Стабильные деньги, без центра эмиссии существуют вне криптовалют.

На мой взгляд, основой криптовалют является защита от взлома, а быстрота развития обусловлена множеством других свойств и внешних сил...

Биткойн развивался задолго до Силк Роад и т.п. Сейчас, на мой взгляд, тоже развивается по многим другим причинам...

Анонимность у неё достаточно хреновая, так-как не являлась основным стимулом создания...

The woman gun guys dream about! 

...just so we have as much Greece<>Bitcoin related info here as possible:

Reason.com article

No word from tem-magnisia group yet. Does anyone have connections to the TEM founder, Yiannis Grigoriou, through some kind of social networking?

(+1 It's annoying to follow threads with such posters in it. When someone has 6k+ posts, and has only been in the forum a year, it's likely that most of those posts were brief blurbs of nonsense...

I think Phinnaeus Gage will be the first member on my ignore list.  )

As for the topic, my sympathies for all who were damaged. I was hoping that after the 2011 Magic the Gathering Online Xchange hack, the BtCex.com affair, the MyBitcoin scam, and appearance of things like 2-factor and paper wallets, such incidents would be behind us...

May all of you be well! There is, obviously, more to Life than Bitcoin... 

Thank you for clarifying that!

So, it's not really a currency as the video presented, but a local barter network.
It sounds like offline Ripple Pay on paper, with an offline database.

Seems well-suited for the average merchant/consumer, because they are used to paper, there is nothing to steal or hack, and the chief of it all can be found locally.
Bitcoin is difficult to comprehend and trust in comparison, if one is not swift with computers...

As long as they don't wish to trade outside their local economy, TEM seems great fit for them.

When they wish to trade outside, they could start using Ripple, and have the same TEM-type system online...

Would be interesting to hear from the TEM boss regarding Ripple, and his future plans for TEM in general. I will try to contact him when i get a round tuit...

It's noteworthy that "non-socialized medicine" in the developed world is an oxymoron.

Even in the United States, where the majority delude themselves that they don't use socialized medicine, in reality they do.

Employer-based, group insurance is socialized medicine, because the employees as a group pay for a substantial portion of the healthcare of the sick members of the employee group...

The vast American military operates fully socialized medicine. The overwhelming majority of American senior citizens use socialized medicine.

A great deal of government (socialized) subsidies are provided for all kinds of medical research, hospitals and clinics...

The majority of the US medical personnel received some sort of government/socialized subsidies in the form of socially-subsidized student loans and grants they never have to repay to society...

The medical professionals who come to America from "socialized medicine" countries, typically received their training completely at the expense of those countries' taxpayers, from which the latter then receive little if any benefit. So, in that sense, countries without "socialized medicine" mooch health care from the taxpayers of "socialized medicine" countries... 

Anyone in the developed world who thinks they are not using "socialized medicine" when they interact with the medical or pharmaceutical industries in any way, is living a fantasy... 

In fact, indeed! Here is your big chance to promote some competition, Charlie, which is reported to be so beneficial to any business sector! 

Do tell jimbobway how many of those "many options" are "a legal business" such as yours...

Please tell us how easy it is to "start a bitcoin business selling bitcoins" in your case in America, which is what you call "legal", how low the cost of entry is, and how no one will be stopping you for any reason... 

Even for me it's impossible to miss the giant "costs and fees associated with the transfers" through the chain of middlemen you terminate. 

BTW, if we are going to split hairs, rather than Bitcoin putting money on your employees table, it's your customers taking food off their own table and giving it to your chain of middlemen.

If there is one thing the recent years have shown, it's that financial middlemen (banks, credit companies, et al) have little regard whose table they clear of food or whose shop they close, as long as they make their quick buck "for now..."

Just saying that, since you mentioned being selfish, in a business that is all about selfishness...  So, you'll have to excuse my lack of empathy for your industry in general...

You stated that "big % of Bitcoiners wouldn't have gotten into Bitcoin" without middlemen like you. If that's true, as opposed to your self-serving PR, my simple point remains:

"a big % of Bitcoiners" have simply xchanged the traditional, expensive middlemen chains for even more expensive new middlemen chains terminated by BitInstant, et al...

Yes, i guess, the organizer of TEM and those guys he has behind the computers would have to buy the backing, which doesn't seem likely, or may even be pointless...

I don't exactly understand how the valuation works in TEM - how they determine how many TEM anything is.

Perhaps, TEM is not really currency, but just another barter ledger system that is presented as a local  currency in this video.

Maybe the reason the average Greeks are not interested in Bitcoin is simply because they are so tired of all the currency-related shenanigans that they would rather just go to the modern versions of prehistoric barter than some nebulous, uncertain geek experiment of Bitcoin...  

Would one of our Greek members be willing to contact the TEM organizer, and inquire why he would not want to use Bitcoin instead of TEM?

Guns as a placebo certainly exist, and many gun-related accidental tragedies also exist, and gun use as an effective tool also exists in meaningful numbers.

A useful thing to google is the "NRA Armed Citizen column", which comes out in their American Rifleman magazine.
I think at least some of those reports are true, because i personally knew a Russian guy, who moved to the United States and was reported in that column to have successfully stopped an armed robbery of a small store he opened there...

He was seriously wounded and survived, but he fatally wounded one of the robbers...

So upon contemplation and life experience, i have to give credit to the Americans and the US government in most of the States for giving American citizens the optional choice to legally use a gun as a placebo or a real tool.

The vast majority of governments don't give their citizens such a choice. Seems to me that the greatest measurement of "Freedom" is the number of options one has...

Yes, she definitely seems to be on top right now!  

However, wouldn't it be best to have a new Bitcoin queen every year? After all, as that American saying goes, "Show me a beautiful woman, and i'll show you a guy who is tired of...  ...her being his queen."  

Thank you for your honesty. My point in this thread and others is that Bitcoin was intended to eliminate "alot of middlemen".

Instead, we are just changing one lot of middlemen for another, in the process eliminating all of the privacy Bitcoin offers, and giving up the protections government fiat offers...

In my experience, new services online start out being free or virtually free, at least for small users. Then, as their popularity increases, they start to introduce or increase fees.

Bitinstant and the like are doing the opposite - laughably high fees from the start for the smallest users, with the possibility of lower fees when the popularity and size of your business grows.

To me, even as a proponent of Bitcoin, that makes the whole Bitcoin system look like a get-rich-quick scheme for a select few, perhaps, a front for government agencies, etc...

Another highly advertised potential for Bitcoin is micropayments. I know over there in New York and
Wall Street, 20$ is considered a micropayment,  but it's not in most of the world or even on American Main street.

So, even here, we are back to the banking status quo - those who can afford to make large transactions have lower percentage fees.
Those who don't have a lot of money, get to pay the highest possible percentage, or have to go to other services, which are slower or not a "legal business" as Bitinstant is, and so on...

These are "actual comments" in a public forum regarding the facts as i see them. The Bitinstant threads here are not your PR or support portal... I am not hating on you or Bitinstant. It's just business facts as i see them, rather than some personal affair.

I certainly will avoid using your service again at current rates. So glad i got my first Bitcoin, before Bitinstant arrived to "make it easy".
At 19.83% or even 4.38%, i doubt i would have taken the chance on something so uncertain to even survive, let alone displace entrenched competitors...

Gauging from the speed of Bitcoin adoption among average consumers, i suspect i am not the only one with that view...

...i stand corrected, because i didn't get the math right:

After the Bitinstant 3.99% fee, one only gets $19.20 worth of Bitcoin. So,

100% - ($19.20/23.95 * 100%) = 19.83% fee to BitInstant and ZipZap cabal.

Is that right?    

If so, it makes banks and credit card companies look like charitable organizations! With this kind of "cool", the governments will not even have to ban Bitcoin or launch any kind of network attacks on it. Its use will just continue to be relegated to IT and financial geeks, freaks, and criminals...  

A convenient way for the governments to track their financial activities, which are, of course, kept completely "private" by Bitinstant, as long as government agents don't show up and force the likes of Charlie to disclose them... "Pretty cool" after all, as LadyBytes said!  

Bitcoin is so geekoid and shady, that particularly an independent endorsement of it, BitInstant, and ZipZap by a beautiful, young woman is worth at least a few % fee to you from the 19.75% the latter two will get from such transactions... 

Yes, i certainly hope that the evil-doers in the US government do not capture you for coaching people to circumvent their KYC/AML laws. We have few women in the B world, and some of the ones we do have might be wannabes... 

Speaking of physically attractive Bitcoin women, so far, all we've had are geeky guys as the major media face of Bitcoin.

Seems that it would be useful if we had an annual contest for the female face of Bitcoin, or whatever that's properly called. She can be chosen by the forum poll, receive donations for her activities, etc... 
What do you think?

 
Regardless of how much the sexy LadyBytes got paid, let me see if i can get the math right:

$3.95 / $20 * 100 = 19.75% fee to get 20$ in Bitcoin = "Pretty cool" according to the video and BitInstant?   

Truly fiat must grow on trees in that wondrous land of the USA! 

As far as Charlie running "a legal business", is it really legal in the United States to transfer fiat through it under a fictitious name and contact info, as this video suggests? 
 

Hundreds of people using this TEM thing in Greece, yet we only got a handful of Greeks to respond here in the poll, and Bitcoin still doesn't seem to be anywhere on the Greek map.

It's funny and sad at the same time...

Feels like all that says something enormous and multifaceted about Bitcoin, Greece, human nature, etcetera that is difficult to process and explain...

I wonder whether it would be possible or useful for the TEM people to back it with Bitcoin... 

Not likely, i think. "Bitcoins will start flowing into those countries" through the same or similar expensive middlemen. It might not be BitInstant, but some other local one.

So, even if exporters in the developed countries are willing to accept B from the developing world, the average consumer won't be able to afford to buy Bitcoins to spend.

If it's expensive for some of us in the developed world to buy B, it will not "start flowing" to the average consumer in the developing world...

It MIGHT be a new niche value store for the wealthy of both worlds, just as gold and such are today, but not a widespread payment system...

Doesn't seem promising to me. 

With the current fee structure, i think it will be a long time before Bitcoin, not to mention Bit-Pay, is widely accepted.

It's simply too expensive to convert fiat to Bitcoin, not to mention too complicated and time-consuming for the average consumer. So, even if pawn shops accept B, it's not cost-effective for the consumer to pay in B instead of paper, credit cards, and other current devils we already know.

Right now, there are so many expensive middlemen, such as BitInstant, Bit-pay, etcetera, that B is more costly to use than credit cards, not to mention cash.

Calculate for yourself how ridiculously expensive it is just to get fiat in your pocket to an xchange via this CVS/Walmart/blahBlah method. You might win OR lose due to the large xchange rate fluctuations. Plus, unlike paper, it's not anonymous whatsoever...

Due to these costs, i am done with using large xchanges to buy B, unless i absolutely have to.

In the existing environment, we simply replace expensive middlemen like credit card companies, with new expensive middlemen, such as Bitinstant, ZipZap, BitPay, bitcoin xchanges, etc.

The governments are allowing it, because the average consumer would have to be a fool to use B instead of fiat, and pay the Bitcoin middlemen. So, B isn't a threat to fiat now, or in the foreseeable future. IIIFFF and WHEN it ever becomes one, the governments will just make it so that the middlemen have to charge even higher fees to xchange fiat to B...

Until i can get paid in B, i would only buy B privately, and you all know that's not easy, cheap or convenient either for most people. There isn't a private exchanger within 100's of kliks of me.

Good luck with widespread adoption given the current xchange middlemen! 

Ah yes, here is something about B at Insomnia

Cool! Thank you very much!

Do most advanced Greek computer users and hackers visit Insomnia?

In which forum do the Greek investors and penny-pinchers talk about financial stuff?

It would be interesting to hear from them here! ...even in Greek!