Hey, Rabbit, it would be great if I could log in with openid and/or my Google account, like I can on bitparking's terracoin exchange.

That would be my hope.  I hope society cashes out of fiat, and that's that.

Any takers, yet?

Great job, guys: you made the news:

http://mashable.com/2013/02/06/pizza-bitcoins/

(It was first on my Google news page.)

I think he's just found that page in his searches and its unrelated to his purchase; I don't believe anyone's trying to tell him they sent him the bitcoins generated in block 1.

It sounds like he sent $500 to somebody (bitinstant?) through ZipZap trying to buy bitcoins but doesn't have a wallet or know how to spend bitcoins, and in trying to research how to spend bitcoins he's gotten into low-level details that are irrelevant for his real question of how does he spend them.

I don't think you've been scammed.  I think you are just making something way more complicated.  Did you try to buy bitcoins using ZipZap?  With whom were you communicating?  Were you trying to use bitinstant.com?

If you can provide a little more higher-level detail about what's going on, we can probably help you.

Do you have the bitcoin client installed?

Were you trying to obtain bitcoins?

If you were trying to obtain bitcoins, typically you would provide an address for those coins to be transferred to.  The address would come from your wallet, from your bitcoin client.  Or you might be using an online wallet such as blockchain.info or coinbase.com and you would provide an address from that wallet.

Then, to spend the bitcoins, you would simply use the wallet (whether online wallet or bitcoin client wallet) to send funds.  You wouldn't need to worry about script pub keys and proving you own the coins and all the details you are talking about; although they are useful for understanding the mechanics and security of the bitcoin system, they are not at all necessary details for a casual receiver and spender of bitcoins.

It was also pretty educational for me, several years ago.  I never heard of arbitrage before this book, and it puts that and many other concepts in simple understandable terms.

It's a big sale of 30000 BTC at a bargain price!

Competition may not be good for bitcoin, but it is good for us (bitcoin users).

Have you given otc a shot, yet?

Why don't you try it and see what jobs are offered?

Why do you we need a definition of lost coins?

You've probably already seen this, but here is a coinbase blog post about their cold storage:

http://blog.coinbase.com/post/33197656699/coinbase-now-storing-87-of-customer-funds-offline

At the time they posted (3 months ago), they were storing 87% offline.  I'm not sure if a more recent figure is available or not, but I find this statement intriguing:

"As deposits continue to grow it may be possible to store 95% or even 99% of funds offline."

99%   I guess they are pretty certain of their ability to cover and do a reload as needed, in a timely manner.

I'm responding to a post from November:


No kidding.  The open source world as a whole brags about the ability to fork, but when someone actually does that, people get mad.  Or when they are unhappy with a project and can't convince the project owners to go the way they want, and you suggest they fork the project, they start crying how they would never do that, as if you asked them to kill a child or something.

Why is forking a cardinal sin?

In Time Will Run Back, Henry Hazlitt depicts a totalitarian society slowly reinventing a free market.  Lots of interesting lessons here about money supply, market exchange, arbitrage, and other concepts.

http://www.mises.org/books/time.pdf

Well, I was thinking of buying some just to play around with the bitparking exchange system.  Of course, for the last ten days or so, every time I've looked they've been stable at 0.0003.  Now when I finally signed up for an account and considered it, they started moving.

Rats, missed my chance to buy into TRC at 0.00018!  Now it's shot up to an all time high of 0.0004!

Welcome to the forum, HMD.  I'm a longtime slashdot user, and I tend to hate the long-flat thread forum format, as well.  But most forums seem to use it, so whattayagonnado?  Hang in there and you'll get the hang of extracting most of the information you need.

So, what do you do with bitcoin?

You can get a chance, but you'll have to do it like everybody else.  Go use coinbase, bitinstant, mtgox, etc. to purchase bitcoins, and do some individual trading with them.  Then you'll have some sort of reputation and track record.

I just concluded my first coinbase transaction today, and at this point I think it beats all the alternatives.  Sure it'd be great if I could whip out a credit card and buy bitcoins with it, but nobody can do that today, essentially.  So if you really want a bitcoin, you'll have to work for it, friend.  If you are not willing to put in enough work to learn how to use the system, you probably aren't worth taking an extra risk on (paypal).

The thing to worry about is not the reputation of the seller, but of the buyer  You would need a much bigger track history of honesty and reliability before anyone reputable would trust you to pay for bitcoin with paypal.