Right now there are so few options for escrow in the typical ecommerce space, such as for an eBay transaction or for the Craigslist buyer. Escrow.com, for example, charges a minimum of $25 per transaction so using escrow.com for an $80 purchase is prohibitively expensive. Here is their fee chart: - http://escrow.com/support/calculator.aspAnd Escrow.com is seen as one of the "least expensive" escrow providers as well. The reasons escrow is so expensive include the fact that the escrow organization is pricing in chargeback risk and that there are extensive regulations regarding escrow service providers. While we do now have several Bitcoin-supporting escrow services offering a service similar to escrow.com, the problem is that not very many merchants can make use of those services as they do not (yet) accept bitcoin for payment. I wonder if there would be an opportunity for an escrow service to accept bitcoin as payment, immediately convert that payment to USD (or whatever currency is used for the purchase), and then to escrow that government currency amount until either the escrow is released or the payment goes to arbitration (or whatever happens after non-completion). That way the customer deals in bitcoins and the merchant benefits by needing to make no changes to their systems other than perhaps the equivalent of using the escrow service as the "Bill To", and then shipping to the customer once the escrow service has received payment. |
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Ok for some reason I am not able to receive payments or payouts I have tried deleting bitcoin and re downloading, still doesn't work. I lost a 14.4 bitcoin payout Just to clarify, ... you don't technically ever "receive" payments locally. A wallet is only needed to create addresses and for use when spending coins that have been sent to those addresses. Hopefully you still have a backup of your wallet.dat from before you "deleted bitcoin". Also see: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Getting_started#Installation |
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Seeing that they are now usable I am curious how many people are going to try them out. I know they are pretty expensive At current exchange rates and difficulty levels, the dual-FGPA board will produce just under 0.12 BTC per day, which is worth about $1.22 USD. Calculated using the typical U.S. residential rate the cost of electricity to run this board for a day is under $0.04 USD, or about 3% of revenue. For comparison, when GPU graphics cards are used for mining the cost of electricity can exceed half the miner’s revenue in regions where electric rates are high. - http://www.bitcoinminer.com/post/9268040136The cost of electricity is not the only consideration however. Many of those mining would like to add capacity but have hit the limit where more GPU equipment would cause breakers to start popping, would require additional physical space, or would require additional methods to remove the heat produced. They are shooting for 70 units to get the per-board production costs down. I would not be surprised if they exceed that target. |
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I sent the 10 BTC back to the address he gave me. That very well could be the problem right there. Were the coins sent to the address provided in the forum post or were they "sent back" to the address where they appeared to have been sent from? If the original payment was sent using an ewallet provider, then "returning" the funds to that address are instead sent to an address owned by the ewallet, and will not likely go to the right account. If this is what happened, that too will be verifiable in the blockchain. So the question is, exactly was the address you used when sending. [Edited to clarify.] |
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Just to clarify -- from the wiki: "While the Bitcoin technology can support strong anonymity, the current implementation is usually not very anonymous." - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity> 1.) How can I select the address I want to use for sending coins? A future version of the client will have coderr's patch which will allow the sender to specify which coins to use in a transaction. http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=24784.0 Coderr's fork on Github includes this in bitcoind now. > 2.) Does that mean that my outgoing transaction contains a whole bunch of my addresses Yes, a transaction may include as inputs many of the many small transactions that were previously received. > 3.) Is the transaction fee voluntary? why should I pay such a high fee like in the wiki The miner determines which transactions to accept into the block that is mined. Some miners will not accept transactions when no fee is paid. Because all bitcoin transactions are stored on all nodes, there are bandwidth and storage costs associated with each transaction. Bitcoin is not an ideal system for microtransactions. If you are planning on using bitcoin with many small microtransactions, expect to pay higher fees. Most complaints about this are coming from miners who have numerous tiny payouts. There are solutions (e.g., increase the payout threshold for the pool account) to mitigate when this is the issue. As far as that example in the wiki, that photo was likely taken from a time back when bitcoin was worth a fraction of what it is today. Do know that the fees are not associated with the amount of funds being sent but instead are associated with the amount of data contained in the transaction. - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees> 4.) Does that mean that coins are transferred without appearing in the blockchain? IP transactions won't appear any different in the blockchain. Here's more information on how they work: - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/IP_Transactions |
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the potential customer has told me he cannot purchase Bitcoins with his Serbian credit card. Due to chargeback risk, there are likely no options for your buyer to purchase bitcoins using a credit card, regardless which country. There are no exchanges yet that accept for deposit funds transferred from Serbian banks. is there some other way to purchase Bitcoins from Serbia? Perhaps there is a method your potential customer can get assistance from an intermediary? For example sending funds using PayPal to a trusted party who would then fund an exchange account using a bank transfer or other method. - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Buying_bitcoins |
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Mining is a form of speculation that is only slightly less risky than buying bitcoins themselves outright. It is all relative though. The miner with a dozen rigs enjoys economies of scale with regard to creating a configuration and replicating that to each rig. That miner though is at a disadvantage to those who are mining their single rig in their business or home where the cost of electricity is included in the rent, for instance. With the mining profitability remaining near its recent low, the miners bailing are generally those who are more affected by the noise, heat and space constraints that mining imposes. Additionally mining requires a commitment of time for keeping current with mining methods and for administering a rig. Though mining might still return a profit the levels are increasingly insufficient to keep the operator sufficiently motivated in continuing operations.  (from http://bitcoinx.com/charts/ ) Another risk today's miner faces is that a replacement technology is right around the corner. There could be an ASIC design being developed that could make difficulty rise so quickly that the GPU miner gets displaced just like how GPU mining displaced CPU mining less than a year ago. |
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Bitcoin having things like "bitcoin porn" is not going to make it look better in the eyes of the general public. Are you referring to posts here on this forum? There no longer is an "official" forum for Bitcoin. For now, links to the old domain still forward to their equivalents on this forum, but new posts and replies no longer get indexed from a bitcoin.org domain. There are other forums with different communities: - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/ForumsThere likely will soon be a beta forum on Stack Exchange, as 94% of the needed "committments" have been reached: - http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/30763/bitcoin-crypto-currency |
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In the U.S. and Canada, generally only large commercial and industrial entities have time-of-use rates. Because hardware costs remain the most significant cost of mining yet, even if a time-of-use rates were accessible, mining is still (at current levels) profitable during peak pricing (in most areas) so it wouldn't make economic sense to shut down during those times. This was described here as well: - http://www.bitcoinminer.com/post/2858427974 |
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As we know from some point clients start to refuse transactions without fee. A friend of mine sent me 0.1 BTC as a donation using old client (0.3.20 or so) which doesn't include fee. So that transaction was never confirmed Even without a fee that transaction would likely have made it into a block right away, and even if not right away (i.e., deemed as a very low priority transaction) that might been just a matter of hours delay before ending up in a block. P.S. there is a little possibility that he had fooled me and sent nothing but let's think of it as it really happened. Firstly, check the address in BlockExplorer: - http://www.blockexplorer.comIf it was only recently sent and you don't yet see it in BlockExplorer, check for it in: - http://www.bitcoincharts.com/bitcoinIf you don't see it in either, perhaps when sent the client did not remain connected long enough to announce the transaction to the network. Simply starting the client back up and leaving it running will cause the transaction to eventually get re-announced, and then it can become included in a block. |
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@Stephen Gornick
Is there a list of exchange with multi-factor authentication ? So far, those that I'm aware of: - Intersango (Britcoin.co.uk, Intersango.com, Intersango.us) - Google Auth with multi-factor - Mt. Gox - Yubikey - TradeHill - Duo Security (mobile) - Camp BX - Text/SMS - ExchB - motp (mobile one time password app) - WorldBitcoinExchange.com - Duo Security (mobile) or Google Auth with multi-factor There are also eWallets with a type of two-factor auth: - WalletBit uses SecureCard, which is a paper-based credentials system |
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I read that those mining namecoin on P2Pool found their first block today? Congrats!
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Better still would be a similar service run directly by the exchange themselves... Because the prices will both rise and fall then over the longer term (e.g., week, month or quarter, at worst) these fluctuations will in most instances cancel each other out. If this is something where there is absolutely no margin for fluctuations, the Mt. Gox redeemable code (voucher) gives the merchant the ability to trade on the proceeds instantaneously, though this requires the customer to use a Mt. Gox account rather than the bitcoin client. This voucher feature is currently available already but for the API they are looking for beta testers yet if I remember correctly. Additionally, when volumes become large enough there will likely be easy and inexpensive methods for lessening this risks similar to how forex protections are available. |
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