I'm curious about their statement that they automatically append a slash as soon as you type the month.
The instructions say "MM/YY", but do not indicate whether the month is required to have two digits, or just permitted to have two digits. My card says it expires 1/16 So when I key in 1, does a slash get appended? Probably not. Instead, it gets appended after 11. 11/6. now what?
So, Agent-1, based on your training and experience, can you conclude, Agent-1, that simply because someone uses a pseudonymous username to conceal their identity, Agent-1, that they are a criminal?
There's no reason to trust me, but if you send me bitcoins, I'll convert to dollars and send to the fund. You preserve your anonymity. I'll convert all donations at the end of each month.
with coinbase, I transferred maybe $600 to Bitcoin. With Dwolla, I transferred maybe $60,000. That should be an indication of the potential.
The reason is that with Dwolla / Mt Gox, I could control my purchase much better. I love ooinbase: they are a GREAT consumer service. But for large sums, I think Dwolla could have a huge win.
Where did you get that, out of that PDF? The number 25% sounds extremely high.
I have read this PDF before, a while ago, and I don't remember that stat. A quick glance tells me that they say that 2 addresses have over 500,000 Bitcoins, but that's just 4.6% (or more, obviously) of the total 10.7M issued so far. And there's no proof that this is the creator of Bitcoin. In fact, it's more likely one of the large exchanges!
So, please help me understand your statement. If it's buried in the text of that PDF, my apologies.
Correct me if I am wrong, but the prevailing thought when that article was written (1992) was that digital currency would resemble more of a transferred digital coin, with signatures representing each transaction. So if I had coin #12345, and I transferred it to you, I would digitally sign it to you giving your private key the spend capability.
With those architectures, a central authority would be required to prevent the double-spend. And with those architectures, the coins grow with each spend.
The difference with Bitcoin (which I think is totally misnamed) is that it's not a coin architecture, it's a ledger architecture. So no matter how many times the amount 1BTC is transferred, each transfer could be just the same length - the sender's address, the recipient's address, and an appropriate signature. Even 50 years from now and ten thousand transfers of that "coin" later, the "coin" doesn't get larger.
The ledger gets larger, but the coin does not (since really there's no such thing as a "bit COIN" - really what you have is a series of account numbers in the giant shared ledger.)
Right now they subdivide to 8 decimal places. .00000001
With minimal change to the protocol they could subdivide to much smaller units.
I think "bitcoin" is a confusing name, because it's really more like a group of account numbers, which can have money with 8 digits of precision to the right of the decimal point.
Think of a Bitcoin Address(es) as your account number(s), and your Private Key as your ATM card, PIN, and signature all wrapped in one.
If someone sends me 50 bitcoins, I have it in my "account" in the giant ledger in the sky. If I want to send 3.5 of them to someone, what might happen is that I create a transaction that sends 50 bitcoins to two different places... 3.5 to someone, and 46.5 to another account (of mine, my change!) in the giant ledger in the sky.
Or for simplicity, think of them like rewards points, and don't try to make it too complicated.
Oh, and on your point #3... Right now, I intentionally do not allow you to initiate a text conversation to a phone number. There are a few issues and challenges with that (particularly in spam prevention, and in having to know the user's carrier).
So in other words, you wouldn't be able to use your second phone and decide on an impulse to send a message to 867-5309.
On the other hand, you could tell the other person to initiate the conversation to you. "Hey, TEXT me at [email protected]. Yeah, I know it's confusing. Just put the email address in, where you usually put phone numbers."
Then once they texted you, you could text them back numerous times, over weeks or months, until they "/stop" the service.
Thanks. I wrote the Terms and Conditions at 4AM when wired on coffee. It's hard to keep them brief and yet explain a little bit of the "why".
Yeah, I'm not sure about http://txt.gs. Google/blogger wouldn't let me point that to their server. And I really don't want to set up a web server just to redirect. Maybe someone here has some ideas.
This was one of those "it's a 3-day weekend... I wonder if I can build something and learn something."
I decided to cobble something together that permits anonymous texting. It's certainly not perfect, but I thought it was worth showing off to the HN crowd.
$35 for a domain name (sigh, I used godaddy for a Southern Georgia .gs domain; namecheap couldn't help me. Sorry guys). An old server, ubuntu Server edition, Python, Postfix, Sqlite, and little bit of code, a free blogger "website", and it all pretty much works.
What do you think?
PS I'm happy to post a follow-up with all the gory details.
A common strategy is to pre-announce when you know a competitor is ready to release a product but yours is in the pipeline.
I'm not claiming that this is the case, but if some other comedian is ready to release on Friday (and therefore become the second significant person to do it), Gaffigan's pre-announcement may actually be part of a well planned strategy.
Funny that Bagcheck is listed as a "good" example.
I was just commenting to someone as to how confusing that site is. There's a box next to the "JOIN" / "SIGN IN" words in the upper right, that is positioned next to those words (as if those words are the label for the text box).
So you start to key in your name, to join, and a bunch of choices are displayed. If you select one (even your own), you are whisked away to another page that isn't even the join / sign in part of the site. You are no closer to being signed in than you were before. And actually further than if you had clicked on the label for the text box that says "sign in" (which is actually a button or a link, although not identified as such, unless you happen to mouse over it).
Ends up the "join / sign in" text box is actually a SEARCH text box.
yeah, real simplified. Put the word "search" in there. geesh.
The instructions say "MM/YY", but do not indicate whether the month is required to have two digits, or just permitted to have two digits. My card says it expires 1/16 So when I key in 1, does a slash get appended? Probably not. Instead, it gets appended after 11. 11/6. now what?