We should care less about offline stores/restaurants accepting bitcoin

[payb.tc]

no, i'm trying to eat my lunch without my bank balance dropping in value by way of reserve bank theft (quantitative easing).

the more people use bitcoin offline, and the less people use government money, the better.

That may make sense to you, but the recent trend has been that bitcoin has been losing buying power much faster than most government-issued currencies do.

sure, but it's not the speed of the devaluation that bugs me.

it's the cause.

[cypherdoc]

no, i'm trying to eat my lunch without my bank balance dropping in value by way of reserve bank theft (quantitative easing).

the more people use bitcoin offline, and the less people use government money, the better.

That may make sense to you, but the recent trend has been that bitcoin has been losing buying power much faster than most government-issued currencies do.

sure, but it's not the speed of the devaluation that bugs me.

it's the cause.

Tony,

i think the 2 biggest issues facing Bitcoin are scalability and security.  the latter will be greatly improved with the pending 0.4 but the former is what is holding back large investors.  it seems to me Steve knows the coding as well as anyone and you guys need to make this  priority number one.  from the wiki it seems this shouldn't be too difficult but until general consensus agrees, it will be difficult to get widespread adoption of Bitcoin as an offline payment method.  resolution of this will be critical for BitPays success.

[Elwar]

The value of the currency does not matter when it is used as a medium of exchange.

Go to the store, buy a bag of chips for $2.50, it currently costs about .5 BTC. If you are worried about price fluctuations keep your money in dollars on MtGox. When you want to buy something in BTC, trade the amount you want. So now you have .5 BTC that you paid $2.50 for.

The merchant plugs $2.50 into his bit-pay app and it pops up saying you owe .5 BTC with a QR code. You scan the code and click "pay". You send .5 BTC and you are done.

The merchant then gets the $2.50 sent to him in dollars through bit-pay.


Like I said in another thread. We need a BTC debit account which makes that first part easy. Keep cash in your account and it converts it to BTC when needed.

Nothing will help money fluctuations other than wide use. Until then, other currencies will be more stable.

[Elwar]

You have to get the bitcoins first. Until there's a (much) simpler way for the consumers to, as hassle-free as possible, pay using Bitcoin without actually having to have two wallets (their regular currency as well as bitcoins) credit cards will be much easier to use.

    1. Open a free account at ExchangeBitcoins.com
    2. Go to the deposit page, make a reservation, and print the instructions.
    3. Make a cash deposit at any of thousands of bank locations nationwide.
    4. Purchase some Bitcoins.

A wallet stored on your phone is easy to carry.

[cypherdoc]

just brainstorming here:  perhaps Casascius's physical btc concept shouldn't be so easily dismissed as a novelty.  thinking of my own customers many of whom do not have smartphones, handling phys-btc would be much more user friendly.  

the merchant problem i see is not accepting btc's, since its a no brainer b/c of the low fees and fairly easy setup use, but is getting btc's into the hands of its customers.

what about getting your merchants to invest in a moderate supply of phys-btc's and getting repeat customers to "trade" them for their USD's so that in the future they can return to make payments with their phys-btc's?  certainly the exchange value could be problematic but i think we're close to the bottom in the btc price and the volatility should decrease from here and perhaps will even go up.  the main point is to get btc's into the hands of consumers.  once they have phys-btc's they may then make the transition to digital btc's which is what we want.

[cypherdoc]

If you are worried about price fluctuations keep your money in dollars on MtGox. When you want to buy something in BTC, trade the amount you want.

whether you realize it or not, people are regaining significant confidence in mtgox's ability to safeguard USD's and BTC.  this is important.

[defxor]

    1. Open a free account at ExchangeBitcoins.com
    2. Go to the deposit page, make a reservation, and print the instructions.
    3. Make a cash deposit at any of thousands of bank locations nationwide.
    4. Purchase some Bitcoins.

You call that easy compared to what people already have?

(Oh, and while I know it comes as a surprise to most americans, there's actually like three or four other countries not included in "nationwide")

[Fakeman]

no, i'm trying to eat my lunch without my bank balance dropping in value by way of reserve bank theft (quantitative easing).

the more people use bitcoin offline, and the less people use government money, the better.

That may make sense to you, but the recent trend has been that bitcoin has been losing buying power much faster than most government-issued currencies do.

sure, but it's not the speed of the devaluation that bugs me.

it's the cause.

Ok, but it's not likely to be a winning sales pitch to most people at this point in time.

[amincd]

Waiting for 1 confirmation is safe enough for the real world.

0 confirmations is safe enough for real world purchases involving less-than-substantial sums of money. The only way someone could double spend the money they sent you is to find a block, include in it a transaction from one of their addresses to another address of theirs, not broadcast the block, run to your store and buy a good, run out, and broadcast their block to get back the bitcoins they sent you.

They have to run the risk of someone else finding and broadcasting a block in between the time they found theirs and they ran out of your store, and the risk that you will track them down and report them for shop-lifting/fraud once their payment to you becomes invalidated.

As for cash, I hate coins. If people were decent enough to include sales tax in the price of the product and make all the prices end in multiples of .25 (even .49 and .99 are acceptable) it would be different, but most stores don't do that. That's reason enough to use Bitcoin for me.

Very true.

[Killdozer]

Well I still think the biggest effort should be put on getting bitcoins widely used online, but you guys have certainly convinced me that there is a great (although probably several years distant) future for using bitcoin in physical locations!

I think services like bit-pay.com are game changers. They really make it very easy for merchants to accept bitcoin. For example, prices can still be printed in dollars, and along with that you could easily print a barcode to be read by mobile apps, in this way you don't have to reprint your stickers every time bitcoin price changes. This still only makes bitcoin a dollar-proxy, which is far, far from the original concept of a world-wide *currency*, but still, there is great potential.

But considering all the remaining problems, like getting bitcoins, security and scalability problems (which are not limited to mobile usage, they exist everywhere of course), it still seems like we should first get bitcoin as big as we can, in online world, because that's where it's best, and get enough people to actually use it, to make the price stable. Eventually, physical locations will follow and in the future, I believe in the situation where you could go to any developed country and instead of exchanging money or worrying abouot your credit card being stolen, just use you phone!

Note that I am not saying anybody already doing something in this direction should *stop*.

Well sounds like it's not a full fledged client, that is able to fully participate in the network activity.

When someone tells you that you're wrong, it's good etiquette to educate yourself before posting again. The Bitcoin Wallet several of us are using on Android is indeed a network participating client. It's based on BitcoinJ, an Android Bitcoin library.

I don't wanna sound like a jerk and it's not like this is so important , but it sounds like it's you who should educate yourself, in basics of bitcoin functionality. Without access to a full block chain, no *full* operation of a client which includes checking transactions, checking for orphan blocks and such is possible. It's not needed for signing your own transactions though, ie, for *some* participation.

[cypherdoc]

@Jordan

everyone here sees your point even if they might not agree.  thanks for putting up a good thread and welcome to the community.