Hmm... I guess I was too slow:
"PAYMENT TIMED OUT! We didn't receive a payment from you. Try again."
I think it only scans for a couple of minutes. I copied the generated BTC address, but forgot the amount by the time Bitcoin launched, so sent you 1.11 (eleven is my favorite number) bitcoins.
Leave it up to you to break things, Gavin.  I think the waiting page should show the address and amount. Yeah, if you don't send the amount it is looking for I think it ends up in "lost and found". Now I didn't get whatever it was I paid for.
Quick! Call the FBI! j/k Send me an address and I can refund. 1. MyBitcoin should get rid of the CAPTCHA for most users (do the Google thing, and only show the CAPTCHA if it detects potential abuse) (oh, you didn't know Google search does that? Yup, they do, if you do enough weird-looking searches quickly enough you'll get a CAPTCHA...)
Oh, I'm an avid Tor user. I've seen google's captcha. mybitcoin also has Tor functionality. Maybe they should only switch on the captcha when they detect Tor or something. 2. Bitcoin needs a 'refundtransaction' feature, to get rid of the scary "Do not ever reuse a temporary payment address or your Bitcoins may get lost" warning. Sending to an old address should just do an immediate refund.
I was thinking the exact same thing last night. There is no easy way to handle refunds.  3. I want to be able to put the payment address into MyBitcoin and see the status of my payment.
I don't understand. 4. Gotta get rid of the "memorize the amount and then copy and paste to Bitcoin" (need a bitcoin-payment-request MIME type, in my humble opinion).
Yup. 5. Gotta improve Bitcoin startup speed; at the very least, make the UI come up quickly while it re-verifies the block chain (I think that's what it is doing...).
Yeah, I never turn mine off and I use the console version so it doesn't bug me at all. The majority of users will be Windows UI users, so yeah this needs to be addressed. Thanks for your input.  |
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First, there is no inherent value in anything (I explained that in another thread). The value of everything is subjective, it is not a characteristic of stuff... it's an opinion people have of stuff. But anyway, I understood what you meant.
Ok. Perhaps "inherent" is the wrong word to use. Things have value if there is demand. I made an assumption earlier that gold/silver/bitcoins have demand. And also, the labor/energy spent on the production of something does not determine the price of this something. That's by the way the labor-value theory used by Marx to justify his theory, which, obviously, is wrong. Something may be worth less than what was spent to produce it (that's why many business have losses!). Actually, I think that the current value of bitcoins is below what we spend in energy to generate them, but I never tried to calculate it. Ahh, but labour/energy itself is valuable. No one in their right mind would apply labour/energy to produce something that has no demand, for it would be a loss. Nice talking to you. You know your stuff. |
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Thanks!  Yeah, that video is sweet. |
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You have bitcoins! |
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FreeMoney is right. Unfortunately, hard-money Austrian-economic libertarians are immediately critical of bitcoin when they find out that it is backed by "nothing"  ! Exactly like gold and silver.  Not exactly. As a commodity; gold and silver are backed by the labour/energy that has been expelled to mine and refine it. They also have inherent value because these metals are rare. (Well, rare for now. There are some situations that *could* change that.) As a currency; gold and silver are backed by what others are willing to trade you for it. Bitcoins are similar. As a commodity; electricity/energy is required to "mine" them virtually. They have inherent value because they are rare. (Only 21,000,000 will ever be mined.) As a currency; they are backed by what others are willing to trade you for it. (Bitcoin is seriously lacking here. Sell more stuff, guys! *hint* *hint*) Now, if the power/internet went out for an extensive period of time, and I needed to buy something, I'd rather have gold/silver. (Food and other supplies would be even better actually, but I'm trying to limit the scope of my post to gold/silver/bitcoins.) For conducting transactions over long distances, I'd rather use Bitcoins. As it was said before, they are complimentary to each other. |
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This article is your typical "test balloon". Now they just need a reason (right tragedy) to get the UK citizens to accept this proposal with open arms. The next step will be the phasing out of cash, and perhaps (in the not so distant future) watching for illegal barter with all of those flippin' cameras they have all over the place. |
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But you are better of trying to tell gold-bugs that bitcoin is a great *compliment* to gold, not a *replacement* (OM NOM NOM NOM)
I totally agree. This is the exact argument that I use on my gold-bug friends. Most gold-bugs believe that money should exist separate from government, and Bitcoin falls into that category. I usually use this argument as my proverbial 'foot in the door'. |
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I didn't forget to attach it. Look again.
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The MadHatter's Bitcoin 4 Cash site http://vms43o4cqysakvyb.onion/ trades directly in several private currencies, such as the FRN, etc. So load up on Bitcoins and spread them around!  |
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Exactly. Spreading propaganda would be their only recourse. They'd spread fear and panic on their traditional media about Bitcoin. Much like how they spread fear about the Internet right now. Only credit card thieves, kiddie porn dealers, and terrorists use the Internet, remember? Hopefully independent media will outpace traditional media and they'll be screwed on that front as well. One could only hope. Lots of people believe that the governments of the world will just turn the internet off. I don't believe that. It is relied on too heavily for commerce now. Why doesn't China just *completely* block the outside world? Same reason. |
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But... how do you shut down a P2P system? If "they" have trouble keeping centralized websites like TPB down, how can they expect to shut down a massive P2P application? lol |
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Hello all, Just a quick post to announce that I have cash available (aka "I'll buy your Bitcoins") to those who want some. I have US Dollars, Canadian Dollars, and Australian Dollars in stock at a low rate of 5% + a stamp (~$1). Check the site in my sig, or PM me for details. Cheers! The Madhatter |
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This is actually very comforting. However, if all of us started operating reputable bitcoin4cash businesses, I wonder how many people would be able to pay bills, mortgages, food, etc.
Probably not very many. I am profitable because I found a niche that sells. I'm sure that there are many other undiscovered and productive niches for Bitcoin out there. Incidentally, have you asked your customers what they intend to buy with the bitcoins that you sell them?
Nope. I never ask. Some of my customers are rather poor at hiding their intentions, so I easily figured out what they were doing without snooping around. So far, I haven't seen anything illegal. I know that is a difficult question to broach in a privacy oriented business, but I only ask because it would be great to know how many people are puchasing bitcoins from you solely as a speculative buy and hold investment (commodity) versus those that intend to buy something from the marketplace. My gut tells me that most of the exchanges taking place today are for speculative or investment purposes, not for the cash-->bitcoin-->marketplace cycle. Of course this is nearly impossible to prove I know for a fact that some people were buying coins from me to buy something online with them. I can't discuss it for privacy reasons. Also, link2voip used to publish their stats to this forum. I remember seeing that they were getting around 2 payments per day like clockwork. So there's a real example. Some of those payments are from me for my hosting! lol And I digress... Goldsmiths probably never thought that they would become bankers, and that their raw input (gold) would become money for the world. We are in the opposite boat. We have the money that we want the world to use, are unwilling to use force to make it so, and are therefore relegated to finding the product/service whereby bitcoin is the only suitable raw input.
Maybe people will adopt Bitcoin after the dollar collapses.. Well, there are a lot of smart people hanging around on this forum. Someone is bound to figure out a niche to make Bitcoin go viral. |
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I just got an email from Tom @ mybitcoin. He said that they are working on a solution for this. He told me that overpaying on a temporary address results in the remaining coins going into a "lost and found bin" right now. He also pointed out that Bitcoin addresses are accumulators. He said that you can actually make a whole bunch of payments onto a temporary address over a 24 hour period until the total amount is equal to the target amount. Anyway, I'm urging mybitcoin to signup on the forum here. I'm tired of relaying information. |
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@kiba + chaord: I like your ideas. I think that selling anything that people would want to buy anonymously (like VPNs, materials and content banned where they live, anonymous calling cards, etc) is a perfect fit for Bitcoin. Without disclosing how much I've made from Bitcoin I'll say this: I've been living off of the proceeds of Bitcoin for 3 months now. Paying bills, mortgage, and buying food. So yes, it is possible. |
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They use Rubles in Russia.
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It uses a temporary payment address so it can store and forward form variables back to a merchant's shopping cart. It is a good thing.
Look at the SCI Receipt interface and how it works. It took me a while to wrap my head around it, but I have it mostly working for my site. (It isn't live on my site quite yet, but it will be soon.)
If you are familiar with how e-gold's SCI worked, their system will make sense to you. I vaguely remember integrating e-gold into a customer's site (it was years ago), so I figured this thing out after a while.
I'm not sure what happens if the user sends the wrong amount of Bitcoins. Maybe someone should email Tom and ask him about it??
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I want to re-emphasize I am a bitcoin supporter and have had only good experiences using the bitcoin software, bitcoin community websites, and discussing on this forum!
Oh, I believe you. I didn't mean to come across as a jerk or anything. Thank you for sharing your views of Bitcoin with everyone here. The high ambition of bitcoin creates a lot of hurdles to jump over that most projects don't face. Satoshi has guts! As do other people who invest substantial effort and resources in building the bitcoin community, I remain very impressed by what already exists and has been accomplished.
I'm in awe of what has been accomplished as well. I wonder if having "guts" is enough. someone should develop a very easy to deploy "pay with bitcoins!" web widget for people selling services over the web.
This has already been done! As of yesterday mybitcoin has a full fledged web-based processing platform not unlike paypal. Check out my other post about it. I also include a cool payment URL that I generated with the merchant tools, if you are interested. https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1054.msg13028Cheers! The Madhatter |
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1. I'm not interested in running multiple computers at max cpu usage for weeks to try to generate a rather trivial value of coins, especially when I know GPU users have vastly higher efficiency
That's totally understandable, but I think you are missing the point. The point to Bitcoin is not to generate "free money" (as if there is such a thing). The point is to back the coins with something tangible -- electricity (aka "energy"). Also, this is about the only way you can carefully control the minting of the currency. All of the world's currencies are backed by energy. Human or otherwise. Bitcoin is a little more direct. The generation (work/labour) creates hashes that are valuable (money) to other computers/people running the same program. Why is it worth something? For the same reasons that FRNs are worth something: people accept it for the trade of real goods and services. It also sounds like you feel inadequate because you can't generate as fast as others. Why not sell something? Selling real goods and services is far more profitable than generating. Plus, there is the added benefit of adding value to the currency itself. Generating isn't the "be-all" and "end-all" of Bitcoin. I don't see the point in generating for gains. Some people advocate generating to help secure the network from attack -- sure I can see that point. I also see that as a public service, or a donation to the cause. Where I live the electricity costs are very cheap, but I'd still pay more in electricity than value that I'd get from the coins. I'll leave the generation to other people, and buy the coins from them for my exchange business. 2. The mechanics of keeping my wallet files private and constantly backed up with a fresh copy gives me "data stress"
Do you keep your life savings in your wallet in the real world? The solution to this is simple: diversify. 3. All software has bugs. Software that is related to money is an inevitable target of attacks, and there is no FDIC backing or legal system remedy available in the case of problems
Sure. Hopefully with enough eyes on the source code the major bugs can be ironed out. The Bitcoin software will never be perfect, but considering the alternatives I'd say it is pretty good. The FDIC is bankrupt. Google it. Also, what good is the FDIC if you lose your wallet in the real world? Legal system remedy? Get real. Have you ever actually tried to sue someone? The lawyers largely benefit from any legal conflicts. The best way to operate is based on reputation. It is what humans do naturally anyway. 4. I don't really know how to document and declare transactions in bitcoins for legal and tax purposes and I'm scared of getting it wrong
That's easy. You don't claim the Bitcoins themselves. You declare the dollar-equivalent value of the goods that you received in trade with Bitcoins. Cheers! The Madhatter |
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