You were able to look at blockexplorer without seeing the fee column?

Apologizes if your left eye is actually missing. No one is paying 2BTC fees.

Ok, cool I was wondering if there was a way to know number of nodes. Number of nodes is going to be a super useful stat for trying to figure out value.

First I saw it was this thread. From understanding it, maybe 2-3 days. Obviously don't know everything and still a lot to learn. After that, I made an effort to get coins (bought 20 on the ClearCoin site for $1.05 or something ridiculously low)

It has nothing to do with self-loathing, it has to do with not being a moron like most Linux geeks who cannot understand anything outside of their world. I bought more at $7, so there is a definite upside. There are a few niche areas I think it has huge potential, and if there is any adoption, it should go up. If it doesn't, it might fall a little. I'm holding off buying any more unless I see a real value potential, but I'm not interested in long term gambling with any more than I already have in the game.

I do loathe a lot of the Kool-aid drinkers on the forum. I wish I was able to pull the trigged earlier when I wanted to dump some money in, but oh well. Got a bank account set up *just for* depositing easily to Bitcoin, looked at some possible business ideas off of it, but none look like spectacularly great ideas. I think the commerce angle is far overrated, and the price is being held up very much by speculation. People are not buying with Bitcoins because it's a good idea. They are doing so for political motives, or they have some they got for free and are too dumb to figure out how to sell in Mt. Gox. There is literally no reason as a buyer to use Bitcoin to buy anything besides using it for Silk Road or other illegal transactions.

That doesn't mean there is no reason to use it in the future. There are just a *lot* of pieces that need to be built. It's so far from ready for use by mainstream, and there's no incentive to make it ready to use for mainstream. It's cool and I wish it was in mainstream use, but I can't detach myself that far from reality.

But here's how I know you are detached from reality. You think that there are 20,000 users. Fine, I buy that (I would have guessed 10,000, but whatever). You think $800k in transactions is happening EVERY DAY. $40/day in transactions PER USER? There's no way that's even close to commerce of that level. I'd like to see how much commerce PayPal has per user per day. Probably are numbers, but I haven't looked. But I'd wager it's at least an order of a magnitude less than $40/day/user.

Perhaps there's little reason to use it as a buyer, for now. But thinking of a previous business I worked a lot in, the lack of transaction fees are a huge plus. Although really there is still some fees to convert the BTC to a real currency, I presume even higer than mtgox spread if you want GBP haven't really looked.

I was in computer hardware sales a few years ago. As a smalltime player, to compete with big vendors, you need to be cheap. also good, but you won't have customers if you're more expensive than the competition and don't do immense advertising. That meant a markup ~7.5% at best. For selling irl it's fine, cash is king and the banks only take 0.5% on cash deposits and a flat 20p on debit cards. But online, people are reluctant to use debit cards when they can't chargeback easily. When Paypal want 3%, and Visa 2.25% - that's a significant chunk of profits.

I sold silver on ebay about a month ago to buy bitcoin. I sold $70 worth and the price included shipping, I was surprised how high the fees were maybe over 10%.

I decide to check bitcoin marketplace and I saw a few awesome sites on the 1st page.

bitcoinhop.com
bitcoingamer.com
http://www.squarewear.biz
BTCdeals.com
programming services

not bad 2 months ago you could only buy alpaca socks.

I've got a little over $40 in PokerStars that I'd like to trade to someone for BitCoins if anyone's interested.

How much could a big retailer like newegg potentially save if they accepted bitcoins?

Assume there's no legal issues and either they feel comfortable holding lots of BTC or there's some exchange with lots of volume they can immediately sell at

Related question: Is it at all possible that by the end of 2012 the cheapest way to buy a 2TB external hard drive is at a website with btc in the url?

http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress....financials.png

newegg has a billion in sales every year. if we assume the credit card companies take 3%, and bitcoin would be <1%, i mean even saving 1% on each sale, and if only 10% of the people use bitcoins, thats a million right there.
lots of incentive for companies to integrate btcs imo

And maybe they get extra business too. I'd be more likely to buy from them. Of course this effect washes out eventually.

The problem I see is that Newegg won't want to invest anything significant speculating on Bitcoin. I'm sure they're big enough that they won't worry about having some exposure, but speculating isn't their core business. This means that they're going to be looking to trade out of bitcoin immediately and automatically. For them to do this they'd have to trust the liquidity on Mt Gox, but it also means that they'd have the cover the fees and spread on Mt Gox, which is going to eat into savings, possibly swallow them whole (I haven't actually done any calculations). I'd also be of the opinion that they'd have to offer the consumer a discount for using bitcoin (let's say 1%) as otherwise they have no real incentive (consumers have more protection via credit cards, although some people would obviously use bitcoin purely for the sake of it).

I'd be interested if anybody has done any actual calculations, but I suspect their unwillingness to not trade out the bitcoin will be the problem, and I can't see too many companies being willing to hang on to bitcoin in its current state.

There are 20,000 users of Bitcoin right now. Maaaybe 1% of that is new customers. They set up this whole infrastructure of selling coins and dealing with exchanges for 200 people? No way.

This also really only affects some of the users that are trying to spend their Bitcoins. Speculators won't bother with this.

I ran a poll on the forum asking what price they'd be willing to pay compared to cash price. (Assume $1 = 1 BTC). Pretty much no one was willing to pay anything more than the fair price. Most expected a discount, some of more than 5-10%. It's lunacy.

If any significant business uses them for this kind of stuff, it will greatly *lower* the value of the coin, as it is just a way to speed up flooding Mt. Gox with coins on the exchange.

It's clearly just going to be based on whatever they save on fees and fraud. I'm not too sure how much fraud hurts a physical product company like Newegg. Does anybody have any figures? They probably get a discount from the CC companies too.

I don't think this is true at all. If Newegg started selling things at a small discount in BTC tomorrow (not a realistic hypothetical), planning to immediately dump every BTC to Mt. Gox, do you really think prices would go down? There would be a massive influx of buyers to the market.

Newegg isn't a good early adoption candidate. A good target for early adoption would be a business that incurs higher fees. Any business that relies on wire transfers should look into bitcoin. Ebay power sellers might realize some gains too. I sold a book on ebay for about $10, the total fees between ebay and paypal were about 15%. That doesn't include any paypal chargebacks. If 1 out of 50 transactions goes bad, thats another 2%, so figure 17% to sell $10 items on ebay. I think thats one reason why one of the companies listed in the btc wiki is an ebay book seller.

I don't think there is a massive influx of people willing to jump through the hoops of going to Mt. Gox to save 1% - .065% (or more if they need them now), without the protections present in a CC system.

Unless you think this will spark a new round of speculation (entirely possible). Remember, the people with Bitcoins who aren't selling now are mostly of the "True Believer" status where they think they are worth $1000 each and they will be billionaires someday.

Every coin newegg sells is a coin someone else would have to buy or mine. If you assume newegg sells all their earned coins, and that some of the volume of their sales comes from former hoarding miners, then there would be net selling on mtgox. Of course the news of newegg accepting coins would likely cause the speculators to increase their purchasing.

In other words, it's hard to say what would happen to the price. I do think that before a retailer like newegg is ever going to use bitcoins heavily the price of a coin is going to have to settle a lot more. 10% daily swings in price could totally destroy a retailers margin.

How do you think Ebay would react to widespread use of some standardized bitcoin auction resolution site/app in their listings?

I know they own Paypal, and Paypal shutdown bitcoin business, but I think that was more about people legitimately breaking TOS than it was them getting scurred.

Anyone who thinks anyone is scared of Bitcoin is delusional. PayPal has regulations to follow and isn't going to do anything to piss off the government.

No one is scared of Bitcoin... yet.

Ebay and paypal aren't worried about bitcoins because currently it is harder to pay in bitcoins than paypal. Merchants might want people to pay in bitcoins, but getting a buyer to do that if they aren't already clued is a nonstarter.

I think for some collectibles niches, starting an auction/commerce site that uses bitcoins to replace barter might compete with ebay.

Read the entire thread after reading an article on a huge German news site.

I want to buy put options on bitcoins, the linked exchange doesnt seem to work, anyone know a way to bet on a falling bitcoin, only options though.

If you know someone you trust could you borrow them?

check #bitcoin-otc on freenode irc. Two sets of put contracts were traded there last night (between trusted members).

On another note, looks like 4 days of pent up Dwolla money finally hit mtgox, breaking the logjam of sellers at 9. Lots more press hits... Reuters, New York Times, the crazy Swedish pirate guy, haters on Quora. Really fun times.

The problem is, buying of reputable is do nothing, because I want to buy them for 12 months maturity and I assume I profit when the currency is almost completely worthless. So by backing out of the deal, he has nothing to lose, because his rep is in something that is worthless.

It would be on you though wouldn't it?

Borrow 1,000 bit coins from Mr X (if you can find Mr X)
Arrange a give back contract (12 months), +1% interest per month or something to make it worthwhile for Mr X
Get the 1,000 BC transferred to your wallet
Sell them
Wait up to 12 months
Buy 1,000 BC
Transfer them back

The other dude can't back out of the deal, only you can, so you need to find someone that trusts you and beleives you can cover them if they go to $1,000 per BC (as you would then be liable for $1,000,000 from $8,000)

This would be a short sell, which I dont want to do because of the unlimited upside.

I want to have the option to sell in 12 months for a fixed price. I pay the seller of the option a premium now to make it worthwhile.

Ah right got you sorry! (I'm a finance noob)