Modern Vespa

Just a friendly reminder: As mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm going to be trying an experiment. Emphasis on experiment. This could easily fail, and I'm okay with that.

In the next few weeks, I'm going to sell off a few remaining limited editions that I have squirreled away (which is not actually that many) in exchange for Bitcoins. No cash, no checks, no PayPal -- just BTC. No exceptions.

I will be putting the following on sale:

(2) "Italia" limited editions
(2) "Pi" limited editions
(3) "Wasp" limited editions (artwork by Ironfoot)
(4) "33" limited editions (artwork by Rae)
(3) "Pirate" limited editions

If you want one of these, this is probably your last chance to get one. I have in the past reserved #1 and #50 of each series for the MV Archives. I'm now giving up #50 from every series to make this possible.

So, this is your heads up. You've got a couple weeks to get yourself up to speed so that you'll be ready. You will need that long to get yourself funded. If you're interested in pursuing this, please start now. It takes a while.

Purchasing Bitcoins
The most straightforward way to purchase some BTC is via CoinBase, though you'll have to connect your bank account to your account there. I don't recommend giving them your bank login information, but you can still verify your bank account via a couple of small verification transactions, the way PayPal (and others) do it. CoinBase is a legitimate company, recently funded by VCs, and are a standout vendor in the world of Bitcoin.

You can also buy Bitcoins locally via a face-to-face transaction via the LocalBitcoins service. This is essentially a service that connects buyers and sellers in a given area such that they can meet and exchange cash for Bitcoins. Use your own discretion as to whether you're comfortable with that kind of transaction or not.

LocalBitcoins will also let you connect with people over the internet, who will ask you to make a bank deposit to their account via a variety of banks with local offices. I'm leery of this approach, so proceed with caution if you go this route.

Note that you do NOT need to purchase one whole Bitcoin (which is trading at about $780 $700 at the moment). You can buy very, very small fractions of Bitcoin. The patches will go for the BTC equivalent of USD$25 (or thereabouts) though I can't tell you the BTC price yet. BTC pricing is very volatile at the moment, so the price in BTC will almost certainly change by the time I actually put these on sale.

Bitcoin Wallets
You will need a place to keep your Bitcoins. You can keep them at Coinbase (if you purchase there), or you can move purchased coins to your own digital wallet, which can take many forms. One of the easiest (and still relatively safe) wallets is the Blockchain Wallet. This service keeps all of your information locally encrypted on your end of the connection, so that even if their service was compromised (say, by a hacker) your BTC would be relatively safe.

If you want to be in absolute control of your own wallet and keep it off the internet, you'll need one of the software wallets that you can run on your desktop computer. The canonical wallet is available here from the Bitcoin foundation. It's a bit of a pain, though -- it takes quite a long time (literally days, if not longer) for your local node to sync up (via peer-to-peer connections) with the rest of the Bitcoin network. Basically, you'll be slowly downloading the entire public Bitcoin ledger to your machine so that you can see transactions arrive in your wallet, or send transactions from your wallet. I've done it, it works, it's safe, but it's slow. These days I mostly use Blockchain.org's wallet.

Transactions
Transactions in BTC are fairly straightforward. Using your wallet software (or online wallet) you specify a public address where you want to send the coins. For small transactions, there will generally be a transaction fee added in order to get the transaction processed, usually 0.0001 BTC (or about 8 cents at the current USD exchange rate). Just be aware of this.

The way I think I will set it up is that I will post a list of all the patches I have on offer, along with a price in BTC. That price will be roughly commensurate with the regular prices of limited edition patches at the current BTC/USD exchange rate. Anyone who wants to place an order can PM me their purchase request, and I will generate a unique public address and reserve that patch. If the BTC funds arrive in that unique public address within a day or two, I'll mail the patch. If not, I'll un-reserve that patch and offer it up to whoever else wants to purchase it.

Purchases will be limited to one patch per member, first come first served.

For more information on Bitcoin for beginners, go here: http://www.coindesk.com/information/

Coinbase should be verified soon. Tried the Cash into Coins link in Blockchain but it is a bit cumbersome. Current buy price is down a bit since I first set up my wallet.

It is. The market got spooked last night, largely due to some technical glitches at one of the original BTC exchanges (Mt. Gox). A big sell-off ensued, with the speculators analyzing the market signals and buying up BTC at cheap prices.

I must admit that I caught the fever and bought some on the way down. I didn't quite manage to buy at the very bottom, but I still picked up 1BTC at a steep discount.

Oh yes it did. http://www.coindesk.com/price/ Still pretty good though. Hope my verify happens soon.

Where do you monitor prices?

A variety of places. The easiest to use is preev.com -- it will put the price in a tab that you can leave running while you're looking at other stuff. The only problem with preev.com is that you've got to select the exchange you want to monitor, or you'll get a composite price for all of them. Because of the Mt. Gox shenanigans (long story) the USD price for 1BTC is about $100 higher than anywhere else. This is an artificial price difference, though -- one that many people have tried (and failed) to capitalize on through arbitrage.

If you use preev.com, be sure to select "Bitstamp" (or BTC-E if in Europe) as your exchange. Then you'll see a price that reflects reality.

You can also go to bitcoinwisdom.com and see charts and graphs and technical signals. This will also show a price in a tab in the background, but it generally more information than most people are interested in.

Thanks for the tip on preev.com. I have been looking at it for a couple weeks and hadn't realized it was a composite.

Great! I'm too late to the party again. Or am I early?? Moved out of Bitcoin and into Dogecoin some weeks ago. Gotta be ahead of the game or you're behind. Good luck..

My head hurts.

Early. They haven't gone on sale yet. Might want to visit Cryptsy and put some of those Dogecoins into Bitcons.

I'm targeting Saturday, February 22nd.

For the past 8 years, our income has been in US dollars and our lives have been in Euros. Voluntarily adding a third "currency" to keep track of has no appeal.

Just think what Europe was like before the Euro!

Mrs Av still has a folio for all the different currencies she needed when she was traveling on business across Europe on a regular basis. Rather than constantly convert, she kept unused currency to use up on the next trip through.

What amazes me is the number of Americans who still show up here with wads of dollars or dollar denominated Traveler Cheques (useless anywhere other than at currency exchanges or banks) rather than use an ATM to get a much more favorable exchange rate.

And there should be a universal language. Perfect, fit world.

I like how you spelled 'bitcoins' Jess.

8)

So WTF are you talking about now?

Me too, not on the euros peer SE but with an international client base we have enough currency exchange issues to deal with.

I'm going with "one currency for all", "one language for all".

Am I close?

Actually, this annoys me when my in-laws come to Europe. They rock-up with several thousand dollars in cash. Then get pissed-off when shops and services don't take them.

BUY LOCAL CURRENCY, dammit!!

The interesting thing about Bitcoin (assuming it ever reaches widespread acceptance, which is a very big "if") is that it has the potential to be a sort of "universal currency". That is, rather than having a currency exchange for all N world currencies into all other N world currencies, there really only needs to be a local exchange for the local currency into Bitcoin.

So for a paltry five currencies, you need the following ten exchanges:
USD <-> EUR
USD <-> CNY
USD <-> JPY
USD <-> AUD
EUR <-> CNY
EUR <-> JPY
EUR <-> AUD
CNY <-> JPY
CNY <-> AUD
JPY <-> AUD

Adding Bitcoin to the mix, those same five currencies need only five exchanges:
BTC <-> USD
BTC <-> EUR
BTC <-> CNY
BTC <-> JPY
BTC <-> AUD

In fact, you can do this today, though we're still a far way away from being able to walk into a currency exchange booth at an airport to swap BTC for EUR in person.

The added appeal of being able to transmit Bitcoin anywhere in the world in the blink of an eye is the icing on the cake.

In my experience the more you exchange currency the more the fees apply so I'm not interested in bitcoin at this time.

Bitcoin transfers (with some minor exceptions) don't have fees.

Fiat money exchangers are a different story.

(But I'm not actually trying to convince you to use Bitcoin here -- I'm speculating on what Bitcoin could potentially do).

One world, some of us really thought that would be possible and quite an achievement. It may have been bad acid.

I'm not sure what matter exchange rates make unless you are speculating in currency. If a transaction needs to be done, it is done at the rate in effect at the time of the transaction, unless you have currency from an earlier date.

By necessity, we hold dollar accounts in the US (pensions that won't direct deposit to our Greek bank) and Euro accounts in Greece (pensions that will direct deposit to our Greek bank in Euro). We do not have a Dollar denominated account in Greece, which is available, but of no use to us. We execute transactions regularly in Euros, Dollars and Pounds from both currencies with no confusion. We simply deal with two banks that charge a mere pittance when paying in currency other than that in which the account is denominated. That was easy to find in Greece, but not so easy in the US.

Most people hold a single currency that could be called a "home currency" (HC). The only exchange rates that really concerns them are those involving their HC. Thus, using jess' model, only five exchange rates are of concern", and if HC is one of those five, only four exchange rates need be of concern. Exchange rates for a currency you don't hold are mere curiosity items.

HC <-> USD
HC <-> EUR
HC <-> CNY
HC <-> JPY
HC <-> AUD

Exchange rates did influence how we did things when in Russia in 1992, as the Ruble was devaluing so fast that you didn't want to exchange more than a day's supply at a time.

That's all well and good for an individual. I'm thinking more in terms of the global currency exchange business.

You and cdwise are thinking in terms of what it can do for you -- which is a perfectly legitimate line of inquiry. However, I'm thinking in terms of what it can do for the global economy, and the impact that it might (or might not) have there.

Yup, has absolutely little or no serious benefit for the average bloke, other than to create a third currency to deal with in what would normally be two currency transactions.

Not sure how the global economy would deal with a currency that has volatility outside a given national economy's health or lack thereof. I would imagine that the national constraints, to include loss of fiscal sovereignty, arising from the Euro experience would give some people pause.

Also, BitCoin would need to become large enough in magnitude and acceptance to isolate it from undue impact by speculators.

Not necessarily. I can purchase things today in Bitcoin from people around the world, with no currency exchanges at all. This presumes one is holding Bitcoin, of course -- but it significantly reduces the friction involved in most cross-currency transactions because of the lack of fees and the instantaneous transfer. This may seem -- today, in the present -- like a far-fetched scenario. But take a moment to imagine what would happen if (say) Amazon started accepting Bitcoin for purchases. The volatility is widely expected to settle as it becomes more widely traded. Today, there are a small number of people holding large amounts of Bitcoin. As that distribution pattern changes and as more people trade in and out of their home currencies, the price will stabilize.

But despite the current volatility, there are some notable things happening and on a significant scale: Last summer, Argentinians started scrambling for Bitcoins in order to protect whatever money they had from crippling inflation and governmental monetary abuse. They were, in effect, using Bitcoin as an ad-hoc store of wealth. The crisis in Cyprus has led directly to a surge of Europeans purchasing Bitcoins as a hedge against the issues with the Euro. For all of the volatility involved in Bitcoin, it is still being used by many as a buffer against the even more severe volatility of their home currencies. These people have asked themselves what Bitcoin can do for them and found a tangible and actionable answer. In a very real sense, Bitcoin is being used like gold, but with the added benefit of being easy to transmit to anyone, anywhere on the planet. And assuming one protects their private keys, it can't be seized or stolen. It has attracted some attention from various governments and central bank authorities, yes. That's a function of how widely traded it is (or is not). There is a tendency today among the Bitcoin cognoscenti to hoard their coins, partly because they are bullish on the long-term prospects of Bitcoin and partially because there are as yet not enough retailers accepting Bitcoins for merchandise. This is rapidly changing, though -- in the last few weeks, Overstock.com and TigerDirect have both started accepting Bitcoins, and this has led directly to some of the early adopters spending coins, thus getting those coins back into circulation.

My US bank charges 0.5% service fee for non-dollar denominated transactions at the bank to bank exchange rate, which is second only to the central bank to central bank rate. Thus, I do not have to purchase and hold BitCoins or deal with BitCoin's current volatility - which may or may not tamp down. My Dollars will always be worth a dollar in the US.

In short, inter-currency transactions are quite painless and routine for us, we can access cash in local currency at a very favorable rate anywhere in the world, and we don't have to hold an additional currency to do so. Since we travel widely, this works just fine.

I get that you don't see it yet. Most people don't. And I don't really expect them to, yet.

But I don't think we're actually having the same conversation. You're speaking to the applicability to your day-to-day life, in the present. I'm speaking to a future where Bitcoin (or something like it) takes on the scope of a universal currency.

And I'm betting that someday you will get it too. It seems inevitable at this point.

Actuarially, you have a better chance of seeing that possible "someday" than I. We are talking about two very different concepts of "the future". What I "get" and what I partake of are two distinctly different things. If BitCoin tickles your fancy, then for gosh sakes, tickle your fancy.

My bitcoin should be available in a couple of days.

Still have this available btw. Shameless plug. For Sale. MP3 250 rear wheel and rotor in FL. Bitcoin Only

And it seems that my item was not the first to accept bitcoin like I originally thought.
For Sale. MP3 250 rear wheel and rotor in FL. Bitcoin Only

Bitcoin is looking a little dicier today....

what do you think about it today?

Curious how much Jess made on these!

I mined some BTC back in 2010 for a couple weeks and thought it was a waste of time. Probably only less than half and more than a quarter of a single BTC. Lost the info for that account back in 2012. Been kicking myself since 2017 and desperately searching my digital hoard for any signs of that account ever since!

I got more into ETH with a bit more in that account as I mined it for a year or so. Still holding onto that stuff for another 15 years to come with big hopes!

Kind of hope Bitcoin is not part of Jess's investment portfolio...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-56012952

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-56012952

The idea was cool, but execution bad.

Yeah that's why ETH is moving away from gpu mining (proof-of-work) into stake mining (proof-of-stake). Drastically less power needs as you are no longer running untold number of gpus all over the world to crunch the hashes for each block. Still has power needs to run the servers and machines that maintain the system.

Granted still a few years away from fully migrated to p-o-s eth. As far as btc, haven't kept up with it enough to know what their plans are for the future of mining.

Why? What do you have against Jess?
BTC was less than $1,000 in 2014. Now it's $53,000+.
Hope Jess kept every single coin and is now swimming in pools of shiny chrome parts and accessories.

Nice to see Aviator and Jess again. Especially Aviator (you know what I mean).

Lot of things have changed since 2014 indeed.

https://youtu.be/L0DL1A1aG2c