Slashdot Mirror
BitCoin Card To Launch In 2 Months, Says BitInstant
hypnosec writes "Charlie Shrem, co-founder of BitInstant LLC, has confirmed that a BitCoin-funded international debit/credit card should be available very soon. Giving a time frame of 6-8 weeks, Shrem said over an IRC chat session that the card will function like any other credit or debit card, and that it can be used at places where MasterCard is being accepted. Shrem has also said that the initial 1000-odd cards will be given for free and subsequent cards will carry a charge of around $10. Any transaction that is carried out through the card [will incur a] 1% BitCoin transfer fee on top of the $1.50 ATM withdrawal fee."
A subsequent RaspberryPi story shouldnt take long now, so strap yourselves in guy's!
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
if it happened no one would think of it that way, at least not any more than we currently think about driving cars around at some fraction of light years per second.
-Lod
Also called 3.43 microBTC (of course slashdot doesn't support the mu sign, not like a nerdy site could need that). Probably around the same time Intel introduce their 0.000000008m processors.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
1% + $1.50 fee... so why would I want to use this? My current debit transaction fees are... zero. AND I don't have to worry about the value of the money in my account fluctuating wildly.
It probably involved email and HTTP too. Do you trust them?
I think in the next 6-12 months we'll see botnets largely stop mining on Bitcoin because the rollout of ASIC mining hardware will make virus-infected PCs hopelessly un-competitive, even though the electricity is free. They're already worthless for doing CPU mining even if you have thousands of them and soon even if you have a lot of infected gaming machines the return will probably not be worth the time.
Us old folks still remember the day when the speed limit was 2.5989246 × 10^-15 light years per second on the highway. Nowadays, you see people zooming along at 3.78025396 × 10^-15 light years per second in the 3.07145635 × 10^-15 light years per second zone. It's MADNESS!
Where's my cane?
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
You have failed the understand the problem here.
The fraud problem is not with Bitcoin. Bitcoins security model is very simple and easy to understand - you have private keys, protect them. If they're stolen, so is your money. There are no chargebacks. How secure you make those keys is entirely up to you. I have most of my money stored in an offline wallet encrypted under a very long passphrase, which is very secure but somewhat inconvenient. Then I have a smaller amount of money stored on my phone which doesn't require any passwords to use and I just accept that if my phone is stolen or lost somehow then I lose that money, but it's very convenient.
The fraud problem comes from the world of credit cards and traditional banking which are hopelessly insecure. Rather than give people the tools they need to secure their money, the managers of these systems simply shift the pain onto merchants who can do nothing about it beyond try and protect themselves with strict transaction limits, complicated risk analyses and just accepting that they'll lose some of the time.
There are also other reasons which you conveniently elided, such as government regulations that forbid / complicate large transactions.
There is a nice counterargument on the Bitcoin forum. To summarize, the card is a great promotional tool, especially for merchants who might consider alternatives to credit card charges.
In a way, the purpose of this card is to make itself obsolete. This is not so strange if you consider many important social movements.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This is a really common misconception. The point of Bitcoin is not to be an anonymous currency. The point of Bitcoin is to be a peer to peer decentralized currency that has limited and slowly decreasing inflation. Let me quote the original description Satoshi had on the website (nowadays it's on the front page of the wiki):
You'll note there's nothing in there about being anonymous. Bitcoin is designed to provide privacy (or call it anonymity if you want), because it's a financial system and people demand financial privacy. Would you use a payment system that published a public record of everything you purchased? In the current banking system, privacy is provided by your bank and credit card company (ignoring the fact that they often waive that privacy for governments both domestic and foreign, with or without legal due process). But in a financial system that doesn't have banks, that approach obviously doesn't work.
As a result, nothing requires you to be anonymous if you use Bitcoin. Most people would like to keep their transaction history private but are happy to identify themselves to merchants and financial service providers (for instance, I do that, as does any user of Mt Gox).
They need to find a new bank.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Please don't bundle the hookers with the rest of those, for they are service workers who involve nobody but themselves and their willing customers in their transactions. Also, please don't bundle the drug dealers, who are mere black market resellers, with extortionists and assassins.
Hookers are completely legit service providers, whether they happen to offend your personal morality or not. Drug dealers may or may not be legit, depending on their business practices. The Mafia, Russian or otherwise, is just a bunch of parasites which often preys on the first two groups. There's no other connection here.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I could be sorely mistaken but I do believe that each and every business you're using your card at has to pay for the privilege of being able to accept your card. Which, in turn, means that business is passing that overhead to you, the customer, cash, debit and credit. So, all y'all have zero points. Or are businesses magical realms that separates a mystical "them" from "us"? They all have fees so whether you see them in the first person or in the third makes not one bit of difference as to whether you're paying for it or not. You are. We all are. Your cash back is a pittance in comparison to what the card providers are making. Otherwise you'd be getting nothing back, ever.
\r
Please send me you untrusted dollars. I'll watch over them for you.