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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."
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?
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!
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?
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).