You still need exchanged. Shop owners who sell goods for that currency aren't going to get the money they need to pay their suppliers by mining more of the same currency, and if everyone can just make it by running their computers, at a profit, then it's not really scarce, and may not be valued.

I don't support patents and copyrights, either, but that's true about the rest. And we all know the outcome. Same thing that happened in every other country where a revolution resulted in public confiscation of private land and private means of production (it was never good).


Why is it unfair? Should workers get more product, even if they don't contribute as much to its production? I would argue that it's unfair for workers to get ANY product, because without the capital owners, no product would be created in the first place (and my argument would also be ridiculous).
Who is it that decides what is fair, what is not, who contributed, and who did not?

You are a poor worker. You are your buddies are forced to toil at machines that manufacture basics like food, clothing, and transportation appliances, and more discretionary things, like electoronics, communication equipment,  and various other tools.

Someone says "Down with the bourgeoisie!" and you all tear down the machines. Now you have no food, no clothing, no tools, and nothing to entertain yourselves with.
Good job, you poor starving morons!

Well, it's a good thing we know how this anger always ends. They will just end up with another Cuba, Venezuela, and Soviet Union. Hopefully I will be able to see it far enough ahead to get myself, and all my money, out of their country before that happens.

Actually, thanks to bitcoin, even an angry revolution won't help them. At least when the russians raided the royal palace and the homes of all the wealthy, they could coonfistake tons od gold, money, and other valuables. Now they will just kill people without any access to their bitcoin passwords   

That's not entirely true. A poor village that earns it's money by sewing shoes and clothes by hand going up a class may be the village installing machines that do that for them, and earns more money by producing more shoes and clothing in a safer and cleaner environment.  Or poor vilagers that can only manage to live by farming their plot of dirt by hand, can move up a class by going to work in phone support for wealthier class, and earn more money to buy more and cheaper food produced by the wealthier class's automated farming machines. Both have happened in China and India.

I guess we should consider many large corporations to have succeeded then, since they have made much of the third world wealthier, healthier, and better off socially.

You must be new here. http://www.whyisntbitcoinworthless.com

Bitcoin has more value outside of its use as currency than gold does.

So, if we ban interest on borrowing money, can we also ban fees for renting cars, or ban rent for borrowing a place to live?



By the way, I finally forced myself to sit through the 2.5 hour Zeitgeist movie. All the science about brains and learning was ok, but then when those guys went into economics, omg were they making mistakes left and right. I was thinking

Survey the entirety of the earth's resources: $200 billion dollars
Build out infrastructure such as power and water to support globaly dispersed cities: $10 trillion dollars
Build the cities on top of the infrastructure, and add things like automatic transportation and manufacturing systems: $60 trillion dollars.
Lifing in a world where everything has already been paid for: Priceless.

And the company that will bring it to you, ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

The ending was rather hilarious. As if the people standing around, doing nothing but protesting, would actually have bags of money to throw at the banks in protest

Now that I know what the Zeitgeist movement is proposing, according to Peter Joseph, the biggest and stupidest mistake it keeps making is by saying we need to set up some method to survey the planet and ask opinion pols of people, to figure out how what people make, and how to make it as efficiently as possible, without seeing that people vote for what they want with their money, and efficiency is driven by money, where companies that are the most efficient in their resource use are the ones with the lowest costs and highest profits. Gah.

If it's generalized categories, and bitcoin is kept anonymous/pseudonomous, all it would do is make

Somewhere in the world, an anonymous person spent 0.05

into

Somewhere in the world, an anonymous person spent 0.05 to buy groceries.


I don't think this would make anything any less anonymous or personal, as long as no addresses are linked to people, and the categories are kept very general.


As a financial analyst and ecoonomist who thinks access to such info would make the job much easier and more valuable for "my kind," not at all. What concerns did you have?

$1,000 donation sent: https://blockchain.info/tx/bcc068b393d57ec83a4e9f7c6466ae66c30500aa32fd5661e3fcf7c35ea3d46b

They are not. They are asking the charity for more info, because their default limit on accepting sales is only $100, while our donation amount is $1,000. I was simply relaying that problem to others here, explaining that BitPay asks donors for more info to bump up the amount they are allowed to receive, and trying to figure out what we can do about it. Considering that it is likely a financial regulatory issue, maybe nothing.

From our end as a donor, all I see is me entering $1,000 into the donation form, hitting Submit, and getting an error page saying the merchant isn't allowed to receive that payment.


... Go drink some coffee. I think you may not be fully awake yet 

Two more:





Another one of those "they just started donating, do they qualify?" things. I think that shouldn't be a problem, but we really need to set up some rule about this.

That is, indeed, what we do. We suggest that they sign up with a payment processor, such as BitPay, Coinbase, or BIPS, and only say that BitPay is easier to set up and use.



Not possible, since I am also a customer of BitPay (and Coinbase), need to know this information for myself, and because we promise to help charities to get set up. I can't help the charity with questions about how to set up with BitPay if I don't know the answers to those questions. I don't think we would get in trouble for providing some free of charge technical support to BitPay or Coinbase, just because we might know the answers and be able to answer them right away instead of them having to go through their support ticket.

At the same time, we do treat BitPay, Coinbase, BIPS, and others as our partners, of sorts, and report any issues that donors bring up back to them, if only to improve everyone's experience.



It is impossible for us to launder money, because all of our accounts are entirely public, and because we only donate $1,000. If you wanted to launder $1,000 by donating it to us, setting up a fake charity, going through our vetting process, and getting that donation back, more power to you. But there are way easier methods of laundering much larger amounts of money.
Also, again, Bitcoin100 is not an American, or a European, organization. We don't have members, just volunteers, and they are not based in any country. Our money is not stored in any bank and is not owned by any one person. We don't even have a structured leadership. I'm just doing a lot of the work related to it, completely voluntarily, but anyone in any other country could do just the same. If I get arrested and charged with something, it will have absolutely no effect on this organization, since the goals and rules will remain, the money will remain, and the method of sending money will remain. Bitcoin100 is, quite literally, everywhere, and nowhere specifically.

I hope this answers your questions.

Another e-mail received:


My power went out Tuesday, and I didn't get home until very late last night, so I didn't have time to catch up on things for 2 days. (this e-mail was sent 2 days ago). I'll review all the new stuff I posted once I get home.

Yes. We don't care who their processor is, or what they do with the coins after they get them. Why should we get FinCEN compliance, if we are not based in US and are not a US organization?

Send this information to BitPay and please let them know about it. I don't know if this is a regulatory problem, a security problem, or a logistics one, but I would like to know if it can be fixed, too.

I like this org, but can't seem to find their donation page. They are fairly new and use a wiki as their website, but they are linked to 501(c)3 org. I'm curious as to where they would prominently display the Bitcoin donation option on their website. They do have a descent Facebook page.
[/quote]

More info from them:

True, but it's more accessible and standardised if it's in the blockchain. True, the merchant provider, such as BitPay, can record this transaction category locally, and transmit the category information in the merchant protocol for the customer's software to pick up, but the history of the data would only be limited to the merchant, and only in the format supported by the merchant processor (if you use something other than Quickbooks, BitPay can't help you). Standardising this to be a part of the transaction would allow any client to label transactions with categories, and give both merchants and customers access to their transaction history categories.


That's true, but I believe if adopted globally, the faked labels will be minor noise compared to true data, especially since transactions will likely not be free and spamming will be costly. I believe real time access to such information on a global scale, being able to see what is selling when, for what price, and in what direction sales are moving, would improve business and pricing decisions enormously. Currently, you have to pay a large fortune for even a small market studdy that only focuses on small regions.

Is it possible to BIP38 a BIP32?

(I swear, bitcoin is becoming more and more like Cosby talk, with a bippity here and a bippity there...)

EDIT: From here http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1t9979/standardised_categories_embeded_with_transactions/ce6d84w

"It is easier to confirm if an address belongs to the person you think it belongs to, such as by comparing with the customer data they sell (yes, most companies with loyalty cards sell that data)."

Yeah, that pretty much kills that idea. Thanks Nataniel for pointing this out.


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Since version 0.9 will allow embedding 80 bytes of arbitrary data, and include a merchant processing protocol, I propose that we come up with a list of codes corresponding to categories, to be embeded into transactions when purchasing items. This could be differentiated with a prefix, such as CAT or CG, and kept short by including a number. Example:

CAT0001 would stand for "Groceries"
CAT0843 would stand for "Gasoline"
(the only thing will be embeded would be the CAT0843, and it would be up to the standardising body to designate what each CAT number represents)

and so on. Kept short, this will not bloat the blockchain almost at all, and anyone with a standardised list would be able to parse the category numbers and conver them to actual category names. I believe that this will provide many benefits. A minor one will be easier importing of transactions into financial and accounting software. An enormous benefit will be the ability to see at extremely precise detail what is being bought and sold globally, which would give even more information to the market as a whole to make decisions on what production and services to increase, and which to exit. Since the categories will be standardisedd, and used along with bitcoin's other pseudonimising techniques, this should not pose any privacy concerns. Considering the benefits it provides (and considering BitPay already allows importing accounting information into Quickbooks), this should not be too much of a problem to import into merchant processing systems, and may even be a selling point for merchants that provide the option of categories versus those that do not.

Questions/comments?