Thanks. Actually you can use this service to pay all kinds of bills. There are almost 700 billers in Australia that accept POSTbillpay. It's just that the BPAY® trade mark is a lot more reputable and familiar to Aussies.
1,727 karma · joined December 20, 2010
Contact: https://www.ryanzhou.com/contact/
I will open source the project once it has gained some initial traction. But before that, I will probably write a few tutorial-like blog posts to demonstrate how to integrate the seamless and unbranded Bitcoin checkout solution into any online business.
But of course, Bitbillpay is actually easier and faster to use than POSTbillpay. For one thing, you don't have to enter your credit number, and you can automatically receive an email with the receipt. (Australia Post will ask you to "print out".)
"As a cutting-edge IT guy and a professional webmaster, what else can showcase our difference? The answer is that we have Bitcoin!
Bitcoin, as a new electronic and digital currency, is being accepted internationally. It's also used in daily lives. You can use Bitcoin buy a cup of coffee, or easily convert it to cash. But in China, Bitcoin is still a fairly new thing. Today, we have a good news: from today, we are starting to officially accept Bitcoin as a payment method. You can use Bitcoin to buy all Baidu Jiasule services. Baidu Jiasule as an innovator in the Internet industry, is now the first cloud service provider to accept Bitcoin and give everyone a better payment method and experience."
If there's a payment aggregator doing this for a number of micropayment merchants, I can see some future in this. However, Bitcoin protocol is not compatible with polling transactions retrospectively, so that requires either a "credit" account or a small deposit to start with.
I've never seen any other major bank in Australia publishing any foreign currency offering for credit card processing.
Braintree is not a small player, so it's highly likely that they are able to get customized proposals from different banks and the choice of NAB should be a lot more than just the existence of a published product.
Of course we fully understand and respect the bank's decision if they choose to close our business account. We already had the intention to close the account anyway. What's unacceptable is the total lack of communication (especially when they refused to stop incoming transfers to prevent further fraudulent transactions). On top of that, we have already built in an advanced fraud prevention system (partly outsourced to a YC startup in this field) and in most instances fraudulent transactions were caught. However there was no opportunity or channel for us to discuss anything with the bank.
Personally I have no complaint regarding their decision. This blog post written by my co-founder is more of a contrast of totally different reactions of two big banks in Australia. One of the transactional banking specialists in our new bank attended our startup pitch, and quickly arranged a meeting with us to discuss the products and services they can offer. Not only they acknowledged the risk of our business model, they gave us a great deal of valuable advice and we discussed a new approach to transaction processing (which will launch in September). With regards to the risk, we were more than happy to put up a security to take more control over the banking arrangements and they're happy to give us relatively customized solutions.
EDIT: Regarding the personal accounts closure, I was severely affected in terms of my personal life and financial wellbeing, because majority of my financial transactions happen with Commonwealth Bank and my only credit card is with them (and it's blocked with full balance due Sep 2). Half of the cards in my wallet became useless overnight. Technically speaking, they have every right to do this and I don't think their Code of Banking Practice will ever protect me in this circumstance. I believe that it's a fine line to draw between "security risk" and "blatant discrimination". Unlike in the US, the "good behaviors" in one's credit history aren't freely transferable between financial institutions (only the "bad events" are recorded and shared). To me, the personal banking relationship is a lot more than just an account number and some dollars. It concerns the mutual trust between the bank and me that both parties have spent real effort and time building and maintaining. I'm a business guy and I know what the bank is doing can be considered "right", but in the end I feel socially worse-off and discriminated against just because of their issue with one of my startups.
"3.days.ago" at least by default is a TimeWithZone object in Rails.
3.days.ago.class
=> ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone
(3.days.ago..2.days.ago).to_a
Calling .include? should be equivalent to .to_a.include? in effect.
The liquidity doesn't matter if the ETF has a fixed pool (with regular creation and redemption). The volume of the ETF can exceed the volumes of all Bitcoin exchanges combined, because the investors are actually trading paper - certificates that represents some units of the trust, which holds Bitcoin.
If creation needs to happen, the investor needs to give the underlying to the trust in exchange for units. In this case, only BTC changes hands.
If redemption needs to happen, the investor will receive the underlying from the trust. In this case, only BTC changes hands.
So, at the trust's side, it's entirely possible to eliminate all fiat transactions after the ETF is issued. All future changes in units will happen with the underlying only, which is Bitcoin. This is similar to and consistent with most of the stock indices ETFs out there in the market.
An analogy: The liquidity of gold ETFs can obviously exceed the liquidity of physical gold. Actually it already does (for retail investors).
The only difference of this from actually shorting is the time. During the time of this operation, there may be adverse movement in the underlying price making the arbitrage too risky. It's true that fully efficient arbitrage may not happen.
But saying that there's no mechanism to maintain equilibrium price of the ETF is entirely wrong. If the ETF price is $60/BTC and the spot is $85/BTC, there's a huge incentive for investors to buy ETF and redeem and then sell in the spot market, even if it takes days. People who already have both BTC and USD in their hands can also quickly increase their BTC holdings, for free!
Therefore, the ability to short underlying simply doesn't matter, as long as ETFs can be created and redeemed fairly freely.
Thanks!
I wonder how hard it is to brute-force the credit card numbers. Given the last 4 digits, the Luhn algorithm and the starting digit of common cards (e.g. 4 for Visa), there are essentially only 10 digits left to crack. That's just 10 billion combinations.
As part of the source code is exposed, most likely the encryption algorithm/sequence is already known. If the passphrase is shared among all credit cards and the encryption algorithm is a fast one, there's a fair chance that eventually these credit cards are going to be exposed all at once.
Or am I missing anything?
EDIT: Even if the encryption algorithm is as slow as 10,000 tries per second, exhaustively attempting every single credit card number possible is going to take 277 CPU-hours, or about a day in three quad-core machines.
In the end they offered Bitcoinica one-year worth of services, which are basically nothing compared to the huge losses. I can expect 7 other customers to be treated similarly.
There were no details available at all. Not only they didn't follow up to the public, there's a shockingly lack of transparency to their affected customers as well.
EDIT: Sorry guys. We got some issues with a gem after installing the recently updated ruby2.0.0p0. The unicorn workers were timing out. TerrificDNS is completely unaffected and the site is already running again.
When disasters like this happen, a quick DNS change can be a life-saver.
EDIT: Based on Twitter search, all CloudFlare sites seem to be down.
In one instance the Sparrow crash caused the entire mail library to be corrupt and I have to download all my mails again.
EDIT: I'm open to any discussions about your opinions and ideas. Feel free to email me (email in my profile).
Basically I sold 100% financial interest in October/November 2011 and I stopped all involvement in the company after April 2012 when I started NameTerrific. The new management was unable to process refunds to affected customers and a series of chaotic events blew up. Many were made up (especially the insider job theory about the last hack) for profit (for example, the owner of the exchanger who wrote the story retained $40,000 funds illegally and refused to provide any information needed to reclaim the money).
Your domains will be safe as I had absolutely no intent to operate any unethical business. Bitcoinica was controlling at peak $1 million in assets during my management and nothing went wrong at that time.
1. Bitcoinica was a regulated financial service provider before closing down.
2. I sold 100% of it in October 2011, ~5 months before the first breach.
3. There has been no conclusive evidence about the last hack.
4. I was not a defendant of the said lawsuit. I have not provided any defence regarding the lawsuit.
You're a credible person, but I hope you have credible sources to post here.
I have tried my best to discountinue my involvement on Bitcoin projects while keeping supporting the currency. I'm genuinely creating value through startups and you should be able to see this through my effort in NameTerrific.
Domain market is extremely competitive. But for domain registrars that accept Bitcoin, I'm quite confident that NameTerrific is simply the best. That's probably why the adoption rate is quite high.
EDIT: Just to clarify, we're seeing much more credit card orders coming up recently so it seems that the market for Bitcoin is quite limited. I guess even the largest Bitcoin merchants (like WordPress) may not have a large absolute figure for Bitcoin use. However, to us, accepting Bitcoin is somehow a symbol of "geekiness" so it's a good thing to continue.
There are many services in the Bitcoin world with highly similar features and it's great to see a healthy competition in such an early stage.
IF you're operating as a business:
When you receive 1 BTC at 10, assuming your accounting currency is USD, you should record a 10 USD revenue and a 1 BTC cash inflow (shown as 10 USD in balance sheet).
If the value of 1 BTC rises to 15, for example, you need to make an adjustment to the Unrealised Foreign Currency Gains and Losses account to reflect the change. The BTC cash account should be shown as 15 USD in balance sheet (with the same 1 BTC holdings) and there's an unrealised foreign currency gain of 5 USD (a temporary contra-expense account in equity section).
When you finally spend the Bitcoin at 20 USD, close the "unrealised" account to the "realised" account, and increase the realised gains to 10 USD. Now you should have a 20 USD expense, 0 USD cash balance and a 10 USD realised foreign currency gain. That's 10 USD worth of "net" expense.
So, 10 USD revenue and 10 USD "net" expense. Everything is balanced. That's 0 USD closed to P/L.
IF you're a consumer:
It should be treated as 10 USD capital gain because you disposed the asset at a higher value than the cost base. Equivalently, you can claim a capital loss if you dispose the asset at a lower value than the cost base. However, whether this is acceptable in your country depends on your actual circumstances.