Sambdala

For a transaction that either isn't shipped immediately (any retailer of physical goods) or that you can rescind (digital item with DRM), it's perfectly safe to accept a transaction that has been propagated to the network but that hasn't been 'confirmed' yet.

However, you wouldn't want to, for example, run a gambling site that accepts and pays out bets immediately after they show up as 'unconfirmed' because you wouldn't have recourse if they managed to double spend.

For this customer specifically, yes. However, anyone that doesn't use a Coinbase account will be sending actual Bitcoin.

It's just as simple to use a variety of other services to pay.

With any BTC payment service (including Coinbase), you also get the option to pay by QR code (if using a mobile wallet is easiest) or copy/pasting an address (if you're using a desktop/web client) which is at least as easy as redirecting to Coinbase, signing in (if you aren't already), and then redirecting back to the merchant's site.

There's a list of other communities at a spoof site I made a while back: http://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com

I would argue in this case that Bitcoin is likely to be more effective in a huge number of cases, not less effective.

I agree with the first part of your second paragraph, but I don't necessarily think it's going to apply here for any places where we see Bitcoin in wide deployment.

Yeah, this is likely to be the case.

Part of the genius of the block award being so top-heavy in the beginning is that it made the network much more secure than it would have been if it had relied on transactions from the beginning which will allow it to mature and stabilize before supply & demand determines what the market is willing to bear in transaction fees.

In addition, it allowed a decentralized method of distributing the coins that isn't able to be gamed.

"Some guy in Arizona can set himself up online, sign up for Stripe, have no set fees, and accept a payment from someone in Germany (or NY or Australia) that afternoon."

Anyone can take payments using Bitcoin in less time than it takes to sign up for and implement the Stripe API (I would know; I've done both), and you don't have to have a bank account in an approved jurisdiction in order to do so.

They can either do this by using the technology directly or using an intermediary such as Coinbase.

"Bitcoin focuses in on those areas where it has a strategic advantage over cards and ignores those where it doesn't."

Thankfully Bitcoin doesn't care what it's used for, and there will probably be people trying to implement a Bitcoin solution for all these areas; the ones that find a niche will survive, and the ones that don't will fail. Either way, we'll (in theory) end up with the services that Bitcoin is suited for, and the ones that it isn't suited for will continue to use more traditional methods.

Some people are interested in the rising price, some people are interested in the interesting things that can be built with and/or on top of it, and some people are interested in some other aspect of the technology that has sprung up around it.

Before you get too gleeful though, I would wager only a small percentage of people who have ever bought Bitcoins have sustained a loss as of today. Besides, there's nothing wrong with putting money behind a technology and then reaping either a gain or a loss based on how successful it becomes.

My actual point was that you can't look at what the fee structure / usability / etc is today and conclude there's nothing useful there.

This is especially true with the more common argument of, "Sure, I can see why someone would find it mildly useful for use a, b, or c; but I don't think it's useful today for more mainstream purpose x, y, or z, so I think it's worthless." Especially when (so far) the abc list keeps growing and the xyz list keeps shrinking. I'm not sure where that trajectory ends, but I personally think there's a lot of interesting problems that will be solved with crypto-currency.

The only reason is that credit card companies haven't implemented such a system.

I'm actually shocked that we've been able to use our current pull payments system for so long without more problems than we've currently seen.

One innovation I did like (which I only saw when I was using Bank of America) was a feature that allowed you to create new, internet-only, credit card numbers on the fly with a self-chosen credit limit that was tied to your checking account. I would have loved to see this implemented in a physical card so that you could just use a different cc# for each separate transaction and only authorize it (in perpetuity) for the exact amount of the transaction.

If it's not a core competency (although for certain marketplaces, it may be), you can use a 3rd party escrow.

You're already effectively using an escrow service when you provide a Credit Card payment option; you just don't get to choose who provides the service, you can't unbundle it from a larger product offering, you have very little control over it, it doesn't work well for certain types of goods & services, and it's built on top of a pull payment network instead of a push payment network.

I'm not entirely sure what point you're making?

...currently.

I don't think most people are interested in Bitcoin primarily because of the utility it currently provides and the infrastructure that has so far been built.

Such an online marketplace should have an escrow included then if they wish to use Bitcoin as a payment method.

I believe the Silk Road(s) have used such systems.

Braess' Paradox "states that adding extra capacity to a network when the moving entities selfishly choose their route, can in some cases reduce overall performance. This is because the Nash equilibrium of such a system is not necessarily optimal."

Also, isn't the internet itself more or less a "a network [where] the moving entities selfishly choose their route"?

Well, they are 'balla-sourcing' now...

$200k in Bitcoin is relatively easy to cash out without affecting the market much these days.

Shameless Plug: http://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com

The layman is going to be familiar with "Know Your Customer"?

This hypothetical new device was the Internet not too long ago, and the PC not too long before that.

Gold's other uses wouldn't make gold worth much on their own.

"Legitimate" uses of a commodity that trades more for its properties as money should be thought more of a really crappy put option, that is it sets a low price floor.

For example, it's been estimated that gold's industrial uses would only allow it to be traded in the low double digits per ounce if people didn't desire it for other reasons.

It's just in the case of something that isn't physical and isn't "backed" by any alternative uses, the floor is 0% of the current price instead of 1%, or similar.

>I want to go from "shitty regulation" to "smart regulation".

I'm tempted to conclude this is something that happens so rarely you may as well count the times it happens as a rounding error.

It's a bit like saying government will just work if we only vote for the right candidate.

That phrase came from a case that was completely unrelated to the content of the quote, and was used to claim that writing anti-draft pamphlets was illegal speech.

That verdict was later effectively overturned, and the judge who first said those words also had this to say shortly afterward in another free speech case:

"The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out."

It's time to stop trotting out that fear-mongering phrase.

Using the console:

I wrote a wrapper function around the site generator that took a callback so the next string to test would be called recursively. If a public key matched the public key I was aiming for, I dumped the response to the console, otherwise I just called the wrapper function again.

Then I wrote a function that iterated over a list of strings and output an array with all the possible permutations.

Then I just fed an array of the userids of the top 20 users into that function and fed that function into my wrapper.

I opened 5 browser windows and fed each of them 20 userids to take advantage of multiple cores, but I'm not entirely sure that makes sense to do.

Brute forced the 1 BTC award.

The HN user was 'petercooper'.

Sure; there's a reason I specified chargebacks and identity theft.

These are two areas that are largely solved with a push payment system rather than a pull payment system.

I'm looking forward to seeing how other types of fraud are addressed in the future, but it's fairly predictable we'll see further scams and fraud along the way.

The current cost of fraud from chargebacks and identity theft from traditional credit cards seems like it would dwarf any eventual power consumption of Bitcoin miners.

It's really easy to be right >90% of the time, if 100% of the time you predict a new technology will fail.

For what it's worth, most Americans under 30 have probably read 1984 in school.

"Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest."