A friend of mine is looking for a way to buy beer ingredients to brew with. Google didn't come up with anything. Anybody here know of such a service?

A friend of mine is looking for a way to buy beer ingredients to brew with. Google didn't come up with anything. Anybody here know of such a service?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNCw8V97H6M

I made a tutorial last night on a method to encrypt your wallet and keep it handy, so it's still easy to use, but protected against trojan attacks.  It gets a little sloppy toward the end, but you'll get the idea

A few friends of mine are involved in a startup that works with local companies to set up ecommerce systems, and I had an idea to link up with their service, and set up a bitcoin point of entry.  My idea involves doing on-the-fly price conversion of products, and taking bitcoins in the value of the item based on the current exchange rate. I would then automatically trade them with the lowest ask at mtgox (and future distributed peerfinders). Last, I would place the order with the seller, and use a credit card tied to an account with a moderate amount of capitol to fund the order, effectively making the transaction from a to b instant. My payout as the middleman would probably be something very small like 1% in btc.  I just want the service to exist, and get a little passive income.

I'm aware that I need to figure out a better fraud protection, but unless someone can convince me otherwise, I'm not too worried about double-spending at the moment.  With enough startup capitol (scalable), I can easily cover the gap from when I need to give money to the seller, and when I would receive money from the exchange.

I'm unclear about the legality of what I'm doing.  If by ordering a product and facilitating a transaction, I am a middleman.  Does the fact that I'm working with bitcoins mean I'm a money changer?  What sort of tax laws am I stepping into?  If this is he kind of question you usually pay someone experienced to answer, I'm open to suggestions for avenues, as well as incentive in btc for expert advice.  Thanks all

Hey all. I had an idea that might be useful for merchants to start accepting bitcoins as money.

It's an api or standalone application that store owners can run to effectively turn their bitcoins into recordable cash, easily and beneficially, as well as tracking their growth.

The system would record how many bitcoins they got for what they sold vs how much the bitcoins were worth at the time of sale.  That way, when someone makes a purchase online, it's the for exact same amount as it would have sold for in USD (or other currency).

Easy to read graphs show them how much money they've got available in their wallet, and how much it's growing by riding the bitcoin economy. As they make more money, some of them are going to start buying things with bitcoin, and the whole goods/services economy would experience the rapid growth it desperately needs.

Let's say you could order groceries, or electronics, and instead of paypal, you'd choose something like "bitpal", that would accept the bitcoins, alert the merchant that an order had come in, and logged the transaction at the highest bid (taking depth of bids into acct) in USD.  The merchant would then have control over when they cash out. They could simply get their money from a market like mtgox (but not limited to mtgox) right then, or they can save it and see if it grows in value.  It could be advertised as a method of deflationary insurance.  If USD goes bottom up, at least your company has made an investment in a currency that operates with different rules.  This would mean that bitcoin could potentially move into the mainstream with an economically viable purpose.

I think as long as store owners can easily track their money, they're going to be more open about using a service that offers a very positive track record in valuation.  It's got to be a standalone, easy to use application. These are business owners, not computer nerds.  As far as scalability goes, I think something like this used on a wide scale could make our economy even more valuable.

thoughts?

I'm trying to make a template for google spreadsheets that pulls the latest figures from mtgox over to use.  I've gotten as far as getting

"=importData("http://mtgox.com/code/data/ticker.php")"

into my spreadsheet,  but I'd like it to give me simply one value, like just ask, or just buy, rather than what it outputs now, which is

{"ticker":{"high":1.95,"low":1.3202,"vol":70274,"buy":1.7132,"sell":1.7499,"last":1.7475}}

I know I saw some raw, plaintext links out somewhere a while back that'd be perfect for this, but I just can't remember where they are.  Thoughts?

Let's face it.  The government is creeping into the web more and more lately, and the inherent nature of bitcoin makes this a potential issue.  Currently, I see a large reliance on Mt Gox for pricing information and general stability.  Are we prepared for the possibility of hitting mtgox and seeing this?


We need to stay a step ahead if we're going to have control over our own destinies.  What do you guys think?