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Flattr Adds Support For Funding In Bitcoin
An anonymous reader writes "Swedish startup Flattr, which offers an 'online tipjar' service, has announced it has added partial support for Bitcoin: you can now fund your account with the virtual currency. Furthermore, the company is considering adding the option to withdraw in Bitcoins too, but it first wants to gauge its community's desire for the feature on Twitter."
Given the nature of bitcoins I'm not sure how this would work. Not everyone would be able to do it or there would be limited supply and shortages once in a while. Might be kinda interesting.
I'd love to use bitcoin more but I'm having a hard time getting any. Where is there that still sells them easily in the UK? Most of the places seem to have closed..
And who created the bitcoin software? We don't know but I'm sure they are having fun selling off coins they got for free to suckers who just finished eating their tulip bulbs.
And I'm sure you are having fun using tulip bulbs to send money across the globe. Bitcoins are a means of payment, not some silly collectables.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Except the initial investment was a tiny amount of CPU time. The person who wrote the original software made a ton of BC when it took no cost to create them.
Not to mention having a great idea and taking the time to implement it.
If that's so trivial, then why didn't you do it first?
No, the initial investment was not a tiny amount of CPU time. The initial investment was in watching out for a workable decentralized currency and potentially trying out a lot of stuff that failed until one day bitcoin came along and was actually semi-successful. You are looking at it now in hindsight, and that is heavily misleading. It's like saying that an oil company's investment was only a single drilling rig when they worked for years beforehand to figure out where to start drilling.
Also, currencies have a network effect and thus need a critical mass to ever be successful. So, it is highly likely that you need to incentivise early adopters in order to establish a successful currency because there is zero value in a currency that essentially noone accepts yet. A company trying to establish a product with a network effect usually does that by spending tons of their investors' money on incentivising early adopters, which later will be recouped from late adopters and paid back to the investors with interest/dividends/whatever for the risk that they have taken, so there is nothing unusual about bitcoin doing the same - it's just in the nature of a decentralized, independent system that the late adopters have to pay early adopters directly rather than that payment being obfuscated by a controlling company.
And finally: Are you suggesting that whoever invented bitcoin got all the time they invested in order to figure out the scheme and to write the software for free? Seriously? Or was your assumption that it took no time to build the software?
Some guys invested a couple of hundred dollars in stocks and now own a fortune. I don't see the difference really. Why didn't you invest that CPU time? Come on! It was really tiny! Oh, you were busy paying stuff with Paypal and VISA, were you?
Not true, because all transactions are public, you can see that Satoshi has not sent any of his original Bitcoins anywhere. This is not to say he will never do that, but if he would, he would have done it by now.
And who created the bitcoin software? We don't know but I'm sure they are having fun selling off coins they got for free to suckers who just finished eating their tulip bulbs.
The creator of the software is presumed to have earned about 1 million BTC (currently worth around 50-100 million USD) but he hasn't spent any of it. So he's either dead, a true believer in his baby, or paranoid about his privacy and personal implications of being associated with Bitcoin.
So it's not Satoshi or the group calling themselves that who are cashing in. It's the early adopter crowd who saw the massive potential of a speculative investment to attract other speculators. These people have done nothing to improve the technical side of Bitcon, they are too busy talking their book and trying to convince everyone how Bitcoin is the next big thing.
And I'm sure you are having fun using tulip bulbs to send money across the globe. Bitcoins are a means of payment, not some silly collectables.
um, you do know the history of tulip bulbs, right?
BOOP!
A site that *gives* you Bitcoins would be far more popular than the site that *takes* them. Currently, to get BTC you need to buy them in Japan, and they are expensive. It's much easier to do nothing and ignore this tip jar and the entire BTC economy, since they are not influential.
BTC doesn't save you money on a gallon of milk; but it would be all the rage if that changes. But first the BTC network must solve some fundamental problems, such as how to get an instant confirmation of a transaction. Credit cards do it well under 5 seconds; you cannot tell people to linger at the store for 10-15 minutes, it's not even physically possible. There are also other problems, such as security of the terminals, and security of the network, and lack of arbitration if things go wrong (you paid, they haven't received - what now?) and, of course, transaction fees.
So... the inventor of Bitcoin might get rich from it, therefore it is bad?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
While personally I view Bitcoins as a great experiment, first step out of many that will be taken that will in fact free the individuals from the oppression of governments by giving many viable, easy to use and very attractive alternatives to all of the things that governments have usurped to themselves as monopoly power, there is currently something else that is happening with Bitcoins.
Winklevoss twins are trying to get out of their gigantic position without crashing the market, they want to make tens of millions of dollars by selling a million or so Bitcoins by offering them via an ETF.
This is one thing that would separate the complete financial nubes from the rest: participating in this ETF.
There is not a single reason to buy ETFs if you want to bet on Bitcoins, all you need to do is buy Bitcoins themselves. An ETF makes sense when it is based around a commodity for example that has other costs associated with it, like cost of warehousing something. Say you want to buy coffee beans, you want 10 tons of them because you think the conditions are good for the prices to go up and you are going to make some money, but you don't want to store 10 tons of coffee beans and you don't want to pay various delivery fees, taxes maybe, etc. So then you can buy an ETF.
There is no such problem with Bitcoins, you store them in a file, the cost is already amortised into you owning a computer and an Internet connection and spending some time learning and installing some Bitcoin software. There is no reason for an ETF like that to exist but for the founders of it to get rid of their large position while trying to prevent market from collapsing in a short time period if they set a large sell order. So instead they create an ETF and have a pool of people buy the Bitcoins from them, it's all in that pool, outside of the rest of the market, that's their idea.
DO NOT FALL FOR IT, it's a stupid thing to do in case of Bitcoins.
You can't handle the truth.
Unknown Lamer posts an article about an unknown start-up offering an unheard of service which now accepts a unused currency.
I think we have our post of the month!
Same as with any other currency- if you make money, you owe the government taxes on it. No different from canadian dollars, pesos, euros, etc. I don't know why people were even surprised.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
No, 100% of the risk is lack of utility. My supermarket, the local restaurants, and none of the places I spend money day to day take it. So its utility is 0. In fact its less than 0- I understand cash. With bitcoin I have to understand and deal with these "exchanges" things and make my purchases semi-public, where in real life I just hand them anonymous multi-colored pieces of paper. In fact I can't even pay for something unless I have an internet connection at hand. No thanks.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
If he were to even attempt to withdraw any of it in the form of USD then there would be a monumental crash. The bitcoins wouldn't even be worth the effort to open up the wallet file.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
And my supermarket, the local restaurants and none of the places I spend money day to day take pounds. So their utility... oh, wait.
Bitcoin is equivalent to foreign cash and there certainly are enough places that take them so they do not lack utility any more than any other foreign currency (that could be instantly transferred across the world) would.
It might not be a ponzi scheme, but it does carry an absurd amount of risk. The fact that people are getting wildly rich from "investing" in bitcoins proves that they are unfit for their original purpose as a currency. Currencies have to be stable in order to be useful. The massive swings we've been seeing mean that bitcoins aren't even close to stable.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Tell you what, you can not owe taxes once you promise to never use a road again, never buy anything that was transported to you on a road paid for by the government again, waive all minimum wage and employment laws, repay your education starting from kindergarden with interest, waive all police, fire, emergency and other services, waive your right to ever use the court for any reason, and you can only use goods (including food) from places that have no regulatory structure and inspections.
Until the STFU and pay your god damn taxes.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Well, now with Flattr supporting bitcoin, you actually can pay someone with bitcoins... (without them needing to be aware of bitcoins themselves, as they will receive the money as euros).
ROFL. Oh dear gods you're one of those. Sorry, the world isn't out to get you. But tell you what- anytime you're tired of paying, feel free to leave. We'd be a better country with fewer of the insane around.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Same as with any other currency- if you make money, you owe the government taxes on it. No different from canadian dollars, pesos, euros, etc. I don't know why people were even surprised.
Unless you're the federal reserve or the IRS, both above the law corporations.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Damn Wesley, I didn't realize you posted on Slashdot. Congratulations on getting released from prison. When will you do another Blade movie?