Licensing is by far the biggest problems. The rest has been solved with the Canadian ATMs. KYC, MSB/MTB licensing is gonna be a pain, along with it being unproven in law and being a huge compliance mess.

Getting a bank account to get the cash is going to also be a significant challenge, since almost all banks will shut down when dealing with any bitcoin related businesses. Say you can get $10 fee for each use. You'll need 100k transactions to even come close on this.

That being said, maybe pursue angel groups, they might have resources you don't have access to.

ridiculous 70 cents!!! outrageous!

Some of these "ATMs" are not ATMs since they use biometric detection to verify the user (palm scan, ID verification). The way to do it would be arguing it does not fit the current definition of ATM.

Yes, it's unfortunate that they used the word ATM. It's really just a bitcoin vending machine.

Doesn't it go the other way, where you can sell bitcoins for CAD?

I don't know.

Krugman NYT bitcoin article 12-22:


This is a tale of three money pits. It’s also a tale of monetary regress — of the strange determination of many people to turn the clock back on centuries of progress.

The first money pit is an actual pit — the Porgera open-pit gold mine in Papua New Guinea, one of the world’s top producers. The mine has a terrible reputation for both human rights abuses (rapes, beatings and killings by security personnel) and environmental damage (vast quantities of potentially toxic tailings dumped into a nearby river). But gold prices, while down from their recent peak, are still three times what they were a decade ago, so dig they must.

The second money pit is a lot stranger: the Bitcoin mine in Reykjanesbaer, Iceland. Bitcoin is a digital currency that has value because ... well, it’s hard to say exactly why, but for the time being at least people are willing to buy it because they believe other people will be willing to buy it. It is, by design, a kind of virtual gold. And like gold, it can be mined: you can create new bitcoins, but only by solving very complex mathematical problems that require both a lot of computing power and a lot of electricity to run the computers.


Hence the location in Iceland, which has cheap electricity from hydropower and an abundance of cold air to cool those furiously churning machines. Even so, a lot of real resources are being used to create virtual objects with no clear use.

The third money pit is hypothetical. Back in 1936 the economist John Maynard Keynes argued that increased government spending was needed to restore full employment. But then, as now, there was strong political resistance to any such proposal. So Keynes whimsically suggested an alternative: have the government bury bottles full of cash in disused coal mines, and let the private sector spend its own money to dig the cash back up. It would be better, he agreed, to have the government build roads, ports and other useful things — but even perfectly useless spending would give the economy a much-needed boost.

Clever stuff — but Keynes wasn’t finished. He went on to point out that the real-life activity of gold mining was a lot like his thought experiment. Gold miners were, after all, going to great lengths to dig cash out of the ground, even though unlimited amounts of cash could be created at essentially no cost with the printing press. And no sooner was gold dug up than much of it was buried again, in places like the gold vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where hundreds of thousands of gold bars sit, doing nothing in particular.

Keynes would, I think, have been sardonically amused to learn how little has changed in the past three generations. Public spending to fight unemployment is still anathema; miners are still spoiling the landscape to add to idle hoards of gold. (Keynes dubbed the gold standard a “barbarous relic.”) Bitcoin just adds to the joke. Gold, after all, has at least some real uses, e.g., to fill cavities; but now we’re burning up resources to create “virtual gold” that consists of nothing but strings of digits.

I suspect, however, that Adam Smith would have been dismayed.

Smith is often treated as a conservative patron saint, and he did indeed make the original case for free markets. It’s less often mentioned, however, that he also argued strongly for bank regulation — and that he offered a classic paean to the virtues of paper currency. Money, he understood, was a way to facilitate commerce, not a source of national prosperity — and paper money, he argued, allowed commerce to proceed without tying up much of a nation’s wealth in a “dead stock” of silver and gold.

So why are we tearing up the highlands of Papua New Guinea to add to our dead stock of gold and, even more bizarrely, running powerful computers 24/7 to add to a dead stock of digits?

Talk to gold bugs and they’ll tell you that paper money comes from governments, which can’t be trusted not to debase their currencies. The odd thing, however, is that for all the talk of currency debasement, such debasement is getting very hard to find. It’s not just that after years of dire warnings about runaway inflation, inflation in advanced countries is clearly too low, not too high. Even if you take a global perspective, episodes of really high inflation have become rare. Still, hyperinflation hype springs eternal.

Bitcoin seems to derive its appeal from more or less the same sources, plus the added sense that it’s high-tech and algorithmic, so it must be the wave of the future.

But don’t let the fancy trappings fool you: What’s really happening is a determined march to the days when money meant stuff you could jingle in your purse. In tropics and tundra alike, we are for some reason digging our way back to the 17th century.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/op...t&emc=rss&_r=0

I have used the one in Vancouver. You can buy and sell.


Also, biometric verification is only needed above a certain purchase amount.

Come on Tom, you are way too sophisticated to respond to that with a couple of memes. Krugman does in no way deny that governments debase currency and you know it.

All you did was click copy/paste. I guess he doesn't want to be your monkey.

LOLKrugtard

Making those memes and reading that filth is more time than cranks like Krugman deserve of my time.

That part you quoted is true. Many people in positions of power setting austerity policy have been predicting runaway inflation for years and it has failed to materialize. Instead of reevaluating their doctrine that money printing and near zero interest rates always leads to massive price inflation they simply double down on their denial and claim some kind of conspiracy is suppressing consumer pricing data. I suppose MIT is in on it as well. http://www.pricestats.com/us-series

Krugman seems to be thinking of bitcoin as a digital paperweight. He's focusing only on the "governments can't print bitcoin and there will never be more than 21 million of them" aspect and completely ignoring the payment network that lets you transfer wealth anywhere in the world almost instantly with low fees and without needing to trust any 3rd parties. Most likely Krugman has a very shallow understanding of what bitcoin is or how it works.

Bitcoin does in fact facilitate commerce, especially commerce that is international, online, and/or restricted by governments. Poker typically checks all three of those boxes.

This article is a wet dream for an Austrian school rebuttal (or ridicule). I'm sure someone would come along and say that Krugman's articles for the New York Times do not represent scholarly mainstream economics work. But these are the exact kinds of things believed by the vast majority of Americans, who have only been exposed to economics at the high school level, and parroted by the vast majority of media pundits here as well. The fact that so many either believe or don't question such statements is why the terrible status quo continues with so little challenge.

Yes, such a strange determination it is to want to turn back the clock on centuries of progress in the discipline of economic exploitation.

It doesn't take an economic genius to know that people value things by what ends they can be used for, taking into account the suitability and relative price of substitutes. Bitcoin can be used to transact parties around the world, without the need for a financial intermediary, and without the need to reveal each others identities.

No clear use for Krugman, and others in his position in the ivory tower.

You can never "boost" the economy by wasting resources and labor. You can boost bogus measures like GDP, but digging and filling holes will not raise the average standard of living no matter how much money you give away in the process. Only producing goods and services that are more valued than their means of production can you increase overall economic well-being. Burying and digging up things, or building roads and ports that have less value than what could otherwise be produced with the same materials and labor, can only be to our detriment.

Is there another site like Silk Road out there now ?

This video explains why Keynsian economics is flawed, in an entertaining way. "Creating employment's a straight forward task when the nation's at war and there's a draft. If every worker was staffed in the army and fleet we'd have full employment and nothing to eat.". The goal of the economy should be to produce stuff people want, not simply increase GDP (which is a very flawed measuring system).

Don't believe everything you read or watch

wait wa?

RSA Security company paid $10 million by NSA to allow NSA access to customer

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9BJ1C220131220



The more people lose trust in the governments the stronger BTC will become.

How could you? Unless perhaps you are schizophrenic.

Then again it is the 21st century. Much too old a reference I imagine.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Elliptic_...ture_Algorithm

http://chrispacia.wordpress.com/2013...s-and-bitcoin/

The unbelievable thing is that rather than using secp256r1 like nearly all other applications, Bitcoin uses secp256k1 which uses Koblitz curves instead of pseudorandom curves and is still believed to be secure. Now the decision to use secp256k1 instead of secp256r1 was made by Satoshi. It’s a mystery why he chose these parameters instead of the parameters used by everyone else (the core devs even considered changing it!). Dan Brown, Chairman of the Standards for Efficient Cryptography Group, had this to say about it:
I did not know that BitCoin is using secp256k1. Indeed, I am surprised to see anybody use secp256k1 instead of secp256r1.
Just wow! This was either random luck or pure genius on the part of Satoshi. Either way, Bitcoin dodged a huge bullet and now almost seems destined to go on to great things.

Keynes-ism is not economics it is a crime! The goal of government is to take peoples money with deficit spending, it is no different than going into your bank account and taking it. It is no different the Cyprus giving back 70c on the dollar or FDR confiscating peoples gold and giving them $20.67 per ounce. Then allowing banks to exchange at $35 per ounce. It is no different than some minimum wage worker working for $10 per hour to give their money to some government worker or teacher that does nothing for $30 per hour.

If printing or deficit money does not cause inflation why not give everyone $1 million? The reality is the inflation is there, it might be delayed, the cpi numbers might be doctored, international wage pressure might keep wages down in the USA, high unemployment might be putting pressure on lower wages, etc etc. There was a time around 1975 where the average U.S. citizen could go around the world and the people would awe in the wealth of the average american.

Do you really want to live in a world where the government decides who is rich and who is poor? The only road to riches for Krugman or Reich is spouting their propaganda of taking peoples money and forcing people to spend it on teachers.

When Full Tilt poker collapsed bitcoin was $1-$2. If you put $1,000 in bitcoin you would have $1 million now. You can let the government dilute your money away, or you can have a currency that should appreciate over time. A currency that appreciates is one where the is no fed printing and the government is running surpluses. Now your rent is going up and you have the nerve to even consider Krugman or Keynesians as nothing more than the problem, they are the cause of your rent going up. Furthermore when you have limited funds and a $2000 a month assisted living expense, there is no more work you can do you savings will be depleted and you can beg to the state to cover your housing costs. Where did your planned future go? Keynes-ism or theft.

Reading Krugmans actual article it is also very flawed. First mining gold is no different than any other mining or oil land based business. Bitcoin the mining will stop, it is only temporary (and basically one flaw of Satoshi) and I am glad the places with cheap electricity have an advantage. Then the ass believes the government has the right to print money to spend it on what it chooses as important $500 hammers, $100 a month oxygen machines, and $100,000 a year teachers.

If I were to eventually buy coins through Bitstamp and am verified, is it safe to load up the account with £/$ and have it sit there dormant until I want to buy in to BTC? I am unsure how I feel about sending money to a Slovenian bank account, being form the online poker world we are pretty untrusting with random websites asking us to send money via bank transfer etc

Its as safe to do this as it is safe to leave btc on there. On bitstamp I'd personally feel fine leaving whatever on there.