lessons to be learned if using a inkjet.. USE FIXATIVE SPRAY!! its a kind of varnish.. google it.

or use colour laser printers

ill just link my reply to the other thread

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131801.msg1413874#msg1413874

ok image from heifer website

the quote "this great investment allows our partners".blah blah

so lets check out the partners
http://www.heifer.org/inside/our-partners
click on non-profit and top of the list is bothar

ok now look into bothars partners
scroll down to the title "walumba Women's Draught Cattle Project" and oxfam is listed as partners
http://www.bothar.ie/index.jsp?p=191&n=206

i know that bothar is linked with oxfam for the supplys stuff.. but heifer is not a goat SUPPLIER.

heifer ask for £120.. but oxfam/bothar only ask for £50/£55.. so i would prefer to give oxfam the £120 so they can buy atleast 2 goats and 40% towards a 3rd goat. which adds up the more that is donated.

heifer keeps atleast £60-£70 of funds..

i got nothing against a charity that atleast gathers some money for worthy charities as its better then no money.. but for the most effective use of the money. give it to oxfam

heifer international do not supply the goats.. their partners do

guess who the partners are.

OXFAM

heifer make profits.. oops that word should not be used when they call themselves non-profit.. so lets use the phrase, huge managerial labour costs.

so get rid of the middleman and put the cash through OXFAM send 2 goats to the needy instead of just 1

the fake hang up trick is a well known scam these days

the other scam is saying that they are the telephone company and a bill needs to be paid that day. if the person does not believe them they say they will prove they are the phone company by temporarily cutting off the phone line when they hang up.

when in actual fact they just mute the call so that the victim does not hear a dial tone. and cant dial out.

5 minutes later the scammer calls them again and informs them if they do not pay immediately then the next cut off will be permanent incurring further costs and a 30 day delay in reinstating the service.

never give any details to people that call you. in the UK this is called cold-calling. don't be convinced by a single phonecall that you were not expecting to receive, demanding personal banking details.

i already use paper wallets. just dont use inkjet as they fade after a few years. use laser printers and then seal the design using a fixative, which is a kind of varnish.

my design is like a bitcoin bearer bond. you could also get the private key etched into a piece of jewellery or a piece of metal. to ensure lastability beyond the risks of paper. store it safe!! go lo-tech (not on a computer or digital format.)

just dont rely on digital data storage. or online services that decode brain wallets. as they may not be available to download in 20 years and the offline storage of the decoder you kept in such an event may have become corrupted.


and remember to put details of the inheritance/childs trust fund in your Will if you want to keep it as a surprise. or they may never find out about it.

API command that is useful for merchants.

lets say they sell a product or multiple products that total 200Euro..

they can send a API to you: (crap example)

?cmd=merchant&convert=EurotoBTC&amount=200

and your service looks up the current BTC sell price AND ALSO more importantly it adds on all of your fees that the system would charge to get FIAT to their bank account/ prepaid debit card and return a BTC amount that represents how much it would cost in BTC to ensure the merchant receives the full 200 euros, thus to him accepting BTC is free. just like cash is to them.

so his website or retail EPOS system will near instantly display the BTC price that includes everything and uses another API to confirm the coins were sent to their registered bitcoin address to make the transaction complete.

mtgox is great for the americans.. but not the europeans. so try a different exchange thats more european friendly


so you sold 300BTC at $11.. so that gives you $3300

buy them at the $13 price giving you around 250BTC. transfer them to another exchange such as bitcoincentral or btc-e and sell the 250 at the $13 and guess what...

you still have the $3300 you were happy to have several months ago... but in a different exchange that may accept your identity..

if you sold out several months ago you would have only had $3300 and you were happy with this amount. so you have not lost out anything but time. it would be worse if mtgox only returned 2cents to you or said you cannot have any money at all.

dont blame bitcoin for this.. blame the companies and the government laws that restrict your use of FIAT i would also recommend looking into the daily withdrawal limits stuff too.. as withdrawing too much in one go will flag extra identification being required by banks etc.

so withdraw 500 a day or whatever the limits are to ensure theres no red flags for high value money movements

not quite. to transfer from cash to BTC is predominantly done using bank transfers or moneygram/ukash and other methods which have fees. unless your cash > btc > cash is done using localbitcoins with someone face to face. which is usually costing you fuel to meet them and their inflated prices to be in their benefit to sell/buy with you.

i agree with the speed of transmission BUT try finding a trust vendor to convert cash to BTC at either end for that amount. also considering point 1's reply i gave. meeting a stranger to swap your briefcase of $1million in cash for BTC.. and then the chinese swapping the BTC for 6 million yuan. plus each side wont hand over their brief cases /BTC for $6k each

i wont reply about each of the other points but all in all the possibilities are there.. but its not quite everyday practice.. bitcoin needs to grow a bit more for most of these examples to work fluidly

also the
http://blockchain.info/tx/ed2efa807c4d33a0ca6d15aab5e608ac624a30039965b508063c8baf9d9e8ecc
is not someone transmitting funds from one person to another.. thats silkroad mixing its funds to hide it from prying eyes.. hopefully blockchain.info will remove the "pirate booty" tag from the 1dky address now its been confirmed to be silkroad

use your private key of where the coins are linked to, on another wallet/client is the easy answer

check blockchain.info or blockexplorer and see your history, see where your coins went to

+1

having a video of a expert and a novice having a scripted conversation is much like those annoying adverts you see that promise you to make atleast $500 a day by following their fool proof method of market trading.

we don't need 'consumer' based videos to get people mining/buying bitcoin. we need people like bitinstant and other talented spokesman to go to merchants and get them onboard.

businesses do not base their decisions on cheesy videos. they base it on business meetings with representatives. so video's made by the armchair anarchist would not really add much merit to bitcoin.

if you build business relations, customer relations will follow.

i think MTGox missed the crucial selling point in their video which turned people off of it..

using an instant access media store as the bases of the demonstration is not a good selling point as it then emphasises bitcoins woes (the confirms)

either risk processing orders with no confirms or change the video to represent a clothing/gadgets delivery website, or something that would atleast hide away the requirement for customers to sit and wait for confirms just to get what they want. but allow them to get on with their lives and just receive an email that says the order has been confirmed later that day. knowing the product should now be on its 3 day journey through a warehouse, postal service and to their door.

another solution for the arm chair entrepreneurs is drop shipping..

with dropshipping the entrepreneurs amongst us dont have to worry about pre-purchasing stock, packaging it and paying delivery costs or waiting for delivery vans to come to them at all hours of the day,

all you need to do is search drop shipping on google, find a supplier/product that you want to sell. Make an script that converts the supplier price into a btc price (adding on of course a nice commission and conversion fees) and then start selling it on your own website.

then just pay the drop shipper and give the drop shipper the delivery address of the customer. and that is it. the drop shipper does all the hard work while you keep the extra commission you added to the bill, without having to do much more hard work then paying a supplier and pasting a delivery address.

hopefully a bitcoin debit card will make the whole process more stream lined. and relationships can be build up for the drop shipper to take BTC to not even require converting to fiat to purchase stock. but atleast the first baby steps is to get more products available for people to buy.

in short fast food

a few of us on the litecoin side are talking about just-eat.com

a international website that links many fast food places in different countries together by allowing you to order their food through the website and have it delivered. mostly europe, canada and mexico is covered, sorry america isnt really listed but this is a great website that if they would accept any crypto currency, it would be a great start.

the best way to begin is if you have used their service or you see your favourite fast food delivery place listed, email just eat with a simple "do you accept bitcoin?".

give them time to realise there is a growing interest/demand in accepting bitcoin(or litecoin) and then one of the nice respected guys among us, such as the talents of bitinstant can formally contact the HQ with a payment solution where they wont have to worry about understanding mining or block chains. but simply displaying a public address and the money gets sent via SEPA/debit card to them.

although just-eat is europe based, maybe a good PR guy from bitcoin central.. hopefully without hyping up things too much that he has to retract his first statements lol

im not against coders at all for instance gavin andersen would be a perfect fit to have gone to this conference, or someone from bitpay/bitinstant/mtgox.

but in this case this particular coder going to a financial conference is like a pimp going to a WI meeting to explain womens rights.
the second video shows the other panellists showing more positives for bitcoin and slightly defending it, but that dude really needs a lesson in PR

watching the first video i could tell straight away this guys background is in the 'anonymous' hacker area. and not a business/financial background.

i am a fan of these crypto currencies but even i could not see one positive thing that guy said that actually helped bitcoin have some credibility.

i really wonder where these financial conferences advertise that they require 'experts' to talk about bitcoin. As that guy seriously should not have been a public face of bitcoin.

making comments such as businesses are accepting bitcoin and making a loss purely because they see the potential. and when questioned about how can someone get bitcoin. he seemed to have no clue about mining or how to explain it simply.

i face-palmed atleast 30 times whilst watching the video. what a waste of a potentially good chance to show bitcoin as better then other payment methods.

nice and short but i can already see factual problems

the exact amount he stole is unknown. the 500k btc ($5mill) figure came from people doing block chain analysis and seeing him loop his transactions through Silkroad, but misinterpreting the 500k stash as pirates, where in fact it was Silk roads.

it might be best to leave it to the guys that are at the top of the investigations to fill in the page. or even not make it an issue to be worthy of mentioning and try to keep bitcoins history as clean as possible instead of just highlighting the bad at every opportunity. maybe make pages for positive bitcoin history.

thats a better idea, where each person had a hologram. it does not have to even be a PGP key for businesses selling the notes, for example:
http://donttreadonmeme.com/what-is-a-bitcoin-bank-note/
they could have the snake image as their hologram making it instantly recognisable as to its origin.

so anyone that is going to make notes for circulation purposes should have their own design hologram. and if your just an individual then a pgp key or your bitcointalk name on the hologram may suffice.

the hologram which only casasius produces.. never resells separately. insures its a casasius multiparty note and not a privately printed note where the producer has seen the private info