over 9000

I'm not worried. It rose prematurely because speculators anticipated the deflation.

That's why I prefer to mail the cash. Even if one in 20 of your letters gets stolen in the mail (a very high estimate) that's still cheaper than Western Union.

Bitcoingateway is great in terms of convenience, but they need to have a high spread (last time I looked it was approx 10 %) in order to protect themselves against the high risks of accepting credit cards. Compare that to bitcoin4cash and bitcoinexchange who offer a 3% spread.

Maybe it's because former paypal customers on mtgox are slowly running out of USD balance, and once they run out they decide to give up on mtgox because Liberty Reserve is too cumbersome.   

There are exchanges where you can buy Bitcoin directly for Western Union or bank wire, so why should someone buy LR via Western Union only to trade it into BTC?  That would only make sense if there was an arbitrage opportunity, but most users can't be bothered with doing arbitrage.

I'm an expat living in the Zurich area. Probably too busy this year to make it to a meet up though.

My personal experience is that strict specification creates software that is extremely good at doing what the specification wants, but for all its elegance, it's not always what the user wants or needs.  We haven't fully figured out the details of how Bitcoin is supposed to behave yet (see discussion on transaction fee policy). We are finding out as we go along.  Nothing against specification, but isn't it a bit early right now?

For me, the skillful execution of an idea is just as important, if not more important, than the idea itself. There is no shortage of ideas in the world. Most are never executed. I doubt Larry Sanger is the first human being ever to think of a collaborative encyclopedia. I think Wales deserves this title equally.

Larry Sanger certainly seems to resent Jimmy Wales. His attemps to defame Wikipedia were really childish and below the belt.  Seems like a bitter man; I kind of feel sorry for him.


Doesn't bother me in the least.


Understandable. Jimmy Wales is a libertarian in private but mainstream opinion isn't sympathetic towards libertarian values. As a public figure he needs to be careful not scare away big donors.

Have you thought about using 3D secure?

This forces the customer to enter a password for each purchase. The password is issued by his bank.

In combination with email verification it's probably secure enough.

Your present procedure is cumbersome. It will discourage a good percentage of potential customers.

I personally find the idea of someone calling me on my mobile phone over some $50 Bitcoin purchase very invasive.  If someone is going to interrupt me at work, it better be something important.  Maybe it's just cultural...

If I really wanted to set up a recurring payment, this would currently take me about 2 minutes.

Example: I want to donate 200 BTC to the EFF on the 15th of every month.

1) create a file called DonateToEFF.cron

2) edit file:
* * 15 * * ~/programs/bitcoin-0.3.15/bin/64/bitcoind sendtoaddress 1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt 200

3)$ crontab DonateToEFF.cron

done!

Also, it shouldn't be difficult for Bitcoin web interface providers such as mybitcoin.com to develop scheduled payments for non-geeks.

There is no reason to bloat the Bitcoin client with this kind of functionality when it can be done more flexibly outside the client.

I think what your merchant friend was trying to say is that, unlike credit card users, Bitcoin users can't be suckered into signing up for recurrent payment schemes that are then a big hassle to cancel, where the merchant ends up with a lot of recurrently paying customers that are only customers because they are too apathetic/computer illiterate/disorganised/embarrassed(in the case of porn) to cancel the recurring payment. Not because they still genuinely want the product, or genuinely prefer it to the competitor's product.

Bitcoin takes away control from large financial institutions and colluding merchants and gives control back to the user.

I understand that a lot of internet merchants have a problem with this because their whole business model is based on this odious practice rather than offering a superior product.

I for one, would be happy so see these types of merchants go bankrupt one by one as Bitcoin gains popularity.

A more competitive internet economy can only be a good thing.

I have been a p2p enthusiast for about 10 years. I have been a strong supporter of pseudonymous p2p projects  such as Freenet, i2p, and Tor since I think their existence is essential to guarantee free communication in society.  But I always thought that most p2p networks don't have a satisfactory mechanism for allocating bandwidth among their users. I already came up with the idea of a p2p cryptocurrency myself to solve this problem about 5 years ago (my version was not nearly as ingenious as Satoshi's).

Also, I have always been angered and frustrated with the crappiness, inconvenience, and lack of security of popular online payment methods such as credit cards and paypal.  

My credit card has been scammed twice. I felt that the ensuing grief was completely unnecessary. There is simply no good reason to give everyone on the internet (and on the street) you pay a few dollars a blank cheque (essentially that's what CC details are) and then to trust them not to abuse it. The stupidity of this system has always amazed me.  

When I first stumbled accross Bitcoin (thanks to the now deleted Wikipedia article), there wasn't much selling to do, I simply thought, YES this is what I have been waiting for all these years.  

In a free market for transaction fees,
spamming the network will have the effect of increasing transaction fees for everybody.

Maybe Mr Burns is more than just a common griefer. Maybe he is a miner with more rational motivations.

A miner has more to gain than to lose by spamming. Yes, eventually a spam equilibrium will be reached where the marginal amount you lose in your spam to the transaction fees of competing miners equals the marginal amount gained from your own transaction fees.  But that is still a macroeconomically subobtimal situation.

To escape this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_trap social trap, more than a market is needed.

Some simple but effective rules should be hardcoded into the Bitcion protocol/specification itself, to discourage the excesses of spamming.

I know that this approach probably sounds too "top-down" for the free market enthusiasts in this forum, but the rules should of course be purely voluntary and consensus based, like the 21M rule we have already.

He probably does want to send money to a relative in a different village.

In many remote parts of Africa this is currently handled by SMS.

This system is better than nothing, but it still relies on capital-intensive mobile phone infrastructure, and the transaction costs are huge, in the region of 10-20%.

The only reason wifi has such a short range is because government regulations artificially limit transmission power to 50 mW. This is tiny. Even a mobile phone can go up to 2000 mW.

Technically it should be trivial to modify transmission power of a wifi device, and government regulations don't get enforced much anyhow in "offline" parts of the world like Somalia, if they exist at all.

Then it should be possible to construct a wireless mesh network with several tens of kilometers between each node, bringing even the most isolated villages online.

All you need is one person with a smartphone in each village acting as the local banker.

Wow, this website looks like it hasn't been changed since the day it was started 1998. It has a very retro feel to it. 

But I thought the article was a good read. It's refreshing to see an external piece on Bitcoin that isn't based on gross misconceptions.  The author did his research and actually bothered to understand how Bitcoin works before criticising blindly.  Substance over style.

Question: If we commission you draw a design, will you permit the design to be released under Creative Commons?

I said never, because before that number reaches 10%, AMD will start manufacturing chips specialised just to compute SHA-256 (HPUs- hash processing units?)

No, it's a joint venture of consumer electronics corporations:

Samsung-Toshiba-Nakamichi-Motorola

Named after Gox, the god of greed