Small markup - yes, 25% markup... I still think that is a ripoff. Of course, if you are willing to pay 25% extra for the convenience of not using Mt. Gox or some other exchange to swap your BTC -> USD, this is probably a great service.

The true ripoff part comes from the fact that he's claiming to order the products 'directly from the manufacturers':

"We strive to provide the absolutely lowest prices to the Bitcoin community.

We deal directly with the manufacturers of all our products. This guarantees that we can pass along the lowest rock bottom prices for all the items you want. These manufacturers are not quite as fast at delivery as the big box retailers. Our shipping will take a little longer than some retailers, but our prices are considerably lower because of this, you will save a lot of money when you buy from us."

If you act as a dropship for DealExtreme, fine, but be honest of what you are doing - just say: "You can order products from DealExtreme through us with a 25% markup on top of the prices you would get from the original source. This is a service which allows you to bypass the exchanges-step and directly buy items from DX with BTC."

However, if they really order the items from the manufacturer, they probably should explain why the descriptions are 1-to-1 with DX including the typos, and the images are the same (including the same file names), just lower resolution to not to use the DX waterstamped ones.

I do like the idea of a store accepting bitcoins, however, directly ripping off people by acting as a middleman between DealExtreme and them is not what's needed IMO.

If you compare, for example:

http://www.bitcoinz.ca/shop/index.php?route=product/product&path=36&product_id=69
and
http://www.dealextreme.com/p/personal-cell-phone-signal-blocker-device-4355

the description and the image is exactly the same as DealExtreme, including the spelling errors ("Perfect for the following senarios", for example). DealExtreme provides also free shipping, and for this example product, if you compare prices, 25.77$ for DealExtreme and 2.2 BTC (~32.2$) for BitCoinz SuperStore, it's quite obvious the store just forwards you products from DealExtreme and charges 25% extra on top of their prices.

I do realize that this saves you the problem of swapping your currency from BTC to USD via MtGox or some other exchange, and removes the exchange fees, but the fees for USD are only .25$ for a withdraw and .3% for a trade, i.e. in this case, for 25.77$, you would pay ~.35$ for the fees. So, for this particular product, the store gets around 6$ per ordered product, not that bad of a profit :p

Just do a search with the exact product names from the BitCoinz SuperStore, and you will notice that they are exactly the same as on DealExtreme...

P. S. It's quite lovely how you couldn't use the large images for example on http://www.bitcoinz.ca/shop/index.php?route=product/product&path=36&product_id=73, since they have the DealExtreme watermark (http://www.dealextreme.com/p/usb-mini-cooling-fridge-7340), so you had to use the low resolution small image - does the filename sound familiar? http://www1.dealextreme.com/productimages/sku_7340_1_small.jpg vs http://www.bitcoinz.ca/shop/image/cache/data/gadgets/sku_7340_1_small-140x140.jpg ;p

Isn't blacklisting blocks that have been mined per the bitcoin protocol (albeit being fraudulent) kind of like... central banks who don't like people that make counterfeit money? Bitcoin is peer-to-peer, so which central authority in bitcoin would decide what blockchain to blacklist? I really hope there isn't one, because if there is, that central authority could use their power to "blacklist" any blockchain they want, in principle...

Did my claim at 17:23 GMT yesterday, and still no word from them. I also asked them about 4 missing withdrawals from the last two weeks, and the customer service replied promptly - to make a claim application to recover the account which I had already done...

Ah well, I'm still holding my thumbs up that all goes well - they did post that they had problems with SEPA transfers, one of my withdraws is now 11 days (withdraw made 11.6) and counting ;p

Finally a service like this, was long due

http://payb.tc/vporo is mine, will be using that for sure, it's really convenient.

If you have access to the database, you can change your account to read anything you wish - the BTC in MtGox aren't real before they are transferred to someone's wallet.dat. That's probably why MtGox is doing a rollback - the 'lost BTC' aren't from anyone, they are just virtual coins which were just added to his account. This is exactly like hacking a real-life bank -- you can change your account to read what ever you wish, but before you actually get your money out from a counter or spend it somewhere, it does you no good. Exactly in the same way, the hacker changed his account to read an arbitrary number of BTC (which do not really exist), sold them for the virtual USD, and when he tried to withdraw those, he couldn't get out more than 1k USD due to the MtGox limit.

That's why a rollback is needed and is justified: the people who bought the 'BTC' for 0.01$ didn't actually buy any real BTC, they just bought MtGox monopoly-money BTC's which do not really exist.

Just my .02 BTC.

The market volume is not the right figure to look at here, because it includes short trading. If I had to make a guess, most of the daily volume is generated by people pumping in some money into the economy by doing short trading). Let's assume there's 100 people on Mt. Gox with 1000 USD on their account doing speculative short trading. Let's also assume each one of them uses all of their USD for the short trading. That's ~66 BTC per trade. Now, person A buys 66 BTC from person B, person B buys 66 BTC from person C and person C buys 66 BTC from person A. We have now a 66*3 = 198 BTC trade volume, but there's no actual USD added to the economy.

What I assume, is that some of the miners are selling their BTC, and that's where the extra USD comes in the economy. Otherwise, it's mostly speculating and short trading, hence the large volumes; the same USD are circulating and the speculators are playing a zero sum game with the exchange rate (Or actually, a minus-sum game, since the only one who wins for sure in that game is Mg. Gox...)

If it is of any help to Tycho in debugging the problem, my withdrawal has been stuck for 9.5 hours again (had problems yesterday too, it was about a parameter change in Deepbit end causing it?), 0/unconfirmed and shows up in bitcoincharts as 0 priority again.

I find it interesting that the moderators are planning on banning users asking legitimate questions - if it's only Deepbit that's having problems with payments, why shouldn't people be allowed to ask about it on the forums? If the explanation given 5 or so pages ago had to do with a software bug causing the problems, obviously it's good that people report that it's happening again; How else would Tycho notice that there is a problem?

Here's the bitcoincharts info:

2011-06-15 21:00:37 81fd5135f82b829d1ea3fefb9679185ef89d52225d413aba45587dfa068a727f
This is a low priority transaction.
size: 257 bytes priority: 0 input: 100.35616430 BTC

100.35616430 BTC from unconfirmed e62d17f875d5a24c886c00ef1d1af102ae68fea023d2b7b0bc9f8367fc7c6b34:0 (12Y396c7Xk3kEKJbUnqtLMLj5MEyG9QaUh)

output: 100.35616430 BTC

    95.68616430 BTC to 1CnuiE129kiXqEDywYBHiQbNqRZASoTHs3
    4.67000000 BTC to 16XrZP4z3Q6JtBMC8MgKg9p7x3UnU3YSVF


[Edit: Added the bitcoincharts info]

I'll answer for him - yes, at least on mine, I see a 0/unconfirmed, date 13.6.2011 23:15 local time, Credit [+4.96]. It's also visible on the bitcoincharts, but it's not getting confirmed since the funds it's coming from are not confirmed, and thus the priority is 0.

Most probably stuck in the same limbo as my 4.96 coins (been 4 hours+ now, and no sign of the payment progressing on the bitcoincharts), it seems that the transactions got a zero priority since the input coins are unconfirmed:

input: 42.42758891 BTC

    42.42758891 BTC from unconfirmed ec5ac4b7bd51997a03f23bb77c91b4a7d6267fdf08bab217926e347ac721ab21:0 (17hytzuhKtDNqgH78FZPk1nPZy541crspQ)

output: 42.42758891 BTC

    37.46758891 BTC to 1BufeGhiUS9Mjg7hugXewpJopPyybRYK4H
    4.96000000 BTC to 16XrZP4z3Q6JtBMC8MgKg9p7x3UnU3YSVF

Any word on this, Tycho? That's a nice... 100 USD stuck there for who knows how long, the priority hasn't gone up a tad bit in the last 4 hours.

2011-06-13 20:15:48
25da8d21805cfd4c8426c8879b9a2e3576280890b0775c4834c98ec113ccb547
This is a low priority transaction.
size: 258 bytes
priority: 0

Priority 0? Interesting :p

As bitcoindaddy said, that page contains the next difficulty prediction in the upper right corner:

Estimated   433249 in 64 blks

That means that the estimated difficulty is 433249 in 69/15 = 4.6 hours.

What I actually noted as the largest hurdle in using BTC to pay face-to-face was not the fact that we were chained into a computer (since I usually carry a mini-laptop around, so I have my wallet with me where ever I go), but the fact that my friend didn't remember his wallet address, and we had to go copy-paste it from his pool account...

So, a way to shorten the addresses would be really nice, I remember seeing a bitcoin related site which allowed you to link your wallet (or was I daydreaming?), a service which would give you a short http-link which you actually could remember (like bit.ly) would have been useful in that situation

Yes, we're trying to fight the deflationary spiral and use our coins, I think he got his EUR back from trading them at MtGox :] And yes, cash would have been good for this scenario, however, in the modern world you hardly ever have cash, it's usually debit cards that are used. Cash is so... hard to transfer if not face-to-face, and besides, easily stolen by pickpockets And - cash is easy to withdraw from the account, but very hard to put back, you'd have to go to a bank to deposit it if you wanted to use it to pay over internet.

Hi,

Just wanted to share the story, since IMO it's a milestone - not a projectwide, but at least a personal one. A friend of mine was coming over to our place for a barbeque, and we called him and asked him to get some sausages and ice cream from the store. When he got here, we noticed that his bank account was in a different bank, and paying him back would take a day - until we remembered BTC, and so, we paid him in BTC ^ ^

So, for the first time, I used BTC in day-to-day life, and I can say, that the speed of the transaction (~1 hour) sure beats the 1 day+ time of inter-bank transfers in Europe

From BitcoinCharts:

Estimated   233521 in 374 blks
Blocks/hour   11.11 / 366 s

Which means that there's going to be an increase in difficulty in ~34 hours, and the difficulty will increase by 48%.

I wouldn't say 'scared' is the right word - but what the poster you quoted meant was that there's ~3000 BTC worth of BIDs on MtGox at the moment, after which the price of a single bitcoin is... well, zero, unless someone makes more BIDs. If the hoarders (aka. early adopters) have 1k+ BTC (perhaps even 10k+ BTC?), it's basically a game of chicken: the one that sells first gets a profit in USD, and after he/she has dumped all of the BTC, the price will plummet, and the other hoarders BTC will be worthless (vs. USD, of course, if you like alpaca socks, they won't be . All of the people with a lot of BTC know this, and the counterbalance against selling right now is the possible increase in BTC/USD exchange rate - "why would you sell now, when it could be 12 USD/BTC soon?".

As long as there's no 'real' value to BTC (aka no major merchants accept it, and only a very few selected small businesses do), this is what it boils down to - which one of the hoarders dumps their BTC first

The community, of course, can counter this by creating a real value for BTC: by getting businesses to adopt BTC. However, it may be hard, since as the investment goes up, people do background research, and sooner or later they will bump into the fact that most of the BTC is in the wallets of the early adopters (which is why the poster you quoted referred bitcoin to a pyramid scheme), which makes the economy unstable.

Just my .02 BTC...

With the hashrate slush's pool had before the big crash, the pool was mining ~50 blocks per day, of which slush got 1 BTC each. That's 50 BTC * 3 USD/BTC (at that time) = 150 USD per day, or 4500 USD per month. That's starting to be a serious amount of money, and would definately warrant for hiring someone to watch the servers while slush is on a holiday / other leave.

I was lucky to notice the crash, and was able to move my miners as soon as things went really bad, but I do feel the pain of the previous posters, losing 30-40 BTC is no fun :/

All in all, at least I won't be moving my miners back before adequate measures are taken to ensure that long (4h+) service outages don't happen; with the current USD/BTC rate, the pool can afford it - that's what the fees are for...

And, to dafishman - I agree that having options is good, however, that shouldn't come at the cost of the miners. Once a failproof mechanism is in place, I will consider moving my miners back. Implementing a software solution just won't cut it, I'm afraid, since as we can see, software can and will fail. Paying someone 100 USD/day to watch over the servers (= check that they work once in 3 hours) while slush is on a holiday would not make a big dent in his wallet with the current fee income

Around 1.6 GHash/s atm, no plans to currently expand the capacity, just bought an additional 6870 :] 4 computers, 2x6870, 1x6990, 1x5870 and 1x4870.

1031774 shares with difficulty 92347.59095209...

That with an exponential distribution and 175 GHash/s yields a 1.5e-5 = 0.0015% chance of not finding a block in 7 hours. That's what, once per 66k blocks? The entire network has solved 119k blocks, so either we've been the unluckiest pool ever today, or something is wrong.

Just my .02 BTC.

[Edit: now 7:13 --> 1.06e-5, or once per 94k blocks...]