6-8 Weeks Until Bitcoin Debit/Credit Card, says BitInstant

But isn't international credit/debit cards (even such with "limited charge") a solved problem? Except when under 18, all my credit cards were always international.

Many cards in America have foreign transaction fees. There may be other fees associated as well.

That said I have looked into cards with no foreign transaction fees for future international travel. They do exist, but one more issue is making sure they support "chip and pin" for European countries.

A friend from Finland came to the US for a mutual friend's wedding. He did some shopping at the mall while we were out together, and his Finnish credit card wouldn't read at Abercrombie, so they had to pull out the old slider to copy the card.

Using cards internationally can be hit or miss.

Good question.

- You never know when you'll have a fraud alert and a disabled card. When you're travelling overseas, even if you call ahead to notify the card company, you're a lot more likely to get a fraud alert. You know how you can get stuck on hold with your card company, lost in touch-tone hell? Well imagine that on cell phone roaming charges with a dying battery on a noisy street corner.

- You never know what will be accepted. Some machines only take chip and PIN (which is the norm in Europe and Asia, they think signing a receipt is weird), sometimes a clerk doesn't know how to do chip and sign or swipe and sign (which is universal here in the US).

- Most of all, you're in a country where you dont speak the language, the ATMs look different, you might not be able to read the signs or even have a conversation with a cab driver.

When your card gets rejected, you want to have a backup. So, two credit cards (from two different providers) and two debit cards (from two different providers).

Seconded; not sure how easy it is to get one if you don't already have a brokerage account, but no annual fee, no foreign transaction fee, and no ATM fees is great. It's a debit card, but that's better for international travel, as you'll need to take out cash, and I don't think you can get credit cards that won't charge a fee for a cash advance.

(As an aside - never never change cash for travelling abroad, the commissions/spreads are ridiculous)

As for bitcoin, I feel that the volatility with respect to regular currency make a debit card not that useful unless you're an ideologue or want to speculate/easily get cash out

> Not the fact that its value fluctuates so wildly ?

This does not worry me at all, since the value has been mostly fluctuating upwards. The positive risk outweights the negative.

With this card, people can invest in to bitcoin small amount each month, and they still can use their bitcoin reserves when they need.

Miners are receiving nearly $100K USD per day but the share to the smaller operators is often just small amounts, oftentimes $20 or so per month. The cost for them to cash out using the bank system is often expensive. This provides an economic method to cash out small amounts without incurring high fees.

That's mostly a volume problem I think, granted one of the problems with Bitcoin is it was specifically designed with no levers. Stability can never be manipulated, so we're at the whim of nature.

When asked how long version 1.0 of Stack Overflow would take to produce, Jeff Atwood famously replied "six to eight weeks" without any sort of serious planning or consideration. It took quite a bit longer. Listeners of the Stack Exchange podcast got to hear Joel Spolsky make fun of Jeff for this many times.

I may or may not subscribe to your politics, but you are sorely mistaken if you think bitcoin stops most of the problems with the worlds financial system( unless you consider how Central Banks handle the money supply such a problem). Using BTC instead of USD or GBP changes nothing for Goldman-Sachs or Barclays but the denomination used to value the financial instruments they manipulate ( oh and maybe who's tax laws they have to evade).

Even if we are talking about comercial banking as apposed to investment banking, little changes.Bitcoin is just a protocol. However, as more people interact with it via exchanges that may hold their private keys(think mtgox,bitconica, etc), we start to see things that look a lot like comercial banks: organizations run by people entrusted with the currency you store with them. The owners of these "banks",whether we white guys tanned by trips to the cayman islands and the vineyard or monitor-tanned cipher-punks of some more cuddly ethnicity/gender, can and eventually will abuse that privilege. The will abscond with peoples money, commit fraud, issue bad lonas and do any number of other things with it. Moreover, in the case of bitcoin exchanges,there is very little regulation and no legal recourse in the event of theft or default(since all transactions are final and there is no FDIC for bitcoin).

Bitcoin has deflation baked into the system. Deflation is _terrible_ for the economy because it encourages people to hide cash under mattresses instead of spending it on useful projects. (Or in more abstract terms, deflation raises the minimum viable rate of return on investment.) We've learned this lesson well. All the really terrible depressions --- the 1870s, the 1930s --- featured crippling deflation that kicked the economy while it was already down. When Williams Jennings Bryan seared "you shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold", he was talking about how using gold for money kept inflation too low and hurt ordinary people in the economy. (Bryan's "free silver" movement would have been inflationary and beneficial.)

One important thing stopping the current depression from being as catastrophic as the great depression is the policy of the Federal Reserve (which is hugely influenced by Goldman Sachs) of printing money and keeping interest rates at 0%. If they didn't do that, we'd be far worse off right now.

So yes, as far as regulating the money supply goes, I'd trust the directors of Goldman Sachs over some algorithm any day, especially when that algorithm seems to have been designed by people with a very dogmatic theory of value, a theory that history demonstrates is incompatible with happiness.

I think he's referring to the centralization rising up around the currency, not necessarily the currency itself.

Keep in mind that every transaction, whether it be email or bitcoin, has to involve two parties. If the centralised solution become widespread, it becomes difficult to avoid it because the chances are that the other party is centralised, even if you're not.

How does "chase" sound to you?

In my country we have a bank that is called "roberry". Very popular. Look it up its called "skok" bank szewczyka.

Also, BitInstant, for its length, is more memorable and makes sense.

Can you quote user bitinstant from the IRC log on this. I see only the following:

> <bitinstant> JimN, the card is denominated in USD, EUR, GBP so far

hmm so who own the best hardware win the game? what if Google decided to join!?

So, the only way to get some bitcoins for a single person would be hacking sites like bitcoinica or users? Also, is there a live statistic, which shows how much bitcoins exists right now?

The computing work secures the block chain. That's the opposite of wasted.

In your computation certificate proposal, would you be able to trade certificates? If so, each grid network would be able to trade counterfeited certs (generate certs for which no work was performed). If not, it isn't a currency. Not to mention that exponential increases in computing power would cause the system to be inflationary, where a goal of bitcoin is to be deflationary.