there was a better way to communicate with the bitcoin network as i dont want my wallet to become unreliable if blockchain.info went offline temporarily. i am well versed at VB.net which i used to make my client but have no clue where to get info about communicating with the network directly.

if anyone would kindly guide me in the right direction to any forums that involve client development it would be much appreciated.