I've been experimenting with bitcoin for about a month and now I have a bit of an understanding I want to start discussing my thoughts and plans a bit more.
I'm still a newbie on this forum for the next 20 minutes / next few posts, so I thought I'd start here.
I work for a small environmental cooperative with aims to run cooperative businesses deliver workshops on sustainability in our local area. I have a background in DIY renewables - wind turbines and solar panels - and will likely be doing workshops in these.
As well as the workshops, our first main project is a wholefood collective buying scheme, or food cooperative.
We're also involved in exploring the idea of 'Transition Towns' for our local area.
We've already stated that we'd accept payments in bitcoins for any of our services, but as yet that's probably not going to account for a great deal of trade until we can find (or develop) other local bitcoin users. We could post some of our wholefood produce, so that's a potential benefit.
Another thought is the using BTCjam to raise finance for stock purchases. For example, each time we make a wholefood order for our coop members we sometimes need to pay our supplier before the stock is delivered and before are customers pay.
Also we'd like to expand into things like clothes where we'd likely store them for much longer, so there'd be a bigger gap between when we buy and sell stock.
Since the financial crisis it's even harder than before for businesses to secure finance from banks, but also it'd be exciting to not have to deal with them, so over the next few weeks I'll probably be looking into building a reputation on the BTCjam site, or elsewhere more generally, and put together some plans.
Anyway, it's been exciting so far, including the huge crash, and my sympathies to anyone who got the rough end of that. My impression is that bitcoin isn't a 'safe bet', but it's definitely an exciting investment. Part of the risk must come from the fact that it could be replaced at anytime with something better. I think there's a great deal of value in us as users not being fickle though, and collectively building on the platform of bitcoin seems the best way forward (though I've bought a few litecoins as well!)
Here's the link to our (very basic) website:
www.eghamsus.co.uk
