9

I have a bunch of websites and use Namecheap for the domains.

Namecheap takes bitcoin, so yeah, I'm happy to use BTC.

"great post" - thanks!

When Realpra said 'Banks are fiat again' I think he meant they go back to fractional reserve banking, ie issuing more receipts than they actually have gold 'backing'.

This is a major reason I love the concept of bitcoin. Even if Ron Paul were elected in the US and somehow got that nation onto a 'gold standard', you know it wouldn't last. Secretly or blatantly, they're produce more "money" than they had gold.

It's human nature, especially when you consider the nature of politicians. You simply can't give power-crazed thieves and bandits the keys to a printing press and then be surprised when they print, and print, and print some more.

With bitcoin you trust the math, not politicians or bankers.

You can't transmit gold. Sooner or later you end up with tokens or digits or paper or some such that is meant to 'represent' the gold - but never does, or not for long. A bitcoin is a bitcoin, just an entry in a ledger but the entry is the money. I see it as genius. The creator turned the whole thing on its head and said 'OK then, if modern money is just digits, let's make digital money'.

Love it, just love it 

I gave up with gold because the "spread" is ridiculous here in Malaysia.

Dunno about elsewhere but here it's 35%

That's plain robbery really. How is something that loses 35% of it's value the moment you buy it any kind of protection against inflation?

I could walk into a local gold store, and in the small town i live in there must be at least 20 of the things, buy $1000 of gold, walk out, walk into a different gold store - or even walk back into the same one - and only get $650 for that gold.

Pathetic.

The good thing about it was it's so hard to actually 'spend' gold that it did a great job of encouraging me to save, so I got the boat I was after. Would I do it again? NO! Not now I know how ludicrous the spread is!

It gets worse..

Silver. Rarer than gold, gonna explode any moment now.. Right?

So I tried buying some. Wandered into a few goldsmiths, none had any silver coins or bars, just some silver jewelry. Determined to get me some 'real' silvery money I ended up buying 10 little 1 OZ bars off Ebay of all places.

During the boat-buying and accessory-buying phase, decided to cash in my silver. No, it hadn't gone up any in price but holds it's value, right?

Right?

So I stroll into a goldsmith, just to check the current price, you know, the street price, the on-the-spot, at this moment price?

"No, we don't buy silver, sorry."

Next goldsmith.. "You wanna buy silver? Oh sell silver? No, we no buy silver, so sorry"

I tried around 6 goldsmiths and even a couple of jewelry stores selling silver jewelry - "No, we not buying silver, sorry."

No questioning the authenticity, or unsure about it being in bars rather than recognizable coins, they just don't want silver. Didn't even ask which coins or bars or anything. Didn't care.

It's somewhat ironic because the local Chinese here (around 40% of the population) are indeed very keen on buying gold as a long-term saving method, they buy it for wedding gifts, for baby's first birthdays and all that. It's BECAUSE it's so popular that the local stores can get away with such a huge spread.They know you're gonna buy it and at full market rate - but sell it? Then they'll kick you in the balls and offer 65%.

I'm sure in most Western countries there's a smaller spread but for it is NOT a simple matter of buy at $1000, cash it for $1000, plus as pointed out you need to secure it and no, you certainly cannot spend it as money.

("You can't eat gold!" - You can't eat Federal Reserve notes either. But at least you can spend them...)

To me bitcoin is digital gold, without the crazy spread and just as easy to transfer or store digitally as any other currency.

It's gold 2.0

My hope is that BTC thrives internationally, with or without America (or mt.gox for that matter)

If it gains enough traction then the US or any other country will have little choice but to accept it simply as a stateless currency and payment system.

I'd be delighted to be able to buy BTC with Paypal, and sure it would be nice to be paid and stick my coins into Paypal as a convenient way to convert and cash them out for local currency.

I wouldn't leave any significant balance in there, obviously.

OK, I'll give it a bash 

It'll be sometime tomorrow, hopefully, when it's finished downloading the block chain.

Heck, the gutless little thing took 10 mins just opening the app. Powerful it isn't.

I'm in Malaysia, nearly 4 AM here. I'll leave the Macbook running but for now I'm off to bed.. In the meantime do you have a link or could you explain how one uses the signature thing to send money without a private key? I found a "message signing" thing, with a screen full of fields? Is that it? How does one use it?


And thank you for your patience...

Nope, aint gonna work. Your site says it's for 10.8, my little laptop is runnng OSX 10.7

 

I asked if the 64 bit thing was the problem and you said 'Yeah.'

 

Alternatively it could just be this POS computer. It's the worse computer I've ever owned in my life, crashes 4 or 5 times a day and it's only 2 months old. It's actually LESS reliable than the 3 year old computer I was replacing.

My next PC will be a Mac.

Does Armory work on Mac? Yay! It doe.... ah. Sort of.

I got so sick of this new machine freezing up (and absolutely HATE Windows 8 ) that I bought a 2nd hand MacBook Pro, to ease my transition to Macs. Lemme try installing on that..

Well that sucks.


Thanks anyway.




A.

Uninstalled the QT client, tried downloading again..

http://bitcoin.org/en/download

This only gives us Windows users the option of a file called bitcoin-08.1.win32setup

"win32"?

I'm running Windows 7 64 bit - is that the problem?


 

Stop trying to put me off; I'm doing a great job of that all by myself thankyouverymuch. 

Regarding usability, I've been playing with it..

1. I got the general idea of an offline wallet and a 'watching only' wallet - but how to create a watching wallet? There's nowhere in the software that seems intuitive.

Eventually found a reference on the 'quick start' thing, on your website. However that says you can make a wallet watch-only in the "wallet properties".

Nope.

Not until I finally gave up looking and deleted the wallet... and THEN it offered the option of deleting just the private keys, making it a watch-only version!

2. But wait...

I was given 2 options, delete completely, or just the private keys. A pretty clear-cut, yes or no question, using radio-button selectors.

Except I could not unselect the "delete completely" option.

Once again some head-scratching before finally giving up and saying yeah, delete everything, completely.. and THEN it produced a watch-only version!

Stop doing that!


3. Help files.

Firstly, it has that classic (cliche?) thing, where you click on 'Help' in an open-source software and instead of helping it gives a long-winded overview of all the changes from previous versions.

As a sales copywriter that is PAINFUL to me. Nobody cares about previous versions; tell me how to use this one?

Your quick-start guide isn't even linked in the software, let alone readable offline inside it?

Mmm, just to double-check that I restarted and got this:


There was an error starting the underlying Bitcoin engine. This should not normally happen. Usually it occurs when you have been using Bitcoin-Qt prior to using Armory, especially if you have upgraded or downgraded Bitcoin-Qt recently (manually, or through the Armory automatic installation). Output from bitcoind:
StdErr:

: Error opening block database.
Do you want to rebuild the block database now?


See what I mean? So I have to wait another 8 hours or so now?

Also there's no 'Yes/No' to select, it asks the question but there's no way of answering it.

In the box below it offers the option of reinstalling the bitcoin software. Seriously?

Let's try the QT thing... Well it opened but 'Error opening database"....  So that was the "output" above? *sigh* OK...

"Catching up  2.4% done"


*fumps head on desk*

I've never yet owned a bitcoin, so yes looking to buy. I'm also interested in how to cash out if I receive any, with the Malaysian thing.

I'm feeling somewhat disillusioned myself but not because of things such as over-reliance upon a single exchange or the fact that people who don't really understand it try hard to sound smart anyway.

I have a Google alert for anything to do with bitcoins and it's amazing the amount of misinformation out there, the sneering and "told you so" stuff, even as the value claws back up again, passing the $150 mark again today.

No, to me the big issues are things such as wallets being hacked, and then trying (and failing) to follow bizarre security such as running Linux on a thumb drive or 2nd computers with their net access permanently amputated, not to mention the sheer hassle of trying to buy the darn things. You need to take a crash course in how to send money internationally, at which point you become so good at it and familiar with international banking that you don't need bitcoin anyway...

Every time mt.gox screws up it drives more business to other exchanges, which is a good thing. Imagine if they didn't screw up, and really did become a single, central weak point? I like it when they make a mess of things, because it's more business for others and encourages mt.gox to improve their system.

There will always be people out there sneering at new ideas and things they don't understand. I've made a real effort to at least try to understand bitcoin and it has led to some less than pleasant realizations, such as that it's far more complicated, more risky and difficult to explain than I first thought. It's discouraging, for sure.

But bullshit?

Nope.

It's very real, potentially huge and is pretty useful, if enough people were using it/them.

I'm still somewhat wobbly, as to whether I should continue and buy some coins or not (or even how. When you're not in the same country as your bank account it can be tricky).

But no, I can't call it bullshit.



AC

If I could do that then I could probably fund Bitstamp or Gox too..

Actually, looking at DGTMKT closer, they clearly only sell BTC to the public, it's not an exchange where you can sell them back to anyone or cash out.

I dunno, maybe it's easier to get Bitstamp to send me money than it is to send them money? My hurdle is the "setting up a new recipient" thing. My bank insists on phoning me to make sure, which is kind of awkward when I'm in a different country/time zone. It tries to phone me with some code, which I'm meant to then type online - but my phone never rings and then it tells me I must have given them a wrong number. Worse, they tell me I have to wait a week before trying again. That was indeed about a week ago, and the price of BTC has risen by about $70 since then. Thanks, bank!

Presumably if I were to sell a coin or two through bitstamp it would be a routine matter to give them my UK bank account and they could pay into it?

But not mt.gox, my understanding is they cannot handle UK stuff, or choose not to.

In my more positive moments I consider the hassles and problems to under-score how useful bitcoins are for international transfers.

At other times it drives home how much hassle and problems there are trying to use bitcoins internationally...

Not sure if the glass is half full or half empty?



AC

Thanks but getting SGD to FYB isn't the problem, it's getting MYR from FYB, see?

If I opt to receive BTC for payment (I have various online businesses but mostly today I'm a copywriter) how do I convert and spend that money, locally, as Malaysian ringgit?

At this stage it looks like DGTMKT is my only option. I know they're expensive to buy coins, I have no idea what it's like trying to get money back out from there?




A.

Nope.

My PC froze up/crashed the first time, 2nd time it took about 15 mins to get back online, including a 4 minute wait for it to scan my transaction history. I've never made a transaction in my life. 

I can see this is probably quicker, and cheaper, than driving into town and depositing cash into some bank to send. And it's semi-anon', so there's that. For making micro-payments though, such as paying to view webpages or an online tip jar? No-one is gonna hang around for 10 or 20 mins while their wallet opens.

For savings it makes sense I guess but I don't think I could use this as my day to day wallet, but if you're NOT using it daily then it takes even longer to start up.

Mmm.

All right for paper wallet savings kind of thing I guess. Penalty for early withdrawal? You have to wait. And wait. Then wait some more.

Anyway, sorry for clogging the thread with my musings and mumblings (grumblings). 

OK, question - if I download the bitaddress.org web page, create a key pair offline, print off the secret key and use Multibit, entering just the public key, what's wrong with that? How exactly is this QT client and armory thing better than that?

Or is that a really dumb question?

Mmm.

Well that's the thing, it synced once before, then started again.

Well it's finally finished, and NOW it (Armory) says it's online.

Presumably it has to catch up with the block chain before it considers itself online? I was confused with that because in the FAQ for paper wallets it talks of an online and an offline install, so I thought it was in the wrong mode or something.

Well let's test it a bit, gonna reboot, re-open the software and see if it syncs fast...

Your add-on seems fine, it's the base client that seems to be the problem.

I uninstalled it before, because it did the same thing, took forever to finally catch up, then a day or two later gave some error message and started all over again. That's why I switched to Multibit.

However it seems Multibit isn't encrypted and so not overly secure, so when I heard of Armory I was hoping it was a good compromise between the two.

If the QT thing means it can, and does, take 8 hours just to open and use the software then that's a non-starter for me.

Mmmm, just tried loading it again, now it says 95%.. 12 minutes. That's a bit better, though.. ah, 13... 15 minutes.. It's going UP? Well waited 5 mins, now says 96% and still 15 minutes. Crazy.

Yet to do the paper wallet thing I should ideally have an old PC or netbook offline? All 4 of my cores are currently over 85%, this is a 2 month old 64 bit PC with 8 GB RAM and Win7 on a SSD and it's straining with this. How long would an Atom-powered netbook take?

Ah, 98% - 2 hours.

2 hours?

Also says in red that it's "offline'. Why? My modem is going crazy, currently at 199 kps, it's very much online.

I love the concept of bitcoin, I'm a strong libertarian and understand the economics. Heck, I just want to buy one coin and store it safely, just as a vote of confidence really, and to understand the system so I can explain it to others. However I'm getting a strong deja vu feeling from various other open source projects, raw, never actually finished and polished, overly complex and hours spent on a forum trying to figure things out.

I would say "I'll be back in 6 months when you've finished it" but experience tells me open source stuff never IS finished.

Not moaning at you, just ranting at the world of bitcoin in general I'm very close to giving up entirely right now.




A.

Well tried it for awhile. Seemed to be stuck at 95%, so closed it.

I wasn't sure where the icon would be to restart it, found it, clicked it, like you do...  "0%  8 hours"

Why start again from the beginning? How does that make sense?

But yeah, I suspect you're right. This whole bitcoin thing seems to be becoming more hassle than its worth.

I was hoping it was a replacement for that bloatware, rather than an extra layer on top of it.