Author Topic: Does anyone here use Bitcoins? (Read 854,854 times)

Renegade · « **Reply #725 on:** March 23, 2015, 02:55 PM »

Big image, so only a link, but this is beautiful!

http://i.imgur.com/BlSVMQx.jpg

Renegade · « **Reply #726 on:** March 23, 2015, 03:09 PM »

Woohoo~! More bitcoin donations for DC!

https://blockchain.info/address/1Hd2aePtYxUD28WZjnp6sGMLAKTcjeQwwX

Keep 'em coming!

Renegade · « **Reply #727 on:** April 18, 2015, 03:53 PM »

Bitcoin hidden in a TV show in binary:

http://i.imgur.com/GF4GfMD.png

Producer... Mike Judge.

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #728 on:** April 20, 2015, 11:23 PM »

Not sure if anyone has heard about this one, or even if it's legit ... But I'm giving it a shot in the name of insane curiosity. ~~eBitInvest.com~~ (Yes that is a referral link)

Update: Oh Yeah...It's a scam. Total return was 0.00

SeraphimLabs · « **Reply #729 on:** April 21, 2015, 01:12 AM »

Quote from: Stoic Joker on April 20, 2015, 11:23 PM

Not sure if anyone has heard about this one, or even if it's legit ... But I'm giving it a shot in the name of insane curiosity. eBitInvest.com (Yes that is a referral link)

Welcome to Ponzi Scheme.

if you're early enough getting onto one of these, they actually do pay out from time to time.

Usually though, by the time you hear about it the scheme is already on the verge of bankruptcy and you won't ever see your money again.

Better to get some btc via coinbase, and send it to the btc/cny futures exchange bitvc. Then you have quite the list of options for how to trade it, but trade with care- if you take a bad position you'll get margin called and lose it.

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #730 on:** April 21, 2015, 03:04 AM »

^That's kinda what I figured...but it is early so I figured dipping a toe in couldn't hurt.

Renegade · « **Reply #731 on:** April 21, 2015, 03:17 AM »

I can just imagine the code for this:

Quote

Invest Bitcoins and get double of your investment after just five days!

Code: (html4strict)

<p>Invest Bitcoins and get double of your investment after just <? echo numberToWord($daysSinceStarted + 5); ?> days!

Arizona Hot · « **Reply #732 on:** May 03, 2015, 10:09 PM »

[attachthumb=#]

Trading bitcoin is about to get a whole lot easier

Renegade · « **Reply #733 on:** May 22, 2015, 01:39 PM »

You have to visit the page to see, so no preview or snippets.

http://amphibian.com/169

Fun

tomos · « **Reply #734 on:** May 22, 2015, 08:09 PM »

Quote from: Renegade on May 22, 2015, 01:39 PM

You have to visit the page to see, so no preview or snippets.

http://amphibian.com/169

Fun

interesting - worth following the links
(look at Ren's comic one first!)

http://thoughts.amphibian.com/2015/05/using-http-402-for-bitcoin-paywall.html
http://challengepost.com/software/zero-click-bitcoin-micropayments

easy ways to make micro-payments would be nice to have...
(apologies if that's a micro-spoiler...)

Renegade · « **Reply #735 on:** May 23, 2015, 01:15 AM »

Quote from: tomos on May 22, 2015, 08:09 PM

Quote from: Renegade on May 22, 2015, 01:39 PM
You have to visit the page to see, so no preview or snippets.

http://amphibian.com/169

Fun

interesting - worth following the links
(look at Ren's comic one first!)

http://thoughts.amphibian.com/2015/05/using-http-402-for-bitcoin-paywall.html
http://challengepost.com/software/zero-click-bitcoin-micropayments

easy ways to make micro-payments would be nice to have...
(apologies if that's a micro-spoiler...)

Ahhh! That is very interesting! That really could make a lot of the web much different than it is now.

Renegade · « **Reply #736 on:** May 27, 2015, 04:00 AM »

The war on cash is escalating pretty rapidly now. The implications are extremely dark. Imagine not being able to buy or sell anything because some bureaucrat froze your accounts. You miss payments. Your home is taken. You lose your car. You're out on the streets, penniless.

Bitcoin is more important than ever in the face of flat out economic war on people. Here are a couple links:

http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2015/05/26/martin-armstrong-reports-on-a-secret-meeting-in-london-to-ban-cash/

That links to this:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/archives/30862

There are many more articles on the topic out there.

Arizona Hot · « **Reply #737 on:** June 02, 2015, 02:23 AM »

[attachthumb=#]

Microsoft BEATS Apple, Google ... to accepting limited Bitcoin payments

[attachthumb=#]

Hey! Want a FREE TOASTER that makes BITCOIN? What? You DO?

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #738 on:** July 14, 2015, 03:14 PM »

This was interesting: Is Bitcoin going mainstream - Infographic.

Apparently it has passed Western Union as the - most popular - fastest way to send money.

tomos · « **Reply #739 on:** July 14, 2015, 08:23 PM »

Quote from: Stoic Joker on July 14, 2015, 03:14 PM

This was interesting: Is Bitcoin going mainstream - Infographic.

Apparently it has passed Western Union as the - most popular - fastest way to send money.

that was very good - it's not too far behind PayPal either

In Germany there is not a lot of acceptance of creditcards, nor of paypal - if they are offered as payment methods, they often incur extra charges (which is fair enough imo seeing as they screw the merchant). I see Germany is one of the top five countries in terms of bitcoin use.

Renegade · « **Reply #740 on:** July 15, 2015, 01:22 AM »

To the moon!!! ┗(°0°)┛ ..○

Arizona Hot · « **Reply #741 on:** July 26, 2015, 03:31 AM »

[attachthumb=#]

Bitcoin Replaces Bag of Bills as Preferred Ransom

I won't make any other comment in order not to incite the criminally-minded here.

SeraphimLabs · « **Reply #742 on:** August 14, 2015, 01:33 AM »

And that's game.

http://www.coindesk.com/real-cost-applying-new-york-bitlicense/

New York State is requiring sites and services that handle digital currencies on behalf of other people to apply for a "BitLicense" intended to protect end users from the many vicious scams out there and to prevent criminal activity like money laundering and terrorism.

In response though, the majority of the bitcoin-related sites I've been using have opted to simply discontinue service to NYS, listing it alongside Iran and Syria as an area that is not allowed to use their service.

This is the end for bitcoin if other states follow suit. They'll little by little regulate it away until everyone has forgotten what it could have been, then ban it outright and mop up the stubborn people who wouldn't let it go peacefully.

IainB · « **Reply #743 on:** October 11, 2015, 01:27 PM »

I have long been interested in Bitcoins, but as a medium of exchange rather than as a speculative punt.
However, I have been and shall remain entirely hands-off Bitcoins until the following conditions are established:

(a) the Bitcoin price stablilises sufficiently for it to act as a safe (i.e., secure and risk-free) medium of exchange.
(b) Bitcoin transactions can be easily and reliably executed through the existing Payments System.

Looks like neither condition is likely to occur in the near future, judging by this thoughtful post on Bitcoins from the economist Gary North:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)

Quote

Bitcoins and the IRS: Walmart's Problem
Gary North - October 10, 2015

It's time for me to revisit the story of bitcoins. As you may have noticed -- or not have noticed -- you don't hear much about bitcoins these days.

A bitcoin used to be worth about $1100. These days, it is worth $250. The price has settled into this range for most of the year. It's boring. The financial media have dropped the topic. So has the hard money community.

I was an early critic of bitcoins, which earned me the hostility of the bitcoin community, which was small then and remains small.

TAXABLE EVENTS
I want to talk about what should be obvious to anybody. Every time some retailer or wholesaler sells something in exchange for bitcoins, this creates a taxable event. The IRS is highly interested in taxable events.

As you know, the IRS taxes people in United States dollars. It taxes businesses in terms of profits made in United States dollars. This is why every business has to keep an account of whatever it has paid out in United States dollars, which constitutes a deductible business expense. At the same time, every business has to keep a record of how many dollars have come in from sales.

This means that every business that does business in bitcoins must keep a record of the price of the bitcoin in terms of dollars at every point of sale or point of purchase. The IRS wants to know how many dollars came in or went out. It is not interested in bitcoins.

This creates huge problems for any business that wants to use bitcoins. Its computerized point-of-sale software must have a conversion system for bitcoins into United States dollars. When somebody buys something from the retailer, and he uses bitcoins to make the purchase, the retailer's software must instantly convert the value of the bitcoins into the value of United States dollars. The businessman is going to be taxed in terms of the value of the bitcoins in United States dollars.

This is obvious, isn't it? But the implications are not obvious.

If you want to get some estimate of the number of businesses that are using bitcoins as part of their operations, you must find out how many businesses have incorporated a conversion system that records the value of the bitcoins at the point of sale. This means barcode software.

Here is what I have discovered: there is no such barcode conversion software available.

This means that no national retail business sells anything for bitcoins. It also means that no small business does, unless its barcode software is integrated with conversion software that enables the business to find out exactly how many dollars came in when somebody purchased something. In other words, until the small business barcode software has built-in bitcoin conversion, bitcoins will remain a dream in the minds of bitcoin enthusiasts.

Here is an article written by a bitcoin enthusiast for small businesses. It discusses integrating bitcoin purchases with QuickBooks. If you want to read incoherent gibberish, read this. I dare you.

Try to find any small business that uses QuickBooks that has integrated this plan for the business operations. The next one will be the first one.

But QuickBooks is a minor issue. The major issue is barcode software.

We were told from the beginning that bitcoins would soon be used for retail businesses. Try to find a store that has anything visible that says it accepts payments in bitcoins. If you find one, ask the person at the checkout counter how many people are using bitcoins to buy something. He will never have heard of it.

PRIVACY
There is no privacy with respect to bitcoins if you are a retail merchant. All the talk about gaining privacy with bitcoins refers only to consumers. None of it refers to businesses.

A business has to defend every deduction, and the business has to defend every purchase. You don't see Walmart, or Target, or any other national business set up to use bitcoins. That's because their point-of-sale software does not have automatic conversion into bitcoin prices.

I have said from the beginning that the use of bitcoins would be limited to a handful of computer programmers and the Mexican drug cartels. They don't report to the IRS. Any normal business reports to the IRS, and it has to account for its sales and purchases, not in terms of bitcoins, but in terms of United States dollars. This means that there will be no adoption of bitcoins until there is a huge market of consumers who use bitcoins, because of the cost of rewriting all of the point-of-sale software to deal with the problem of the conversion factor. This is the chicken-and-egg problem that the bitcoins movement face. There will not be large numbers of bitcoin users until Walmart and Target and similar national chains make available their products in exchange for bitcoins.

Until you see major national chains adopting point-of-sale software that provides automatic bitcoin conversions, you can safely ignore bitcoins. Still.

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #744 on:** October 11, 2015, 03:30 PM »

The only thing that impressed me about that article is that it's abundantly clear that the author has not a clue what barcodes do.

Quote from: the Article

Here is what I have discovered: there is no such barcode conversion software available.

Right, that's because barcodes are nothing more than a laser readable font...that never gets "converted" to anything.

How can we possible process a BTC sale through a POS system?!? Derp... as ~like~ cash maybe?? Oh wait that was covered - IMO - rather clearly in the "incoherent gibberish" article they linked to.

FUD spreader much?

x16wda · « **Reply #745 on:** October 11, 2015, 08:37 PM »

Quote from: IainB on October 11, 2015, 01:27 PM

This means barcode software.

What?? What kind of lame-brained leap of logic is this?? That is such a nonsensical statement -- it's like The Big Lie, just say it in your discussion as if it were fact, and [some] readers will take it as such.

And just because the guy links to someone's "incoherent gibberish" (in his opinion), doesn't mean he isn't spouting his own brand of the same.

IainB · « **Reply #746 on:** October 12, 2015, 07:00 AM »

Hmm. Interesting responses there.
My main interest was in how to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange - the criteria for which I saw as being:

(a) the Bitcoin price stablilises sufficiently for it to act as a safe (i.e., secure and risk-free) medium of exchange.
(b) Bitcoin transactions can be easily and reliably executed through the existing Payments System.

And I added that:

Quote

Looks like neither condition is likely to occur in the near future, judging by this thoughtful post on Bitcoins from the economist Gary North: ..."Bitcoins and the IRS: Walmart's Problem" ...

I could be wrong, of course, but I considered that what he was writing about could convey several implicit and valid points:

BCs (Bitcoins) are effectively a kind of foreign currency at the POS (Point-Of-Sale) for retail outlets (the QuickBooks article also refers to this).
Retail POS terminals/systems are usually only geared up to operate in a single standard national currency (in the US).
BCs are not a stable currency, due to their fluctuating BC-US$ price, which is presumably fluctuating due to intense speculation in a dynamically changing market.
BCs in any event have the potential (at least currently) for escaping any form of local/federal Retail Sales Tax or VAT (Value-Added Tax) at the POS - the IRS would presumably object to that.
The need to establish the forex (foreign exchange rate) value of the "foreign" BC currency in the local currency (US$) at the POS and at that instant of sale (which is what the BC engine is presumably doing somewhere at that point), would probably be impossible with current Payment Systems technology, as it would necessitate having access to a real-time national database of worldwide BC-to-US$ prices. This seems like it could be a bit of a stumbling-block.
In any event, large retailers (such as Walmart, for example) do not currently have the necessary software which, on scanning the barcode of the sale item at the checkout and getting the US$ price, could then look up such a real-time forex database (assuming that it existed and was nationally accessible in real-time in the first place).

I did not quite see why North was so hard on the Jason M. Tyra QuickBooks + BCs article, unless it was maybe that Tyra seemed to be only recommending how SMEs (Small-To-Medium Enterprises) could account in QuickBooks for using BCs for Sales/Purchases, which approach would not be able to contribute overmuch for expanding the use of BCs and certainly couldn't be scaled up for use in large retailers such as Walmart. This approach would be akin to fussing over how to twist and spin wool into yarn by hand, when you actually need to automate the whole thing by using the Mule and the Spinning Jenny.
As far as I could see, Tyra offered what seemed to be a perfectly reasonable workaround (i.e., creating notional Sales or Purchases invoices) to the inherent constraints of not having the forex for a BC "cash" payment, which could then pass through the books as a legitimate double-entry. Though he does not use that term ("double-entry"), he does warn of the adverse consequences of effectively letting the BC transaction remain as an incomplete single entry transaction in the books.

Two other thoughts occurred to me:

I couldn't quite see where the $value of the "foreign currency" BC transactions would best be be classified as part of the domestic money supply. This would presumably be relevant and necessary for federal econometric modelling, and for balancing the National Accounts.
If (say) the BC transactions were not treated as a "cash" transaction, then they would presumably need to be tied to a notional "bank" entity in the national GSS (the federal Gross Settlement System) to offset the balances On Them and On US within (say) a 24-hour period, so as to establish the true/accurate levels of interbank indebtedness necessary for monitoring federally-ordained debt-equity ratios.

Added up, there would seem to be several factors here which could delay/frustrate the adoption of BC as a generally legitimate and useful currency within a nation state or between nation states. The difficulty would seem to be in enabling BCs to somehow flow through and be monitored as part of the existing tightly regulated and controlled Payment System(s), GSS (for interbank settlement) and SWIFT (forex) settlement systems. I would not expect the Establishment to be in any hurry to sort the mess out. I mean, why should they assist the development of a new, competitive foreign currency and supply of money - which threatens to compete with or undermine the federally-mandated ~~mythical~~ national currency status quo - and which they don't currently control to boot?

Some people (not me, you understand) might say that it is likely to be - and may well be already being - blocked at every turn, but I couldn't possibly comment.

x16wda · « **Reply #747 on:** October 12, 2015, 10:39 AM »

I agree with what you are saying. What I am curious about is why one would look at a dynamic, fluctuating "exchange rate" and then say that the answer is to do some kind of conversion to a static, unchanging barcode.

As to whether there is any sort of pressure being presented by the established financial players, of course I couldn't possibly comment either.

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #748 on:** October 12, 2015, 12:03 PM »

Quote from: IainB on October 12, 2015, 07:00 AM

I could be wrong, of course, but I considered that what he was writing about could convey several implicit and valid points:
BCs (Bitcoins) are effectively a kind of foreign currency at the POS (Point-Of-Sale) for retail outlets (the QuickBooks article also refers to this).

Only if you let them be.

Quote from: IainB on October 12, 2015, 07:00 AM

Retail POS terminals/systems are usually only geared up to operate in a single standard national currency (in the US).

Right, and there is no "profit" in telling the POS system anything different. Just tell it this is a cash transaction, and get on with you day.

Quote from: IainB on October 12, 2015, 07:00 AM

BCs are not a stable currency, due to their fluctuating BC-US$ price, which is presumably fluctuating due to intense speculation in a dynamically changing market.

This is only an issue if one is planning to sit on them for weeks/months at a time. If your margins are so tight that selling off at the end of the day is a risk, then I'd be inclined to assert thet you have bigger problems than BTC.

Quote from: IainB on October 12, 2015, 07:00 AM

BCs in any event have the potential (at least currently) for escaping any form of local/federal Retail Sales Tax or VAT (Value-Added Tax) at the POS - the IRS would presumably object to that.

Two words ... Cash Transaction.

Quote from: IainB on October 12, 2015, 07:00 AM

The need to establish the forex (foreign exchange rate) value of the "foreign" BC currency in the local currency (US$) at the POS and at that instant of sale (which is what the BC engine is presumably doing somewhere at that point), would probably be impossible with current Payment Systems technology, as it would necessitate having access to a real-time national database of worldwide BC-to-US$ prices. This seems like it could be a bit of a stumbling-block.

Enter amount into BTC wallet in USD (or your preferred currency) and it is automatically converted to BTC (yes that all already do that).
hit generate QR code button - Assuming it hasn't already done it on the fly (many do).
Have customer -(yes this assumes a phone based wallet)- scan the QR code and - if all looks kosher - hit send.
watch for incoming transfer (it only takes a few seconds).
Transaction complete.

Quote from: IainB on October 12, 2015, 07:00 AM

In any event, large retailers (such as Walmart, for example) do not currently have the necessary software which, on scanning the barcode of the sale item at the checkout and getting the US$ price, could then look up such a real-time forex database (assuming that it existed and was nationally accessible in real-time in the first place).

The necessary BTC software is free, and they all do a dollars to BTC conversion on the fly...which is based on a user configurable exchange.

FOR SMB's CoinBase (and I'd wager other companies like it) offers a web based transaction handling service that will generate a QR code based invoice, send it to the customer, and then automatically sell off the coin and deposit the money in you bank account (at the agreed on/transacted exchange rate).

...So just a little lite reading and the whole thing turns into a complete nonissue FUD storm.

tomos · « **Reply #749 on:** October 12, 2015, 01:55 PM »

Price has been fairly stable also since mid-january this year, so for the last 9 months.