Buy a car with Bitcoins, save $5,000
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
As the November 9 sale got underway, your Reg reporter checked in with Holmquist to see how it was going. "It's going fantastic so far!" came the response. "We had so many hits this morning that I had to upgrade servers and add some DDoS protection."
So... did they sell anything?
If you wanted to be really paranoid, you could set up a checking account just for stuff like bitcoin, and only load small amount of money into it right before making purchases.
But those are all anyone needs in order to withdraw the entire contents of your account, and they're being stored on someone's presumably-poorly-secured server. At least with paper checks they're, well, paper and are likely physically given to the bank for processing.
If you wanted to be really paranoid, you could set up a checking account just for stuff like bitcoin, and only load small amount of money into it right before making purchases.
My credit card account comes with an online service to generate one-time-use card numbers, for buying things from companies you don't exactly trust. So this suggestion is perhaps not so overly paranoid.
Donald Knuth (author of The Art of Computer Programming) no longer writes personal checks.
You write a cheque to X. X hands it to their bank A. A asks your bank B for the amount on the cheque. B asks A for the cheque to check its valid. B sends money to A. Done. Which is why I thought they take days to be processed.
Since the writing of a Knuth article, checks have become less risky, but they're still more risky than credit cards. [1]
So like I said, don't give your banking info out to just anyone. There's still risk involved. Whether or not you find Coinbase overly risky is up to your own utility curve.
[1] Knuth cites an article [http://perimetergrid.com/wp/2008/01/01/checks-the-most-dange...] which has since been updated [http://perimetergrid.com/wp/2008/01/01/checks-the-most-dange...]
It is still optimised for micro-transactions where that 4% fee isn't a significant cost.
The popular gambling site satoshidice is responsible for the rapidly increasing size of the blockchain, now around 3GB.
Bitcoin has two main utilities, firstly it is very hard to prevent a bitcoin transaction from taking place, it can potentially be tracked after the fact if you aren't careful though.
Secondly the fixed limit means that it should become a safe store of value, assuming that bitcoin is successful in the longterm.
Bitcoin isn't really designed to scale up to VISA levels of transaction processing, instead it is more suited to be used as a clearing house, to track deposits and withdrawals.
You are right though, in it's basic form, Bitcoin will not work for micro-transactions where you want to transfer a few cents a few times a second. However, there are strategies [2] to support some forms of micro-payments.
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability
[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts (see example 7)
I suspect bitcoin blockchain transactions will never be very useful for micro payments, because of the confirmation delay.
If you use bitcoin as a clearing house though, which means you aren't broadcasting a blockchain transaction for every payment then micro transactions could work very well.
If the people behind this effort really want to get the BTC economy rolling, they need to figure out some way for more people to _earn_ their way into it. If you have a hoard of BTC, now is a good time to figure out a project that you want to crowdsource; if you wait too long BTC will be worth nothing, because everyone will be saving theirs for later...
This is not why it's called Black Friday. It's called Black Friday originally by the retail workers who had to man the stores that day. "Black" meaning bad or dark, in this case, like "this is a black day", rather than any reference to finance (or racism). Those who worked their way into the corporate structure of many retailers, or graduated college and moved on in their careers retained their floor-worker slang, and the term spread.
Business type-writters had red and black ribbons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)#Origin_...
http://main.wikispeed.softlaunch.352media.com/car
Personally, I'm not liking the chassy and it looks a bit shaky for my interests. That said, if everything is interchangeable, maybe I could get some better suspension in there.
It's an interesting first design and I'd like to see where it goes. Surely there's a way to design this to be more luxurious without sacrificing too much in terms of performance.