Good for you, I'm sure everyone else would love to know how they are accomplishing it (other than setting much higher mining rewards for the transaction) because this is a well documented issue.
You will see this happening more and more, as the BitCoin network has dived in performance in recent weeks with transactions taking up to an hour to be written into the block chain - so you can't really run an "instant delivery" platform on that basis, as you have no guarantee of the transaction going through until its actually happened.
Either customers have to wait until the transaction is written into the block chain to actually get their purchase, or the vendor has to take a risk in giving the product before the transaction is set in stone, allowing for transaction reversal attacks. As most stuff on these type of stores are impulse purchases, or instant gratification purchases, most users will not want to wait out the block chain and will rather go elsewhere.
Now, yes MS does control a lot of these devices and thus can take the product back again (eg XBox games, Metro apps etc) but this just turns the whole thing into a PR nightmare issue, and doesn't stop users from purchasing music (which are not DRMed) on hacked accounts and reversing the transaction.
So, all in all, BitCoin currently doesn't work for these type of stores.
I think *you* need to distinguish between rented and owned property - if you rent, then no you don't have a right to live there, you have a privilege in being allowed to live there by the owner, who can under some certain circumstances, withdraw the privilege.
If you want a right to live somewhere specific, then buy.
The main issue for me (being that I have moved to other browsers and made my peace with similar functionality) is the way it was handled by the FF developers - it really was a huge "fuck you, this is happening, tough shit if you don't like it" at the time, with massive changes to the way the address bar worked. If you wanted to revert to the old functionality, you were told to do x, y and z, while the developers and fanboys ignored the valid response that doing x, y and z didn't actually restore the address bar functionality to pre-awesomebar functionality, it just gimped the awesomebar functionality and made it even worse to use.
So, once it became obvious that the developers didn't give a shit about people using the software, I left for another browser. Haven't actually looked back once either - I do however smile every time I see a Slashdot story about some bat shit insane decision by the FF devs, but I don't regret stopping using FF.
I Firefox from its early Phoenix days until I switched to other browsers after the "AwesomeBar" debacle in 2008, and my opinion today is that while the binary size has increased, the value provided by Firefox has gone down. Its no surprise they have lost market share from a decent high in the mid 2000's to their pathetic lows of today.
Prior to Apple getting involved, I was buying ebooks from several sources - and had never bought one from Amazon. Today, its Amazon or Apple - and both are more expensive than the old services.
So no, Apple didn't break Amazons monopoly, they bullied their way into the market and made it so everyone else had to get more expensive - that killed off a lot of smaller providers which were doing fine alongside Amazon.
Oh, and with Amazon I can read my ebooks on Windows, Linux, OSX, iOS, Android, Windows Phone and other platforms. With Apple, its Apple kit and thats it. So fuck Apple, they deserve this.
Mobile broadband subscribers still have a physical subscriber address which can be checked for a TV License via the ISP, same goes for smart phone users.
Public wifi will probably end up blocking iPlayer and other streaming video sites just to be on the safe side, otherwise the providers of those services will have to get a license in order to avoid enforcement action - its much the same as TV in pubs and bars currently.
And no, it doesnt cover all means of accessing streaming video, but it does cover the biggest UK streaming site - and if a service is already allowing access to the BBC et al then they either have a license from the BBC to do so, in which case a combination of that license and new laws can force them to take part, or they dont care about legality, so this actually adds more weight to enforcement as it is no longer just copyright infringement that they can be prosecuted for.
Why dont you think it will work? An ISP knows about traffic that is being sent to iPlayer (typically, most ISPs actually have peering directly with the BBC for iPlayer, so that makes it even easier). A broadband connection has a physical subscriber address where the service is provisioned - does that physical address have a TV License, yes or no? If the answer is "no" then it gets passed to enforcement. Covers the vast majority of iPlayer users, so the BBC gets to concentrate on the minority such as detecting VPN users etc. That will probably make it even easier to detect VPN users infact...
Its a lot easier than the current method of enforcement.
Read the post I am replying to - it talks about a converted WW2 armoured car being used to escape the Iron Curtain, referring to something similar being used to flee North Korea.
Hence my comments about a minefield designed to stop the predominant NK tank - its going to stop any such "freedom tank" as discussed.
The main reason print newspapers are dying is that the news media turn around time has gone from a day or half a day to minutes - you can no longer wait until the next edition of the newspaper to break a story, it has to be on the web as soon as possible or its already old.
This is why we have headlines on news sites which are literally "Breaking News!" and a five or six sentence which acts as a place holder until the actual article is written. On the BBC News website this means you get a banner alert at the bottom, a highlighted story with absolutely no more detail or content and fuck all else for 20 minutes. Yay:/
They already fairly successfully limit the iPlayer to UK ISP's only, with VPNs regularly being cut out of the loop - so all they have to do is enact a law requiring ISPs to release details of subscribers who access the iPlayer service.
Since a residential TV license is for the premises, then its pretty easy to check to see if the address of the internet subscriber matches an address in the TV License database. There are some edge cases (students et al), but that would cover 99% of access.
I have no idea how "checks" (from here on in this post refers to them as "cheques") were handled in US shops, but here in the UK you could not actually buy goods in a physical shop with a cheque unless it was also presented with a valid cheque guarantee card issued by your bank - the cheque could then be presented up to the value of the cheque guarantee card.
The only time you would present a cheque without a guarantee card is when buying remotely, and then the shipper would wait until your cheque cleared before shipping your goods.
Unless BitCoin comes up with a valid equivalent of a cheque guarantee card, physical shops and online shops which give you immediate access to digital goods cannot use BC as a payment method, because there is no guarantee they won't be defrauded by you walking out of the shop and immediately cancelling the transaction.
Even before they started to be completely refused as a payment mechanism at UK shops in recent years, cheques were almost always refused at shops if they were not accompanied by a cheque guarantee card which covered amounts greater than the face value of the cheque.
It already has reached its (current) limits - you can currently wait up to an hour to have your transaction written into the block chain, which means that at any time during that period the buyer can withdraw the transfer, so you have to delay handing over products until the transaction has actually been written into the block chain.
Can you imagine having to wait an hour before you can leave the supermarket if Visa didn't authorise a transaction right away?
Uh, the Marine Corp are *not* part of the US Navy, no sir-ee - they both fall under the Department of the Navy, but they are both entirely separate forces with their own separate commanders and their own separate budgets.
And no, the Army had utterly no say at all in the F-35 design - they provide no budgetary support to the program either.
How about you actually do some research on the topics before you try to argue your points, it stops you looking stupid.
Both British Airways and Air France had initial orders for 6 aircraft each, and those aircraft were paid for in full by each airline. When the market collapsed, several completed Concorde airframes were dropped by their buyers, and they were sold to Air France and British Airways at cost because no one else would take them.
What the governments did do was write off the development costs, which would have been recouped from sales had they not been dropped during the oil crisis in the 1970s.
By the time it was cancelled, the Boeing 2707 received a similar level of funding from the US government as Concorde did from both the British and French governments - but Concorde flew, while the 2707 was scrapped before the prototype was ever. I think we British and French got the better deal...
Slashdot Mirror
Good for you, I'm sure everyone else would love to know how they are accomplishing it (other than setting much higher mining rewards for the transaction) because this is a well documented issue.
You will see this happening more and more, as the BitCoin network has dived in performance in recent weeks with transactions taking up to an hour to be written into the block chain - so you can't really run an "instant delivery" platform on that basis, as you have no guarantee of the transaction going through until its actually happened.
Either customers have to wait until the transaction is written into the block chain to actually get their purchase, or the vendor has to take a risk in giving the product before the transaction is set in stone, allowing for transaction reversal attacks. As most stuff on these type of stores are impulse purchases, or instant gratification purchases, most users will not want to wait out the block chain and will rather go elsewhere.
Now, yes MS does control a lot of these devices and thus can take the product back again (eg XBox games, Metro apps etc) but this just turns the whole thing into a PR nightmare issue, and doesn't stop users from purchasing music (which are not DRMed) on hacked accounts and reversing the transaction.
So, all in all, BitCoin currently doesn't work for these type of stores.
You say that as if that opinion is the only one that can exist...
Well, they do need fresh blood to finish off GNU/Hurd, this is one way to get it...
You realise that its extremely hard to just let a worker go in the UK, right? We dont have the equivalent of Californias "right to work" rules here.
I think *you* need to distinguish between rented and owned property - if you rent, then no you don't have a right to live there, you have a privilege in being allowed to live there by the owner, who can under some certain circumstances, withdraw the privilege.
If you want a right to live somewhere specific, then buy.
Plenty of affordable accommodation outside San Francisco that you can move to if you can't afford to live within San Francisco itself.
Fuck off, you aren't more important because of "the arts". Pay your way.
The main issue for me (being that I have moved to other browsers and made my peace with similar functionality) is the way it was handled by the FF developers - it really was a huge "fuck you, this is happening, tough shit if you don't like it" at the time, with massive changes to the way the address bar worked. If you wanted to revert to the old functionality, you were told to do x, y and z, while the developers and fanboys ignored the valid response that doing x, y and z didn't actually restore the address bar functionality to pre-awesomebar functionality, it just gimped the awesomebar functionality and made it even worse to use.
So, once it became obvious that the developers didn't give a shit about people using the software, I left for another browser. Haven't actually looked back once either - I do however smile every time I see a Slashdot story about some bat shit insane decision by the FF devs, but I don't regret stopping using FF.
I Firefox from its early Phoenix days until I switched to other browsers after the "AwesomeBar" debacle in 2008, and my opinion today is that while the binary size has increased, the value provided by Firefox has gone down. Its no surprise they have lost market share from a decent high in the mid 2000's to their pathetic lows of today.
Prior to Apple getting involved, I was buying ebooks from several sources - and had never bought one from Amazon. Today, its Amazon or Apple - and both are more expensive than the old services.
So no, Apple didn't break Amazons monopoly, they bullied their way into the market and made it so everyone else had to get more expensive - that killed off a lot of smaller providers which were doing fine alongside Amazon.
Oh, and with Amazon I can read my ebooks on Windows, Linux, OSX, iOS, Android, Windows Phone and other platforms. With Apple, its Apple kit and thats it. So fuck Apple, they deserve this.
Not at 11,000ft its not.
Mobile broadband subscribers still have a physical subscriber address which can be checked for a TV License via the ISP, same goes for smart phone users.
Public wifi will probably end up blocking iPlayer and other streaming video sites just to be on the safe side, otherwise the providers of those services will have to get a license in order to avoid enforcement action - its much the same as TV in pubs and bars currently.
And no, it doesnt cover all means of accessing streaming video, but it does cover the biggest UK streaming site - and if a service is already allowing access to the BBC et al then they either have a license from the BBC to do so, in which case a combination of that license and new laws can force them to take part, or they dont care about legality, so this actually adds more weight to enforcement as it is no longer just copyright infringement that they can be prosecuted for.
Why dont you think it will work? An ISP knows about traffic that is being sent to iPlayer (typically, most ISPs actually have peering directly with the BBC for iPlayer, so that makes it even easier). A broadband connection has a physical subscriber address where the service is provisioned - does that physical address have a TV License, yes or no? If the answer is "no" then it gets passed to enforcement. Covers the vast majority of iPlayer users, so the BBC gets to concentrate on the minority such as detecting VPN users etc. That will probably make it even easier to detect VPN users infact...
Its a lot easier than the current method of enforcement.
Read the post I am replying to - it talks about a converted WW2 armoured car being used to escape the Iron Curtain, referring to something similar being used to flee North Korea.
Hence my comments about a minefield designed to stop the predominant NK tank - its going to stop any such "freedom tank" as discussed.
The main reason print newspapers are dying is that the news media turn around time has gone from a day or half a day to minutes - you can no longer wait until the next edition of the newspaper to break a story, it has to be on the web as soon as possible or its already old.
This is why we have headlines on news sites which are literally "Breaking News!" and a five or six sentence which acts as a place holder until the actual article is written. On the BBC News website this means you get a banner alert at the bottom, a highlighted story with absolutely no more detail or content and fuck all else for 20 minutes. Yay :/
They already fairly successfully limit the iPlayer to UK ISP's only, with VPNs regularly being cut out of the loop - so all they have to do is enact a law requiring ISPs to release details of subscribers who access the iPlayer service.
Since a residential TV license is for the premises, then its pretty easy to check to see if the address of the internet subscriber matches an address in the TV License database. There are some edge cases (students et al), but that would cover 99% of access.
I have no idea how "checks" (from here on in this post refers to them as "cheques") were handled in US shops, but here in the UK you could not actually buy goods in a physical shop with a cheque unless it was also presented with a valid cheque guarantee card issued by your bank - the cheque could then be presented up to the value of the cheque guarantee card.
The only time you would present a cheque without a guarantee card is when buying remotely, and then the shipper would wait until your cheque cleared before shipping your goods.
Unless BitCoin comes up with a valid equivalent of a cheque guarantee card, physical shops and online shops which give you immediate access to digital goods cannot use BC as a payment method, because there is no guarantee they won't be defrauded by you walking out of the shop and immediately cancelling the transaction.
Politics. People don't agree on what constitutes "open source". Funny that.
Its doubtful - the main issue here is the core BitCoin team who are blocking changes.
This is a fantastic post on the topic, from an authoritative source: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment.
Right. Through a minefield designed to stop T-72's. I don't think you realise the enormity of the situation there.
Even before they started to be completely refused as a payment mechanism at UK shops in recent years, cheques were almost always refused at shops if they were not accompanied by a cheque guarantee card which covered amounts greater than the face value of the cheque.
It already has reached its (current) limits - you can currently wait up to an hour to have your transaction written into the block chain, which means that at any time during that period the buyer can withdraw the transfer, so you have to delay handing over products until the transaction has actually been written into the block chain.
Can you imagine having to wait an hour before you can leave the supermarket if Visa didn't authorise a transaction right away?
Uh, the Marine Corp are *not* part of the US Navy, no sir-ee - they both fall under the Department of the Navy, but they are both entirely separate forces with their own separate commanders and their own separate budgets.
And no, the Army had utterly no say at all in the F-35 design - they provide no budgetary support to the program either.
How about you actually do some research on the topics before you try to argue your points, it stops you looking stupid.
No they didn't.
Both British Airways and Air France had initial orders for 6 aircraft each, and those aircraft were paid for in full by each airline. When the market collapsed, several completed Concorde airframes were dropped by their buyers, and they were sold to Air France and British Airways at cost because no one else would take them.
What the governments did do was write off the development costs, which would have been recouped from sales had they not been dropped during the oil crisis in the 1970s.
By the time it was cancelled, the Boeing 2707 received a similar level of funding from the US government as Concorde did from both the British and French governments - but Concorde flew, while the 2707 was scrapped before the prototype was ever. I think we British and French got the better deal...