Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Tripamang_sl said:

Positives:
-Lower transaction fees (3% vs 0 dollars if you're willing to wait for a verification delay)
-No charge backs, this is a surprisingly large amount of an online vendors cost because they eat the hit for fraud.

Negatives:
-Price volatility.. when the price per coin can vary 20$ a day it's hard to really sell anything. There are companies who offer to be go betweens on the transactions
-Time it takes to verify a transaction. 60mins is fine for an online purchase, but completely sucks when you're trying to use it like a debit card.

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While credit cards have handling fees around 3%, that has nothing to do with traditional currency: Those fees exist to finance the ~1 month free credit the consumer is getting. If any business is going to offer bitcoincredit cards, they will also have to recoup those financing costs, either through handling fees or higher overdue fees.

Bitcoindebit cardson the other hand, may exist with zero/minimal handling fees. Such systems exist for regular currency debit cards too, though (at least up here in Norway).

Also, note that by exchanging Dollars into Bitcoins to buy services, and the person selling the goods exchanging Bitcoins back into Dollars, you are enduring transaction costs even though no one is charging an explicit transaction fee. Both parties are:
A: Taking on FX risk, which has a negative value
B: Paying a "fee" through the bid/ask spread on BTC-USD

Btcguild is decommissioning the getwork servers because they are so prone to ddos. Stratum seems more resistant to them.

I think that bitcoin protecting sellers is a huge selling point. If sellers aren't eating the fraud, then they can offer lower prices. Certain sellers in particular would absolutely love no chargebacks, such as virtual goods merchants. It's also easier to integrate bitcoin into storefront software. The first VPN I used charged less when you paid with BTC for these reasons. No setting up merchant accounts. No paypal freezing your money. Accept payment from any country in the world.

Paying is actually easier to do too. Snap a picture of a QR code, enter the amount (or maybe not even that much, depending on if the price is encoded in the QR pattern), hit send, done. No typing in a 16 digit number + CVV code + CC password. I'm not suggesting people will start using bitcoin just for this, but it's nice.

For small transactions, many merchants won't make you wait for 6 confirms, so an hour wait isn't required for everything. Service providers in particular can simply cease serving you after an hour if you defraud them.

Some types of merchant fraud becomes a thing of the past when using bitcoin, as they can't overcharge you, or refuse to cancel recurring payments, or threaten your account by not securing your credit card information in their database. No more hidden charges that companies like to sneak in and profit from people not noticing them or disputing them. You also have proof of payment immortalized in the block chain, so they cannot claim that the money was not received either.

Microtransactions become a lot more viable as well. Instead of creating some obnoxious point system as is commonly done now, you can use BTC directly. Investing is friendly to small time speculators for this reason.

Alkorin_sl said:

slush disagrees, since his stratum server has been offline for 8+ hours due to DDoS. Just an excuse to decommission getwork, which should have happened a long time ago anyway.

Edit: It's entirely possible that his stratum server is just down. He isn't responding on bitcointalk and his getwork server is up, so... who knows. A lot of people don't know how to connect to getwork, which is fine by me, because I'm earning nearly 0.1 BTC per block right now (but blocks are taking way longer to solve).

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I'm just going by what eleuthria has said about getwork and stratrum. He has said that the getwork servers get attacked more often than the stratrum servers. It looks like the eu-stratrum servers got hit yesterday with an attack. The great thing about eleuthria is that he honestly seems to care about the pool and the bitcoin network as a whole. Even going so far as to implement a plan should btcguild hit over 45% of the network that would increase fees on new users to get them to go to other pools.

So far I have had no issue with connecting to btcguild. I think eleuthria has said he wants to shut down getwork to help with the 51% problem. If I ever get my asic from BFL, I don't know if I'll stick with his pool or not, just to help with the concerns of hitting 51% of the network.

I do wonder what kind of money he is pulling in, I would imagine its a quite a bit but then he did lose like 60k with that hard fork a few weeks back and that was before the huge spike in price.

If you switch, you'll be defaulted to pay-per last n-share, which is a 3% fee vs, pay-per share that is a 5% fee. With pplns you'll get a higher variance but a lower fee. For instance, 48 hours ago, I was making .07btc with pplns, the last 24 hours, I'm down to .05btc. So the variance within a 24 hour period can swing but over time it evens out and the lower fee helps. You can always change to the pps to get less variance. It wouldn't hurt you to set up a back up pool, if slush goes down, its switches over to btcguild. We've been a a little bit of a bad luck streak lately though.

We don't really know how this coin is created. You can't have a functional money without a basic transparency.

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what value would bitcoins have if you could not change it to fiat money and what value would fiat money have if you could never change it to bitcoins.

Please find another thread to shit on. This is getting stupid.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/news/2013...ion-moneygram/

Another way business' could be using bitcoins.

what happened to that link someone posted about 25 people being arrested for using silk road? could have sworn it was passanger replying to my question but his post is goneeee.

TecKnoe_sl said:

what happened to that link someone posted about 25 people being arrested for using silk road? could have sworn it was passanger replying to my question but his post is goneeee.

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What would you like to know?

The 25 person bust that I think you are referring to happened in central NJ recently. While it was mentioned that they used USPS to ship drugs around, it was never mentioned that Silk Road was at play. In addition it was a pretty big operation because not only did they find something along the lines of 20+ lb of weed, MDMA, LSD, mushrooms, etc, they also found $70,000 in cash and weapons. On top of all of that they seized tons of cars.

Even the two instances that I mentioned with 100+g of MDMA being intercepted, Silk Road wasn't mentioned but was assumed to due to origin of the shipment. The only mentioned bust that explicitly stated Silk Road was play that I can remember happened earlier in the year in Australia which was expected. The guy saved something along the lines of 10,000+ texts regarding his dealing activities and Australia has the toughest customs around.

I am not too fond of leaving Silk Road related material out in the open for various reasons, hence why the earlier comment is gone.

Got an actual 5g/h jalape?o in the wild
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6mmT...e_gdata_player

So bfl might be sipping those soon at least