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Comment by Murkin | Hacker News Reader

Can someone give a concrete example of themselves using Bitcoins for something other than speculative trade ?

I sold my motorcycle for coins.

I was buying a lot of article writing service (0% payment fees is nice!)

I shipped several orders from international customers in my http://store.gifti.us and accepted payments in bitcoins (0% foreign transaction fees is nice too!).

I bough steam codes.

I built somewhat profitable for short period of time site - http://betco.in and used some profit in bitcoins to pay for development work on open source project.

EDIT:

Bought, just like few other visitors, articles in PDF at http://ubitio.us. This is also project of mine and I am going to contribute it to open source soon, so just another bit into bitconomy.

And I am working on two other projects involving products/services and bitcoin :)

This is just what came in to my head right away...

I'm curious, how have you found the currency value volatility for buying and selling goods and services?

I envision a bitcoin meme: 0% fees, 1000% volatility :)

It is stable enough to be able to convert bitcoins to usd at predicted rate (marked is liquid enough - and this is where speculators are good evil).

I am converting to usd only part needed to pay suppliers and rest leave in coins for now. Agree, income is fluctuating. But I am ok with it since so far I did not see technical issues with bitcoins itself.

But you are right - as I said below, huge fluctuation (although, what time period you used for 1000% fluctuation claim?) is a problem. And I will welcome stabilization at any level. Although market is too small to be stabilized soon.

What Open Source project?

betco.in - is mix of three projects: 1) python poker network - open source poker server 2) jpoker - open source jQuery-based poker client 3) the room - front-end for everything of it.

1 & 2 - were existing pieces of software which are actively developed further.

3 - started from scratch.

All of these are open source. Technically anyone can clone github repo and follow instructions to spawn copy of this project.

Project licensed under AGPL which secure all future changes into it will become open sourced as well.

Silkroad. It has consistant business and I know people who have used this website.

However, it fails to use bitcoin as a currency in the sense that other stores use dollars as a currency. The prices on Silkroad are adjusted to mirror the USD->BTC exchange rate dialy. And, I would suspect that the majority of the users are buying bitcoins to buy goods on Silkroad, and that venders on Silkroad turn their BTC back into USD often. These two use cases don't support BTC as a viable currency. It is being used exactly as detractors presumed: merely a way to launder money.

Using a currency as a means of payment is its main purpose. Using it to store value is also important, but secondary. Obviously some people where using it as an investment (which is kind of a store of value), but probably not the same people.

Anyway, a currency that people buy to use in particular markets is possibly a way that money got started in the first place. People traded for a currency to use in a (physical) market and then traded that into different stuff that day. Eventually, as things stabilized they might have been happy holding some money.

If bitcoin became commonly used as a way of transacting, but not of storing value or denominating prices it could still be a good enough starting point.

> If bitcoin became commonly used as a way of transacting, but not of storing value or denominating prices it could still be a good enough starting point.

Even if the only markets in which it was "commonly used as a way of transacting" were illegal ones, as a means of money laundering? Is that really a "good enough starting point," a way for drug dealers to clean their money?

I'm not sure that makes any difference. I'm not sure how big this market is, but it could plausibly be big enough. It would probably leak into other markets too. Drug dealers comfortable with bitcoin might also buy shoes with bitcoin etc.

And I'd be able to buy bitcoin from drug dealers trying to convert bitcoin into cash, buy shoes from someone with the bitcoin, and that someone could sell that bitcoin to someone looking to buy drugs from a drug dealer. The demand for bitcoin naturally smears over the entire market for bitcoin.

If a lot of people are buying bitcoins then that should push the value of them up (depending on the available supply of bitcoins) regardless of whether they exchange them back in to traditional currency shortly afterwards. It is a form of utility.

All currencies are valued against each other, it is no surprise to see the dollar value used most frequently to determine value, since dollars are the worlds reserve currency.

My opinion is that bitcoin is probably ahead of its time, the technology is amazing, and could be used in many different ways, and I am not yet ready to count bitcoin out just yet.

Amongst MANY other examples:

You can buy web hosting at http://cinfu.com, https://bitcoinwebhost.com, or https://kalyhost.com/?Currency=BTC

Purchase domain names at http://privacyshark.com, http://exoware.net, or http://bitdomain.biz

Use them at a variety of travel locations: http://bitcoin.travel/

Buy NewEgg stuff through http://bitcoinredemption.com or http://bitspend.com

Charity: http://bitcharity.org, http://bitcoin-charity.com, http://bitcoinsforcharity.org

http://gawker.com/5805928/the-underground-website-where-you-...

How real is that?

Like, I know the site exists, but how many people here know people who have successfully conducted commerce on it?

How are they keeping themselves from being exposed?

It's a tor hidden service, and it works really well. I know lots of people who have used it from both sides of the commerce equation.

It's the main driving force behind the price of bitcoins on the public exchanges, which makes for a rather novel opportunity for a market-moving attack I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

I know people who have "conducted commerce" on that site. It's real.

My understanding is that the real risk is taken by the buyer. The seller can anonymously receive payment, then drop the drug envelope into a random postbox. On the buying end, regardless of Tor and Bitcoin, they still need to have it shipped to a real physical location.

The seller still has to trade the bitcoins for something (either buy something with them, or trade them for $).

Unless they only buy virtual goods, there's a trail to follow.

The seller can easily buy virtual goods, like other e-currencies, and hide his trail that way.

Yes, that's what I said. But on the other hand, the BTC market is still very poor. Besides domains and hosting, what other virtual goods are there to buy?

Real money. Sell bitcoins to people who are buying them in order to purchase drugs.

There's nothing inherently linking the two transactions of "X bitcoins transferred from wallet #1 to wallet #2" and "Y USD transferred from Bob to Joe" - with sufficient care and redirection, you can make it very difficult to track down exactly where the bitcoins are being traded for real money.

Well yes but you are assuming you can find a buyer who is willing to do a straight bank transfer rather than using an exchange. And most people much prefer to use the exchanges. Especially if they are buying drugs with the bitcoins; if they did a bank transfer to a person selling drugs, they could have just used that payment method in the first place.

But now you have to trust "Joe" to make sure his real identity can't be easily linked from his bitcoin addresses, or else they'll find out about the USD transfer.

Silk Road has worked well for me. Seems real enough.

As the article states, the site is only accessible through the TOR network, which is completely anonymized. All transactions are completed through Bitcoins, which is also pretty anonymous. When shipping the drugs, users are urged to get creative, such a vacuum sealing to avoid smell detection.

I don't understand how it would be safe at all for the recipient. If the "smell prevention" failed couldn't the police just arrest whomever it was shipped to? I can understand that the shipper is pretty safe dropping the package off but if it's flagged as black-market goods it seems like the buyer is totally busted.

A system that ships millions of parcels in an almost completely automated way that has only occasional narcotics canines attempting to sniff literal mountains of packages to find one that has an ounce or less of substance that has been vacuum-sealed multiple times.

Then, they have to setup a trap in which the recipient knowingly takes delivery (and there can be no other way than the recipient signing for it, or else it would be entrapment or just mis-shipment, which is just as common) and catch them. All for a person who bought a small packet of drugs.

I think the Feds even consider such a thing a lost cause.

The law requires a little more proof than that, otherwise you could just ship drugs to people you don't like to get them arrested.

How would it get flagged as a black-market goods?

You can buy magic cards at abugames.com and electronics at newegg.com (through a proxy) using bitcoin.

i actually make a living buying and selling magic cards, and i can attest that ABU Games is legitimate. I sell cards to them often, and I was unaware they took BitCoin!

Thanks, I just bought some cards using bitcoins to complete my Unglued collection! My first bitcoin transaction for real goods!

I bought iTunes gift card codes for the US store.

While there is an iTunes store in Germany, some of the apps aren't available (e.g. TV Station apps that I could use with a VPN) and with the current euro/usd ration, the US store is cheaper.

This is even more useful for renting US movies, because the German iTunes movie store completely sucks. I hate it that there's no good streaming service in Germany. Or do you know one?

Not that I know of. I usually use "unblock us" (http://blog.marc-seeger.de/2011/04/07/hulu-and-iplayer-outsi...), but I guess that's mainly for TV series rather than movies.

Yes http://betsofbitco.in - it's the only thing I ever used it for.

I recharged my account on link2voip. That transaction was easy and fast and there was no fees for either party.

I don't know who, but I know that people have subscribed to porn via btckink.com

I bought a license for TotalFinder with Bitcoin.

Eating burgers at room77 in Berlin, Germany

Seconding hippich -- gambling, for one thing. All gambling sites require you to ship currency on and offline. Normally the site swallows a 5-7% fee for that each way, which is why it takes so long -- to prevent you from doing it too often. With Bitcoin you can deposit, win, withdraw in an hour and you'll get better odds because the casino's got 10% more money to throw at the games.

Sorry to hear betco.in's going down -- StrikeSapphire.com will stick around no matter what the price goes to, because it's just a good, efficient way to take bets, process payments, and pay people out.

This make me think - there was recently a huge scam in the poker world - some of the major sites (FullTilt for example) were using clients money as their revenue. With bitcoins the clients could check that the bitcoins were not transfered from the company address.

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