81–90 of 205 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, let's play a game. Say you had $5mm. How would you manipulate the Bitcoin market and earn a guaranteed return?
A government entity looking to destroy the market wouldn't necessarily care about getting a return. Even if they were, take a look at what happened yesterday when someone dumped 5k bitcoins onto mtgox. http://i.imgur.com/K8T4F0Y.png
As usual on HN, any submission about Bitcoin is met with concerned comments about its high volatility, present impracticality as a currency, disadvantages versus precious metals, current concentration of transactions in a single exchange (MtGox), potential for market manipulation by governments and/or speculators, etc. This is analogous to being present at the creation of the World Wide Web, but instead of getting ex…
As hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky said, "Please stop trotting out that quote Steve Jobs once said because we've all heard it and there are very few hockey players who are actually great enough to really know where the puck's going, anyway. Don't automatically assume you're one of them."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coinbase is a bitcoin payment processor. It addresses exactly those issues.
Original issue: "However, the problem is that the amount of time it takes for a transaction to become "verified," i.e. be part of the official block chain, can take up to 10 minutes." https://coinbase.com/merchants : "Confirmed in 1 hour" Underlying issue not addressed
Which is faster than any credit card gives money to a merchant. As is a one hour final confirmation.
As usual on HN, any submission about Bitcoin is met with concerned comments about its high volatility, present impracticality as a currency, disadvantages versus precious metals, current concentration of transactions in a single exchange (MtGox), potential for market manipulation by governments and/or speculators, etc. This is analogous to being present at the creation of the World Wide Web, but instead of getting ex…
There are some real concerns with Bitcoin. For example, I was going to write an app that accepts Bitcoins as payment. However, the problem is that the amount of time it takes for a transaction to become "verified," i.e. be part of the official block chain, can take up to 10 minutes. What am I supposed to present to the user during this time? Am I supposed to tell them that their payment may or may not have been accep…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some real concerns with Bitcoin. For example, I was going to write an app that accepts Bitcoins as payment. However, the problem is that the amount of time it takes for a transaction to become "verified," i.e. be part of the official block chain, can take up to 10 minutes. What am I supposed to present to the user during this time? Am I supposed to tell them that their payment may or may not have been accep…
Isn't there a way to pay a higher txn fee and get it processed faster? Or could you run a dedicated miner to only process your own txns (or does mining not work that way?)
The higher txn fee ups the chances of your txn being in the next block (it's up to the miner that wins the block which txns are included - some set a minimum fee). Once your txn is placed in a block, it is included in the future blocks too. A confirmation is generated by each block your txn is in, and a block is generated every ten minutes, so for 6 confirmations, you still need an hour.
Running a dedicated miner wouldn't help since you'd have to be the one to win the next block to be able to process your txns.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like an opportunity for a "bitcoin credit card" or "bitcoin charge card" where a trusted third party maintains complete control.
Perhaps YC could fund such a startup.
> However, the problem is that the amount of time it takes for a transaction to become "verified," i.e. be part of the official block chain, can take up to 10 minutes.
coinbase is pretty cool but fails completely at solving the posted problem. The soonest I've seen payments settle is in about an hour.
Remember: "What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich." - Paul Krugman EDIT: To be clear - this quote is not intended (by me) to be a knock on BTC. It's just an elegant statement of my own opinion that the value of 1 BTC is not all that indicative of its value to the economy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some real concerns with Bitcoin. For example, I was going to write an app that accepts Bitcoins as payment. However, the problem is that the amount of time it takes for a transaction to become "verified," i.e. be part of the official block chain, can take up to 10 minutes. What am I supposed to present to the user during this time? Am I supposed to tell them that their payment may or may not have been accep…
Sounds like an opportunity for a "bitcoin credit card" or "bitcoin charge card" where a trusted third party maintains complete control.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some real concerns with Bitcoin. For example, I was going to write an app that accepts Bitcoins as payment. However, the problem is that the amount of time it takes for a transaction to become "verified," i.e. be part of the official block chain, can take up to 10 minutes. What am I supposed to present to the user during this time? Am I supposed to tell them that their payment may or may not have been accep…
Isn't there a way to pay a higher txn fee and get it processed faster? Or could you run a dedicated miner to only process your own txns (or does mining not work that way?)
I'm curious, why hasn't anyone implemented a mining client in javascript, so you could in effect has visitors to your website mine coins for you. It might be a create way to fund content instead of advertising.
But these are all best-case assumptions. Your visitors might not average 5 minutes per page. Your JS mining tool almost certainly won't be as efficient as the specialized GPU rigs that can mine bitcoin for less than the cost of electricity (and drive up the cost per unit for everyone else who's mining bitcoin). Or your users might not have an extra 100W of power to throw at your mining operation. Taking these factors into consideration, I'm guessing you'd be looking at CPM equivalents that you would never touch.
Also, I suspect it would be considered malware by many. Still, it's an interesting idea.