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 ...
17
I am developing the ccxt cryptocurrency trading library, check it out on GitHub:
https://github.com/kroitor/ccxt
It is a library for cryptocurrency trading and e-commerce with support for many bitcoin/ether/altcoin exchange markets and merchant APIs.
With it you can access market data and trade bitcoin, ether and altcoins with more than 70 (!!!) ...
16
http://api.bitcoincharts.com/v1/csv/
Each of these files have every trade executed on the given exchange (except the last 15 minutes or so).
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 ...
14
To my knowledge, bitcoin is not traded on any stock markets. It is traded directly on exchanges specialized in cryptocurrencies. These exchanges don't necessarily close, and therefore trades are always occurring.
Your wallet is reading the price feed from one of these exchanges (you can probably configure which one if you look at the settings), and is ...
13
The bitcoin price is determined by a free market of buyers and sellers. There is no way to calculate the price on your own without an external source. I suppose the only exception to this would be if you ran your own bitcoin exchange and you had enough users and volume to produce a fair market price.
12
Some possible reasons I read:
Merchant adoption through payment processors
While merchant adoption is growing, it is currently mostly through payment processors, hardly any merchants keep a significant portion of their bitcoin earnings. With the broader selection of things to spend bitcoins on, more people are shopping with bitcoins, yet, not necessarily ...
12
Bitcoin is not a stock. It's a decentralized currency and its markets are open 24/7.
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 ...
9
Bitcoin does not have one single buy and sell price. Bitcoins are exchanged on many different exchanges, each keeping track of their own market price.
However, BitcoinCharts.com has a useful API that summarises many of the largest exchanges according to their trading volume. You could use that to display the Bitcoin price on your website.
9
It is because it is more expensive and has delays longer and more unpredictable to get $USD out of MtGox, and because they are facing regulatory and lawsuit problems. US branch of MtGox, known as Mutuum Sigillum, may bankrupt or get more assets seized. Simply put, a dollar at MtGox is not worth as much as a dollar elsewhere. MtGox is more accessible/less ...
9
An exchange doesn't set a price at all. It provides a framework for customers to buy and sell coins to each other, at whatever prices the buyers and sellers find mutually agreeable. The exchange itself does not buy or sell, and the prices it quotes are just a report of what its customers are doing right now.
9
When exchange 'A' sells bitcoins for 200 dollars and exchange 'B' buys bitcoins for 300 dollars, there will be people who buy at 'A' and sell at 'B' as long as they can make money on it. This is called 'arbitrage'.
Because of the open markets, people are free to do as they please, so there are people who buy and sell solely to make mere cents on the dollar. ...
9
You can't include the USD amount, but you certainly can include the btc amount in the QR code. The QR code essentially embeds a text like this:
bitcoin:1ArmoryXcfq7TnCSuZa9fQjRYwJ4bkRKfv?amount=0.005
Note the amount here is the amount in BTC. You can generate a QR code for that text using gobitcoin.io. If you just want to insert an image, you can use ...
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
This is really asking about basic trading economics: if I have some new product X, what price does it have? I can set a price and see if anyone buys it. If not, I might lower the price or auction it to see what someone might pay for it. That is the starting value, but it doesn't really mean much as it hasn't been field-tested (so to speak). If others think ...
8
If you have 0.1 BTC and the Bitcoin price is $10,000, it is worth $1000.
If the Bitcoin price becomes $20,000 you will still have 0.1 BTC but it will be worth $2000.
7
May be useful psp(python) example:
<%psp
import urllib2;
import simplejson as json;
j = json.loads(urllib2.urlopen("https://data.mtgox.com/api/2/BTCUSD/money/ticker").read());
%>
<%=str(j["data"]["last"]["value"]) %>
Or one command line:
# /usr/bin/python -c 'import urllib2; import simplejson as json; j = json.loads(urllib2....
7
Yes - it's feasible.
Bitcoins are released at a constant rate determined by the protocol. At the time, 50 Bitcoins were being generated for every block(this is now 25); and blocks are supposed to be found every 10 minutes. Miners compete amongst each other for this prize.
In 2009, you could mine using your computer's CPU and you were only competing with ...
7
You might want to try http://www.cryptodatasets.com/
It has free raw data and sampled data from Bitfinex and HitBtc (currently).
P.S. it's my website
7
For every Bitcoin they sell, someone else had to obtain that Bitcoin. So they increase the demand for Bitcoins by at least as much as they increase the supply.
In addition, they increase the utility of Bitcoins, which increases their value. All other things being equal, a currency you can spend at more merchants is more desirable than one you can spend at ...
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.)
7
Found the data on crypto compare
const endpoint = 'https://min-api.cryptocompare.com/data/histoday?aggregate=1&e=CCCAGG&extraParams=CryptoCompare&fsym='+ ticker.toUpperCase() +'&limit=365&tryConversion=false&tsym=' + currency.toUpperCase();
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
You can get complete and up-to-date price history here:
http://api.bitcoincharts.com/v1/csv/mtgoxUSD.csv
You can also get subsets of the data.
For details see: http://bitcoincharts.com/about/markets-api/
6
Observations
Mt.Gox is currently offering neither fiat withdrawals, nor Bitcoin withdrawals.
No withdrawals means that the Mt.Gox price is completely decoupled from the Bitcoin market, as there can be no arbitrage to close the gap.
Precursors
Mt.Gox has handled the Malleable Transaction issue poorly, and squandered the trust of a lot of its users. ...
6
This is all speculation in a very new technology. I'm not an expert in economics, but there are irrefutable facts that's some of the "cultists" will not entertain. There are, simply put, 2 types of Bitcoin advocates:
Those who see in binary; black and white, moon and doom - more often than not Bitcoin's "success" is solely judged in fiat conversion
Those ...
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