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141  Economy / Trading Discussion / Re: Spreadsheet for tracking your current BTC/USD value on: March 06, 2013, 06:21:30 PM
bitcoinexchangerate.org/price is new to me and I like it. The importXML command I was also unaware of. I'll be adding those to my spreadsheet.

Sweet! I'm so glad you found something useful here.

The wallet contents are easy to fetch from blockexplorer.com/q/
I make a chart like this:
A                  | B
wallet address | =ImportData("http://blockexplorer.com/q/addressbalance/"&A1)

...[for however many addresses are in your wallet]

total              | =sum(B2:B12)

I created a public spreadsheet that I planned to put all kinds of data in but there was no interest so I abandoned it and just keep updating my personal one.


That's a great idea, I should add that to mine as well. I'm surprised there's no interest in this sort of thing. For me, it was day 1 stuff. I had to know what was going on to figure out if this was worth further interest. Watching it the last 30 days, it's been pretty clear to me, it is worth my time (that is, unless the bottom falls out tomorrow).

Thanks again for your comments.
142  Economy / Trading Discussion / Re: Spreadsheet for tracking your current BTC/USD value on: March 06, 2013, 05:50:25 PM
Apologies for posting this in general if it's trading related. I didn't think of keeping track of my BTC via a spreadsheet as trading, but I guess that makes sense.

My original question still stands. What is everyone using to keep track of this stuff? If you have multiple online and offline wallets, surely you need a tool to keep track of them all, right?
143  Economy / Trading Discussion / Spreadsheet for tracking your current BTC/USD value on: March 06, 2013, 05:26:20 AM
I'm new to Bitcoin and quickly realized how helpful a spreadsheet is for keeping track of the few buys I've made at different levels and what my overall USD value is. I figured others may find this useful as well, so I made a generic one. Feel free to make a copy and enjoy: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkOD_dGHOm6IdE5ZbTdRYmhxLUNBSkFvb2dqS0RKTHc#gid=0

If you already have something like this in place, what are you using? I assume there has to be something more sophisticated out there.
144  Economy / Speculation / Re: The rally will stop tomorrow 03/06/13 on: March 06, 2013, 03:19:09 AM
Sorry... What? I'm confused. If you'll be buying, wouldn't the price go up?
145  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bitcoin: DO YOU SPEAK IT??? on: March 05, 2013, 05:11:59 PM
Nice post - you cover a lot of ground and link to some of the better resources... Wish you could add NameCheap.com to the list of businesses accepting bitcoin right now, but they're still busy implementing it...

Edit: And here's a blog post from Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz that mentions bitcoin: What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years. Love seeing mentions, even just in passing, from some of the top VCs out there...
Thanks!

Please feel free to add NameCheap to the comments.

And thanks for that link from cdixon. I really enjoyed it and shared it on Twitter as well. Good stuff there.
146  Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Help a newbie with some info PLEASE :) on: March 03, 2013, 09:02:40 PM
I just published a blog post last night on my first month or so of learning about Bitcoin. I linked to a lot of resources you may find useful: http://bestoked.blogspot.com/2013/03/bitcoin-do-you-speak-it.html
147  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bitcoin: DO YOU SPEAK IT??? on: March 03, 2013, 06:22:57 AM
Good stuff.

Since you are interested in FRB, this paper is a must. Bitcoin makes FRB obsolete by providing the Austrian ideal of an inelastic monetary base.

http://dev.economicsofbitcoin.com/mastersthesis/mastersthesis-surda-2012-11-19b.pdf

Thanks Solex. Believe it or not, I actually clicked through to that today and did a TL;DR, though I did enjoy some posts over there.

I will have to give it a read at some point.
148  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Campaign for XBT. A new ISO Currency Code is required for Bitcoin on: March 03, 2013, 06:20:22 AM
Great discussion. As the founder / developer of an ecommerce system, I was thinking about this also. I like XBC, but XBT would work too. If we can agree on something and setup a system to send a consistent message to the standards group, that would be fantastic.
149  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bitcoin: DO YOU SPEAK IT??? on: March 03, 2013, 06:02:19 AM
Not a bad effort but one thing to be clear about is that Bitcoins never *actually* traded at 0.01 USD (although the media loves to report that) as all the supposed trades that occurred between the *hack* occurring and the system being brought back up after it was shut down were *wound back*(and from memory after Mt. Gox started trading again it was from around 17 USD).

Ah, thank you! I do remember seeing something about it being wound back, but I didn't make the connection.

Brings up an interesting point, though. What the media reports impacts public perception which changes trust and results in a reality which almost doesn't care about what actually happened. Sad.
150  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Bitcoin: DO YOU SPEAK IT??? on: March 03, 2013, 05:24:34 AM
I just published my first blog post about my last month or so learning Bitcoin. I'd love for you to give it a read and let me know if I missed something or if I'm way off somewhere.

http://bestoked.blogspot.com/2013/03/bitcoin-do-you-speak-it.html

There are some great posts out there about Bitcoin, but sometimes they can be hard to find. Do you have one? I'd love to read it. If you do, please reply with a link so I can check it out.

Thanks! Smiley
151  Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Bitcointalk needs to be more noob friendly on: March 02, 2013, 09:40:42 PM
As someone who just recently got out of the newbie jail, I think it's a good thing.

However, I do think there may be something worthwhile in the OP. When you're involved in a community for a long enough period of time, you forget what being outside of that community feels like. A newbie like myself then has insight you can't obtain on your own. That insight may be valuable.

Was I annoyed by the jail? A little bit. Do I think it serves a valuable purpose? Yes. In fact, I've used it as a positive attribute of this community when describing it to others.

Here's the larger concern: The forums are overwhelming.

Want to learn about ASICMINER? How much free time do you have to read through 106 pages of forum posts?

It's understandable for those who have put in the time to be frustrated with those who are unwilling to do so. My thought is, most of the population has no freaking clue how their money works ("But... I thought the money I deposit in my bank is actually in there...?"). For Bitcoin to become more widely adopted, these are the type of people that will have to feel confident using it. People fear change and many fear technology. Sure, they could read the wikipedia page and get up to speed rather quickly, but most probably won't even go that far. The bitcoin wiki is helpful also, but again, there's a lot of info there for someone to read if they are still trying to evaluate "is this worth my time?"

So what's the solution? I'd love to see more videos explaining bitcoin. I'd love to see a "top posts" summary section in the forums. Maybe even some weekly summaries of the best discussions, filtered down into usable pieces of information within specific categories.

Someone could even setup a business for this. Charge a small subscription fee, pay contributors a small reward for writing great content. etc...

But hopefully my original point is understood. The forums have so much information at this point that new members feel overwhelmed. Maybe there should be a separate way for them to learn about bitcoin, get their questions answered and not lose 3 or 4 weekends doing it.

Or we could just keep things as they are.
152  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Altcoin Discussion / Re: Ripple Giveaway! on: February 28, 2013, 04:17:20 PM
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153  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: So far we got Wordpress, 4chan, mega and reddit so whats next? on: February 24, 2013, 03:13:14 AM
OP updated. Wink

Wow! Thanks!

This should definitely get our team excited about adding support. Talking this over with my business partner, we did have some legal / liability concerns which I posted about here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=146164.msg1551802#msg1551802

Feel free to add some thoughts in there as well. The answers so far have been pretty good.

Seriously, this just made my day. Definitely cool to see this kind of support.
154  Bitcoin / Legal / Re: Ecommerce SaaS: If we add support for Bitcoin, are we increasing our liability? on: February 23, 2013, 05:33:38 AM
Another thought: Are your customers selling through their own websites? Identity verification of businesses on the web is traditionally supposed to be done as part of the SSL certification process. For example, you might require people without validated merchant accounts to have a certain kind of SSL certificate (probably Extended Validation). That way they're mostly going through checks that they had to go through anyway, and you can check that they're verified automatically by looking at their certificate.

That's an excellent idea. Thanks!

And yes, it's mostly arse covering and trying to avoid any increased liability accepting Bitcoin could create. Based on some of the other posts in this category, it seems the laws are still being discussed and/or written. With new ground comes new risk.

But with risk also comes reward.
155  Bitcoin / Legal / Re: Ecommerce SaaS: If we add support for Bitcoin, are we increasing our liability? on: February 23, 2013, 03:22:56 AM
How can you be more liable than a politician? There was a politician that accepted bitcoins..... they basically just told him to ask for the name that's all. I would say
Request to know the name
record IP
treat it like cash for tax purposes

But I'm not a lawyer...  (there is also a legal subsection)

wish you the best.

Thanks notig. Sorry about posting in the wrong place, I didn't notice the Legal sub section. Glad to know I can move topics myself. Smiley

That's an interesting analogy. Are you referring to this post about the New Hampshire Deputy Sec. of State? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104544.0

The concern I have is ongoing illegal activity. Sure, an individual donation could be illegal, but probably won't get noticed. If ongoing sales are happening, that will probably draw the attention of law enforcement who may think we're empowering them to do their thing. We may have the same protection as ISPs and similar service providers, but it's all new territory for me, so I'm asking questions, learning daily.
156  Bitcoin / Legal / Ecommerce SaaS: If we add support for Bitcoin, are we increasing our liability? on: February 23, 2013, 03:08:20 AM
My business partner and I were talking about this today, and I wanted your feedback. We're both new to Bitcoin and are getting excited about the possibility of adding Bitcoin support to our ecommerce software as a service (FoxyCart.com). One concern we have: What prevents someone from doing illegal activities through our platform using Bitcoin?

Currently we benefit greatly from the merchant account provider who approves or denies the merchant. If someone wants to user our service, they have to have a live merchant account to collect payment. This helps ensure the users of our system are right inline with our terms of service because of the merchant account provider's approval process.

If we were to support Bitcoin directly or through a service like Bitpay, what protection would we have? What would prevent someone from signing up and selling illegal things on our platform since they are basically anonymous?

Here are some possible solutions I can think of, but please add some of your own as well:

  • Charge a premium for stores who want to use Bitcoin payments exclusively and use the extra fees to manually vet and periodically check up on each merchant to ensure everything being sold is legal (this assumes no password-protected areas of their site).
  • Do our own identity validation service (much like mtgox) to ensure we have valid identification for the merchant so if there are any illegal activities going on and we get subpoenaed, we can point to a real person.
  • Require a signed document or some similar process to ensure our terms of service is understood and will be followed.
  • Rely on the checkbox they clicked and hope for the best.

I'm having trouble coming up with more solutions. Addressing these concerns could help bring Bitcoin well beyond the hacker community into mainstream every day life. We want to help with that, but we also have to protect our company and users. At the very least, accepting Bitcoin means a second look at our business insurance and a long talk with our lawyers.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
157  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: So far we got Wordpress, 4chan, mega and reddit so whats next? on: February 22, 2013, 07:08:46 PM
I'm asking my team to seriously consider supporting it (this is my first post out of Newbie Jail, btw).

I'm new to Bitcoin, but have enjoyed this recent price increase (it was $17 when I found out about it). I've been talking with the great folks in #bitcoin and reading what time will allow here and on Reddit. Fascinating stuff.

We run a shopping cart software as a service (http://www.foxycart.com) who's primary focus is serving developers. The Bitcoin community seems to have a lot of developers. We're hoping, if we do support it on our platform, it could create some buzz, drive some traffic and actually get people using Bitcoins for every day commerce. We're not in the 10's of thousands of stores (yet), but we do have more than a couple thousand using our system and, according to these guys, we're #8 out of 177 this month for fastest growing ecommerce technologies: http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/growth

If we can help move the needle a little bit and get every-day merchants thinking about Bitcoin, that's a win for everyone.

So please keep an eye out for us and give us some love if we do launch Bitcoin support. Our first tiptoe in the water may involve bitpay support and who knows about the future.

Side note:
Thanks for being such an intelligent community. I like the "newbie jail" idea and I've been pleasantly impressed with the rational thought talking place here. Then again, maybe I just haven't been around long enough. Smiley
158  Other / Beginners & Help / Re: ASIC: $2M+ a year for a $30k investment? WAT?! on: February 18, 2013, 04:34:34 PM
Problem is that this isnt a skill game, unless you can find out how many asics will be delivered and installed in the next 6 months and when you will receive yours if you order today. No one knows the answer to either question. However, consider there at least 2 known asic miners entering the market now but that not selling their gear, Goliath and ASICminer.  ASICs are expensive to develop, but cost almost nothing to produce, so you should expect at the very least those two companies  to ramp up their production (and therefore increase difficulty) for as long as its profitable for them. If its no longer profitable for them with ~$5 chips, just imagine how unprofitable it will be for you when paying >$100 per chip from BFL.

If you want to gamble, buy some more bitcoins. Probably a far safer bet.

Huh, good to know. Makes sense there would be other people out there hording their own golden egg laying geese.

Mining is exactly the same.

Great analogy, thank you.

my strategy is to watch proceedings for now.

Sounds like a good strategy. If anything changes so quickly that waiting is a bad idea (with difficulty going up, tons of ASICs chugging away, etc), then any medium or long term ROI calculations would be out the window already.

Thanks all.
159  Other / Beginners & Help / Re: ASIC: $2M+ a year for a $30k investment? WAT?! on: February 18, 2013, 03:02:35 PM
If the BTC price collapses to $10 per BTC again, it might be better just to buy up a load, to be fair. If the BTC price is high, investing in ASIC mining may still make a lot of sense, but having burned my fingers a little (thankfully not too much) with the bASIC débacle, I'm out of any "pre-order" shenanigans for good now.

Yeah, ultimately everything depends on the BTC price. That said, some feel $30 is way under-priced... but who really knows anyway, right?

Difficulty is about to explode. No ones knows for sure how many asics have been ordered/are being assembled, but 500TH over the next 6 months seems like a low estimate to me. BFL alone should be in that ballpark, and they are only one of 3 or 4 players. That means  difficulty will likely be >20x higher than today by the time you get your mini rig.  And thats only when you start mining, its not like it will stop there, as you wont be the only one ordering and getting hardware late. In case you hadnt noticed, people have been ordering from BFL since august last year, and none have shipped today. So dont expect an order today to ship next week, or month.

In all likelyhood, if you order today, it will never repay itself (when both purchase and revenue are expressed in bitcoin), but if you feel like gambling, dont let me stop you.

Even with difficulty exploding... it should all balance out in the end, right?

Let's say, for argument's sake, there are currently 10,000 GPU miners trucking along today. Due to the cost of power, they are basically breaking even (from what little I understand and hear on #bitcoin). If 50% of them switch over to ASIC and another 25% enter the market, that still leaves a gap when things "settle down" in difficulty (we'll always see the same number of coins mined, regardless of difficulty) which would mean it would (at least) be more profitable to mine then than it is now. Any logic there even though I'm pulling numbers out of my arse?

And yes, it does seem a lot like gambling. I'm not much of a random chance gambler, though I do love me some Texas Hold'em Smiley
160  Other / Beginners & Help / ASIC: $2M+ a year for a $30k investment? WAT?! on: February 18, 2013, 02:41:26 PM
[ Non Newbie Category: Mining ]

Ultimately, my question is this: Should a newbie buy an ASIC?

I've been learning about BTC for a few weeks now (thank you, #bitcoin, you rock!). Based on those conversations and the few threads I've read, I figured the days of profitable mining were gone. Then I stumbled onto the 1,500GH/s rigs and this:

http://tpbitcalc.appspot.com/?difficulty=3651011.6307&hashrate=1500000.00&exchangerate=26.37&bitcoinsperblock=25.00&rigcost=30000.00&powerconsumption=1500.00&powercost=0.10&investmentperiod=355

WAT?

Now, convincing my wife to drop $30K on something like this is probably not going to happen, but being able to get your money back in 7 days? That's insanity.

I understand the difficulty is constantly going up and the block reward will half in 2016, but even $1M a year isn't bad. That also doesn't take into account what the future value of BTC could be (I, for one, am very optimistic).

I can understand if people are hesitant to share their real world stories on this (and that only a few people actually have ASICs running now), but I really would love to hear any insight you are willing to share. Is this for real? How will a change in difficulty adjust these returns? It seems like unless every single current miner upgrades to ASIC, the newbies have a chance to make some money.

I'm considering buying one of the 30GH/s models to see if I really can make my money back in 7 days.

I can understand not wanting to share details about this as increased difficulty and more people using ASICs decreases the average reward for everyone, but it also makes sense to me to spread things around (even the creators of the ASIC chips seem to agree to that). Seth Godin's post today loosely relates in that more people involved in bitcoin means more seed for future value: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/02/planting-harvesting-and-your-fair-share.html

Side note: it would be cool if the calculator could include an "estimate increase in difficulty percentage" where it would recalculate each step for a more accurate estimate for the year. Maybe it could default to Moore's law or something as the current ASIC flood is probably confusing things a bit.

Thank you for your thoughts and time. Those are more valuable than most things.
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