Since there are markets which will buy bitcoins from you for dollars, I don't see why you would refuse to accept bitcoins for an ad-hoc business transaction. You might make it more expensive for the buyer, to cover the extra hassle and the exchange fees you're going to pay.
Let's say you're, um, an itinerant gardener. You offer to mow someone's lawn for $10. They ask if they can pay in Bitcoin. You check how many Bitcoins you could sell for $11, quote him that price, do the job, take the Bitcoins, and sell them immediately.
The only risk to you is that the market value of a Bitcoin collapses, between the time you quote him the price, and the time you sell the Bitcoin proceeds. Even now, just looking at the historical prices, that seems like a low risk. The longer you keep them, the greater the risk -- although there's just as much possibility that the value will increase. As confidence in Bitcoin increases, people will feel more comfortable keeping their Bitcoins rather than exchanging them, right up to the point where they earn them and spend them without ever converting into a "real" currency.
The thing is, I barely recognise your stereotype at all. Maybe things are different where you live.
The environmentalists that pass through my sphere -- in the pages of New Scientist and The Guardian, in the British Parliament, my own friends, they are mostly rational people with evidence-based belief systems.
If you wander through the "Green Futures Field" at the Glastonbury Festival, then you'd think the whole movement was crystal healing, aura massage nutjobs.
If you go to the Centre For Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, you'd find a lot of serious, pragmatic, science.
Of course the second it actually works the greens will be dead set against it. Gotta be some obscure critter living out in that desert ya know,
Because, just like Slashdotters, "The Greens" isn't a homogeneous group of people with identical opinions, nor is "environmentalists".
You can be an "environmentalist" and only care about the aesthetic appearance of countryside during your own lifetime (therefore opposed to onshore wind turbines). Or you can be an "environmentalist" and only care about CO2 emissions and their long term effect (probably in favour of onshore wind turbines) Or any of hundreds of differing viewpoints.
My first reaction to this was that you were pointing out an implementation detail. The parent of the Java process is the browser, and that's a good enough definition of "running in" for me.
However, I think I see what you're getting at. Extend this PC emulator so that it has some visibility of the DOM and JS input events, and you could use X86 binaries as the logic behind interactive web pages.
It's a fairly niche requirement -- where you have a binary and no access to the source -- but it could certainly have uses.
Geeks are smart but they lack understanding of the behaviour of common people and of developing user interfaces that are useable to common people. I call this the Linux effect.
Yeah, I can't imagine a time when ordinary people have Linux machines in their living rooms, or on their mobile phones...
There's an experimental Android client for Bitcoin. There's no reason why the user experience needs to be difficult. The bigger barriers to Bitcoin adoption are that the benefits are difficult to explain, and address concerns that most people don't have an issue with (including myself, I must admit).
Why not sell your stash of bitcoins for US$ in that case? You may regret it when the value continues to rise, but in that respect it's no different from a "real" currency.
In theory, the people who mined the 99% of coins did so by spending a lot on hardware and energy -- and of course, by gambling on the future value of their investment. Clearly there was a BC goldrush, from which you've profited, and perhaps that can't be helped. As the currency settles down, it should become more effective to trade for BC than to mine, for most people.
My entire point is that you need to just stop right there. Why would everyone start to accept bitcoin? It's complicated, and it offers zero advantage over federal reserve notes to 99.99% of people.
There are several services out there which will buy a Bitcoin from you for almost $8 -- and sell you one for slightly more. It doesn't need "everyone" to accept it. It just needs a critical mass.
It appears that there is already the critical mass for a Bitcoin to be worth a non-trivial amount of "real" money. There seem to be people buying and selling real goods and services with it.
I don't know whether Bitcoin has a target penetration rate. I'm pretty sure it won't eclipse the dollar. Perhaps its users will be happy if they can just use it within their subculture of privacy nuts, criminals and tax-dodging libertarians.
But none of it matters until they reach critical mass. People will only buy them if vendors accept them, and vendors will only accept them if people are buying them. The problem is how you get one to happen in significant numbers before the other.
It seems to me that if you were a certain kind of vendor -- empowered to make informal and ad-hoc deals (*), and given that there are people who buy/sell Bitcoins for Dollars -- it would be a no-brainer to accept them. A customer eager to spend his Bitcoins comes asks for a price. You multiply your dollar price by the exchange rate, and add a bit to make it worth your while, he pays you in Bitcoins, you sell the Bitcoins for dollars as soon as the buyer's out of the door.
What would stop a bigger business from doing exactly the same? 1. Lack of customer demand 2. Legal doubts 3. The unstable exchange rate, meaning either your BC retail prices change day by day, or you have to guess the future exchange rate when you set prices.
A more daring move would be to keep a fund of Bitcoins, rather than immediately exchanging them for dollars. It seems that doing that has worked out well for everyone who's done so up until now -- but if it was such a dead cert, why would anyone willingly sell you a Bitcoin rather than keep it for the future?
(*) The temptation is to think of prostitutes and drug dealers, but how about, say, someone selling their home-grown vegetables at the roadside?
But Paypal has the appearance of dealing in "real" currencies. My (UK) Paypal account tells me what my balance is in £.
Whereas, Bitcoin is only a currency because people use it as one. If I agree with my landlord that he'll accept 700 jam tarts instead of this month's rent, how can the FSA intervene? If he can sell those 700 jam tarts for £700 and have converted that into a "real" currency, how can the FSA intervene.
You can buy/sell using anything, as along as the parties involved agree on it. Turnips, jam tarts, Magic the Gathering cards, Panini stickers, or Bitcoins.
It's going to take new laws to make this illegal, and I struggle to see how they could be made just.
What interests me more, is that Bitcoin could be (and probably is being) used to facilitate tax evasion. It'll be fascinating to see how this is countered.
Unless there is a convent way to transfer it, it will remain worthless.
I assume you mean "convenient", since nuns aren't really relevant to the value of a currency.
If you google, you'll find services that will transfer US$ to/from your credit card in exchange for Bitcoins. Is that convenient enough for you?
You'll also find merchants who will send you PC components, or other goods, in exchange for Bitcoins. I suspect you'd find people on the Bitcoin forums who pay their rent in Bitcoins.
Whatever they might be in the future, right now they are not "worthless".
They are valuable as long as people are prepared to trade them for goods and services -- and there is already a community of traders who accept Bitcoin.
I've checked today, and there are places that will give me almost $8 for one Bitcoin. So, if someone were to offer me one Bitcoin for one of the Dreamcast games I'm currently contemplating putting on eBay, I'd struggle to find a reason not to accept it.
But what is a coin worth? It seems like the "mining" process is compute intensive, but the "coins" effectively come from nowhere. (although you certainly will have to pay for the energy required to power your computer while it was mining... doesn't seem very "green" to me...) How is the value of a coin determined, and how stable is the value?
It is an interesting project, and I am genuinely curious... Thanks
The anticipation is that market forces will cause the value of a bitcoin to settle at a level where it's worth just slightly more than what it costs to "mine", if you have a very efficient operation. Hence for most people it will make more sense to trade goods, services, or other currencies for bitcoins, than to mine.
There are already people using it in earnest. Whether they're a lot cleverer than the rest of us, or quite the opposite, I really don't know.
If you'd bought a bunch of Bitcoins in February, and sold them to day, you'd have multiplied your investment by nearly 8...
WoW gold, except that it's maintained by a P2P network rather than a central "bank"... that can be traded for real-life all kinds of things, from groceries to PC components, to anything else.
Last time this came up, in February, when the market value for a bitcoin hit US$1, someone speculated about hookers accepting it. A quick Google search revealed at least one establishment that did.
And why not? If someone wants to pay with Bitcoins, and there's an exchange that trades Bitcoins for dollars, why not let them?
As I understand it -- and it's only a vague understanding -- the creation of bitcoins is a side-effect of administering the bitcoin transaction chain. So those systems are indeed doing useful work.
5) if someone invents a way to make coins cheaply does this doom the system? What regulates the produciton rate? does this work if I have 1 million different user identities? if there is a central signing authority for this then what keeps this from getting cracked or printing their own money to flood the system?
6) what happens if botnets start mining?
how does this actually work, end to end, technically not operationally?
As I understand it, no matter what the state of the art in technology used to mine bitcoins, market economics will drive the value of the coins to around the cost of the power/hardware/infrastructure to achieve it. Hence you could make a narrow profit margin by investing in high end computing for bitcoin mining, and no doubt some people will do that. For most people, trading for existing bitcoins is an easier/cheaper way to obtain them than mining.
They are just like gold in that respect. If you're a huge mining conglomerate, you can dig for gold profitably. If you're anyone else, the most sensible way to get gold is to buy some.
The biggest businesses already trust their data to third parties all the time. It's common practice to outsource payroll, HR records, orders, invoicing, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Since there are markets which will buy bitcoins from you for dollars, I don't see why you would refuse to accept bitcoins for an ad-hoc business transaction. You might make it more expensive for the buyer, to cover the extra hassle and the exchange fees you're going to pay.
Let's say you're, um, an itinerant gardener. You offer to mow someone's lawn for $10. They ask if they can pay in Bitcoin. You check how many Bitcoins you could sell for $11, quote him that price, do the job, take the Bitcoins, and sell them immediately.
The only risk to you is that the market value of a Bitcoin collapses, between the time you quote him the price, and the time you sell the Bitcoin proceeds. Even now, just looking at the historical prices, that seems like a low risk. The longer you keep them, the greater the risk -- although there's just as much possibility that the value will increase. As confidence in Bitcoin increases, people will feel more comfortable keeping their Bitcoins rather than exchanging them, right up to the point where they earn them and spend them without ever converting into a "real" currency.
The thing is, I barely recognise your stereotype at all. Maybe things are different where you live.
The environmentalists that pass through my sphere -- in the pages of New Scientist and The Guardian, in the British Parliament, my own friends, they are mostly rational people with evidence-based belief systems.
If you wander through the "Green Futures Field" at the Glastonbury Festival, then you'd think the whole movement was crystal healing, aura massage nutjobs.
If you go to the Centre For Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, you'd find a lot of serious, pragmatic, science.
Of course the second it actually works the greens will be dead set against it. Gotta be some obscure critter living out in that desert ya know,
Because, just like Slashdotters, "The Greens" isn't a homogeneous group of people with identical opinions, nor is "environmentalists".
You can be an "environmentalist" and only care about the aesthetic appearance of countryside during your own lifetime (therefore opposed to onshore wind turbines).
Or you can be an "environmentalist" and only care about CO2 emissions and their long term effect (probably in favour of onshore wind turbines)
Or any of hundreds of differing viewpoints.
Hydrogen in what form?
What manner of fuel do expect to find on the "homeless" planet?
My first reaction to this was that you were pointing out an implementation detail. The parent of the Java process is the browser, and that's a good enough definition of "running in" for me.
However, I think I see what you're getting at. Extend this PC emulator so that it has some visibility of the DOM and JS input events, and you could use X86 binaries as the logic behind interactive web pages.
It's a fairly niche requirement -- where you have a binary and no access to the source -- but it could certainly have uses.
Yes, but there are already PC emulators that will run in your browser as Java applets. I strongly suspect those will always be more efficient.
This is a cool demo of how fast Javascript has become, but it has very little practical use.
Yes, but you haven't contradicted me. Regardless of their utility, gold and diamonds are worth what people are willing to trade for them.
Gold, diamonds, bags of sand, cows, fiat currencies, Bitcoin -- they're all worth what people are willing to trade for them.
A bitcoin and $7.75 are currently worth about the same.
Gold and diamonds are still only worth what people are prepared to trade for them.
Geeks are smart but they lack understanding of the behaviour of common people and of developing user interfaces that are useable to common people. I call this the Linux effect.
Yeah, I can't imagine a time when ordinary people have Linux machines in their living rooms, or on their mobile phones...
There's an experimental Android client for Bitcoin. There's no reason why the user experience needs to be difficult. The bigger barriers to Bitcoin adoption are that the benefits are difficult to explain, and address concerns that most people don't have an issue with (including myself, I must admit).
Why not sell your stash of bitcoins for US$ in that case? You may regret it when the value continues to rise, but in that respect it's no different from a "real" currency.
In theory, the people who mined the 99% of coins did so by spending a lot on hardware and energy -- and of course, by gambling on the future value of their investment. Clearly there was a BC goldrush, from which you've profited, and perhaps that can't be helped. As the currency settles down, it should become more effective to trade for BC than to mine, for most people.
Here you go:
http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf -- or Google's cached version -- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
My entire point is that you need to just stop right there. Why would everyone start to accept bitcoin? It's complicated, and it offers zero advantage over federal reserve notes to 99.99% of people.
There are several services out there which will buy a Bitcoin from you for almost $8 -- and sell you one for slightly more. It doesn't need "everyone" to accept it. It just needs a critical mass.
It appears that there is already the critical mass for a Bitcoin to be worth a non-trivial amount of "real" money. There seem to be people buying and selling real goods and services with it.
I don't know whether Bitcoin has a target penetration rate. I'm pretty sure it won't eclipse the dollar. Perhaps its users will be happy if they can just use it within their subculture of privacy nuts, criminals and tax-dodging libertarians.
But none of it matters until they reach critical mass. People will only buy them if vendors accept them, and vendors will only accept them if people are buying them. The problem is how you get one to happen in significant numbers before the other.
It seems to me that if you were a certain kind of vendor -- empowered to make informal and ad-hoc deals (*), and given that there are people who buy/sell Bitcoins for Dollars -- it would be a no-brainer to accept them. A customer eager to spend his Bitcoins comes asks for a price. You multiply your dollar price by the exchange rate, and add a bit to make it worth your while, he pays you in Bitcoins, you sell the Bitcoins for dollars as soon as the buyer's out of the door.
What would stop a bigger business from doing exactly the same?
1. Lack of customer demand
2. Legal doubts
3. The unstable exchange rate, meaning either your BC retail prices change day by day, or you have to guess the future exchange rate when you set prices.
A more daring move would be to keep a fund of Bitcoins, rather than immediately exchanging them for dollars. It seems that doing that has worked out well for everyone who's done so up until now -- but if it was such a dead cert, why would anyone willingly sell you a Bitcoin rather than keep it for the future?
(*) The temptation is to think of prostitutes and drug dealers, but how about, say, someone selling their home-grown vegetables at the roadside?
But Paypal has the appearance of dealing in "real" currencies. My (UK) Paypal account tells me what my balance is in £.
Whereas, Bitcoin is only a currency because people use it as one. If I agree with my landlord that he'll accept 700 jam tarts instead of this month's rent, how can the FSA intervene? If he can sell those 700 jam tarts for £700 and have converted that into a "real" currency, how can the FSA intervene.
You can buy/sell using anything, as along as the parties involved agree on it. Turnips, jam tarts, Magic the Gathering cards, Panini stickers, or Bitcoins.
It's going to take new laws to make this illegal, and I struggle to see how they could be made just.
What interests me more, is that Bitcoin could be (and probably is being) used to facilitate tax evasion. It'll be fascinating to see how this is countered.
Unless there is a convent way to transfer it, it will remain worthless.
I assume you mean "convenient", since nuns aren't really relevant to the value of a currency.
If you google, you'll find services that will transfer US$ to/from your credit card in exchange for Bitcoins. Is that convenient enough for you?
You'll also find merchants who will send you PC components, or other goods, in exchange for Bitcoins.
I suspect you'd find people on the Bitcoin forums who pay their rent in Bitcoins.
Whatever they might be in the future, right now they are not "worthless".
They are valuable as long as people are prepared to trade them for goods and services -- and there is already a community of traders who accept Bitcoin.
I've checked today, and there are places that will give me almost $8 for one Bitcoin. So, if someone were to offer me one Bitcoin for one of the Dreamcast games I'm currently contemplating putting on eBay, I'd struggle to find a reason not to accept it.
But what is a coin worth? It seems like the "mining" process is compute intensive, but the "coins" effectively come from nowhere. (although you certainly will have to pay for the energy required to power your computer while it was mining... doesn't seem very "green" to me...) How is the value of a coin determined, and how stable is the value?
It is an interesting project, and I am genuinely curious...
Thanks
Just like any currency, it's worth whatever people are willing to trade it for. Here's a service that will sell you a Bitcoin for $7.84 as I write, which they claim is market value. I don't endorse that site, by the way -- it's the first one Google gave me.
The anticipation is that market forces will cause the value of a bitcoin to settle at a level where it's worth just slightly more than what it costs to "mine", if you have a very efficient operation. Hence for most people it will make more sense to trade goods, services, or other currencies for bitcoins, than to mine.
There are already people using it in earnest. Whether they're a lot cleverer than the rest of us, or quite the opposite, I really don't know.
If you'd bought a bunch of Bitcoins in February, and sold them to day, you'd have multiplied your investment by nearly 8...
Executive summary:
WoW gold, except that it's maintained by a P2P network rather than a central "bank". .. that can be traded for real-life all kinds of things, from groceries to PC components, to anything else.
Last time this came up, in February, when the market value for a bitcoin hit US$1, someone speculated about hookers accepting it. A quick Google search revealed at least one establishment that did.
And why not? If someone wants to pay with Bitcoins, and there's an exchange that trades Bitcoins for dollars, why not let them?
As I understand it -- and it's only a vague understanding -- the creation of bitcoins is a side-effect of administering the bitcoin transaction chain. So those systems are indeed doing useful work.
5) if someone invents a way to make coins cheaply does this doom the system? What regulates the produciton rate? does this work if I have 1 million different user identities? if there is a central signing authority for this then what keeps this from getting cracked or printing their own money to flood the system?
6) what happens if botnets start mining?
how does this actually work, end to end, technically not operationally?
As I understand it, no matter what the state of the art in technology used to mine bitcoins, market economics will drive the value of the coins to around the cost of the power/hardware/infrastructure to achieve it. Hence you could make a narrow profit margin by investing in high end computing for bitcoin mining, and no doubt some people will do that. For most people, trading for existing bitcoins is an easier/cheaper way to obtain them than mining.
They are just like gold in that respect. If you're a huge mining conglomerate, you can dig for gold profitably. If you're anyone else, the most sensible way to get gold is to buy some.
The biggest businesses already trust their data to third parties all the time. It's common practice to outsource payroll, HR records, orders, invoicing, etc.
Vi in Javascript? Why not? http://gpl.internetconnection.net/vi/
GCC in Javascript would be a foolish enterprise, but remote compilation is more than just viable -- it's a good idea.
You can make hydrogen out of water and heat, or water and electricity.
You can also make it by fermenting biomatter, or by processing the gases that come out of landfill sites.
... unless Apple decides not to approve the app.