I totally support such a motion!
To start with proof of solvency, a daily proof of millions could already give them a small batch of trust. The proof of "my" funds being there is essential to ensure a 100% coverage but not to gain some basic trust. Without reading all at your links I would assume it would collide with cold storage and transaction policies/habits at the existing exchanges to have each and everyone's money separated/provably available or if it doesn't it could be arbitrarily complicated.

Also I would extend your suggestion to not only include a provably solvent (but may next second insolvent with zero money) badge but also provide another badge for provably save bitcoin deposits:
If I proof to the exchange that I have and am willing to trade a certain amount of bitcoins, there should not be a need to let them hold them. Any amount that is not on the orderbook naturally does not (and I think should not) sit on the exchange. In order to be able to quickly trade, traders would still need a way to get their coins there within milliseconds rather than minutes or even 6 blocks. Therefore exchanges could have an incentive to implement off-chain transactions using micropayment channels. With this in place, an exchange could release some (open source) client to their exchange that the user can connect to the exchange and take full control of his trades. This could even work for the orderbook. If the user is disconnected, his offers drop out of the order book. If an order is met, the client has to approve the release of the corresponding amount of bitcoins and if it fails to do so within a second, it would get penalized. This much more complex order book with dependency on external clients would come at a cost that clients that want this security should pay for and maybe it comes at a cost that would require a few slow-down mechanisms like 60s settlement intervals with minimum order volume or a price per minute an order stays on the order book but I guess this would be a price power traders with thousands of bitcoins locked up in exchanges would be willing to pay. Or in other words I guess once implemented, the overhead would not be that dramatic.

great! Thanx! Will point people to it when they quote bitcoin prices off of gox.

I don't fully understand your comment and guess it's because this is a complex detail of your implementation. I guess these off-chain-transactions are by far no common knowledge within the bitcoin community precisely because of their complexity. Not Zero-Coin-complexity but still an order of magnitude more complex than the Satoshi whitepaper.

Edit: @blueadept would you share my opinion on the potential of off-chain-transactions if implemented your way? I mean this list:

• instant (as in milliseconds)
• free-ish (as in "as much as 0.01CPU-second and a 1kB package over the network costs")
• arbitrarily small (as in "1 Satoshi minimum")
• more private (in a sense, maybe)
• without third party risk (and minimal third party risk for a full peer to peer version)

Dein Idealismus in Ehren, aber ich fürchte, die meisten, die tatsächlich Hardware für Bitcoin anschaffen, tun das nicht aus Idealismus. Die Miner nicht, um das Netzwerk abzusichern und die ATM-Betreiber nicht, um Bitcoins an den kleinen Mann zu bringen. Wer das tut sind Geschäftsleute, die in ihren Businessplänen was von Wettbewerbsvorteil stehen haben. Da steht dann, dass sie der Konkurrenz in Recherche voraus sind und so. Aber ja, ich bin auch mit meinen idealistischen Plänen am Start.

Another relevant link: Decentralized networks for instant, off-chain payments

Do your math. Janet Yellen's term as head of the FED is 4 years (I had to google that). If within her term 1Ƀ went to $1M being worth todays $50k, where is the rest of the value? In an 2000% inflated USD? Yeah, that could indeed drive the bitcoin price to such highs in a short time but then the valuation would only be a snapshot of a landslide and the next day 1Ƀ would be $2M. 2000% inflation in 4 years is 376% inflation per year. Assuming from where we are now to a total of 2000% in 4 years is a smooth process, things would look even worse USD not being anymore like within weeks.


Well, I guess this is true in an idealistic sense but not in the real world. I evangelize Bitcoin to people and made no difference of background or education. Giving a $10 paperwallet to a filthy flying salesman feels sadistic though, no matter if I explain it to him patiently for 10 minutes or not. He will not remotely grasp my good intention as he's not used to good intentions and even if he does, he will not be able to get started for so many reasons, lacking smartphone and lacking education just being the most obvious.

I sad I "made" no difference of background, not "make" because now the shadiest of all people greet me in the street when I'm out with friends cause I was nice with them. Embarrassing with some, maybe dangerous with others who might think I am some wealthy elite gentleman, so there again is a barrier to entry even for the information flow.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yzst_gChOr8 sounds interesting but I find Mike Hearns microtransaction channels way more convincing. Petty coin seams to have serious issues and looks quite expensive to me. The channels would allow 100k tps per channel while pettycoin would really struggle with huge persistent data for such an amount network wide. Maybe in a far future we need both but channels first.

The first establishing transaction is on the chain, slow, expensive. After that this system works as described in the video above.

Extended the post that was written on the go without links as a reaction to reading pages over pages of "problems" and nobody mentioning the solution microtransaction channels where it would have fit so well. Hopefully more people become interested in this exciting topic.

Your post is considered spam and taking over the thread. Make your own thread and discretely point there please. Else, I would like to have a bigger radius. Maybe report daily the 5 closest changes? Something like "Cool Café (3.5km) stopped accepting Bitcoin, Blaaa internet (12km) started, Fooo Café (700km) started, … "

Edit: The screen looks like it might or might not work for my address with no way to check prior to giving you my email address!?!?
Edit 2: https://blockchain.info/address/1MsG8sijd1P2FXiSkAYJGSVKP7oqc28W4B yet coinbase says it doesn't let me in and I have not seen yet what I'm paying for? Seriously? I'm of the "I vet everything" crew but don't expect others to do that.
Edit 3: No way to change my location for my life-long subscription? No way to cancel my life-long subscription? Announcement to tell me about opening but not about closing shops?

Whenever people mention off chain transactions, others jump at him and shout "fractional reserve banks are evil" because they assume the only way to do off-chain transactions is to have a middleman who takes their money and will or will not give it to whoever they want to send it later.  This assumption is not true.

Off chain transactions can also be done without a third party. Please educate yourself about micropayment channels.
I think the off-chain-transactions are the most important thing since bitcoin itself because they allow transactions that are

• instant (as in milliseconds)
• free-ish (as in "as much as 0.01CPU-second and a 1kB package over the network costs")
• arbitrarily small (as in "1 Satoshi minimum")
• more private (in a sense, maybe)
• without third party risk (and minimal third party risk for a full peer to peer version)

My prediction is that the first to actually solve this, has a potential to become filthy rich and this is how:

• Implement microtransaction channel
• provide an open API
• provide an open source client
• charge 1% + 1 Satoshi on every transaction
• run it on TOR for users' privacy and your legal protection

What the client would have to do is talk to another client and funnel transactions through:
Lets say Anton wants to send Berta 1Ƀ: Anton and Berta have a micropayment channel with "torpay" (Anton@torpay and Berta@torpay).

To never entrust torpay with more than 1mɃ at a time, Anton does 1000 transactions that cost him 1%+1000 Satoshi = 10mɃ such that he sends the next 1mɃ only once Berta@torpay confirms having received the last 1mɃ. With this setting running through TOR it might actually take a minute or two.

Anton does a lot of transactions with many people, so he did not only lock up 1Ƀ but 10Ƀ, so now to buy a chewing gum, he can instantly send 0.1mɃ to Cesar@torpay in less than one second. Cesar sold another few chewing gums and the first 0.1mɃ chewing gum made torpay actually lock up 10mɃ worth of bitcoin to establish his channel for a week. He uses torpay anonymously, so neither does he know who runs torpay, nor does torpay know he's a chewing gum dealer named Cesar, yet he can use the channel to send and receive without having to trust torpay.

Cesar's cellphone is also payed by the second. His telephone company runs another implementation of the API as they don't like these anonymous torpay punks. Cesar@telko (runing on Cesar's phone) pays to service@telko (running at telko's server) in one second increments.

Dora has her own such server and configured it to relay to torpay and vice versa, so Cesar@torpay can pay to Dora@dorapay thanks to dorapay and torpay settling their balance in the background. This settling transaction would be used for all @dorapay to @torpay transactions, so Dora's friends (for example "friend123") can use Dora's server and torpay (actually run by the CIA) wouldn't be much wiser about money movements from the @dorapay network as the identifier "dora" or "friend123" would not be needed at torpay.

The API might expose some relay fees, so maybe dorapay and torpay take a 1% + 1Satoshi fee each or it depends on the direction of the payment but these details wouldn't be the worry of whoever wants to be the first mover. Most likely as soon as competition evolved, openness would be a big plus.

The open API + open source client will give users 100% trust they can't loose their money.

Why do we need this?
Lastly, many still praise Bitcoin as the instant for free payment network that it isn't. On-chain transactions are very very expensive and the 25Ƀ subsidy is blinding people of this fact.
We have a network that can do seven transactions per second. A transaction channel as described by Mike Hearn takes two transactions on the blockchain to open and close the channel. If every citizen of earth wanted to use Bitcoin, how many transactions could a user do per day … or year … or life? For "day" that would be 0.0000864. "Year" would be 0.03, or 3% of the world could do one transaction per year. Per 80 years life it would be 2.5. So how do we get from 0.0000864 transactions per day to 5 transactions per day? 10MB blocks won't cut it. Even only micropayment channels won't cut it but 12 months channels with 10MB block chain would get us a long long way and my vote is to use long transaction channels first and bigger blocks later.

Ok, MtGox as default hurts but you can't remove something 33.33333333333% of the users watch. I recently started adding a Gox-Tab again when I noticed how the usual Bitstamp +$100 didn't work anymore. It's fun, not reference for actual business.

This project should be so much more active. We are at 3100 locations now? Bitpay has 20k customers. I'm sure there must be more than 3k that should be pinable to a map. Every pin on that map is a selling argument when evangelizing Bitcoin to your local shop.
On the other hand I wouldn't want to stress the OSM project with our bitcoin spam. payment:Visa would also be a valid key that is barely used, at least compared to how many places actually accept Visa. No idea what the official take on bitcoin on OSM is.

Define the world's fiat and do the math yourself.

Ever checked out the wiki? There is a long long list already.

And yeah i was tempted to hit that report button as gnah, who let the noobs out?

Very positive article and as i was told also on paper.

BitcoinQT and Mycelium. BitcoinQT out of tradition and Mycelium because it handles well spending from paperwallets. Evangelizing Bitcoin by tipping people with paperwallets and not having a good way to redeem paperwallets other than Mycelium pretty much forces me to this. Hear blockchain.info would work, too.

ideed an impressive project that deserves attention. http://blog.bitpay.com/2014/02/14/introducing-bitcore.html
Not sure if it is press worthy though.