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821
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Easiest way to explain Bitcoin
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on: June 20, 2013, 06:30:27 AM
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layman's explanation of Bitcoin These videos are good: - http://vimeo.com/63502573 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-w7SnQWwVA - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA0LkCkvUeUand why the average consumer should care. That will be very specific to each business and each consumer. A person who likes to play poker online will care about bitcoin different from the next person. Plus, many of the advantages that should be here now with Bitcoin are still out of reach. For instance, merchants can pass along their savings when accepting Bitcoin by offering a discount for that payment method and gain a competitive advantage. But few do this today. But if a customer was offered a 3% discount on the bill if paid using bitcoins, that alone might be enough to cause the average consumer to want to use Bitcoin. But today the cost to acquire coins (via exchange) offsets that gain and thus offers no economic incentive. The Bitcoin Education Project might be a resource that will help in this area: - http://btcedproject.org |
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823
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Economy / Service Discussion / Re: BitSpend Business Indefinitely Closed Because Their Bank Doesn't Like Bitcoins
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on: June 20, 2013, 04:34:18 AM
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Where before we were using as a regular business, we'll instead form distributed informal networks. We'll focus all our efforts on meeting the needs of our customers and resisting your efforts to shut us down and none of our efforts on compliance.
That's a key point. BitSpend only needed a bank account to restock the dollars on the payment cards they use for making the purchases as part of their service. If they used a bank account debit card, then obviously that was at risk of the bank taking an action like this. But if instead they had a credit card or prepaid debit card even which could be reloaded as needed, they simply only need a way to convert bitcoins to the funds for reloading. One labor-intensive approach is to convert bitcoins to cash and use the cash to buy Moneypak, which is then used to reload the card. No bank account is necessary. This whole process would be unnecessary if the merchants were to accept Bitcoin for payment though, cutting the payment card (and their bank issuers) out of the picture completely. |
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825
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Economy / Economics / Re: Bitcoin - we have a problem.
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on: June 19, 2013, 07:58:29 PM
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If another big mining pool goes down we may be looking at 40 mins between blocks maybe even longer - transactions are not processed if no blocks are solved.
Statistically, even if hashing is at the target rate then once every 48 hours there will be at least one block that took an hour to solve. Can you remember even one time that this was a significant problem for you? And if one pool suffers technical issues those miners will just switch to another pool. As far as this being a problem if hashing capacity drops below target and that persists for a couple weeks ... there is little difference between six confirmations taking an hour versus six confirmations taking two hours. With most of the costs for ASIC mining being fixed (i.e., for the purchase of the equipment), there is little reason why hashing capacity would suddenly drop dramatically. |
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832
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: The Bitcoin Arms race
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on: June 18, 2013, 02:48:20 AM
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I guess it only makes fiscal sense to mine on an industrial scale. Who would be interested in colocating bitcoin miner arrays in a datacenter?  No, that's not correct. GPU mining is done for, permanently. It doesn't matter how much you are scaling, it is now unprofitable (or rapidly nearing that point) to mine on GPUs. But even the small ASIC device (e.g., Jalapeno) is competitive against larger operations ... meaning the cost per Ghash/s for hardware is not that much different whether you are buying a 5.5 Ghash/s Jalapeno or some 1 Thash/s monster, and they are not dramatically different on power consumption (when compared to the value of the bitcoins that are the result). |
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833
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Bitcoin / Project Development / Re: ICBIT Derivatives Market (USD/BTC futures trading) - LIVE
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on: June 18, 2013, 12:44:35 AM
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Now, along with minor visual improvements, this page is going to require a one time password to be entered for any withdrawal operation, if you have tied Google Authenticator to your account.
I notice that simply doing a password reset through e-mail can successfully bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) protection as I can withdraw funds without 2FA after resetting the password. Shouldn't the 2FA code be required to request a password reset (when 2FA is enabled)? |
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839
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Bitcoin / Press / 2013-06-13 Techliberation.com - Mr. Bitcoin goes to Washington
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on: June 13, 2013, 11:19:41 PM
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Mr. Bitcoin goes to Washington by Jerry Brito On my panel were representatives from the Bitcoin Foundation, the Tor Project, and the DOJ, and we had a lively discussion about how these technologies can potentially be used by criminals and what these open source communities might be able to do to mitigate that risk.
[...]
I was therefore interested in the keynote remarks delivered by Jennifer Shasky Calvery, the Director of the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. [In particular, she addressed the fact that since there have been several enforcement actions against virtual currency exchangers and providers, the traditional banking sector has been wary of doing business with companies in the virtual currency space.
[...]
It would be a shame if [banks] felt they couldn’t do business with an innovative new kind of start-up simply because that start-up has not been (and may never be) adequately defined by a regulator.
[...]
Hopefully FinCEN will revisit its guidance now that the conversation has begun, and as other regulators consider new rules, they will hopefully engage the Bitcoin community early in order to avoid ambiguity and uncertainty. - http://techliberation.com/2013/06/13/mr-bitcoin-goes-to-washington |
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