Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising offer comes from Wikispeed, makers of a custom, modular car that claims to be able to drive 100 miles on a single gallon of gasoline. On Bitcoin Friday only, customers who purchase a Wikispeed SGT01 with Bitcoins can get 20 per cent off the list price, a $5,000 discount.
As the November 9 sale got underway, your Reg reporter checked in with Holmquist to see how it was going. "It's going fantastic so far!" came the response. "We had so many hits this morning that I had to upgrade servers and add some DDoS protection."
My main problem with bitcoin is that there's no way to buy them. I've tried using Dwolla and Bitinstant and other methods and so far have failed after jumping through all kinds of hoops including entering bank info and uploading pictures of IDs and utility bills to shady websites. And everyone wants their 4% transaction fees, so if you want to buy this $20k car you'll be paying hundreds of dollars in fees. I don't understand how a new economy is supposed to form around it if it's so hard to enter.
Given the appalling lack of basic security across many of the Bitcoin services there is no way on earth I would be trusting them with bank account details.
The only banking details it needs are you routing and account number. Granted, you shouldn't give those out to just anyone, but it's the same info you give out every time you write a check.
If you wanted to be really paranoid, you could set up a checking account just for stuff like bitcoin, and only load small amount of money into it right before making purchases.
The only banking details it needs are you routing and account number. Granted, you shouldn't give those out to just anyone, but it's the same info you give out every time you write a check.
But those are all anyone needs in order to withdraw the entire contents of your account, and they're being stored on someone's presumably-poorly-secured server. At least with paper checks they're, well, paper and are likely physically given to the bank for processing.
If you wanted to be really paranoid, you could set up a checking account just for stuff like bitcoin, and only load small amount of money into it right before making purchases.
My credit card account comes with an online service to generate one-time-use card numbers, for buying things from companies you don't exactly trust. So this suggestion is perhaps not so overly paranoid.
From what I've seen of their security, it's better than most of the bitcoin services, and in this case, due to YC and some other known investors, I think the risk of insider fraud is far less than with most other bitcoin services (run by pseudonyms).
I really think this is one of the bigger hurdles of bitcoins. Whether it really is secure or not, the infrastructure around bitcoins just doesn't really seem like it is.
localbitcoins.com enables cash-to-bitcoin trades with private people who live near you. It would be difficult to buy $20,000 worth of Bitcoins in one shot for a favorable rate, but you can get significant amounts without going through too much hassle.
It's actually not really optimised for micro transactions.
The popular gambling site satoshidice is responsible for the rapidly increasing size of the blockchain, now around 3GB.
Bitcoin has two main utilities, firstly it is very hard to prevent a bitcoin transaction from taking place, it can potentially be tracked after the fact if you aren't careful though.
Secondly the fixed limit means that it should become a safe store of value, assuming that bitcoin is successful in the longterm.
Bitcoin isn't really designed to scale up to VISA levels of transaction processing, instead it is more suited to be used as a clearing house, to track deposits and withdrawals.
Bitcoin can scale to VISA level transactions[1]. The software is still BETA, the optimizations required for this scalability have not yet been implemented (they are being actively worked on). The primary one is support for pruning the block-chain. This will drastically reduce the current 3GB blockchain size.
You are right though, in it's basic form, Bitcoin will not work for micro-transactions where you want to transfer a few cents a few times a second. However, there are strategies [2] to support some forms of micro-payments.
The pruning stuff looks great, at the moment the time it takes to download the blockchain (and the disk space requirements to a lesser degree) is creating a disincentive to run a full verifying node.
I suspect bitcoin blockchain transactions will never be very useful for micro payments, because of the confirmation delay.
If you use bitcoin as a clearing house though, which means you aren't broadcasting a blockchain transaction for every payment then micro transactions could work very well.
The problem with BitCoin at this stage in it's lifecycle is that there is a real tension between its use as means of exchange, and its use as a store of value; and too much hoarding will decrease the utility of BTC as a means of exchange.
If the people behind this effort really want to get the BTC economy rolling, they need to figure out some way for more people to _earn_ their way into it. If you have a hoard of BTC, now is a good time to figure out a project that you want to crowdsource; if you wait too long BTC will be worth nothing, because everyone will be saving theirs for later...
I agree entirely! Everyone is sitting on their hoards of Bitcoin and not spending it. This is merely one attempt at a solution. One way for people to earn BTC IS to sell things.
"For those unfamiliar with American customs, Black Friday in the US refers to the day after Thanksgiving Day, which is traditionally considered the first day of the holiday shopping season. It's generally the busiest shopping day of the year, resulting in huge profits for retailers – thus, putting them 'in the black.'"
This is not why it's called Black Friday. It's called Black Friday originally by the retail workers who had to man the stores that day. "Black" meaning bad or dark, in this case, like "this is a black day", rather than any reference to finance (or racism).
Those who worked their way into the corporate structure of many retailers, or graduated college and moved on in their careers retained their floor-worker slang, and the term spread.
Never heard of this theory. Black refers to ink color. Line items in red are loses, black are break-even or profit. Black-friday is when retailer make so much profit they get back in black.
Wikipedia presents both origin stories, but the accounting version (black ink) does appear to be a 1980s back-formation trying to put a nicer spin on the name.
Personally, I'm not liking the chassy and it looks a bit shaky for my interests. That said, if everything is interchangeable, maybe I could get some better suspension in there.
It's an interesting first design and I'd like to see where it goes. Surely there's a way to design this to be more luxurious without sacrificing too much in terms of performance.
As the November 9 sale got underway, your Reg reporter checked in with Holmquist to see how it was going. "It's going fantastic so far!" came the response. "We had so many hits this morning that I had to upgrade servers and add some DDoS protection."
So... did they sell anything?