If I must, but most users are too lazy to do that everytime it's actually necessary.

First tip, don't mention SR.  Ever.

Second, the best way to buy bitcoin depends upon who you are and where you live.

Yes and no.  Eventually running a full client is going to be like drinking from a firehose, but only professional miners, wallet services, banks, etc are going to bother.  Most people will be using thin clients that don't maintain a complete blockchain that is dependent upon a central server to tell it what transactions are important.  Much like BitcoinSpinner on Android or Electrum works now.

http://bitdex.net/


you do realise those where toys right?

You do realise that's a price difference of about 1.25% right?  I often see larger price differences from one block to the next and from morning to night at the same station.  Dude, you're not getting gouged.  If he actually has a monopoly at one station in the area, you're very lucky the price difference isn't 50 cents per gallon.

I looked up bitdex, and there wasn't even that much there from my perspective.  I'm sure that you know whether or not a product exists with bitdex, but I don't.  You don't even have a video or the attempt at a faq, just a cartoon of a book.

Ad-hoc meshing may or may not be a solution, but that also depends on what your persectives on what the problem is.  Wireless mesh networking has it's place, but I won't claim that it's easy or likely, but a meshable hardware wallet would be a useful feature for some.  Furthermore, you don't have a working demo either; at least not one you are willing to show us.


How then, if not some kind of p2p ad-hoc connection?  If it involves a cable, you've already lost.
Fair enough, texting is an unnecessary function.  Still, they would work great for sending the device a cryptographicly signed purchase receipt, something that I would find useful.  You could buy something at wal-mart with bitcoin anonymously, but walk out of the store with a return receipt that's far better than the paper receipts available now.  Of course, if you are using a wal-mart branded bitcoincard, they know who you are anyway.

I'm not.  I'd call it a fail, or at least a dodge.  I asked if he could prove that those afore mentioned criminal activities have occurred.  It was a loaded question, of course, because the only way that he could prove any such thing would be to have access to the private computers of those afore mentioned criminals.  Which, most likely, would mean that those computers belong to himself or someone he personally knows quite well.  Anyone who would use a publicly posted bitcoin address to send funds to a publicly known criminal either doesn't know the criminal part & didn't buy criminal services or is an idiot, and it would be hard enough just to prove one or the other, much less an actual crime.

Preconfigured is a different requirement than doesn't require linux.

can you prove that?

This so explains your hostility to features claimed in bitcoincard, you're biased because you're invested into a competitor.  I'm glad to hear that there are more than one option on the way, but I will wait until there is something to see.  Will your product be able to transact without cell service & send free text messages as well?

And what is BitDex?

good luck with that.

that's a practical impossibility.

Sure, you could use a bitcoin client that exclusively uses Tor to hide your transactions, but you still can't be certain that the phone company doesn't already know what your addresses are.  Android clients are going to continue to be a huge part of the bitcoin economy, this is true.  However, so will stand-alone hardware devices like this one.  We seem to have a bunch of naysayers on this forum with little real knowledge about digital telemetry repeatedly declaring either 'un-possible!' or 'no one would want one'.  I want one.  Hell, I want six for my family, and I'd start to give them to family members for presents instead of gift cards.  Can you see a future wherein a teenage daughter says, "Dad, can I borrow your keys and your smartphone? I'm going to the mal- *cough* library." or "Dad, can I borrow your car keys and a few bitcoin for my card?..."

Not everyone uses smartphones, or ever will.  My wife uses a cell phone that can make phone calls and text, and nothing more.  I have a android.  I've noticed myself that for the act of making actual voice phone calls, her's is superior even though my is three times the cost.  Plus, there is the issue of security, your cell phone could potentially get hacked or malwared.  A simple standalone hardware device that uses a data protocol that doesn't permit arbitrary code to be loaded onto it from the radio is more secure by nature, thus better for the common user.  Better even for the power user in many cases as well.


Yes, some people will want it.  No, you can't practially do this with a smartphone, because no matter what you do, your cell phone company knows who you are, where you are, and what packets cross their network.

It would at that, and that is a market bitcoin needs to be able to penetrate with reasonable & inherent security.  I own a smartphone, and I'd buy this card today (and a dongle for my home router) if it were available.  I can think of no other method that is as secure from infultration, as portable and as convient.  Sure, my cell can text just fine, but not anonymously and not if I'm out camping beyond my providers reach.  If I had one of these cards for each of my kids, whether they had bitcoin or not, I could  communicate with them even when they were hidden by the trees, so long as they were in radio range with me and/or their siblings.

Smartphones are just computers.  Android is a version of gnu/linux, as an example. Linux is fairly secure by nature, but it's not perfect.  The problem is the shear complexity of the modern OS, which leaves open the possibility that a security hole was missed by the developers to be found by hackers in the future.  There is also the problem of your cell provder, do you trust them enough to handle your money?  Becuase from a practical perspective, they have acces to your unrooted cell phone; so somewhere there is a backdoor to the device.  This is how they can update your phone's software over-the-air without your personal involvement.  What happens if the next wallet stealing trogen is written by the former developer for Sprint?

I think that you got that from me.  I said, if this card is based upon Dash7, a line of sight range of 2km is possible.  At least it's possible with a true line of sight and the owner holding the card above his head like shown in the video.

So?

It's neither 'retarded' nor deceptive.  The video advertises 'no supporting infrastructure' with a collapsing cell tower in the background.  Although it's not technically true, since a usb dongle attached to the back of a POS terminal or internet router is 'supporting infrastructure', the reality is that it doesn't depend upon commercial communications infrastructure.  It can mesh to extend it's practical communications ranges, although that's much more likely to involve privately owned dongles and the internet than not.  Still, your cell phone can't mesh at all, unless you have a rooted android phone with a running Serval client, and even then can't mesh more than 70 meters with no obstacles.  (I should know, I have actually done this)  If your city has a power outage, your cell towers' batteries die in three or less hours.  So not only can't you make a regular phone call, even though your cell phone is fine, you can't spend bitcoin with the guy standing next to you.  With a device that's capable of directly communicating with other devices sans infrastructure support would at least open up the possibility of bitcoin business transactions in meatspace where internet access is not a given.  Someone is going to do this, and if done well, the radio standard is going to stick, and more capable devices are going to come into existance that can act like a bitcoincard, a bitcoincard server, etc. 

That would permanently break my forum autonomy, so I'm going to decline.

We could have a lot more running clients than that, since some of us have 'quite' clients, myself included, that won't show up in those scans.  Those are usually based upon the ip addresses that show up in the bitcoin IRC bootstrapping channels, and there are many clients now that don't use those channels anymore.

40 meters, just after dark.  No I don't do it often, and intentionally skipping in the CB band is illegal.  I have a ham radio license.