1.) If you wait for a few confirmations from the bitcoin network (each confirm is ~10 minutes) before delivering your item, there is 0 chargeback risk. There is a slight, very very slight chargeback risk (in bitcoin talk this is called a double-spend) if you ship your product right away without waiting for any confirmations on their bitcoins they sent you.

2.) Sure, pm me. Not much. Depending on the complexity of your site/shopping cart app, could prob be done for under 10 BTC.

3) The Trade page on the bitcoin.org Wiki is the best listing of bitcoin-available products and services. List it there, it is usually the first stop for people with the question, "what can I buy with my bitcoins?" - there are also other sites and directories tailored for BTC business, just poke around the official bitcoin.org forums.

fizz ty ty pm'ing you now

It should never take you that long. Sending to Mt. Gox takes little time. Selling can be automated. Also, if you really wanted to do it faster, just keep a reserve on Mt. Gox, sell those immediately, and replenish when your orders come in.

A scathing review of BitCoins, a good read:

http://www.quora.com/Is-the-cryptocu...r/Adam-Cohen-2

I'd be interested in peoples thoughts

This tells me the author doesn't quite understand it. If everyone did it, you are less % likely to 'win' them, which means the electricity to run the computer at 100% becomes less and less worthwhile, so people will drop out and it will stabilise. Is that a fair criticism? (Have I understood it correctly?)

This is an interesting point I haven't considered

This is almost certainly one of the biggest weaknesses of the bitcoin economy given it's fixed supply. Case in point: Paul Krugman's classic article on the collapse of the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op - http://www.slate.com/id/2202165/

check the bitcoin forums for a full rebuttal to that post - he clearly doesn't understand the technology.

And sure, anyone can comment about what they think the exchange rate to USD should/will be, any of these hatchet jobs that include blatant errors about the technology can easily be ignored.

I'm convinced > 50% of these types of posts articles are pure ignorance, someone who hears about it and without fully investigating drags out the usual strawmen from a classical economist point of view. A significant percentage is probably also bitterness.

as far as the tired refrain about hoarding - the difference between 'bad hoarding' and 'proper saving' is one of perspective. And according to the blochain, the 'velocity' of bitcoin movements is only increasing along with the price rise.

His followup
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2612237

Another reason against bitcoins.

The public opinion is made by people how are against the technology.

I started reading this thread because of an article on a well known German online news site and their coverage was extremely positive. I saw the bitcoins thread here before and I had no interest in opening it, I actually thought it was something completely different. If the article had been negative, I would have no interest in bitcoins what so ever.

This is a major point and the entire community doesnt get it, because a lot of them are very young and naive.

It's not the best product that sells, it's the best advertisement that makes you money.


Right now a lot of people get interested in bitcoins because of the high price and the absurd rate of return. This is some sort of advertisement, but I dont think it's enough.

It is annoying to read negative articles by people who clearly haven't done their homework. Tyler Cowen made a comment that as soon as someone figures out how to do the cryto with dollars bitcoins would be useless, but I don't think he considered that may not be possible.

Gresham's law is a good argument against bitcoin ever going huge mainstream. USD are extremely easy to use and inflationary, so why not spend them first. The obvious counter to this is that bitcoin will get used where it is better than dollars. For a US player, funding a poker account is easier in bitcoins. Other illegal uses will probably drive adoption and may already be. International wire transfers are expensive and difficult. Thats one legal use where coins are better.

These are all good points, but the thing is, if the technology is sound, it doesn't matter what people think. If there are advantages, those who don't use it will lose and those who do will win. Yes, the general public is dumb. But they don't need to understand it or buy into it. We aren't at that stage and we don't need to be. The infrastructure is very small now. This is the internet in 1993.

People will move to it if its easy to use and it has advantages. If they see other people do cool things with it, they will use it. Simple as that. Let them be skeptics now. A lot of people thought PCs were completely pointless as well. If there is profit to be made and an advantage to use, someone will make it accessible for the masses.

I'm fairly unconvinced by this Cohen guy, and also some of his examples make it clear that he didn't study the subject all that much.

He can only be argueing that a decentralized currency is impossible, right? He's backed off the word "scam", which is good because it's pretty ridiculous. Although, even though he's backed off it he does still seem to think it. He brings up the Fed creating money, and says that they don't just mail it out to random people. That's true, but they're still creating money.

Also, fwiw I think that the bitcoin model is very kind to early adopters, and they're likely to be the first to gain serious wealth if the currency succeeds. This doesn't mean that it's a scam. I honestly think that the notion of it being an outright scam is utterly ridiculous, and could only be thought by somebody who hadn't examined the system.

This could be a problem if the value never gets any sort of stability. However, the economy is too young to use its current volatility to predict its future.

People have mentioned the Washington baby-sitting co-op and Gresham's law. However, I don't see how either of these apply as there is no set rate of conversion. In the baby-sitting co-op each scrip was for 30 minutes of baby-sitting, the value of the scrip didn't depend on how much there was in circulation and there was no market where you could, say, accept 1 scrip for 60 minutes.

Okay, but seeing as I can apparently buy things such as Pepsi with bitcoin now, if I'm so convinced that Bitcoin is going up then why do I have any dollars at all? People will also buy things because they need/want them, not as an investment.

As far as I can tell this whole section is nonsense. People in a certain country will have to accept its fiat currency to settle a debt, but there's no state guarantee that you can exchange it for anything else like he's insinuating (for most of the world anyway). He says that currency exchange rates could change but they'd never go away completely, but this is clearly not true. It's pretty obvious that that's way more likely to happen to bitcoin than the euro, but there's no 100% guarantee of either and the chances of it happening to bitcoin would go down as the currency became more successful.

I will be interesting to see what happens when there's a major hiccup, technological or otherwise, in the Bitcoin economy.

He also uses really annoying meaningless sound-bites like he isn't about to start accepting his paycheck in bitcoin, but nobody is suggesting that he do this at the moment. Actually, I'm not sure why I bothered writing a reply, he isn't being logical at all.

My main concern with bitcoin is that if and when the early adopters decide to liquidate I don't see any way the market could hold up.

I mean a guy with $25k or so ran the market up almost a dollar per coin the other day in about 15 minutes. Imagine what someone looking to sell 300,000 bitcoins would do. Obviously he'd be stupid to just dump them like that, but one major dump could create a race to the exits and a complete freefall.

This is a bad scenario, and I could only see this play out if there was a legit reason to panic. Perhaps a new blockchain gets really popular. Perhaps there is an unrecoverable security flaw.

The beauty of this is the early adopters are mostly true believers. They also didn't have to invest much to get that much. People panic when they lose money. They don't panic as much when they lose "could have had" money. Go to a poker table, find a guy who bought in for $100, ran it up to $1000, then loses it all. Then find his buddy who bought in $1000 and lost it all. Who is more pissed?

So the real thing is, what sets a panic in motion? If it drops, the true believer believes it will go back up. It also takes time for him to sell his coins. So he *really* needs to be rattled. What would cause this to someone who doesn't have much skin in the game?

Now no one would be dumb enough to sell that many coins all at once. So that should alleviate that case.

I think a panic is much less likely than a drying of interest and an increase in interest to sell where the price dips a bit lower and lower each day. Does that start a panic? Possibly, hard to tell. I've seen some pretty decent dips and thought we might see a mini panic, but each time it's come back strong. Hopefully the early adopters are selling a bit off to make sure they don't panic when the time comes.

I don't think anyone with that many coins would ever dump quickly. Wouldn't they actually be losing money by driving the market down? Sell 50,000 BTC make a little money, crash the market, make other 250,000 bitcoins worth drop.

Yeah, but currency in the co-op was pegged to one hour of babysitting. Bitcoins are market-driven, and their price could easily fall to $0. If the currency doesn't catch on, they'll become worthless because no central authority is backing them with a gold-standard or babysitting-standard or whatever.

What's weird is that Cohen's trying to argue that bitcoins won't work because people perceive them as too valuable to spend. Huh?

Panic selling, wouldn't that only be a temporary down swing before correction?

It would be a stupid thing to do. But then so was what looked to be one person buying $25k all at once and driving the price up the whole time.

I think the points you and the previous poster make about why this isn't likely to happen are valid, but if the whole market is resting on all the early adopters acting rationally then that's a precarious situation.

Currency Confidence Quiz for posters who have a non-negligible stake in bitcoins:

Which of the following scenarios would incite you to sell off your BTCs?

a) You wake up tomorrow, check the markets, and see that volume has spiked and the USD/BTC rate has dropped by 25%. You can't find anything that may have triggered a big loss.

b) Same as above, but with a 50% drop.

c) You head over to MtGox and see the FBI/DOJ domain seizure page.

d) Krugman devotes an NYT column to explaining why he expects BTC to be worthless within 6 months. You happen to see it the instant it goes live, so the market hasn't reacted yet.

a) I hold. Possibly buy a small amount more.

b) I buy big at $5. I have a bunch of money sitting on Mt. Gox for this purpose.

c) Figure out the new address for Mt. Gox. Possibly sell some if I can beat the rush. Buy back after the price drops.

d) I buy a large amount more. Krugman saying something negative is the biggest endorsement you can get, and huge exposure. Krugman attacking would mean it's made it, and it also would guarantee that it would be worth something in 6 months since he's never right.

I have about $1,000 worth of BTC... and would probably buy in for more in all four scenarios during the panic.

Be greedy when others are fearful, be fearful when others are greedy.

Are you at all concerned with leaving USD or BTC on MTGOX?

My responses are pretty much the same as TC's, except I don't have a bunch of money on MTGOX. I've got another $1k on the way to Dwolla to increase my position.

Any thoughts on best/worst times to buy BTC? Looks like it spikes a little immediately after a difficult increase, and trends down over the course of a weekend, but I'm not so good with this stuff

Alright, since you're clearly bullish, TC, let me put it this way: what would induce you to liquidate your position? Is there anything that could happen in the next 24 hours that would get you to cash out, or are you committed to being in this thing for the long haul?

Also, as one of the (relatively) early investors, how cognizant are you of the fact that you only win when enough other people are confident about the currency? Does this ever cloud your public statements about BTC? That is, would you ever lie about staying cool when faced with a panic even though you know you'd sell? [There's really no way for you to answer this question in a meaningful way, but I'm throwing it out there anyway.]

I only bought a stake I'm comfortable losing almost all of it. It's a gamble investment.

Biggest threats are government cracking down on getting money into the system, and a competitor that is superior. Those are my two biggest reasons to exit. Or I just think it gets overpriced.

I definitely understand the public perception of it. I had money going to Gox and there was a mild panic, and I tried to instigate it going further If I were to put a significant position, getting some propaganda type videos to drive hype would be a big part. I've even considered leaking false press releases to drive demand up. There are lots of dirty tricks.

But my answers above are honest. I have cash on Gox specifically for buying dips. I can reevaluate based on why it goes down. I have specific valuations based on probabilities of various scenarios, and if those valuations are changed, I'll change my position. My position is not huge by any means (and becomes smaller each time I go to betco.in. I think if I put more in, I'd definitely sell some off on a drop. But that would be a different type of investment.

I am concerned about it a bit. I'm less concerned because I'm pretty sure they have most of their money in Japan and I'm assuming they are following the laws of the land there. They might lose a small amount of what they need to float in the US.

My reason for leaving it on Gox vs. Dwolla - it takes a while to get to Gox. Dwolla is a small startup, so it's not like it's super safe there either. I need to act quickly, and going Dwolla to Gox takes time.

The weekend downturn I think is a myth, at least people put enough money on Gox to counteract it.

My guess is you are more likely to see a rise when people are awake and less when they are sleeping. If it was easy to predict this, I'd make a fortune daytrading it. The best thing is to look for when big buyers push it up. I think you are more likely to see big buyers than big sellers (strong surges, trickle back down).

scary, but I pretty much agree with TC.

I'm not worried about the govt. That's a minimum 1-2 years out, a lifetime in the BTC universe.

I'm worried about an exploitable tech flaw or a competitor. A true competitor, meaning p2p - not Googlecoins or YahooCoins (those do almost nothing to hurt BTC - see FaceBook Credits). The first mover advantage for such a p2p service, not backed by any corporation, is insanely large - just not a reasonable risk.

So tech problem: SHA256 broken (quantum computer maybe), colluding operators of mining pools trying to double spend, transaction spam causing network issues, New 'Ultra' miner finding blocks every 5 seconds then the difficulty ramps to the point where nobody else gets coins - and that person/entity then controls the network, things like that.

All have mitigation strategies. But something like that would likely get me to sell, assuming I was one of the 'first' to find out about it.

If krugman actually said it was doomed to failure, that's pretty bullish to me.

I've also got around $1k in bitcoins. I started with $200, sold some silver to a guy to get me to about $500-$600 and the market got me the rest of the way to $1,000.

I agree that pretty much all those scenarios have me buying (ignoring any potential to sell and buy back at a lower price). The 50% drop would make me nervous enough that I might just hold.

The biggest thing that would cause me to sell is anything that should create a legitimate loss of confidence in the currency. If there's a legitimate competitor that's a big issue. If there are any major flaws (security, usability, etc) that come to light that's a big issue. These are the sort of things that would have me selling, and I'd sell first and ask questions later at a credible hint of any of that. If it turns out to be a non-issue I can always buy back in.

Other than that, like others have said, I'm content to let it ride.