I'm a bit ashamed to upload a pic of these here as they were not stored in airtight containers since purchase; had no idea they would devalue if not but hey ho...
 
Can someone give me an idea of what the floor is on these? Obv. they are funded and intact (i.e. hologram sticker untampered) but .. as I said.. there has been some oxidation over time.

I am considering taking them to a coin collector in order to have them cleaned - an anathema in the world of numismatics I know - but people like shiny stuff....

One is silver and other other silver with bronze (?) highlights.

Will upload pics in a day or two if there as interest. Would prefer to sell both together but would be ok to sell one at a time.

Am London (UK) based. Also I have no idea how escrow would work if I do sell these so please give me some pointers in public replies.

Dear fellow bitcoiners,
About a year ago (!) I proposed a wifi hotspot that runs on a raspberry pi that accepts bitcoins for payment.
I am at a juncture at this project as I'm getting to a dev-release product "real soon now" (It helps that I have a few others pushing it along now as well) and the dilemma I face is this - how to get it out in the way that suits the community the best. Here are my options (with the relevant pros and cons) and I'd like your feedback.

1) Bootstrap off sales of the unit when it's ready. ie. keep working evenings and weekends (I have a day job) until it is ready. The pros are that the the unit will be ready for sale when it's ready and therefore no expectations, no let down etc etc. The downside is that this could take another few months. Also I will have no idea on how popular the thing will be, so it could be months of work for very little return.

2) Put up pre-sale orders. This will help gauge interest, but if I get just a minimum of orders, I'd have to keep working on the day job to pay the bills, feed the kids etc etc and I risk losing reputation from anybody who does pre-order that the device still won't be ready for a little while yet.

3) Crowd source the initial sales.... Similar to 2) above.

4) Seek the sale of some equity to an angel... So I have business plans etc etc ready .. but seeking finance is always a time consuming effort and perhaps I would be better off product development instead of this option.

All advice gratefully received. If you want to keep in touch with the project, I am running an email sign up list on the webpage here : www.bitcoinwifi.net[1] ... There is also a link to a very dark and uninspiring demo video (new one in progress) and also some of the source code (the client unit will 100% GPL open source upon sale btw).
Am more than happy to discuss the business, tech etc behind the idea, but for now just seeing what the community thinks my best direction to go down is.

This is a crosspost that I put on reddit earlier - http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2j0uv3/bitcoin_wifi_what_to_do_next/

I have also issued (as an experiment) a small number of tokens that would give the current holder lifetime access to bitcoinwifi.net access points as suggested by one poster. The token is called BTCWIFINETLIFE and can be seen here ->  https://blockscan.com/assetInfo.aspx?q=BTCWIFINETLIFE .

Hi all,

I have completed a working prototype of a Bitcoin enabled Wifi Hotspot running on a Raspberry Pi. I will upload a video in hopefully the next 5-7 days once I've made the web pages a little bit prettier.

Anyway, here's what it does :

1) creates an open SSID called "BitcoinWifi". Allows any connection to a bitcoin node on port 8333 (thus enabling easier wifi payments).

2) any webpage gets redirected to a payment page on which the user can pay an administrator - adjustable fee for access ( so far just 1hr or 24hr but these are just initial timeslots).

3) upon payment (there is a bitcoin formatted URI on the payment page above which should enable *most* bitcoin smartphone wallets to go directly to their payment mechanism), the redirect is disabled and full internet access is allowed. The wired subnet that the router is on is blocked *apart* from the actual "real" router for internet access (so users will not be able to access anything on your network).

4) after the time period, the restriction is automatically started again.

The device is zero config to get running. Just plug into a 5v usb micro and ethernet into your router. To extract the bitcoins, you'll need to login as an administrator (password will be included in the package), and just go to an admin page and put in an address to which the bitcoin balance will be forwarded.

I am going to be marketing it shortly (as mentioned, just need to tidy up the webpages as they look awful - I'm a developer first and foremost!).

I will be selling the device as a Rasp Pi + WiFi USB + SD Card for probably about 1 btc to start with (which is pretty much the sum of the parts) once I have a demo online (I am tempted to put up a pre-order page but I know how much you all love those - "shipping in two weeks" (tm) promises). However, I am collecting names, contact details of interested parties now.

Feel free to get in touch with me via this post or PM and we can exchange email addresses.

In case you hadn't seen the related posts in reddit, there is a small group of pubs that now accept bitcoin. Details here : http://www.individualpubs.co.uk/ . Despite the website looking like something from the 80s (at least they have a website right?), the pubs are all actually really nice. No music, TV blaring at you etc etc. And real beer too !!

I would like to gauge the response to a side project I'm looking at doing - it's basically a very cheap store of your private key (potentially internally generated) which just signs transactions, ie you plug it into the USB of your pc, send it over a txn, it signs it and sends it back. It can also just output the public key as a pseudo-usb-keyboard device if you want to type that into other apps etc.

Now there is a little bit more to it than that, but what it can do is potentially replace the "2nd pc" problem that you can have when you use things like armory etc etc - you don't need to boot up or keep that 2nd pc in a safe, just a small credit card sized device (which is obviously a bit thicker as it has the usb ports mounted on it, as well as a few leds, touch interface etc) .

If you are all willing to pay 60 usd + for a hardware wallet, then perhaps it's best just to wait for the others to mature, but if you are after something cheap, then this could be ideal.

I was thinking that it could also solve the "sell btc on ebay" issue as well as it could be configured that it is "used" once a transaction is signed on the device, thus demonstrating that if someone returned it as "defective" they have, in fact, used it. So you'd ship the device on ebay "charged" with the amount of btc they have bought, prove delivery as its something physical and prove they've used it (which may help with chargebacks etc etc). As it's so cheap, you can just factor the price in with the cost of the sale or offer a refundable deposit if they returned it.

I'll see if I can knock up a youtube video over the next week.

 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.getbitcoin.bitcoinlive

I believe this is the first and only Android app *not* to use http polling for prices (but please correct me if I am wrong).

It connects via an intermediary server to mtgox (which filters out most of the noise) - so basically you get the benefit of streaming prices (ie fast) without the overhead of bucket loads of data using up your data allowance (ie each "tick" is only about 30 bytes now). I've added a shed load of other currencies and for USD you can get vwap, low, high etc etc.

There are only three "slots" you can use to assign prices to as I am finding out how popular the app is.

All feedback gratefully received.

A plug for my app here - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.getbitcoin.bitcoinlive

It's just 3 lines of text that show the current bid/ask/last price from mtgox.

The difference between this and the 100 other mtgox android apps is that mine uses an intermediary server to get rid of all the guff you don't want to see and works via push / subscribe messages. The net effect is that it works pretty fast (check the video on the link above to compare with bitcoinity ).

Now.. I have had some troubles with the AWS server as it was running out of thread resources but I'm pretty sure that's all nailed now.

Please give it a go and let me know what you think. I'm building up a list of feature requests. My aim is just to get the price on the screen in as fast a time possible, so you can just have the android phone / tablet next to your trading PC (as someone has done if you read the app comments).

If there are any Android devs out there, I'm happy to provide a jar interface for easily getting the live prices from the server - will be adding a bunch of other exchanges soon.

I'm the dev. It looks like crap as there are already 100 other "mtgox price" apps out there - but the difference is this one is streaming data via message queues - ie it doesn't get the whole socket.io data but just the mtgox_ticker data.

Here's the link to the app:  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.getbitcoin.bitcoinlive

And here's a quick youtube comparing it to bitcoinity.org: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KUr-JxJI_Cw


If it's popular, I'll make it look prettier . I can even release a jar to other android devs that hook straight into the subscription datastream so to add live prices to your app, it's as simple as including the jar and the following code:

 private void startSubscriber()
    {
        Handler h = new Handler() {
            @Override
            public void handleMessage(Message msg) {
                String d = msg.getData().get("message").toString()    ;
               // Log.d(Tag, d);
                String d2 = d.substring(d.indexOf(" ") + 1);
                try {
                    JSONObject jObject = new JSONObject(d2);

                    String ask = jObject.getJSONObject("sell").getString("display_short");
                    String bid = jObject.getJSONObject("buy").getString("display_short");
                    String last = jObject.getJSONObject("last_orig").getString("display_short");

                    TextView ask_text = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.btce_ask_value);
                    ask_text.setText(ask);

                    TextView bid_text = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.btce_bid_value);
                    bid_text.setText(bid);

                    TextView last_text = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.btce_last_value);
                    last_text.setText(last);

                } catch (JSONException e) {
                    Log.e(Tag, "Exception", e);  //To change body of catch statement use File | Settings | File Templates.
                }

            }
        };

        zmqt = new ZeroMQMessageTask(h,"tcp://betadata.getbitcoin.info:5565","mtgox_ticker");
        zmqt.execute();


    }

The prices are filtered and streamed from an AWS instance - which won't be free if it becomes widely used .. so I'll have to figure out how to make an income enough to cover those costs (which won't be significant).

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://bcfxer.appspot.com/kml

Please add any missed to : http://bcfxer.appspot.com/submissions/newbusiness

Thanks

It's called "Bitcoin Businesses" and you can get it here : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ragmondo

All / Any feedback gratefully received.

It's a simple map app that shows you where all merchants that accept bitcoin are located. Let me know how you get on !

Link here : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ragmondo

Submit the details here : http://bcfxer.appspot.com/submissions/newbusiness

Then (shortly afterwards), you'll be able to see it via the "kml" located here : http://bcfxer.appspot.com/kml

If you have google earth, put that kml link into the "places" section and all the currently listed merchants will appear - screenshot here :

Note: Started this by working on an Android Map app to display this, but thought I'd get the business submission part done first.

Here's the android app screenshot (work in progress, not released yet):

I put together a quick demo of an Android App which displays all known bitcoin bricks-and-mortar businesses. There was a good response from reddit ( see here : http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/197vn9/do_you_want_this_android_app_a_map_app_that/ ) but the obvious question was "how to submit new businesses".

So I've knocked together a quick submission form here : http://bcfxer.appspot.com/submissions/newbusiness

You can view this live on google earth by "importing" the kml file from here : http://bcfxer.appspot.com/kml

They don't automatically get published as for now I want to spam filter them and also the data for output to the app is cached to reduce the amount of db access.

Anyone know of a good resource of bitcoin accepting businesses? Even better, please submit any you know of yourself to the above link.

The Android App is not yet available, but it will basically be a map app utilizing the data entered on the above site. I intend to make the database as open and free as possible so others can use it in their web apps, mobile apps etc etc within reasonable API request limits.

http://bcfxer.appspot.com/

Am now offering a bounty (haven't figured out how much to offer yet - suggestions welcome - but I can't afford 100 BTC per edit that's for sure) for new "routes" added to the database. I may have to start as low as 0.01 BTC and go up from there.

The app now calculates the "next best" alternate route. I am working on getting multiple routes out and ranking them, as well as providing an API so if you do any form of exchange, you can write directly to the app about how much you'll get for how much. That's probably in a few weeks though.

Please try it and let me know what you think !

Please come back I miss my poker !!

Link here : http://bcfxer.appspot.com/

I am updating the graph it uses with user feedback. The graph is "live" so that I can adjust the weights programatically and the idea is that it will poll the different means of exchange and update the fees and percentage lost per transaction on a regular basis (don't need realtime - but perhaps every few hours).

eg. Let's imagine localbitcoins has someone offloading their btc for a knock down rate - then the app will display that (if you are looking to convert USD Cash -> BTC for example).  Now when that offer no longer exists, it may be more favourable to use coinbase and/or blockchain etc etc.

Any feedback appreciated. Feel free to use the add/new box which is an anonymous comment area or just in this thread.

The plan is to monetize it not by paid promotion in the rankings but kickbacks from referrals to sites (eg sealswithclubs, satoshi dice or equivalents). It doesn't need to generate much as it's running free on google app engine currently. All the graph can be memcached so it hardly makes any data calls (apart from when the routes are edited/ added -when it's flushed).

All feedback gratefully received.

I've written a web app which, although it looks pretty basic, uses some graph theory and shortest path algorithms to try and answer the question of "how do I get bitcoins" and for the "best" price (ie least lost due to charges, fees etc etc). It uses a modified version of the djikstra's algorithm to find the "shortest path" between what you have and what you want (and shortest path == lowest cost).

The version I've put up at the moment answers this very basically but what I intend to do is hook in "live prices" from any various exchange merchants (push or pull api) so that you can get a good idea of how many bitcoins you'll end up with - and how long it will take.

I've only got a few merchants up so far for this version but if you can send me

1) What your transferring from (ie cash, what currency the cash is,  bank account based where? etc etc)
2) The website you are promoting
3) A few lines about how the transfer will take place
4) The time it takes

Then I'll add you to the database. It would be even better if you could supply an API which would provide the current best bid/offer you have. I won't be polling more often than once an hour.

Any designers out there who want to give a hand, that'd be great too.

Here's the demo url before I get a domain name sorted.

http://bcfxer.appspot.com/

The plan is to make cash via donations (!) and referral fees - but this won't affect the algorithm. Also, I have coded a "exclude this from the path" option (if you don't like the particular recommendation) but that hasn't made it into the GUI just yet. Oh and I tried to make the dropdowns the "typeahead autocomplete" type but my javascript isn't quite up to scratch yet.

I'm sure this scenario has been thought of but can someone tell me why the following can't happen :

Scenario 1
1) A malicious user joins a mining pool
2) The mining pool dishes out some hashes to try -  he doesn't get the "golden ticket" this time, but does get a share of the effort (as per normal)

Scenario 2
1) Same malicious user joins mining pool
2) Malicious user finds the winning hash but then does not report it back to the pool, but claims it for himself.
3) Mining pool loses out on the mining reward.

Thanks.

Hey chaps,

I know I'm new here and all that, but I have a concept I'd like to run by you all - it's basically a fund which we can use to guarantee fiat cash to regular merchants. The fund will be "untouchable" by any individual - in fact I propose that it requires 3 out of 4 trustees to be able to access it - so I hope that help alleviates any concern about a "hit and run".

Although I'm initially targetting businesses that might be near a bitcoin or tech event (as they would benefit from increased foot fall), if it does take off then I'm sure it could be applicable for any small merchant.

Please read more here: http://www.indiegogo.com/bitcoin-indemnity-fund

And

Please tell me what you think! Don't worry, I'm quite happy to hear bad feedback as well as good.

I've created an indiegogo project here - http://igg.me/p/313491/x/2117228

I would be grateful for your input on this - good and bad. I will edit the details on the project with your feedback so please feel free to suggest or ask questions.  Feel free to answer questions too !!