WordPress.com accepts Bitcoin
en.blog.wordpress.com
en.blog.wordpress.com
Crazy enough that it's genius.
I smile a little every time I see "Bitcoin Now Accepted Here". I personally don't use them, but the ideology behind the currency is fascinating and remarkable. Not to mention the credibility WordPress gives it (and hopefully soon, Reddit...).
I'm going to take the liberty to nit pick.
There isn't any ideology behind bitcoin. It's just a protocol.
Among existing serious bitcoin users, there's a pretty diverse range of political opinions (some of which I find pretty distasteful), plus disagreement on the actual merits and potential demerits of bitcoin.
I'm not even sure I would be in favor of labelling bitcoin as having a "monetary policy." Monetary policy describes governmental policy-making. The rules of the bitcon protocol are also unlike "policy" in that they can never change.
I know I'm nit picking, but I think that it's really important to keep concepts clear and crisp. (There's a bit of ideology for you!)
(or am I picking one now?)
Wikipedia has a good list of the common policy options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_policy#Types_of_monet...
Notice how many are focused on inflation (CPI and price level as measures of inflation/deflation). All of them are used by central banks to influence the markets. None make much sense for an virtual medium of exchange.
Now supposing there was a central bitcoin bank I'd suggest a policy of targeting low volatility. Bitcoins utility as a medium of exchange is a function of transaction cost and volatility risk. Still even without a central bank both attributes will improve with time. Thus the lack of central bank may become a feature by removing human fallibility.
The Milton Friedman/John Taylor position is that markets will adapt to pretty much any monetary rule as long as it is stable and predictable. Bitcoin's monetary rule is about as predictable as you can get.
The one part of the Keynesian story that I find compelling is the part about inflation being needed to address the problem of sticky wages. But wages in web sectors tend to be much less sticky. Free money's time has come.
I think a good deal of today's economic problems are connected to the fact that most people either do not understand or do not agree with this.
I disagree. It was motivated by particular strains of cryptopunk thought, has features designed specifically for long-desired applications like multi-signing or a built-in programming language for stuff like Szabo's smart contracts, the original Satoshi whitepaper was explicit about goals, and multiple design choices were made for non-technical reasons (such as a hardwired limit to coin issuance). Finally, in the very first block in the official blockchain, Satoshi included a newspaper quote about bank bailouts! Not the most neutral non-ideologically-charged topic in the world, let us say.
Certainly serious Bitcoin users have a wide range of views, but to say 'there isn't any ideology behind Bitcoin' is to just plain ignore everything about its conception.
That's great because a better payment methody something we really need. A payment method for a world where computers exist. Credit cards, paypal and friends are doing this job terribly, inequitably, opaquely and at a high cost.
For "card not present" transactions credit cards work like this: (1) a merchant tells CC company (through payment gateways) that a customer wants to pay them some amount (2) the credit card company says OK (or no) (3) If at any point in the next 6 months the customer demands that money back, they take it out of the merchants account. If this happens too often, they cut off the merchant's ability to accept credit cards.
Step 3 puts the entire cost of fraud on the merchant. They then find their own way of minimizing it. There's the cost of the actual payment processing (2%-4%), the cost of fraud & the cost of preventing fraud. That's around 2.5%-10% of gross. In some cases it just completely prevents entire business categories. This also amounts to a pretty steep competency requirement just to accept payments.
There are a lot of businesses and business categories that just don't exist because the basic infrastructure of the digital economy (money) is crap. We're basically using seashells.
Whenever a customer places an order and chooses to pay by Bitcoin, we will use Blockchain API to generate a Bitcoin address for the invoice. After the customer pays, they can press a "Check Payment" button and then the system will simply check the balance of the Bitcoin address generated. If it's greater than or equal to the invoice balance, it's considered "paid".
We keep a history of Bitcoin exchange rates (the NameTerrific rate) for tax purposes. All invoices have records of the applied BTC/USD exchange rate so they can be translated into fiat amounts in the books. For Australians, the GST is being accounted using the daily rate method (BTC/USD rate from the invoice, and daily AUD/USD rate from an official source).
The wallet gets cleared every 10 BTC or so to prevent theft.
[1]: https://www.nameterrific.com
[2]: https://blockchain.info/wallet/
EDIT: WordPress.com accepting Bitcoin is huge.
A company pouring $1M+ to develop a 65nm Bitcoin mining chip: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=69
It just shows the fundamental lack of equality or fairness in the 'currency'.
If we were still on a gold standard, would investing in new mining techniques signal similar about our currency?
In that sense the computation no less useless than any other cryptographic technique that has complexity to thwart brute force attacks.
[I may be completely off base here, I wouldn't call myself a bitcoin expert, but this is how I perceived it]
There is another mechanism that could reduce the need for proof-of-work though: the participants could instead show proof-of-stake[1], i.e. prove that they control a certain amount of currency. Somebody has created ppcoin[2] (a bitcoin fork) to experiment with this.
...and if these Bitcoin-mining ASICs are primarily purchased by people trying to attack the system?
Here in the US Midwest, in museums there are old coupons, tokens, wooden nickels printed by local banks, business, bars(!) and pressed into service in the 1800's when coins became scarce. The US Mint didn't respond for years, leaving us essentially without money. Caused a local recession.
Bitcoin may be flawed, but at least its obviously and predictably flawed. This stability should in the long run allow for much better planning on an individual level.
It is fascinating how people may misconstrue the plainest topics to turn them into something completely different. The subject of Fed creating the money has very little to do with current topic, and I did not express any indication that I somehow not worried about it (if you want to know so badly, yes, I am worried, very much, are you happy now?). However both nature of this problem and its causes are completely different from the topic at hand - and I specifically only compared bitcoin to gold and not paper money to avoid any temptation to this completely irrelevant turn. Of course, I was destined to fail.
Also http://bitcoin.com/ looks way more accessible and polished compared to last year. What are the major obstacles for mainstream adoption?
MtGox is a really good exhange.
Bitfloor is also really good and seems to be run by great people (plus it's located in NYC instead of Japan, which I think is nice), but you have to be willing to forgive them for a security breach in the recent past. (Never leave large amount of BTC in an exchange.)
CampBX is another good option, they are located in Atlanta, GA.
Sorry if I've left out anyone's pet exchange.
A (generally) better way to acquire bitcoins for spending (as opposed to speculation/wealth storage) is to use bitinstant. You can literally buy bitcoins at Wal-Mart and CVS (which are super ubiquitous where I'm from) using bitinstant.
edit: apparently you can also buy them using coinbase (a YC company). I didn't realize you could do that until someone else mentioned it, since they advertise themselves as a hosted bitcoin wallet.
> MtGox ...
> Bitfloor ...
If this is the first two you come up with I'm guessing none of them are reliable.
Anyway, all bitcoin exchanges are perfectly reliable for exchanging. Where they have had problems in the past is when people use them as a bank. Don't leave your fiat currency or coin there. Do your exchanging and then take your money out.
Also, it's easy to get rid of #0 as a fear. Does your bank (or more analogously if you have stocks, your account for some company's online trading interface) support YubiKeys or similar? http://www.yubico.com/ Mt. Gox has given quite a few of them away for free. (Mine was free.)
I understand why they need this and I appreciate that they are thorough in their measures to prevent fraud and money laundering. I even sent my passport to other companies, but only altered in a way that makes it unusable for identity theft.
But still: I don't trust them enough that I don't fear my passport scan gets leaked some day and is used for identity theft.
For anyone browsing the thread, this is part of an email their support desk sent me for accepted documents, which is significantly more permissive than the upload page for verification suggests:
1 A copy of your government issued photo ID such as:
- Passport
- Permanent residence card
- Driver’s license
2. Proof of Residence that is not older than 3 months such as:
- Monthly utility bill
- Internet Bill
- Cellphone Bill
- Tax Return document
- Residency Certificate
- Voting registration form
- Medical insurance
- Pay Slip
- Car Insurance Policy
- Medical Billhttp://store.wordpress.com/premium-upgrades/pro-bundle/
--
Here's what you can buy:
Pro Bundle (all upgrades in a single purchase)
Custom Domains
Custom Design
Premium Themes
VideoPress
Extra Storage
Ad-Free
Guided Transfer
Offsite Redirect
Actually, the Pro Bundle doesn't include all our other upgrades just a selection of our most popular upgrades at a discounted price.
The Pro Bundle includes:
A Custom Domain (Either a new one or map one you already own). The Custom Design Upgrade - Fonts, Colours, CSS. VideoPress video hosting. Makes your site Ad-Free. An extra 10GB of storage for your images/videos.
You can see the full store listing here: http://store.wordpress.com/premium-upgrades/
It seems to me that the move from "everyone knows everything" to a truly distributed model entails a lot of risk, and it's possible that the protocol just may not work at this scale. Is this a reasonable concern?
However, for just spending coin, it's easier to use a hosted wallet like coinbase.com (a YC company).
You don't need to run an actual bitcoin node yourself unless you're doing something beyond just using bitcoin for spending. (e.g. holding large sums for long periods of time, mining, building some service, etc.)
Electrum looks interesting, due to simplicity. What does it mean by using a remote server though? Do they just use a single block chain remotely and tell you what your balance is for keys <a-z> ?
Edit: Aha, the article links to http://https//bitpay.com/ instead of https://bitpay.com
Edit2: Aaaand it's fixed. Disregard this post.
link?
What are you looking for? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page has a lot of good info on a lot of stuff. reddit.com/r/bitcoin is a pretty helpful place to ask casual questions.
So many questions. Bitcoin is really making re-evaluate a lot of things. I think I've given you a sense of what I'm looking for.
I'm no expert, but I don't think that most banks would actually hold paper notes for every dollar they are storing for their account holders. In reality banks are already pretty much digital for most transactions.
What I am wondering is when* various governments are going to start enforcing existing regulations^, that apply to banks, on the various bitcoin exchanges.
* perhaps the exchanges already comply with these regulations, but I would be surprised.
^ don't ask me what the regulations are, I am guessing that banking is/should be a heavily regulated industry in most countries.
edit: formatting.
During the subprime mortgage, American banks (and some foreign banks but I can't recall them) were deregulated in a way that allowed them to have a higher ratio between their liabilities and what they actually held. This meant they could increase their financial investments without really having the money. I can't remember the exact ratio but it was something like 40-1.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_regulation#Reserve_require...
Here's an analysis of that report by economic analyst Tuur Demeester: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-04/bitcoin-seen-throug...
Here's an interview of Tuur Demeester by Max Keiser about his report: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5vowdygIPU#t=12m42s
Long story short: The ECB is worried about Bitcoin because unlike e-gold and other centrally clearing solutions, the peer-to-peer bitcoin doesn't have a central guy doing all the transaction clearing so there is no-one to bully and arrest.
Still a good read if only for a perspective change.
Intentional inflation and deflation of bitcoin is impossible, but one could imagine the creation of a digital currency where it would be possible.
You don't need to put bitcoins in a bank for "safe keeping," but in a mature bitcoin economy, you'd probably want to invest them in some form, so there would be banks that give out loans. They can't use fractional reserve banking unless they issue their own "notes" (digital or otherwise) that are redeemable for bitcoin. In such a case, there would be no required fractional reserve, unless one were to be instituted by law. Basically, in all these aspects, you can really think of bitcoin as a digital fom of gold. Banks used to hold gold in their vaults and give out redeemable bank notes, so this has happened before historically.
Legally, there are some export laws that may apply, but those depend on the good or service being exchanged.
- How banks would react? They would loose they power of creating money (which is good, since they create mostly sick kind of money - http://www.moneyasdebt.net)
- How goverments would react? Would they try to tax Bitcoin incomes, if yes, how to do this?
Though, I think Automattic wouldn't accept it as a form of payment if there was such a possibility.
Is there anyone who can enlighten me about the legality of Bitcoin?
It will be interesting to see what happens to these initiatives next time there is either an upward or downward move in price.
Does anyone know if Paypal gave a reason for blocking Bitcoin? Is it simply because it can be a competitor in the future? Oh well, more market for Coinbase and the others then.
The _real_ reason is that lots of scammers used paypal to buy bitcoins, and would then initiate a chargeback. High chargeback rates are painful for payment processors, and lead them to dropping those merchants with the highest rates.
I wish the designer of Bitcoin would've thought about this before creating it. Maybe he just didn't think Bitcoin will become that popular, and become orders of magnitude more valuable than a dollar in a more distant future.
http://blockchain.info/address/1JDELvQTsa7fGo9BQHhvSVUiYzy3u...
I think that wins the prize for the most hyped remark on HN, ever. Really, the world has not shifted to bitcoin, it won't shift to bitcoin in the near future and possibly never.
Bitcoins are interesting, a very nice implementation of the idea of a digital currency with some thought provoking possible consequences. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market), but it isn't a general currency at all, let alone that the world is switching to it.
What you are seeing is that a few companies have caught on to using bitcoin as a way to promote themselves because 'accepting bitcoin' is a way to get free press.
Can you get by for a month just spending bitcoin without any other resources than bitcoins at the beginning of the month, sufficient for a normal months' worth expenses?
When you can go to your local greengrocer and buy an apple with bitcoin I'll cede to you that the world has indeed switched to bitcoin. Until then, it's neat but not quite there yet.
I'll accept payment of US$250 or €250, whichever is the higher value.
The guys at https://www.bitinstant.com/ are in the process of making a debit card backed by bitcoins, so when that's out, you will indeed be able to buy everything you currently buy with a card. However, at that point I still wouldn't agree with the assessment that the world is shifting to bitcoin. For that I'd need to see at least a few billion dollars market-cap, I'd be much more comfortable with a trillion dollar market-cap.
This just means its early days for Bitcoin. I fear governments will present themselves as a major obstacle in the next 5 years. Lets hope i'm wrong, the idea of Bitcoin is really interesting (in a good way).