26
I am not a lawyer, but...
The Coinage Act of 1965, Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," states: "United States coins and currency... are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues."
In the USA all monetary debts can be paid in US dollars.
Second, while bitcoin is legally a payment method in the US, it does not have legal ...
20
I made a payment to a company for a product more than a year ago in
bitcoin. The amount that I paid then was equivalent to $75. Now the
company has failed to provide the product and they and I both agree
that I'm owed a refund. However, we disagree on the means.
The company wants to refund me - in bitcoin if I wish it - to the
value of $75 of ...
14
While in the US last year, I sent money to myself in Europe that way once, because it was significantly cheaper than using the legacy banking system.
I think it mostly comes down to whether you have easy access to a Bitcoin exchange from your bank account in the US and what amounts you are trying to transfer. It also depends on how urgently you need the ...
14
A refund should be issued using the same payment method that was used at the time of purchase.
This also serves an anti-fraud measure for the cases where a purchase was made on a stolen medium (eg a credit card) but the scammers request a refund in a different medium (eg cash) as soon as the payment goes through because all they want to do is take the money ...
12
Yes!
Bitsquare.io is:
Decentralized – there is no single point of failure.
Safe – Bitsquare never holds your funds.
Instantly accessible – no need for approval from a central
authority.
Private -no one except trading partners exchange personally
identifying data.
Open – every aspect of the project is transparent.
Easy – we take usability seriously.
Many ...
10
I'd actually like to see a reference to someone saying that it's illegal.
...because it's legal.
FinCEN guidance establishes who must register with government and when one must pay taxes (sell bitcoin for USD, pay taxes on gains).
10
XBT is used because the ISO 4217 (the standard for currency codes) alphabetic code XBC is already in use. It stands for the European Unit of Account.
Here's the Official table of ISO 4217 codes
The X indicates it's not a national currency, but rather a supranational currency (like the East Caribbean Dollar, XCD) or something else that isn't quite a ...
10
Given that bitcoin has increased in value, one of us has to profit from this.
If you hold the bitcoins while the value goes up, you are the one entitled to profit from it, because you also risk holding while the value drops, and then you're the one stuck with the loss.
Imagine the 10,000 BTC pizza transaction were refunded now: would the purchaser be ...
10
Acquiring Data
You have two options here:
Check out one of the data providers online. Quandl offers (mostly) free historical data for a variety of pairs and exchanges. Alternatively, if you have bucks to spare, Coinigy offers high-quality data sets on a per-month pricing model.
Roll your own data crawler, using a programming language of your choice and the ...
9
There is a Complete Guide on How to Create a New Alt Coin on Bitcoin Talk.
9
There are memory intensive mining algorithms, but usually the "memory" being discussed is not of the DDR3 variety. That 64 GB of DDR3 RAM you have is an excellent resource for many computing tasks (and enough to make me jealous), but is also dramatically slower than the L1 and L2 cache physically on the chip with your CPU. This is the memory we're talking ...
9
In addition to the technical factors mentioned by MCCCS, it's important to consider economical factors as well.
If the problem being solved has value outside of the Bitcoin network, it allows miners to essentially "double dip" on the rewards - they earn both from the Bitcoin received as block rewards, as well as the incentive structure off chain.
...
8
As with any traded commodity the price largely depends on the confidence of the buyers and sellers in the future evolution of the price. Basically you pay whatever you feel it is worth. Like stocks this changes over time, as the company or the bitcoin economy in our case evolves.
The wild price swings are not that really that surprising then when it is ...
8
The Bitcoin price is the result of a free market. There is no central authority that could by order "pump money into the system".
This currently happens anyway - but decentralized. When more people buy Bitcoins the market cap increases. With a higher market cap a single trade has a lesser effect on the price. Therefore, over time when Bitcoin attracts more ...
8
But then the next problem is transaction order and validity to prevent double spending. I don't understand completely why a timestamp can't just be included for every broadcasted transaction, and the transaction could have the correct, universally agreed upon time, and each ledger gets sorted chronologically. Is this because it requires a centralized system ...
7
There's no technical problem with making an inflationary crypto-currency. For Bitcoin, just changing the block reward schedule would do it. And there do exist crypto-currencies that have perpetual block rewards.
The thing is, the set of people who believe that inflationary currencies are good doesn't significantly overlap the set of people who think that ...
7
From Introduction on the Bitcoin wiki:
Capitalization / Nomenclature
Since Bitcoin is both a currency and a protocol, capitalization can be confusing. Accepted practice is to use Bitcoin (singular with an upper case letter B) to label the protocol, software, and community, and bitcoins (with a lower case b) to label units of the currency.
So, the accepted ...
7
Was there a sales contract?
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_to_accept_Bitcoin,_for_small_businesses#Contract points out the value of specifying the refund policy in such a contract.
(Personally I'd think this was a USD purchase, quoted in USD, to be refunded in USD, irrespective of how the value was transferred. But IANAL, and I'm not even American.)
6
Because the demand for bitcoins is largely driven by speculation, i.e. people buy bitcoins in the hope that the conversion rate will rise so that they can make a profit.
Such speculative investors tend to exhibit herd behaviour: the more the rate falls, the more of them will sell, to realize gains or cut losses. And the more it rises, the more people want ...
6
The reason Bitcoin has value is because it is resistant to censorship (e.g., prohibiting transactions related to illicit purchases) and corruption (e.g., an authoritative source changing the rules). It does this thanks to the innovation known as proof-of-work.
But this proof-of-work means Bitcoin is vulnerable to attack from a party or cartel with more than ...
6
The point of Feathercoin (and the other alt coins) is to see what works and what can gain traction. Feathercoin is where Bitcoin was in 2009-2010—one FTC is about $0.13.
CoinDesk had a pretty good article on Feathercoin: Feathercoin shows heavyweight potential.
Intro to Feathercoin has a good list of Feathercoin resources.
6
Does Bitcoin have inherent value if you can fork the project and create a new cryptocurrency easily?
Yes, this is a real possibility. Effectively, Satoshi Nakamoto created a billion dollar market-capitalization of currency out of thin-air. Of course major corporations are going to attempt their own flavor, it is the nature of capitalism and it is a very healthy reality, which ultimately ends with a satisfied consumer. Progressive companies are forking it, ...
6
Coinomi Universal HD Wallet will do exactly what you're looking for.
Coinomi is a very secure and lightweight, universal, open-source HD wallet for Bitcoin and many altcoins. At the moment the supported coins are:
Bitcoin
Dogecoin
Litecoin
Peercoin
Darkcoin
Reddcoin
NuBits
NuShares
Blackcoin
Feathercoin
Rubycoin
Digitalcoin
Cannacoin
with more ...
6
Here is a guide: How to Fork Bitcoin (create your own chain).
I really think Bitcoin as a concept is unique and powerful, and the project is well maintained by very talented developers, so I wanted to write this not just to help make it easy to clone, but to help increase understanding of the concepts and how to fully utilize them in other projects. I would ...
6
You probably should start from the source by yourself, look here:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/network
2,523 forks of bitcoin. Greatest bump ever.
You should get source of 2 coins that you want to compare, and simply diff it. It is easiest way to understand what's the difference.
# git clone https://github.com/fastcoinproject/fastcoin.git
# git ...
6
Since you originally stated that you wanted to write a trading bot, perhaps you will find the following library useful:
"XChange is a Java library providing a simple and consistent API for interacting with over a dozen Bitcoin exchanges providing a consistent interface for trading and accessing market data" (according to their GitHub page)
Unfortunately, ...
5
Taking your questions in order:
How yet another "currency" will solve anything, or what Bitcoin is supposed to be solving?
Because this is a currency that has different properties that avoid the properties of other currencies that create these problems. For example, the supply of Bitcoins is fairly precisely defined and nobody can devalue them through ...
5
The price wont rise, they are issued and redeemable by Amazon. Think of it as loyalty points you would receive from your local supermarket to use later rather than a cryptocurrency.
5
ASICs (Application-specific integrated circuits) are especially manufactured for one specific hashing algorithm. Therefore, a Bitcoin ASIC using SHA-256 will not work for Litecoin or Dogecoin as they both use Scrypt. One example for ASICs are the Butterfly bitcoin miners.
There are altcoins that also use SHA-256, such as Freicoin, Peercoin or Namecoin. An ...
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