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A Look at the Bitcoin Economy

thegenesisblock.com

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Re: A Look at the Bitcoin Economy

#11

Post by vinhboy »

lumberjack wrote: post #5

What is an example of a service* or product* that is served better with cryptocoins than with cash, bank transfers or credit cards? What are people spending bitcoins on and why? That would be nice to know and definitely more informative than a graph of daily activity within the blockchain. * preferably something mundane and totally within the boundaries of the law

Donations and Tips.

It's really easy to donate money with bitcoins. You don't have to give up any identifying information and every dollar you send goes directly to the charity. That's how I donated to the EFF and it was an awesome experience. I wish more non-profit orgs accepted Bitcoin. NPR I am talking to you!

Re: A Look at the Bitcoin Economy

#12

Post by dwaltrip »

lumberjack wrote: post #5

What is an example of a service* or product* that is served better with cryptocoins than with cash, bank transfers or credit cards? What are people spending bitcoins on and why? That would be nice to know and definitely more informative than a graph of daily activity within the blockchain. * preferably something mundane and totally within the boundaries of the law

International purchases to certain countries and remittances. Small online transactions ($0.10 -$0.50) are also more feasbile with bitcoin, which could potentially open up new business models.

Re: A Look at the Bitcoin Economy

#13

Post by snitko »

pbreit wrote: post #10
lumberjack wrote: post #5

What is an example of a service* or product* that is served better with cryptocoins than with cash, bank transfers or credit cards? What are people spending bitcoins on and why? That would be nice to know and definitely more informative than a graph of daily activity within the blockchain. * preferably something mundane and totally within the boundaries of the law

Nothing legal. The only reason merchants accept bitcoin is to amass bitcoins and a bit of marketability.

Not true. I bought VPN access with Bitcoin precisely because it would be difficult to trace me using my payment methods. I'm not doing anything illegal. I just like anonymity and would like to protect myself from those snitching on wifi networks.

Re: A Look at the Bitcoin Economy

#14

Post by aqme28 »

klochner wrote: post #3

Is there really an exponential growth in transactions per day? The last I heard it has been constant for months: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions [edit] I see he's excluding the 100 most popular addresses. Is there any justification for that? I'm sure he would have left them in if the chart looked right.

They're mostly things like Satoshi Dice, which will skew the results weirdly.

https://blockchain.info/popular-addresses

Re: A Look at the Bitcoin Economy

#15

Post by sliverstorm »

gojomo wrote: post #9

I find it interesting that the current value of all mined Bitcoins is currently about $5.4B, per http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap . (I've seen this value described as "one Nakamoto".) And, the number of full peer nodes is about 130,000 – per the network scan done by http://getaddr.bitnodes.io/ . To an extent, the total value is an emergent property of all the nodes together. But for grins we could distribute…

use about 15GB of your hard drive space (

My 64GB SSD disagrees with this proposition :(

Re: A Look at the Bitcoin Economy

#16

Post by TylerE »

TomGullen wrote: post #8
lumberjack wrote: post #5

What is an example of a service* or product* that is served better with cryptocoins than with cash, bank transfers or credit cards? What are people spending bitcoins on and why? That would be nice to know and definitely more informative than a graph of daily activity within the blockchain. * preferably something mundane and totally within the boundaries of the law

> Served better From whos point of view? As a merchant, I'd love it if our customers all paid in BTC as it would eliminate all fraudulent/charge-backed transactions which cost us $15 each time. (A nice little money earning industry for the CC companies btw!) As a customer, I'd rather pay with my CC so I have some protection over my payment. If you're looking for something that's better from both points of view, then…

> As a merchant, I'd love it if our customers all paid in BTC as it would eliminate all fraudulent/charge-backed transactions which cost us $15 each time.

As a customer I would never pay with BTC for exactly the same reason.

Re: A Look at the Bitcoin Economy

#17

Post by Aldo_MX »

gojomo wrote: post #9

I find it interesting that the current value of all mined Bitcoins is currently about $5.4B, per http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap . (I've seen this value described as "one Nakamoto".) And, the number of full peer nodes is about 130,000 – per the network scan done by http://getaddr.bitnodes.io/ . To an extent, the total value is an emergent property of all the nodes together. But for grins we could distribute…

I find surprising the fact that you say it uses about 15Gb, 6 months ago it used around 10Gb and at this point I can imagine that around 2016 it will need around 100Gb and the number will keep increasing...

Re: A Look at the Bitcoin Economy

#18

Post by obi-nine »

TylerE wrote: post #16
TomGullen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Served better From whos point of view? As a merchant, I'd love it if our customers all paid in BTC as it would eliminate all fraudulent/charge-backed transactions which cost us $15 each time. (A nice little money earning industry for the CC companies btw!) As a customer, I'd rather pay with my CC so I have some protection over my payment. If you're looking for something that's better from both points of view, then…

> As a merchant, I'd love it if our customers all paid in BTC as it would eliminate all fraudulent/charge-backed transactions which cost us $15 each time. As a customer I would never pay with BTC for exactly the same reason.

Why not if the merchant has a great reputation that you can verify?

Re: A Look at the Bitcoin Economy

#19

Post by gizmo686 »

Aldo_MX wrote: post #17
gojomo wrote: post #9

I find it interesting that the current value of all mined Bitcoins is currently about $5.4B, per http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap . (I've seen this value described as "one Nakamoto".) And, the number of full peer nodes is about 130,000 – per the network scan done by http://getaddr.bitnodes.io/ . To an extent, the total value is an emergent property of all the nodes together. But for grins we could distribute…

I find surprising the fact that you say it uses about 15Gb, 6 months ago it used around 10Gb and at this point I can imagine that around 2016 it will need around 100Gb and the number will keep increasing...

Bitcoin was designed with a pruning ability, which can delete unnecessary data from a local copy of the blockchain. Based on the Bitcoin website [1] the blockchain as of 2012 is less than 100mb when pruned.

[1]https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

Re: A Look at the Bitcoin Economy

#20

Post by kissickas »

TylerE wrote: post #16
TomGullen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Served better From whos point of view? As a merchant, I'd love it if our customers all paid in BTC as it would eliminate all fraudulent/charge-backed transactions which cost us $15 each time. (A nice little money earning industry for the CC companies btw!) As a customer, I'd rather pay with my CC so I have some protection over my payment. If you're looking for something that's better from both points of view, then…

> As a merchant, I'd love it if our customers all paid in BTC as it would eliminate all fraudulent/charge-backed transactions which cost us $15 each time. As a customer I would never pay with BTC for exactly the same reason.

It appears obi-nine is ghost-blocked or whatever it's called, which is unfortunate because I have the same question.

Why wouldn't you, if you trust the merchant?

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