It's called BitcoinStore, but the prices are only shown in USD. I expect it will show the conversion on the checkout page, but at first glance the concept feels like just a marketing gimmick.
I agree, the price should not be shown in dollars, otherwise I feel it kind of defeats the purpose. But this could be the beginning of something great. Bitcoin needs a real economy behind it to sustain itself and to become a lot less susceptible to speculators.
I don't see point displaying the bitcoin price, instead they should post what their conversion rate is. Still like to compare the prices with other USD rates.
We're adding the option soon. For now we just wanted to get the site out there so people could see the savings they can receive if they use Bitcoin. Having the prices set in USD helps consumers compare across sites much easier.
Products vary in pricing. We don't undercut them on every product, but the fact that we're able to undercut them severely on a good percentage of our products is amazing!
The lack of chargeback risk is no doubt great for the merchant, but I wouldn't consider buying from such a place unless it had built up an extremely good reputation, not only for honesty in terms of shipping what I paid for, but also in resolving problems.
Credit cards give me a lot of protection and I wouldn't want to shop online without that.
It's unfortunate that shipping to european countries is on average about 4x the cost of the product. For example: a kensington-like cable is 25$ but shipping is $110. Similarly, for a 200$ screen, shipping is $300.
So while it's nice that international shipping is available, it's not very practical unless you have very deep bitcoin pockets.
The site's been up less than a day and it's still very early beta. I've been informed that the shipping estimates being provided at checkout are not even close to correct for non-U.S. customers and that's something they're working hard to fix. Give them time :)
Both the minimum order and extra international shipping costs will go away as we move forward. They were unfortunate hurdles we had to place in order to get the site public on schedule.
I'm curious what licit, low volume, etc. products actually would make sense to sell in Bitcoin vs. something else.
The best thing I can come up with is online-delivered services from non-US (and ideally, non-developed financial system) countries, to other non-developed-financial-system countries. Like, a guy in Zimbabwe who wants to provide an online service to someone from PNG. Which is really a stretch to imagine.
The advantage to using Bitcoin is that there are no payment processing fees. What we're able to cut with BitcoinStore is that 1-10% fee that Visa, PayPal, et al. charge especially when dealing with products that have a high chargeback risks. So the products that sell best when using Bitcoin have high chargeback risks associated with them.
This is usually filled by escrow services which I'm not sure this website has implemented. Even Silk Road has implemented this, so it's a deal-breaker for me.
Silk Road has implemented this because it is a market between sellers and buyers. BitcoinStore is a company selling stuff, having escrow would have no point at all.
How does the fact that it's a company instead of an individual change the picture at all? In both cases, escrow serves the same purpose: to safeguard against getting ripped off.
Assuming bitcoinstore hasn't ripped off their previous N customers, I'm fairly confident being purchaser N+1, especially if my transaction isn't "special" in any way.
They would have a lot to lose by ripping off customers, vs. a random seller on silkroad, so I'd feel comfortable up to a few thousand dollars.
I think I've actually bought something from Memorydealers before. I'm not sure of the relationship between bitcoinstore and Memorydealers. If they're the same entity, then I'd be fine up to $100k or so -- it's a real business.
Escrow has its own risk and cost. The hilarious thing with previous online currencies (E-Gold, OSGold, Pecunix, ...) was that the escrow providers themselves were often the weak link.
For the 1-3% fee businesses, it does actually make sense. Especially with really low-margin sites. Think of your local grocery store offering a cash discount because of credit card fees, those businesses really do exist on the margin.
Very cool! BitcoinStore.com's sidebar hover animation is totally weird on Chrome though... like it's stacking them. It could totally benefit from .stop(true, true) on that hover event before it executes said animation.
This is very interesting, and I hope it is a success.
Since the government can't shut down bitcoins by stealing them (how they ended the last attempt at a sound currency- the FBI perpetrated a heist where they stole $8M in Platinum, Gold and Silver).... they will have to take more direct methods, like passing a law, or calling this "money laundering".
If they don't, then things like this will proliferate, and the only power the government has to back its currency is violence.
But employing violence here may be too much for people to accept. ...who am I kidding. Like I said the FBI stole $8M from an american vault and americans don't care, the ones who even know about it believe it was justified because the FBI gave a press release branding the people "terrorists" who "sought to undermine the US Dollar".
Oh, undermining the dollar, it sounds so scary when you put it that way.
Everyone should read The Creature from Jekyll Island by Griffen. It's a monetary history of the USA. The federal reserve was not created by accident, the boom-bust cycle they've perpetrated (eg: 2008 crisis for example) is not by accident either.
I won't say they'll use violence against bitcoin-- they're still using propaganda and that hasn't failed yet... or bitcoin might unravel itself.
But if this store is a success, it can't be allowed to stand, or there will be others and the entire system will unravel, eventually.
Source, please. Are you thinking of Liberty Dollars? If so, don't you think having quotes like this[2] on their website, "I simply hand them the currency as payment. 95% of the businesses accept it" make it sound a lot like they were encouraging counterfeiting?
If you think I'm making too strong of a claim, read the "Works Just Like US Dollars" section of the website. I could be misinterpreting it, but it seems really fishy.
You know what all you delusional conspiracy theorists keep forgetting. That roughly the same financial system model in the US exists in many other countries. So does that mean that there is a mini-conspiracy in each country or is it between countries ?
Anyway this whole government is scared of Bitcoin is ridiculous. They know, just like everyone else does, that Bitcoin is nothing but a modern day pyramid scheme that disproportionally rewards early participants and relies on new entrants to prop the whole deck of cards up.
> They know, just like everyone else does, that Bitcoin is nothing but a modern day pyramid scheme that disproportionally rewards early participants and relies on new entrants to prop the whole deck of cards up.
I take issue with "disproportionately", because I know you cannot substantiate that, as it does not disproportionately reward anyone. The rules for reward and the value of the currency is entirely transparent.
Besides this, that is how all securities work. You have people who invest in it first (Bitcoin wouldn't have even worked without someone mining to protect the blockchain) and others who buy shares of those investments later by assessing the risks similarly, or also contributing to the mining (which will continue for more than another decade).
Turns out (gasp) the technology is perfectly sound and secure. It's open-source so you can take a look, or you can ask me any questions and I'll be able to explain it to you. It's just a transferable credit system that has gradually earned value through commerce, you don't need to be so cynical.
There's nothing theoretical about what's he's suggesting.
You'd be referring to BIS.org, the central banker's bank, which was setup in 1930 for reparation payments to Germany. The bank was almost dissolved in 1944 after allegations it facilitated Nazi Germany's looting of other countries assets. Two of its directors were convicted at the Nuremberg trials and one owned the bank used by the Gestapo. But the modern father of economics, John Maynard Keynes, was a prominent voice against its dissolution.
I believe the very existence of the bank was denied publicly for years. Today they have assets around $400 billion and are immune from any jurisdiction (based in Basel, Switzerland). There is nothing American about the Federal Reserve system nor its international counterpart, the BIS. It's an oligarchy and extremely corrupt. The reports of the BIS have numbers like "$147 trillion" referring to currency swaps etc. It's a fascinating look at how international banking works, all of which is public now.
As for the Liberty Dollar, it existed for around 8-years and had letters from the Treasury, Secret Service and others attesting to its legality. As soon as Liberty Dollar made millions of dollars in Ron Paul coins, they were indicted and their customer's property was seized. However, the Liberty Dollar's marketing plans for the promotion of their alternative currency were deceptive and likely illegal.
> pyramid scheme that disproportionally rewards early participants and relies on new entrants
Only the miner who discovers new bitcoins gets "rewarded" by the system; every other person who receives the bitcoins later gets them in exactly the same ways that other people get currency -- by participating in economic transactions. So no, it doesn't rely on new entrants for anything; if people stopped joining tomorrow, or if people stopped mining tomorrow, current participants would still be able to trade with each other and get value out of it.
The system is designed so that coins are minted at a steady rate. There is some additional reward for early adopters in terms of less power required per coin for mining. But there is also risk for early adopters: If you're a miner you have to buy real equipment and electricity which costs real dollars today, without a guarantee that you'll be able to liquidate the Bitcoins it produces to recoup your investment (which may take years). A healthy market should have a reward premium built into the success payoff of a risky investment.
> Only the miner who discovers new bitcoins gets "rewarded" by the system
And that reward is really just compensation for keeping the whole system difficult to attack. Mining is not cheap, you need expensive hardware and electricity. I like to think of a miner as a transaction notarizer (e.g. like a notary public). Miner is definitely the wrong term, IMHO.
That's how it works, the difficulty scales with the amount of computing power in the network. If it didn't, the entire currency supply would have been mined already.
The real conspiracy theorists are the people who (seemingly without ANY experience and explanation) accuse Bitcoin of being a ponzi scheme or whatever else. Ask me a technical question about it and I can explain _anything_, after researching it casually for years.
This is open-source so you guys better be able to back up your accusations.
Yeah, it's between countries. The same same small group of people owns the majority share in the Fed and controls almost all central banks worldwide. The independent central banks are disappearing one by one - Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan.
You can as well say that flat currencies and fractional reserve banking are modern day pyramid scheme, that disproportionally rewards those participants that have a banking license.
How is that not different from our current system? Early participants acquired huge savings that continue to accumulate, so the rich get richer, requiring newer participants(immigrants) to help prop up the system and make the rich even richer. The only difference is bitcoins are a pyramid scheme that governments cannot control.
So if it's the same as the status quo (only less flexible, usable, stable and secure) then which should I or anybody else care ?
And this idea that governments couldn't control Bitcoin is just laughable. They could get into the mining business and distort the currency beyond repair. They could setup Bitcoin->USD/JP/etc exchanges to track people. They could simply unite together and declare it illegal internationally. Plenty of things.
Point is that it's going nowhere. I do want an alternate way of paying for things and sending money. But I want security, identity and fairness built into it.
>And this idea that governments couldn't control Bitcoin is just laughable. They could get into the mining business and distort the currency beyond repair. They could setup Bitcoin->USD/JP/etc exchanges to track people. They could simply unite together and declare it illegal internationally. Plenty of things.
Getting into the mining business would only help bitcoin, by further securing the network. It certainly won't allow them to distort the currency, since the rate of coin generation is built into the protocol.
Setting up exchanges really wouldn't undermine anything, people just won't use them if they know they're being tracked by them.
Uniting together and declaring it illegal is their only option, but they will have trouble justifying why it should be illegal. And they will also have trouble enforcing it, short of shutting down the entire internet.
It really is a fascinating technology, and if you truly want an alternative way of securely sending money, I'd suggest doing more research on it.
A big enough mining pool could DoS some or all users by consistently producing a longer block chain than anyone else's (which clients would accept as authoritative) while omitting any transactions they don't wish to let through.
This is true. A 51% attack in which the attacker prevents all transactions from going through is probably bitcoin's largest vulnerability.
However, even at today's difficulty levels, this attack would be very expensive to maintain. With the introduction of dedicated mining ASIC's coming soon, the difficulty will rise substantially, which will offer even more security against this type of attack.
On the other hand, even with those ASICs, the government could buy more of them than anyone else. And then make us pay for them. I don't think the threat is worth discounting.
