How To Use Bitcoin – The Most Important Creation In The History Of Man

[remirol]

Blah blah blah on and on, worthless garbage of speculation and personal opinion expressed without any actual knowledge base.

Yes, because nothing convinces people that bitcoin is worthwhile like responses which completely ignore everything the other person has said and contain nothing but six-year-old playground chatter.

How's Romney doing these days?

So were we going to do Pizza Hut, Papa Johns or Dominos? My fraction of a bitcoin is ready.

You know, I took a look at both Papa John's and Domino's, and I don't see anywhere on their website which indicates I could pay in bitcoins. When I ordered from Dominos not long ago, I had an option for 'cash' or 'credit card', but not 'bitcoin'.

Can you substantiate your claim that you could order from any of those three and pay in bitcoin?

 

[Belz...]

Blah blah blah on and on, worthless garbage of speculation and personal opinion expressed without any actual knowledge base.

No, actually. I don't see any garbage or/of speculation in there.

 

[Ferguson]

So. Let's say for whatever reason it isn't economically feasible to mine on what hardware I have. I note you can pay a transaction fee to make a transfer go through faster. Can I set my client to handle transactions of that sort, as a different way of earning bitcoin?

Nope, the transaction fees are added to the block currently being mined. So when an individual/pool discovered the current block, they'll get/split 25+transaction fees (probably something like 25.10474834).

 

[Mister Earl]

Well, guess that means mining is out for me. Just too late to get into the game without a really substantial initial investment. Maybe i'll speculate for laughs, but that's it.

 

[mhaze]

....
Can you substantiate your claim that you could order from any of those three and pay in bitcoin?

Dude, you're just moving too slow with that kind of talk here. <munch munch munch>

Pizza's order, paid for with bit coin, and it's gone.

 

[psionl0]

So. Let's say for whatever reason it isn't economically feasible to mine on what hardware I have. I note you can pay a transaction fee to make a transfer go through faster. Can I set my client to handle transactions of that sort, as a different way of earning bitcoin?

Yes. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fee.

Depending on how many transactions you process, your client would probably make money for you while you are sleeping. It is envisioned that ultimately, transaction fees will be the main incentive for running a bitcoin miner.

 

[mhaze]

Yes. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fee.

Depending on how many transactions you process, your client would probably make money for you while you are sleeping. It is envisioned that ultimately, transaction fees will be the main incentive for running a bitcoin miner.

All true, but almost meaningless when many people are just trying to survive.

Argentina

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e__m-w4N7NI

Greece

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qip60i0pFNk

These people have a way out which never existed before. And that was a pretty good pizza, well for a home delivery type pizza.

LOL

 

[remirol]

Dude, you're just moving too slow with that kind of talk here. <munch munch munch>

Pizza's order, paid for with bit coin, and it's gone.

Uh huh. That's a no then... Just as I suspected. Wow, five posts back and you're already humiliated in your first exchange. Gonna pay off your election bets?

ETA: Seriously, dude, face it. Things I can't do with Bitcoin:

* pay my mortgage
* pay my electric or gas bill
* pay my cellphone
* pay my ISP/internet/etc. bill
* make a payment on a credit card
* make a payment on many other services (Spotify, etc)
* buy a burger from a drive-through
* buy my groceries
* buy some lawn stuff down at Home Lowe's Pike Despot

To that list, we can now add: Order a freakin' pizza. Because when push came to shove, you couldn't back your statement up -- all you had was childish rantings. Pretending that bitcoin is a currency relies on the same sort of logic that got you so embarrassed six months ago that you couldn't bear to show up until now because you were so ashamed at being proven dead. nuts. wrong.

I disagree with psionl0 on a lot of aspects of bitcoin, but you know, he doesn't seem to have any problems talking about it or discussing the substantive aspects. Perhaps you could take a page from his book.

 

[mhaze]

Uh huh. That's a no then... Just as I suspected. ...

To that list, we can now add: Order a freakin' pizza. Because when push came to shove, you couldn't back your statement up -- all you had was childish rantings. .....

Hmmm...serious lecturing from ignorance, dude. Really. I covered this before:

yes, when I say ignorance I refer to

...people that otherwise are smart, intelligent 和(and) well meaning, 但(but) who simply do not understand the basics of this electronic currency, 和(and) who by well or ill formed habit, find 他们(their) fingers compulsively lurching toward keyboards, producing mad drivel, usually simply not relevant or factual, 依赖(relying) on their favorite pundits, who are not exactly math whiz types, 和(and) stridently proclaiming their expert opinings, while before they even finish, others have graded their paper and their work F-.

So, like you earned the F-, but don't be strutting proudly. You've made some mistakes and you can figure out where and how.

Then I said...

Dude, you're just moving too slow with that kind of talk here. <munch munch munch>

Pizza's order, paid for with bit coin, and it's gone.

Here's the final lesson, since Google clearly ain't no friend of yurs.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1bgg5v/

 

[psionl0]

I can't use it to pay for anything I regularly purchase in my world, being as I do not purchase drugs nor other illegal things which require untraceable 'money'.

With the IP and wallet addresses of every bitcoin transaction a matter of public record, I would hardly call bitcoin "untraceable money".

I'm sure there are, for example, pizza places which take bitcoin, but given that the effective "exchange rate" between bitcoin and USD appears to be set by hucking darts at a board, I can't figure out why the pizza place is even willing to consider it since it has to purchase the materials to make the pizza (and pay its employees, and all those little things) with USD.

Perhaps the owner views it as a way to channel a certain percentage of his profits directly into speculation; fair enough, it's his not-money, he can do what he wants with it. I know that were I to sell a pizza I made for $10, I would not at all want to be given a rock that was currently worth $10 but could be worth anywhere between $2 and $20 depending on when I needed to use the rock to pay for something from someone ELSE who accepts rocks instead of money. The only way I could afford to do this would be if I was independently wealthy and/or had sufficient not-rock income so that I could absorb the times when rocks were worth $2 and wait to use them until rocks were worth $20. This isn't useful as a currency.

You forgot to ask the only question that matters if you are in business: "What difference would it make to my bottom line if I allowed bitcoin payments"? Sure, you can't answer that question with any degree of certainty but there is enough data to allow you to come up with a probability distribution and assess the risks accordingly.

Given the direction the price of bitcoin usually goes, I suspect the odds favour an increased profit.

 

[kevsta]

back over $100 again, doesnt look like a full bubble collapse just yet, just your average parabolic blowoff top thus far.

 

[varwoche]

The Winklevoss twins are cornering the Bitcoin market.

Surely this will put minds at ease about Bitcoin. Right?

 

[remirol]

Hmmm...serious lecturing from ignorance, dude. Really. I covered this before:

So, still no evidence that you can buy a pizza from Pizza Hut, Papa John's, or Domino's with bitcoin. Why am I not surprised that you can't answer such a simple question when challenged? Oh, right, November. But it's April now.

You forgot to ask the only question that matters if you are in business: "What difference would it make to my bottom line if I allowed bitcoin payments"? Sure, you can't answer that question with any degree of certainty but there is enough data to allow you to come up with a probability distribution and assess the risks accordingly.

That's sort of what I did when I talked about it. I need to (vastly oversimplified):

* buy ingredients
* pay employees
* pay rent for a location to cook and/or serve
* pay for marketing

I can't do any of those with bitcoin, so receiving bitcoin payments mean I'm putting out real money for the above and getting back a rock that, when I go to convert it to a currency I _can_ do the above with, may or may not have covered the appropriate portion of the above expenses.

The big risk here is that if bitcoin is 'down', I am in real trouble if I have a bunch of rocks and need actual money. I can't time-shift any of the above expenses, they have to happen on a regular basis. So for me to support bitcoin, I am either going to need to have more of a cash reserve than I normally would (because bitcoins are so volatile) or have a completely workable business based on USD _independent_ of my bitcoin transactions as part of that business. Hard to do, since I still use the same employee hours and ingredients to make the pizza whether it gets paid in USD or bitcoin -- the storefront and marketing I can handwave over for awhile as those are fixed costs regardless of the purchases made.

Given the direction the price of bitcoin usually goes, I suspect the odds favour an increased profit.

Except for the times when the price of bitcoin goes the other direction and the odds favour me going bust in a big way because suddenly all my bitcoins are rubbish and I need to buy mozzarella and pay my pie flippers.

I suppose I could just overcharge the hell out of people ($10 USD, $50 BTC) for pizza and that would cover my losses when BTC drops back down. I could even call it "exchange rate costs" or something like that. Not particularly ethical of me, granted, but since it doesn't appear that it's very easy to order pizza with bitcoins in the first place, there's a scarcity thing coming into play.

 

[psionl0]

That's sort of what I did when I talked about it. I need to (vastly oversimplified):

* buy ingredients
* pay employees
* pay rent for a location to cook and/or serve
* pay for marketing

I can't do any of those with bitcoin, so receiving bitcoin payments mean I'm putting out real money for the above and getting back a rock that, when I go to convert it to a currency I _can_ do the above with, may or may not have covered the appropriate portion of the above expenses.

You are still missing the vital question: "Could you sell more if you accepted bitcoins as payments"?

This is similar to the question of whether to permit credit sales. You can definitely sell more if you allow credit but it is more risky. You need to chase up your debtors and every dead beat customer subtracts directly from the bottom line. Yet most "Jiffy" lunch truck drivers (for example) extend credit to selected customers so it is obviously worth while.

With bitcoin, the problem wouldn't be with deadbeat customers but whether your coins would lose value between the time you accept them as payment and the time you exchange them for legal tender. For most of its history, the answer has been "no".

 

[Belz...]

I can't do any of those with bitcoin

And why would you want to ? I mean, if I have 5 bictoins each worth 100$ at 2 pm and I decide to get an AC system from a nearby store, get dressed and leave for the store, shop around a bit, and get to the cashier to pay with my BTC only to realise that they're now worth 40$ and I can't pay for the 200$ item with taxes, what do I do ? Wait for the BTC to go up again ? Come back another day ?

And if I'm an employer, the utter instability of BTC value will certainly not encourage me to use them, either. I don't even know if I can pay my employees come pay day. And I don't think they'll want to wait for my BTC to go up again before I pay up.

 

[Belz...]

This is similar to the question of whether to permit credit sales. You can definitely sell more if you allow credit but it is more risky. You need to chase up your debtors and every dead beat customer subtracts directly from the bottom line.

You mean credit cards or just credit ? Because the guy with the credit card isn't actually the one giving you money.

But even if you allow BTC as one of several forms of payment, you have to be up-to-the-minute with the price of BTC, which means that, for a restaurant, someone will order a meal for price X and be charged price Y at the end of the evening, otherwise the restaurant risks huge losses over a single night (or huge profits, depending). That's just too risky and unreliable.

 

[Tolls]

Yet most "Jiffy" lunch truck drivers (for example) extend credit to selected customers so it is obviously worth while.

Isn't that the key part?
They don't do it to every Thomas, Richard, or Harold.

 

[psionl0]

You mean credit cards or just credit ? Because the guy with the credit card isn't actually the one giving you money.

Just credit.

But even if you allow BTC as one of several forms of payment, you have to be up-to-the-minute with the price of BTC, which means that, for a restaurant, someone will order a meal for price X and be charged price Y at the end of the evening, otherwise the restaurant risks huge losses over a single night (or huge profits, depending). That's just too risky and unreliable.

You make it sound complicated. I charge $70 for a service. If my customer wanted to pay in bitcoins, I would look up preev.com, see that the price (as I am typing this) is $134.5, whip out my calculator and say the price is 0.52 BTC. I would also expect the customer to add 0.005 BTC to the total so the transaction gets verified quicker.

(The general public is largely unaware of bitcoin so this doesn't happen - yet).

 

[Chaos]

You are still missing the vital question: "Could you sell more if you accepted bitcoins as payments"?

No. The vital question, which remirol understands and you ignore, is: "What good is selling more by accepting bitcoin if I cannot possibly know how much these bitcoin will worth by the time I can exchange them for real money?"

Say, psionl0, do you think it would be a good idea, business-wise, to accept lottery tickets as payment?

 

[psionl0]

No. The vital question, which remirol understands and you ignore, is: "What good is selling more by accepting bitcoin if I cannot possibly know how much these bitcoin will worth by the time I can exchange them for real money?"

In the worst case scenario, if I accepted bitcoins as payment on April 9 this year, my $70 service would have netted me something like $20 if I cashed the bitcoins in at the end of the week. The following week, the same service would have netted me something like $100.

Between June 2011 and December 2011, the price of bitcoin dropped by an average of 16% per week - meaning that I would have only gotten an average of $60 per week from the bitcoin customer. I would probably have gone along with it anyway for the good will (better $60 per week than $0 per week). At all other times, it would have been more profitable for me to accept bitcoins than cash.

If 10% of my customers pay with bitcoins, I don't think my bottom line would be adversely affected.

Say, psionl0, do you think it would be a good idea, business-wise, to accept lottery tickets as payment?

Please don't tell me you think you are being clever?