# Bitcoin: A Self-Publishing Gamechanger?



## Cricket (Nov 4, 2015)

I've been wondering lately about whether bitcoin could make Amazon unnecessary. Here are my thoughts on the subject.

*What is Bitcoin?*
If you've never heard of Bitcoin, it's basically the e-mail of money. You get yourself a bitcoin wallet program, which can either be an online program hosted by a company (like the bitcoin equivalent of gmail) or you download a wallet program to your home computer (like Outlook Express). Whichever method you choose, you get to create a "bitcoin address" for yourself which works like an e-mail address, except that you receive money instead of messages. A bitcoin address looks like this: 19v5V5P9infaQyCaRxWWeWoHnRbkX684PS. (This is for a Pet Rescue site.) So if you wanted to send money to this bitcoin address, you would basically just pop open your money-email program and hit send. The money appears in the recipient's "money inbox" in a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the sum you send. As for transaction fees, they are so minimal as to be nearly nonexistent--we are talking on the order of pennies. This makes it practically to send $0.99 to someone and not have the money eaten up in transaction fees.

The really neat thing about bitcoin addresses, though, is that they are just a line of text. You could post one anywhere--in your forum signature, at the end of your book, in your mailing list, your tweet, or on your author webpage. Anywhere you can put an e-mail address, you can put a bitcoin address. This effectively means that anyplace you can type text becomes a potential storefront.

*Why Do We Need Amazon?*
Now let's ask ourselves: why do we sell our books on Amazon, and not on Goodreads or Twitter or Wattpad or our website any other site that offers free exposure for your book? Well, duh. Because Amazon has a big, fat "Buy" button and those other sites don't. But with bitcoin these other sites become storefronts--anywhere you can type your e-mail, you can type your money e-mail. This means that readers can buy direct from Goodreads or Wattpad--no need to go to Amazon at all. What's more, bitcoin enables "one click" purchases everywhere. You don't have to go through the hassle of registering up for an account or worrying about giving your credit card information to some stranger--all you need is your bitcoin address. Needless to say, this makes it much more feasible to sell direct from your website. In fact, if you can get your first readers to buy book 1 on Amazon, you could quite possibly get them to buy the next three books directly from your website via bitcoin and it would be just as convenient. Better yet, you could just put a bitcoin address on the last page of your e-book with the message "Buy book 2 here for $2.99 (bitcoin address)" Before customers have even closed your book, they can already have ordered the next book in the series. Now _that's_ direct marketing. You could also sell directly to your newsletter subscribers by including a bitcoin address in your new book announcement. Heck, why not sell from Goodreads or Facebook or Twitter, for that matter? Remind me why we need Amazon, again?

*Advantages for Serials*
Bitcoin could be very good news for serials. Let's say you want to run a serial where you promise to unlock each new chapter when your readers have collectively paid $50. With credit cards or Paypal, it would be impossible to tell how much had been donated, and thus your customers would have no way of knowing whether you were ripping them off or not. Well, with bitcoin that worry is gone. Due to the nature of the bitcoin architecture, the amount of money in every single bitcoin address in the world can be viewed online for free, so a customer can verify how much money has been donated to the author. No cheating possible, and customers can trust that they are getting what they paid for.

*Opening the Youth Market*
Those who are marketing books to children and younger teenagers also have something to gain by bitcoin adoption. Traditionally, it has been the case that authors had to market their books to young purchaser's _parents_, because after all, mom and dad are the one with the credit card. But there is nothing stopping a youngster from getting a bitcoin address anymore than an email address. Would parents trust their kids with bitcoin? Sure, because a.) in-app game purchases; and b.) what happens when Johnny forgets his field trip money/lunch money and needs it sent over to school immediately? With a credit card it would take days to arrive; with bitcoin, it takes minutes. What's more, bitcoin is not like a credit card, where you can overdraw and go into debt. If there's no money in your bitcoin address, you can't make purchases. Period. So that makes it safe for kids who want digital purchasing power. What this means is that kids who have their allowance in bitcoin can now buy books directly from authors. This would significantly change the marketing paradigm, I think. Bitcoin will open up opportunities for a younger audience who would previously have been unable to buy books simply because of the inherent barriers of e-commerce.

*Foreign Sales*
Another thing that bitcoin enables is foreign sales. Email is universal; you can send an e-mail to someone in (say) China for free without any consideration of borders or sale tax or the like. Bitcoin operates on exactly the same principle. If a seven year old Iranian kid wants to buy your book, now they can. Bitcoin is as universal as the internet itself; national barriers are no longer sales barriers. What's more, transaction fees will be on the order of a penny, no matter how distant the customer you are dealing with. And there's no sales tax, though this may cause issues come tax time.

*One Missing Piece*
This is all in the future, but I think it will start in the next few years. The only piece of technology that is missing in my scenarios is a bitcoin autoresponder program that will send the customer their purchase upon the receipt of the correct amount of money. However, I don't think this is a big deal technologically. You can already append a little message to a bitcoin payment, so it's technically feasible--if awkward--to accept $4.99 in bitcoin from a customer and then send back a $0.01 payment with an attached message containing the URL download link for your book. The capability is there, but it hasn't been streamlined and exploited yet. When bitcoin starts getting mass adoption, then I am confident we will see such conveniences added to the program.

Good news, hey?  I'm looking forward to the future.


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## 555aaa (Jan 28, 2014)

I can send money to you today with your e-mail address using PayPal. Or Spark. Or Amazon Payments. Or Apple Pay. So what exactly does selling in Bitcoin do? With credit card based payments, one reason that there are fees is that there are buyers remedies when the seller fails to perform. The intermediary party also takes on the overnight exchange rate risk (and profit if there is one). There is also authentication across both parties via an intermediary, which makes it much harder to commit fraud.

With Bitcoin, I still have to take my wallet and go to an exchange and transfer real money in and out of my wallet. Bitcoin fluctuates so wildly in the exchange rate that it is not a "store of value." That's what money is. Look, here the fed is worrying about whether inflation is or should be 2% or 2.5% annually, which is the "error" in the store of value of money. With Bitcoin I don't want to get paid in bitcoin until it is a store of value. If Bitcoin was just an encryption scheme for transactions which happens behind the scenes of a currency exchange front end, that's fine, but it's not money.

If you had bitcoins in your wallet on the 4th of this month, the ones you have in your wallet today are worth only 2/3 of what they were on that day. And before that, from Aug 25 to Nov 4, bitcoin had a 130% run-up relative to the dollar. People have seen 20% swings overnight. That's a tough proposition to run a business on.

You cannot legally evade sales taxes or VAT just because of the means of payment. Worse, there's no one managing this for you. With a site like Gumroad, collection and payment of VAT is managed for you. Sites like Gumroad (and Amazon for that matter) enforce regionalization also. I have a title that I can't sell in the EU or UK. So I have to authenticate that my purchasers are not residents of those countries or get sued by the rights holders. I can't do that in an anonymized purchasing system.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-12/bitcoin-can-t-escape-the-dark-side-of-the-internet


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## Ian Marks (Jan 22, 2012)

I don't think it will be game changer at all, although I admit I've been wrong about this sort of thing in the past. I'm hardly an e-commerce newbie, and I've been online since the BBS days, when a 1200-baud modem was considered hot stuff and America Online was the new kid on the block. My PayPal account is older than most of the people who _work_ for PayPal (okay, a slight exaggeration, but you get the point).

But this Bitcoin thing leaves me scratching my head. You say I can send you money based on a line of text you've inserted, well, anywhere, but where is that money coming from? My PayPal account is linked to my bank account and credit card, so I don't need to "buy bitcoins," or whatever one does to fund a Bitcoin purchase. If I have a problem I can get a PayPal representative on the phone. I can even use my PayPal debit card at the supermarket. Bitcoin, in stark contrast, states on their website that they have "no central command," and are owned by no one. Moreover, they also state that Bitcoin transactions are irreversible. It seems to me that if a dispute were to arise with a Bitcoin transaction, the aggrieved party would have no recourse at all.

It all sounds slightly sketchy... useful for staying below the radar while moving money across borders, I suppose, or buying that Inflatable Susie doll I've been eyeing without tipping off the wife (I'm kidding, honey, I swear...), but not completely above board. What exactly is the advantage? Is it the small transaction fee? And maybe while people are telling me what a Luddite I am, perhaps someone could explain what "mining for bitcoin" is?


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

Bitcoin, in my opinion, will remain the currency-of-choice for illicit dealings in the deep web, but it's never going to go mainstream enough affect anything Amazon, Paypal or authors in general do.


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## Cricket (Nov 4, 2015)

I've sold books off of my website for a couple years, and I've had a few customers ask me if I would accept bitcoin. The other email I get is from customers who live in a country that Paypal won't serve. "I want to read your book, but I can't buy it because..." Bitcoin can solve this problem for them, though naturally they've never heard of it. I do know that I lose a lot customers just because of the hassle and time of using Paypal. If I could get a one-click purchase system like the one I described, I'm sure that I could get more sales. (I live in an area where there's no sales tax or VAT, so I actually don't have to worry about that.)



> You say I can send you money based on a line of text you've inserted, well, anywhere, but where is that money coming from?


I actually got my bitcoins from one of those "make money online!" websites where you take marketing surveys and such. I only earned about $2, but that was more any other site paid me. (In fact, this bitcoin-based site was the only one that _wasn't_ a cunning scam, so I can say from experience that bitcoin has cleaned up at least one dirty corner of the internet.) But I suspect that most people will get bitcoin in ordinary ways as it gradually becomes more and more widely available. The other day I saw that my favorite podcast of all time, Dan's Hardcore History, was accepting it. What does Dan do with his money? Possibly he spends it on other sites that accept bitcoin. And so it trickles slowly through the ecosystem.



> Moreover, they also state that Bitcoin transactions are irreversible. It seems to me that if a dispute were to arise with a Bitcoin transaction, the aggrieved party would have no recourse at all.


This is partially true, but there's a lot of things you can do to fix the situation. At any rate, I don't think it really applies too often. My customers know me and trust me. I have a well established website, and my books have enough reviews that they know I'm not going to scam them. If something goes wrong with the purchase, they send me a support e-mail, not a refund demand. I've only had like two or three refund demands in all my years of selling direct.



> What exactly is the advantage? Is it the small transaction fee?


The low transaction fee actually is a huge advantage. I sell exclusively through Paypal, for example, and for every $5 book I sell they take $0.50, or about 10% of my profits. That's practically the same as the cut for a traditional agent.  With Amazon taking 30%, you could afford to hire _two _traditional agents.



> I can send money to you today with your e-mail address using PayPal. Or Spark. Or Amazon Payments. Or Apple Pay. So what exactly does selling in Bitcoin do?


In theory you can, but in reality you can only send me money via Paypal, because I don't have a clue how to use those other payment systems. The payment market is fragmented. You don't have this problem with email, because the architecture is universal. Bitcoin serves essentially the same purpose. 


> If you had bitcoins in your wallet on the 4th of this month, the ones you have in your wallet today are worth only 2/3 of what they were on that day. And before that, from Aug 25 to Nov 4, bitcoin had a 130% run-up relative to the dollar. People have seen 20% swings overnight. That's a tough proposition to run a business on.


Bitcoin has recently gone through a "dot.com" boom, so I'm not really convinced that this is a permanent problem. In any case, I would just cash out regularly. I don't allow money to sit in my Paypal account either; it's not good to leave your money on a 3rd party server. 


> And maybe while people are telling me what a Luddite I am, perhaps someone could explain what "mining for bitcoin" is?


Oog.... It's complicated. Too complicated for my small brain to explain.  Suffice to say you'll never need to do it.



> You cannot legally evade sales taxes or VAT just because of the means of payment. Worse, there's no one managing this for you. With a site like Gumroad, collection and payment of VAT is managed for you. Sites like Gumroad (and Amazon for that matter) enforce regionalization also. I have a title that I can't sell in the EU or UK. So I have to authenticate that my purchasers are not residents of those countries or get sued by the rights holders. I can't do that in an anonymized purchasing system.


Well, I can't answer for that. I do know that there are big and small companies already doing online commerce via intermediaries like Bitpay, so presumably the company handles that for them. As I said at the beginning, I don't have to pay VAT or sales tax where I live, so it's not an issue for me.


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## Joel Ansel (Oct 17, 2013)

I dabbled in Bitcoin for a short period of time a couple of years ago. It was mostly an experiment to see what could be done. I made a tidy profit when I cashed out, but I would not recommend anyone getting into Bitcoin for reasons that I won't go into in this thread.

However, details of my experiment and the reasons why I didn't continue can be found in this old thread.

http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,172714.0.html

There is also a lot of information there from others, both pro and con, that explains how Bitcoin works in further detail. I just don't see Bitcoin as a viable option for book sales beyond a small handful of consumers who a willing to deal in that form of payment. Also, as stated before, the Bitcoin you'd get for a book that you're charging $2.99 for today could be worth pennies tomorrow. You'd have to sell an awful lot of books for Bitcoin everyday in order to justify converting to USC on a timely enough basis. Otherwise you'd risk losing your shirt.

With all that said, if someone wanted to buy one of my books for Bitcoin, I'd probably take it.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Bitcoin is not just a method of online payment, it's an actual currency. It's completely digital, but the way it is created makes it a tangible currency, and it had a finite amount that can be created. There will be a day when all online retailers will except it for payment, although we are still years away from that. Bitcoin is traded on the open market just like every other currency and precious metals. Right now the value of Bitcoin is still fluctuating too rapidly to make any use as an everyday replacement for your trusty debit card. Right now in Bitcoin land it's like the days of the California Gold Rush. They didn't know the value of Gold from one day to the next because tommorrow could always bring a big hit thus increasing the supply and sending the value downward. We just are not going to see widespread adoption of its use until its value stabilizes to the point that you can be sure that $10 of bitcoin today will probably still be the same $10 in 6 months. Now once it does get to that point though, I have no doubt that it will quickly (read as a few decades) replace most fiat currents on this planet, which is what it was ultimately designed to do. And you can believe that as soon as it's economically feasible Amazon will except Bitcoin as a payment option. All the tech companies know the future is heading there, but they are smart enough to time it properly.

Now on the point of not needing Amazon. If you honestly think you can make a living selling books just from your website and ignore the likes of Amazon, Apple, B&N, Google, and Kobo? Well I don't how to say it nicely, so I'll just say, you haven't learned enough from this forum yet. Please do more research.

Now if you want to experiment with using Bitcoin on your site, go for it. Just don't ever expect to become a full time Author without utilizing the big retailers. There's just no way you can gain the exposure you need without them. The authors on this forum who have quit their day jobs have done so because they are selling 40-60 books a day (some a lot more). You just can't sell 60 books a day without the power of Amazon's customer base.


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## Cricket (Nov 4, 2015)

> Now if you want to experiment with using Bitcoin on your site, go for it. Just don't ever expect to become a full time Author without utilizing the big retailers. There's just no way you can gain the exposure you need without them. The authors on this forum who have quit their day jobs have done so because they are selling 40-60 books a day (some a lot more). You just can't sell 60 books a day without the power of Amazon's customer base. Now if you want to experiment with using Bitcoin on your site, go for it. Just don't ever expect to become a full time Author without utilizing the big retailers. There's just no way you can gain the exposure you need without them. The authors on this forum who have quit their day jobs have done so because they are selling 40-60 books a day (some a lot more). You just can't sell 60 books a day without the power of Amazon's customer base.


Tsk! I sell 2 nonfiction (mostly) books off my website and earn a steady average of $400 per month, none of that from Amazon. I also know for a virtual fact that I could double that to $800 with two more books. When you really get down to it, Amazon is nothing but a storefront and a file hosting site. Goodreads has all the same trappings (cover, blurb, star rating, reviews, also-boughts, recommendations) but no buy button. When you can add a buy button (i.e. a bitcoin address) to Goodreads, why not cut out the middle man, aka Amazon, and take all the profit for yourself? What value does Amazon add to the process? (I suppose there is a lot to be said for a slick download to the customer's Kindle, but I don't see this as an insurmountable barrier from our end.)

The traditional publishers thought that nobody could sell books without them, but all they really did was connect writers and readers. What if readers and writers don't need to connect through Amazon, either? Why can't I put a bitcoin address on the last page of my novel and sell the next book to my reader directly from the book itself? Why do I even need a storefront at all?

Joel, I'm going to quote your 2013 post because you make some good points I hadn't thought about. Things have changed since then, but I suspect your experiment would still fail today. The situation won't begin to move until we start seeing widespread adoption.



> I had mentioned in another thread that I'm creating book formatting software that allows you to add a plugin and turn your book's database in to a website. I also mentioned that I would be creating a buy button that would then allow you to easily sell your books from that website. http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,172350.0.html And an author suggested that I allow the books to be purchased with Bitcoins.
> 
> I can tell you that erotica authors have problems with Paypal. Paypal has frozen erotica author's accounts in the past for selling erotic stories. So Bitcoin would be a great option for us. But what about non-erotica authors? How familiar is everyone here with Bitcoins? If you were to have the ability to sell your books from your website, would you consider accepting Bitcoins along with Paypal?
> 
> ...


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

If you are already selling $400 of books a month from your website then what is the purpose of this thread? And if you already have books moving that volume without Amazon, then why the hell are you not selling them on Amazon? Are you so anti Amazon that you are willing to just throw money away? If you have books making $400 a month from your website alone then you could easily be bringing in $4,000 a month from Amazon with little effort. So what is your goal? To continue being a starving artist doing it your own way just to buck the big Zon? Or do you actually want to be a full time writer?


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## geronl (May 7, 2015)

are bitcoins still a thing?


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

geronl said:


> are bitcoins still a thing?


Yes, still a thing, and will be the future, just not any time soon.


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## Cricket (Nov 4, 2015)

> If you are already selling $400 of books a month from your website then what is the purpose of this thread? And if you already have books moving that volume without Amazon, then why the hell are you not selling them on Amazon? Are you so anti Amazon that you are willing to just throw money away?


I didn't start this thread to dish out abuse on Amazon (though actually, I'm a little surprised to see it so strongly defended). My main objection to them is that I don't like the idea that I have to pay them one third of my profits. Why give up 1/3 of your money if you don't have to? And if bitcoin lets you reach more customers and take home more $$$, then why not take advantage of it?

The reason I don't sell with Amazon is mostly just the market I'm in. To make a long story short, I don't actually think my sales would be improved that much by selling there. Besides, I sell the books using a pay-what-you-want strategy, and Amazon's price matching thing might be an objection to that. I do plan to sell on Amazon eventually, with some books that I think would do better there. However, I will pull out the minute I think I can make better money on my own.

As an addendum, I'll just say that I believe you should always give your customers an incentive to buy direct from you. In my case, this means that customers who choose to buy books from my website instead of Amazon will find that I have included awesome artwork, comics, short stories, a making-of interview, fan challenges, lessons in the fictional language used by my characters, and tempting photographs of 3D printed rings identical to the mystical shapeshifting rings worn by my characters (which they can purchase at my Shapeways store for $69.99). In short, the people who buy from Amazon will get the plain vanilla version of the book. The people who buy direct from me will get the special edition version crammed with bonus content. Both prices being equal, which version would you rather buy?


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## Dune (Apr 21, 2015)

I've avoided Bitcoins for a long time, but your arguments sound good. I did a little research after reading this and I find all the Bitcoin fees and exchange fees to be pretty steep. One article showed spending $294 for $250 worth of Bitcoin. How is this any cheaper than Visa transactions? Then there are fees to get the money back to your currency of choice. I really don't see the benefit, except perhaps to leave the money as Bitcoins, once you have bitcoins.

If the OP could show me how to get a 1 to 1 exchange, I'd do it. The OP made it sound like there was next to zero fees, but I haven't seen any way to achieve that in my research in the last hour.


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## Cricket (Nov 4, 2015)

Hey Dune,

The bitcoin _transaction _fees are practically nil. The _exchange _fees, however, are a different story. In my 3-to-5-years-from-now scenario, I assume that either a.) bitcoin will have stabilized enough that it will be safe to keep money in that form; or b.) bitcoin will be widely adopted to the point that you can simply spend it on your day to day bills while keeping your long terms savings in dollars. Either way, you wouldn't be doing much exchanging.

However. I know that right now there are some companies that use a bitcoin system which instantly converts the bitcoin they receive from a purchase to dollars, thus minimizing their risk from price swings...unfortunately I don't remember the name anymore. All bitcoin company names sound alike.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Cricket, I'm not defending Amazon, I disagree with a lot of the things they do. I'm simply trying to point out that I think trying to make a living as a writer and intentionally boycotting Amazon (or any other retailer) is probably foolish. Yes, Amazon takes 30% of your profit, but 70% of a whole ton of books adds up to a heck of a lot more than 100% of a few books. The number of people buying books from Amazon on a daily basis is astronomical. You simply can't replicate even a fraction of their site traffic on your own. Now I never said selling direct to readers was a bad idea or you shouldn't do it. By all means do it, and have them pay you however you want. However, if your goal is to make enough money that selling books pays all your bills and you quit your day job, then boycotting Amazon simply because they take 30% is a recipe for failure. You will never sell enough books to be financially independent if your only outlet to new readers is your own website. The benefit of the established retailers is they already have loyal customers shopping every day. It's about being visible, more eyes seeing your book means more books sold. You simply can not cut out the biggest fish in the pond and then expect to be successful. There are a lot of successful authors on this forum, I seriously doubt any of them would advocate that going the route you are suggesting and cutting the retailers out of your marketing is a good idea.



Dune said:


> I've avoided Bitcoins for a long time, but your arguments sound good. I did a little research after reading this and I find all the Bitcoin fees and exchange fees to be pretty steep. One article showed spending $294 for $250 worth of Bitcoin. How is this any cheaper than Visa transactions? Then there are fees to get the money back to your currency of choice. I really don't see the benefit, except perhaps to leave the money as Bitcoins, once you have bitcoins.
> 
> If the OP could show me how to get a 1 to 1 exchange, I'd do it. The OP made it sound like there was next to zero fees, but I haven't seen any way to achieve that in my research in the last hour.


Checkout Coinbase.com, Bitcoins are very easy to acquire and use without crazy exchange rates. What you read was most likely referring to sites that are preying on less knowledgeable people and selling Bitcoin way overprice. When you buy and sell Bitcoin, you really should look at like a precious metal gold or silver. When you buy say $100 of Gold you get $100 worth of Gold today, but next week that same Gold might be worth $100, $120, or $80 depending on supply and demand changes in the Gold market. Bitcoin is a hot commodity right now, and speculators can cause vast fluctuations. Right now it's best to look at it as an investment rather than try to use it as daily currency.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

555aaa said:


> Bitcoin fluctuates so wildly in the exchange rate that it is not a "store of value." That's what money is. Look, here the fed is worrying about whether inflation is or should be 2% or 2.5% annually, which is the "error" in the store of value of money.


That's not true. Money is not a store of value, it is an abstraction of value that provides a medium of exchange. Inflation is not an "error" in the "stored value" of money, it is a _reduction_ in the value of money through the increase (inflation) of supply. This pushes prices up because each currency unit (dollar, etc.) has gone down in value. This is basic stuff. http://economics.about.com/cs/studentresources/f/money.htm

The US Dollar, for example, has had nothing backing it for decades, so the value it represents is basically a decision (thus the term _fiat currency_). Its value is primarily decided by government action. It is only "stable" because the government has a direct and heavy hand in stabilizing it. However, the government -- much to its disappointment, I assume -- is not omnipotent. There is a limit to its power. Governments (and the societies suffering their meddling) have faced hyperinflation before, and it can (and probably will) happen again. It can happen to your government-backed fiat currency of choice, and if that happens you'll find your "stored" value is gone. Because it was never there. If you want something to store value, buy metals, or something. Our books, as "intellectual property," store more value than any fiat currency.

Bitcoin is money just as the US dollar is money, because people use it as an abstraction of value as they engage in value exchanges. I don't want to trade my books for chickens, but if you sell your chickens for Bitcoin (or USD) I will accept your payment in Bitcoin (or USD) instead.

Those wanting to learn more about accepting Bitcoin for their books might be interested in an experimental first draft of a "book" project that I was using as a way to familiarize myself with the Penflip writing platform: https://www.penflip.com/RattlesnakeStu/selling-books-with-bitcoin

_Edited for typo correction_


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Crenel said:


> That's not true. Money is not a store of value, it is an abstraction of value that provides a medium of exchange. Inflation is not an "error" in the "stored value" of money, it is a _reduction_ in the value of money through the increase (inflation) of supply. This pushes prices up because each currency unit (dollar, etc.) has gone down in value. This is basic stuff. http://economics.about.com/cs/studentresources/f/money.htm
> 
> The US Dollar, for example, has had nothing backing it for decades, so the value it represents is basically a decision (thus the term _fiat currency_). Its value is primarily decided by government action. It is only "stable" because the government has a direct and heavy hand in stabilizing it. However, the government -- much to its disappointment, I assume -- is not omnipotent. There is a limit to its power. Governments (and the societies suffering their meddling) have faced hyperinflation before, and it can (and probably will) happen again. It can happen to your government-backed fiat currency of choice, and if that happens you'll find your "stored" value is gone. Because it was never there. If you want something to store value, buy metals, or something. Our books, as "intellectual property," store more value than any fiat currency.
> 
> ...


Excellent explanation of fiat currency, value, and inflation. One of the reasons that I believe Bitcoin is one day destined to replace fiat currency (hopefully while I'm still alive). It has a guard against inflation and government manipulation built into its very design. I don't want to get into the whole bitcoin vs fiat currency thing though, because I'm an "End the Fed" supporter and that will quickly devolve the thread into a political discussion that will likely get the whole thing locked.

Getting back onto topic, there is an ebook storefront website out there that sells ebooks for bitcoin. I'll have to dig around to find them again. I remember when I seen them several months ago there was only a handfull of books on it so I didn't even bother.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

DarkarNights said:


> Getting back onto topic, there is an ebook storefront website out there that sells ebooks for bitcoin. I'll have to dig around to find them again. I remember when I seen them several months ago there was only a handfull of books on it so I didn't even bother.


I've used a couple -- and both are closed (or indefinitely "down for rebuilding") now. And I only made one sale. It's definitely a challenge right now, although if I ever get out there to do some hand-selling or book-signing I plan to make it possible for people to pay with Bitcoin in addition to credit card. That's more likely to educate about Bitcoin than to earn any, but that's OK with me.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Crenel said:


> I've used a couple -- and both are closed (or indefinitely "down for rebuilding") now. And I only made one sale. It's definitely a challenge right now, although if I ever get out there to do some hand-selling or book-signing I plan to make it possible for people to pay with Bitcoin in addition to credit card. That's more likely to educate about Bitcoin than to earn any, but that's OK with me.


The one I was referring to was http://www.bitbooks.co and it is currently down.

Another thing to know, for anyone thinking of using Bitcoins, is make yourself well educated in how it actually works. Because if you have a wallet address that is not managed by software via a site like Coinbase or via a hardware based device like a Bitcoin vault, you need to treat that wallet address like a piggy bank. Only ever withdraw the total amount once, and consider it smashed. Because of the way the blockchain works, if you attempt to withdraw a partial amount, the transaction actually removes the whole amount, gives you what you asked for into wherever you directed it, and the puts the remainder into a new address referred to as a "change address". Software wallets can handle these new change addresses behind the scenes and keep them secure so you still have that money. When dealing with a "paper wallet" (one not managed by software) you will never know what the change address is that got generated by the transaction and you will loose that money. That is why you withdraw 100% of what the paper wallet holds. Now the smashing part (or shredding in the case of paper) is because one an exit transaction has been made on an address that transaction become a permanent part of the blockchain (the blockchain is a digital record of every bitcoin transaction ever made) and this reduces the effectiveness of the cryptography in your address. So you can actually reuse an address and put money back into it, but it is less secure than an address that has never had withdrawl.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

DarkarNights said:


> The one I was referring to was http://www.bitbooks.co and it is currently down.


Ah, right, that was the one I couldn't remember. I used that and CoinDL. The latter was where I made my one sale, but the store that was there is gone now. Last I remember seeing, the BitBooks.co owner was looking for someone to pass it along to, which (last I checked) had not happened. Looking at it now, it's hard to know whether anything more has happened to bring it back to life. I'd already removed my content before it was shut down, though, for reasons unrelated to the site itself.

On the minimal site now at the CoinDL address, I saw a reference to a new service called BTCDLC. Apparently Dropbox is used for storage of the files, and BTCDLC processes the payment and fulfillment. Not particularly interesting to me, but some might find it worth a peek.


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## AlexBrantham (Feb 27, 2014)

An interesting thread, but one which I think has suffered from conflating two more-or-less separate issues.

(1) Can you thrive as a writer selling books directly, without retailers such as Amazon?
(2) Will bitcoin become a widespread currency?

OP seems to think "yes" to both, which is fine (though there is plenty of room for debate on both). But they are separate: the paypal examples given show that selling directly is quite possible without using bitcoin, and the question is then only haggling over how many percentage points to want to pay for the service. And bitcoin could take over the world and we still might all be dependent on the retailers - it would be comparatively easy for Amazon to embed bitcoin into their systems.

I am though interested in a related question, raised by OP's comment "I live in an area where there's no sales tax or VAT, so I actually don't have to worry about that." The thing is, as far as the tax authorities are concerned, where you live is irrelevant. It's where the purchaser lives that matters. So if you want to sell directly to an EU customer, for example, you should be collecting VAT and remitting it to the taxman. Now, your turnover may be so small that they will never notice and they won't come after you. But if you're right about there being a game being changed, and a lot of business were being done that way, their attention would be grabbed and you can expect some action to be taken.

Which is why I think there isn't a game being changed, but rather incremental changes where we might see a little more use of bitcoin and a little more direct selling, but my guess is that the market in 5 years time won't look fundamentally different from what we see now.

Only a guess, of course!


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## Annette_g (Nov 27, 2012)

I'm in the UK, like a lot of authors here and I don't want to sell direct from my website or anywhere else because of the complicated VAT laws. Amazon, Smashwords, Allromance etc. take care of that for me for a percentage. It's worth it for me.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

FWIW, reader here:

I don't personally have a need for bitcoin. I suppose if I came upon something I wanted to buy and that was the only way to do so, I'd look into it further. But I'd have to REALLY REALLY want the thing, AND, not be able to buy it ANYWHERE ELSE, to actually figure out how to get bitcoin to pay for it.

It all feels a bit too nebulous to me. I hear the arguments that bitcoin is just like any other currency -- US dollars, UK pound sterling, the Euro, the Yen, the Shekel. But I have actually HELD dollars, pounds, euros, yens, and shekels in my hands. I've had them in my wallet or change pocket. Probably I'm old fashioned but given that I can't hold a handful of bitcoin, I'm not likely to trust it as a medium of exchange. I realize that may seem contradictory -- I'm perfectly fine with ebooks which are really only bits and bytes, and I have no trouble using the bits and bytes to trade/move around the money I am familiar with, but there it is.

I have no problem with a site accepting bitcoin, and I do even see where it could be a solution in some cases, but *I* would prefer to use some 'real' -- or maybe the better word is 'traditional' -- currency instead.

Also, FWIW, I do buy most of my books/media via Amazon because: Kindle. They have a huge catalog and there's not a lot of need for me to look elsewhere for stuff to read. I also borrow quite a bit via my local libraries. Again, I realize that not everyone is in this position for reasons that might be beyond their control.


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## Jeff Hughes (May 4, 2012)

Remember Crown Books?  Here, in the mid-Atlantic of the United States, they were ubiquitous for many years.  Modest sized, cookie-cutter bookstores, all carrying pretty much the same titles.  Current New York Times bestsellers.  A spartan selection of titles in different genres.  A couple tables of remaindered volumes.  And a nice selection of magazines.

In contrast to Crown Books, when Borders first appeared it was an astonishment!  Physically huge, it contained not just the latest and greatest titles, but also a comprehensive selection of old and obscure texts, on almost any genre one could imagine.  For years and years, my wife's and my weekly date night was dinner out, and then a lovely hour or two at Borders.  Alas.

Yes, Amazon is a storefront.  And as an inveterate reader, that's precisely why I go there.  The price discounts are nice.  The fast and reliable shipping is lovely.  As is the 'BUY' button and easy, one-click shopping.  But all those are vastly secondary to the real reason... selection.  Not only can I can find nearly anything I want there, but Amazon helps me with a powerful search engine, algorithms which trigger recommendations, also-buys, and the variety of other tools that help find even the most obscure, little-known titles.

Neither your website, nor mine, can ever match that critical mass of content.  The method of payment is almost irrelevant.  As others have pointed out, there are many easy options for that.  And the volatility of Bitcoin today makes it highly ill-suited for such transactions.  A game-changer?  Hardly.

As a reader, I go to Amazon because that's where the books are.


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## Guest (Nov 18, 2015)

Sorry. Bitcoins are monopoly money. It isn't backed by any known, responsible entity. There is no enforcement behind it to protect you. If someone makes an unauthorized withdrawal from my bank account, I'm protected by law to only $50 liability. If my bank fails, my deposits are protected. Someone steals your bitcoins, which happens more often than the fanboys care to admit, you are screwed. 

And seriously, some of the OP's arguments for using bitcoins are shady. Market to minors without their parents knowledge! Evade taxes! Essentially, use bitcoins to break the those pesky laws about marketing directly to minors and paying taxes. It simply reinforces the belief that bitcoins are a shadow currency used by shady people.


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## 555aaa (Jan 28, 2014)

The value of money is the value of the goods and services that can be exchanged for it. Inflation is a good measure of the value of money because it collects all the goods and services which people use, and then measure the amount of money used for that, over time. So it is exactly that measure. And the ability to transmit that value through time is what makes money useful. The reason that we have fiat currencies is to allow the supply of money to be adjusted to balance the amount of goods and services exchanged in an economy.  When you have a fixed supply of currency units, and there is more production in a growing economy, then you are going to have deflation, because the ratio of production to units goes up as more people make and sell more stuff. It's basically like going back to the gold standard. If you want to store up something whose supply doesn't increase (much) over time, just go buy gold.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

555aaa said:


> Inflation is a good measure of the value of money because it collects all the goods and services which people use, and then measure the amount of money used for that, over time. So it is exactly that measure.


I'm sorry, but that is fundamentally incorrect. Inflation is a reduction in value of money, not a measure of the value of money. As I said before, this is basic stuff. If you're not sure, there are abundant reliable sources that will help you understand what inflation and is not. You may not consider Wikipedia itself to be reliable, but perhaps references linked from it will be of sufficient merit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation You can certainly measure how much has been lost to inflation over time, but measuring its effect does not make inflation itself a measurement. As an analogy, you can measure how much water has evaporated from a cup but that does not make evaporation a measurement of water, it is still a loss process.

Discussing basic economics is topic drift, and I'm not an economics pro, so I'll leave it at that. As to the nature of Bitcoin vs USD, I'm amused by the notion that the Fed is "responsible" when they object to auditing, which is a critical element of real financial responsibility. But the politics of economic intervention is also topic drift. However, Ann, you can print a paper Bitcoin wallet which is a physical artifact of the currency, the only difference being that it lacks government approval. On the other hand, strictly within the Bitcoin economy (without regard for exchange rates), the value of a paper wallet can be verified (no counterfeiting, thanks to the blockchain) and it will not change in amount until you spend (withdraw) it. Naturally the spending power of that amount will vary over time.

Direct selling does impose a lot of trouble, assuming one wants to stay within the law, which was the main reason I stopped trying to do it. Even a service like Gumroad can't properly handle it (last I checked) because some places, such as Washington State, collect tax on digital goods _and_ you must have the customer's address to apply the correct rate. For now, until (if ever) governments find some way to eliminate this problem on a broad scale, the mainstream market "game" won't change much.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Sorry. Bitcoins are monopoly money. It isn't backed by any known, responsible entity.


With all due respect, you have no idea what Bitcoins are, how they are created, or how they are secured by the technology of the blockchain. They are backed by their own intrinsic value, the same way gold is backed by its own intrinsic value. To truly understand the intrinsic value, and why it has value, you need to learn about the technology, how they are created, how transactions work, and how the complex cryptography at the base of the whole system works. Please research about a thing before you go off demonizing it. And you want a true example of Monopoly Money? Pull a Federal Reserve Note out of your wallet, there's your Monopoly Money backed by nothing, without any intrinsic value. Now go learn about what the Federal Reserve actually is, because it's not what most Americans think it is, and it is truly sinister, and once you learn the truth you will never look at your money the same way ever again.


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## Guest (Nov 18, 2015)

DarkarNights said:


> With all due respect, you have no idea what Bitcoins are, how they are created, or how they are secured by the technology of the blockchain. They are backed by their own intrinsic value, the same way gold is backed by its own intrinsic value. To truly understand the intrinsic value, and why it has value, you need to learn about the technology, how they are created, how transactions work, and how the complex cryptography at the base of the whole system works. Please research about a thing before you go off demonizing it. And you want a true example of Monopoly Money? Pull a Federal Reserve Note out of your wallet, there's your Monopoly Money backed by nothing, without any intrinsic value. Now go learn about what the Federal Reserve actually is, because it's not what most Americans think it is, and it is truly sinister, and once you learn the truth you will never look at your money the same way ever again.


"Intrinsic value"..."sinister" Federal Reserve...gotcha. I see where this is going.

Bottom line is this: If I have to place my bets on the United States government backing the dollar or a group of anonymous "miners" who are answerable to nobody, with whom I have zero recourse, and that are working outside the rule of law, I will take my chances with the U.S. government.


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## gljones (Nov 6, 2012)

The amusing irony to me about Bitcoin is that if it is successful it will fail.  In other words, if these monetary instruments become widely accepted and commonly used, governments will step in and regulate them like any other currency, effectively making them the same as every other currency.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

If I can't pay my actual, real-world bills with it, I'm not interested in using it.


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## bang on the drum (Nov 2, 2015)

Also, bitcoin will drive grocery stores out of business. Why go to grocery stores when you can just pay farmers in bitcoin?


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## Guest (Nov 18, 2015)

bang on the drum said:


> Also, bitcoin will drive grocery stores out of business. Why go to grocery stores when you can just pay farmers in bitcoin?


I'm really not clear on what you are arguing here?


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## Flopstick (Jul 19, 2011)

I really don't see any of the advantages you listed as advantages. Some gimmick for serials, marketing to hypothetical children spending their parent's Bitcoins, and selling untranslated books to Iranian youths do not even begin to mitigate the massive inconvenience of having to calculate and pay VAT on sales in a currency that fluctuates in value on an hourly basis - let alone the risk of getting ripped off by yet another Bitcoin exchange theft, getting paid in currency that cant' be spent on normal things without conversion, unstable prices, and all the rest of it. If someone's that desperate to avoid spending cash, they can pay me in Kit Kats; those I can at least eat.


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## Guest (Nov 18, 2015)

Flopstick said:


> If someone's that desperate to avoid spending cash, they can pay me in Kit Kats; those I can at least eat.


I too would totally accept payment in various forms of chocolate.

Of course, if someone really wants to pay me in virtual currency, I will also accept cartel coins. I'm still trying to unlock the rest of my Yavin stronghold, and there are some stronghold decorations I've been wanting to get...


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## Cricket (Nov 4, 2015)

> Cricket, I'm not defending Amazon, I disagree with a lot of the things they do. I'm simply trying to point out that I think trying to make a living as a writer and intentionally boycotting Amazon (or any other retailer) is probably foolish. Yes, Amazon takes 30% of your profit, but 70% of a whole ton of books adds up to a heck of a lot more than 100% of a few books.


I definitely can't disagree with this, Darkarknights. It would be absurd to boycott Amazon unless you have the financial data to prove that it's worthwhile. I'm just saying, I don't know if it always will be worthwhile. 


> Remember Crown Books? Here, in the mid-Atlantic of the United States, they were ubiquitous for many years. Modest sized, cookie-cutter bookstores, all carrying pretty much the same titles. Current New York Times bestsellers. A spartan selection of titles in different genres. A couple tables of remaindered volumes. And a nice selection of magazines. In contrast to Crown Books, when Borders first appeared it was an astonishment! Physically huge, it contained not just the latest and greatest titles, but also a comprehensive selection of old and obscure texts, on almost any genre one could imagine. Amazon helps me with a powerful search engine, algorithms which trigger recommendations, also-buys, and the variety of other tools that help find even the most obscure, little-known titles.


Amazon is the best thing we've ever had. And that's why it's so hard for people recognize its weaknesses. Here are some shortcomings that Amazon has:
- They make it really hard to give stuff away free
- They don't carry free archival material, like Google Books does
- Posting a single chapter of a book on a fanfic site will get you ten reviews. Selling 100 copies of your book on Amazon will get you one review. This is broken.
- Kindle Worlds, Amazon's fanfic outlet is lifeless and dead compared to a real fanfic site
- Amazon only lets you download books in Kindle format; they try to lock you into the Kindle ecosystem as much as possible
- They use DRM
- The "Look Inside" feature is slow and inconvenient for customers
- There is no way to search for one-of-a-kind documents, like medieval manuscripts or cuneiform tablets

The best thing ever only stays the best until something better comes along. I don't see Amazon as perfect; I see them as a complacent monopoly ripe for disruption. People who are used to getting 8% royalties are joyous that they now get 70% royalties. Amazon seems so generous from the perspective of those who have been getting screwed over by the traditional publishers all their lives. But I, spoiled child of the internet that I am, find it absurd that Amazon takes 30%, whereas Paypal only takes 10%, and bitcoin would take less than 1%. If Amazon had any real competition, we would be getting higher royalties: 80%, 90%, 99%.



> The amusing irony to me about Bitcoin is that if it is successful it will fail. In other words, if these monetary instruments become widely accepted and commonly used, governments will step in and regulate them like any other currency, effectively making them the same as every other currency.


Government regulation of bitcoin would basically be like requiring everyone to buy a stamp whenever they sent an e-mail.

RE all the comments about bitcoins' potential for illegal activities--yes, bitcoin _can _be used for illegal things. But here's the part of the picture you're missing. When a revolutionary new technology comes along, it breaks a lot of paradigms, usually including regulatory frameworks. Look at the legal trouble that Uber and other ridesharing companies have been in recently as they disrupt the taxi industry. Look at AirBnB's legal troubles as they disrupt the hotel industry. Look at the whole internet. It was only last year that the European Court of Justice ruled that yes, hyperlinking was legal. _Hyperlinking._ Laws are not immutable things; they change with the times. In the meantime, ordinary people will blithely go on leading lives of mass civil disobedience, uncaring about what the law actually says. For example, the laws says that if you want to use a copyrighted image, you have to get permission from the creator. As authors, we ought to be the most copyright-compliance group on the planet, right? So how many of us actually asked permission from the creator who designed the image which we use as our profile picture? We don't think of ourselves as thieves or bad people. We just tell ourselves that we're not doing anyone any harm, and besides, it would be an immensely cumbersome burden if we had to ask the creator's permission before sharing a cool picture on Facebook or snagging an image for our profile. So we just ignore the law. Bitcoin will be much the same. People won't feel that they're doing any harm by failing to collect this or that tax when they sell person-to-person through bitcoin; it would be as silly as collecting sales tax at a garage sale. But in truth their collective behavior will create a huge, casual, well-meant dark economy where the participants don't even realize that they're doing something illegal. Just like everyone is now an innocent pirate, soon everyone will be an innocent tax evader. Annoyed by the loss of revenue, the government will cleverly readjust its taxation methods and find a new way to get the money in. People will still be paying taxes, but different kinds of taxes. And so the regulatory framework will change to enable another revolutionary new technology. Alas: given how long it took to legalize hyperlinks, this could take awhile.



> And seriously, some of the OP's arguments for using bitcoins are shady. Market to minors without their parents knowledge!


I get letters from minors every few months pleading for me to give them my books free because they don't have Paypal or a bank account. Have a little sympathy for the poor kids.



> selling untranslated books to Iranian youths


Again, I get letters from poor people in tyrannical third world countries who begin by humbly apologizing that they cannot buy my book, then ask if I would possible give them a free version. For every person that has the courage to ask, I can only assume that there are ten who go away in silent disappointment. If bitcoin opens up the world of paid literature to folks like this, I'm all for it--even if it's illegal. If a law said that you could not help the poor, would you obey it? Or would you try to change the law?


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## Jeff Hughes (May 4, 2012)

I'm not at all non-plussed by the notion that Amazon might be superseded by something else.  Sooner or later it surely will.  And I'm not especially put off by Bitcoin.  It's a quirky, speculative, innovative idea that might or might not succeed.

My only point is that it - Bitcoin - is not a storefront.  It's simply - to the extent that it succeeds, that people trust it - a method of payment.

Whatever replaces Amazon will have to be much more than that.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

We can debate the need for Amazon and other retailers all day long, I don't think anyones minds are going to change on the subject. We can also debate Bitcoin till the cows come home, but it's still decades away from becoming useful in everyday life (and that's only if it stabilizes), so what's the point? But honestly...book starved minors and Iranian youths? Really? Ok, I'm now calling shenanigans on the OP. I think all these scenarios he has invented. I don't believe he is getting emails from Iranian kids begging for his books. And I seriously doubt he has books sellling solely from his website making $400 a month. I think this thread was created solely for trolling and stirring up some heated debate.


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## Cricket (Nov 4, 2015)

> But honestly...book starved minors and Iranian youths? Really? Ok, I'm now calling shenanigans on the OP. I think all these scenarios he has invented. I don't believe he is getting emails from Iranian kids begging for his books. And I seriously doubt he has books sellling solely from his website making $400 a month. I think this thread was created solely for trolling and stirring up some heated debate.


I'm a she. And, well, I have to admit that I _am _the sort of person who enjoys a good, heated debate  so long as we can keep the discussion at the level of logic without devolving into mindless flaming. As for $400 a month, the only reason I mentioned it in the first place was because you put my hackles up in reply #6 by writing me off as a know-nothing when I've been publishing for years. Honestly, selling that volume is just a matter of SEO. $400 a month is a mere 3 copies a day at $4.99 apiece. Is it so much of a stretch that out of thousands of daily visitors, 3 of them might want to buy a book?

RE getting emails on the subjects I described, yes I do get them. My website includes comics and humorous stories which I give away free as loss leaders for my nonfiction books. Kids and adults alike flock to my website to enjoy the fun, then notice I have books on the subject and go buy them. And as for getting emails from people from tyrannical third world countries, I would imagine that anyone who a.) uses Paypal at a sufficient volume, b.) sells a digital product that can be given away free, and c.) gives the impression that they are sympathetic enough to help you out, must get such requests. No, I've never had an email from an Iranian kid specifically, but I do get emails from kids and from countries like Iran. Typically on the order of one every couple months. Most of my emails asking for free books, however, come from poor Western adults, i.e. college students who have no money but who fervently promise to pay me back some day. (And this in spite of the fact that they could easily pirate my book on several sites!) These emails are part of the reason why I eventually set things to pay-what-you-want.


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

555aaa said:


> So what exactly does selling in Bitcoin do?


Let's see... devalue at random, disappear into the ether when your unregulated, nearly untraceable exchange goes under, taking billions of nerd play dollars with it, be needlessly complicated to use, prop up a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists, anarchists and drug dealers and also people who give themselves heat stroke trying to get ROI on jacking up the price of video cards for no good reason*.

You'd be better off demanding payment for your books in 'pure strain gold' and magic beans.

*Explanation: bitcoins are 'mined' by solving complex equations--literallyt he computer geek equivalent of 'doing work'. Only as it turns out, if you slave a bunch of high end video cards, you don't have to do much work at all, you just have to run up a crushing electric bill.

Videos cards in turn produce a lot of waste heat. A LOT. So inevitably, there have been several 'miners' who gave themselves heat stroke by leaving their mining rigs on and going to bed. This is an actual thing when it comes to this crap.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Vaalingrade said:


> Let's see... devalue at random, disappear into the ether when your unregulated, nearly untraceable exchange goes under, taking billions of nerd play dollars with it, be needlessly complicated to use, prop up a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists, anarchists and drug dealers and also people who give themselves heat stroke trying to get ROI on jacking up the price of video cards for no good reason.
> 
> You'd be better off demanding payment for your books in 'pure strain gold' and magic beans.


[in my best James Earl Jones voice] I find your lack of faith disturbing.


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

DarkarNights said:


> [in my best James Earl Jones voice] I find your lack of faith disturbing.


Can I interest you in some dogecoin?

so crypto

much currency

wow


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## Guest (Nov 19, 2015)

The Law of Averages says that there is someone stupid enough to fall for this. Don't let it be you. That is all.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Oy.  Y'all are making my head hurt.  I'm going back to my quilting.

Standard reminder:  no flaming, no political discussions, remember that "troll" is a four letter word, and that no one has to be part of this discussion if they don't want to.  Lots of other threads.

Peace to all.

Betsy
KB Mod


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## Chinmoy Mukherjee (Apr 26, 2014)

How to get refund? What if author already spent the nickels in booze and other extra curricular activities?


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## JayCoDon (Nov 19, 2015)

I've been prowling this forum for a couple years now, but never made an account. I never had anything worth contributing. Besides, I am an aspiring author, so my time should be spent buried in my words. That being said, since I am _also_ a blockchain consultant, I finally felt like I could contribute something worthwhile. And for those that don't know, blockchain is the public ledger that is what makes Bitcoin so incredible. So that it doesn't appear that I'm just a "nobody" pretending to know about this, here are my credentials: One and Two.

There are a lot of half truths being thrown around this thread and a lot of impassioned statements, which makes sense because we're talking about money. Anytime you talk about money, things are bound to get heated and that's always the case. But the fundamental problem is that no one really knows what money is. My advice is to watch this 



 talking about the history of money.

Here's the thing that is important to understand about the U.S. Dollar: there aren't enough physical dollars in print to make up for the amount of "money" in circulation. The reason this is the case is because we have a fractional reserve system. What that means is that if a bank accepts $1,000 in deposits, it may make loans equal to $3,000. It has "created" $2,000. And so long as there is not a bank run (when people rush to get their cash), the dollar is perfectly fine. Inflation (the devaluing of that U.S. Dollar) is relatively small in the country. Because the USD is the currency of the world (you can almost always spend USD in another country), it remains powerful.

Before I jump into Bitcoin, I want to first give one of my strongest opinions about this space: _Bitcoin will NEVER replace dollars, euros, yen, renminbi, pesos, etc._ And the reason that is the case is because a government will never want to give up control of its currency; it will never want to give up the ability to print more money (induce inflation) for the sake of lifting the economy. That is the basis of Keynesian economics. Many people in the Bitcoin space disagree with me and that is perfectly fine.

Now let's move on to a definition of what *Bitcoin* is. At its very core, Bitcoin is a payment protocol that is built entirely for the Internet. And in more general terms, Bitcoin is like having a giant spreadsheet in the sky that keeps track of who owns what. It is a ledger. That ledger is secured by individuals who run dedicated servers. If value is sent from point A to point B, there needs to be a way to track that value and be 100% certain and verified that it is a valid transaction. That is what these individuals, who are often times called miners, do.

But as we all know, we can't do things for free. Therefore, there needs to be an incentive for these miners to verify these transactions and ensure that the ledger (blockchain) is secure. That incentive is bitcoin. Approximately every ten minutes, when a new "block" is sealed and the transactions become verified, the miner receives 25BTC. (This will decrease in July by half and decrease again every 4 years). The miner also receives tiny transaction fees, which at present day, do not make up for the cost of mining. I can explain that if anyone wants ...

The bitcoin that the miner receives also serves as the digital token by which value is transferred. Bitcoin is just a software packet.

*Rules of Bitcoin:*

There can only be 21 million total bitcoin in circulation
Bitcoin is divisible up to 8 decimal places. The dollar is only divisible up to 2 decimal places (0.1 and 0.01)
Bitcoin will be released at a predetermined consistency that will shrink every four years until the year ~2140
When you spend a bitcoin, you cannot get it back. If I give you cash, I have no way to demand it back.
It cannot be counterfeited. The system tracks every bitcoin. Attempting to create new ones will not get past the verification process.
A transaction is nearly instant. Ever tried to send money to someone from one bank to another? That takes days. Bitcoin takes about 10 minutes.

This brings me to point #1:

_Bitcoin is backed by math._

Math is the basis of everything. Math is what makes up code, which is what makes up the Internet. Therefore, Bitcoin is backed by code that cannot be changed without complete consensus; therefore, Bitcoin is backed by math. The reason many of us find that so appealing is because mathematics is law; it cannot be altered by man. It cannot be changed. Math is what math is. Therefore, the rules by which Bitcoin is run cannot be altered because someone just wants it to change.

If you have faith in math, you have faith in Bitcoin.

Let's move on to point #2:

_Bitcoin is actually really bad for drug dealers, extortionists, etc._

Remember above how I said that Bitcoin is just one giant spreadsheet in the sky? Well, that spreadsheet can be analyzed by anyone. Literally, every single transaction that has ever taken place since Satoshi Nakamoto started this can be seen on the blockchain. Every. Single. One. If you're a law enforcement officer (LEO), it's pretty sweet to be able to track a transaction and see where it came from and where it went. That's a really useful tool and it's actually how the FBI was able to take down Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road (Amazon for Drugs).

Here's why drug dealers think that it is useful. It is pseudononymous. What that means is that all a LEO sees are the public addresses. A public address, as the OP said, is like your email address for receiving money. Here is an example public address: 3J98t1WpEZ73CNmQviecrnyiWrnqRhWNLy. So on the surface, that seems pretty cryptic. That doesn't say that Jacob is the owner of that public address (which I'm not). However, let's say that a lot of BTC start to go to that address. As a LEO, I could start to identify trends and start to follow the money. At some point, I catch a break and see that a person who sent BTC to that address accidentally revealed who they were six months ago somewhere else. Now I've got that person and then it's just good old fashioned police work.

The blockchain (Bitcoin) is a public ledger that will make catching criminals easier. That's why LEOs across the world are excited about Bitcoin (despite what you read in the papers). They love the idea of a public ledger.

Let's move on to point #3:

_Your credit card is way better than Bitcoin._

The reality is, in the United States, our payment methods are relatively straightforward. While there are certainly risks for fraud and identity theft when using a credit card, using a credit card is way too easy for people to switch. And I don't expect them to.

And what that means is that Bitcoin sucks for eCommerce. Why should I buy an asset, such as Bitcoin, wait for the money to leave my bank and get to the exchange (which takes 3 days) and only THEN use it to buy something? That's just stupid. For a 3% savings? Bah, that's a waste of my time. 3% off a book that I'm buying is not worth all that hassle. Hell, I own bitcoin and it's still annoying to have to use it to make a transaction.

So no, bitcoin is not going to replace your credit card. It's just not. It's not efficient yet.

Because of this, bitcoin is never going to "replace" Amazon. More importantly, even if Bitcoin was used by EVERYONE, it would never replace Amazon. Amazon is a website to buy things; Bitcoin is a payment protocol. That's like saying that Visa is going to replace Target. Amazon takes 30% not because it is processing transactions, but because it is exposing your book to its audience. It is Amazon's audience and in exchange for a 30% cut, you get access to that audience. So no, Bitcoin will not ever replace Amazon.

Let's move on to point #4:

_Volatility is in the eye of the beholder._

555aaa was 100% spot on when he said, "if you had bitcoins in your wallet on the 4th of this month, the ones you have in your wallet today are worth only 2/3 of what they were on that day. And before that, from Aug 25 to Nov 4, bitcoin had a 130% run-up relative to the dollar. People have seen 20% swings overnight. That's a tough proposition to run a business on."

Bitcoin is tremendously volatile because the market cap of the digital tokens is relatively small: $4.8 billion. It's not hard for someone with a lot of money to come along and mess with that. But if bitcoin were to double, it'd be harder to mess with that. If bitcoin were to triple, it'd be even harder.

But more importantly, volatility is in the eye of the beholder. In countries that have experienced SERIOUS hyperinflation, 20% swings overnight are nothing. Consider, for a second, the Weimar Republic in the 1920s after World War I had ended. In 1918, the value of one gold Mark in paper Marks was approximately a 1:1 ratio. By the end of 1923, it would take 1,000,000,000,000 paper marks to be equal to ONE gold mark. That's $1 trillion. Imagine if I took your dollar from you and five years from now, I gave you a 1 trillionth of its value. That's 1 divided by 1 trillion. That's what hyperinflation is. And that sort of hyperinflation happens all over the world.

In the 1980s, hyperinflation was so bad that when you went grocery shopping, you had to move as fast as possible because the price of a loaf of bread might change while you were literally standing on line to pay. That's what hyperinflation can do and it is devastating. Imagine getting a pay check worth $1,000 and by the time you got to the store, you only had the buying power of $900.

So yes, 20% swings are hard to stomach here in the United States, but in other parts of the world, that's the lesser of two evils. And those price swings will become smaller and smaller as more people start using it.

Let's move on to point 5 before talking about applications of Bitcoin:

_Bitcoin, like all new technologies, is always used by nefarious people first_

What made the Internet a success? Porn. That was the "killer application." For Bitcoin, the first primary use cases were drugs. That's always going to be the case. When a new technology comes out, people who are constantly needing to adapt (criminals) are the ones more likely to try it out. That's an unfortunate reality.

The good thing is that Bitcoin has moved beyond that. $1 billion in venture capital money has been invested in Bitcoin companies. Every bank in the world is looking at ways that they can apply this technology. Many big companies have hired bitcoin specialists, like me, to help them make sense of the technology. The same thing happened with the Internet. First the criminals were there and then the legitimate people came and made it 10000x bigger.

That's going to happen with Bitcoin. And the reason it is going to happen for Bitcoin is because it really, really, really works well. The payment protocol is absolutely incredible. Below are a few applications.

*Applications for Bitcoin*


Remittance: Let's say you live in the United States, but you have family in India. How do you send them money? You go to Western Union, give them USD, and then Western Union gives rupees to the person in India. For this great service, Western Union takes approximately 10%. Bitcoin, on the other hand, would allow me to transfer funds to that person in India and it would cost about a penny. For context, the remittance market is a $500 billion a year business and the fees are equal to about $50 billion of that. Imagine what these less fortunate countries across the world could do with an additional $50 billion.
Business Payments: Let's say that John is a vendor in Italy and has a customer Alice in the United States. John sends Alice a bill for $10,000. Alice goes to her bank to send John the money. But Alice's bank doesn't communicate with John's bank. So Alice's bank sends the money to its international banking partner. But that international banking partner doesn't communicate with John's bank's international banking partner. So there is an intermediary between the two. So to send $10,000, there are at least 5 banks that are talking to each other, each holding the money for a day and each taking a small cut. By the time John gets Alice's money, it has been a week and he has lost 5% of his money, which is $500. To send it via bitcoin would have cost him about a penny and would have been accessible in about 10 minutes.
Microtransactions: Ever tried to send someone a nickle? It's impossible with our current credit card system. But with bitcoin, it's easy. Because I can divide bitcoin by 8 decimal places, I can send you a nickle. Or a penny. The use for this can be as a replacement to ads. You could charge someone a nickle to read your article, which is probably more than you'd make from ad impressions on that one person. Get a million people to give you a nickle and you've got $50,000.
Underlying Technology: The above three are strictly financial. There are dozens of potential applications that the underlying technology can allow for such as smart contracts. Without needing a lawyer, you can create a set of rules that says, "if scenario A happens, release asset A. If scenario B happens, release asset B." This can all be done programatically and it is verifiable on the blockchain.

The final point I'll make it this ... Bitcoin is still very new. It could fail completely. However, some of the smartest people in the world are working on it. In the early 90s, people were saying that the Internet was a joke, no one would ever use it, who would want to use it, blah, blah, blah. And now it is what allows ALL of us to make money selling books. Bitcoin is a payment protocol that people say will never be used, will never take off, and will never succeed. I was too young to have been part of the early Internet. I don't want to miss my shot now that I am old enough.

Money creates emotional reactions. And that is perfectly fine. But as you learn more about the technology (and I've only touched the service in this rather long post), you'll see its potential is wide. I imagine I'll get a lot of rhetoric about scams, ponzi schemes, etc. But if you're actually interested in learning about the technology, I'm always available to answer questions.


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## Jeff Hughes (May 4, 2012)

Quite the first post, Jay!

A very nice description of what Bitcoin is - a payment protocol; and what it isn't - a threat to Amazon.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Jay, 

congrats on your first post!

Betsy


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Wellcome to the darkside...I mean welcome to the board Jay. Thanks for that very informative post, I hope people who have created a prejudice in their mind against Bitcoin actually take the time to read and understand it. And don't be a stranger, you have an awesome brain.


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

Just gonna leave this here...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2892892/one-year-later-were-no-closer-to-finding-mtgoxs-missing-millions.html


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## JayCoDon (Nov 19, 2015)

DarkarNights said:


> Wellcome to the darkside...I mean welcome to the board Jay. Thanks for that very informative post, I hope people who have created a prejudice in their mind against Bitcoin actually take the time to read and understand it. And don't be a stranger, you have an awesome brain.


Thanks, mate. If I have nothing valuable to add, I prefer not to speak. But on this topic, I think I have something to say. Like to the next quote ...



Vaalingrade said:


> Just gonna leave this here...
> 
> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2892892/one-year-later-were-no-closer-to-finding-mtgoxs-missing-millions.html


Just going to leave this here ...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304773104579266743230242538

With all technologies, there are going to be hiccups. That is fact. But what you have identified is an instance where bad operators screwed something up, not the technology. They did not use multi-sig technology, they allowed one person to control everything, they did not have safeguards, etc. With Target, the data was not stored in an efficient fashion. These are human mistakes, not technological mistakes.

Bitcoin is perfectly secure. It would take quantum computers to break the cryptography that the software is built on, and if we get to the point that quantum computers are in existence, cracking bitcoin is the least of our concerns. The common misconception, and it is the misconception that you are perpetuating Vaalingrade, is that Bitcoin is to blame for the MtGox losses. And that's simply not the case. Do we blame the credit card technology for what happened to Target? No. We blame Target. We shouldn't blame Bitcoin, the technology, for what happened to MtGox. We blame a complete, bloody moron who had no business managing that many people's money.

Here are the new, big boy players in the bitcoin space:

Coinbase: Their investors include the New York Stock Exchange and BBVA Ventures (the venture arm of the Spanish banking group, BBVA)
Gemini: This was founded by the Winklevoss twins who were made famous by the Social Network movie. They have received complete regulatory backing from dozens of states
Circle: Their investors include Goldman Sachs and Accel
And the list goes on and on...

Those are operators who are having daily conversations with regulators, who understand the serious risks that come with new technologies, and are continuing to innovate over it. MtGox was a sham, but we have left the Wild West of the Bitcoin days. The legitimacy of the technology is incredible. I would be happy to answer any of your deep concerns, Vaalingrade. Please just ask.


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## Guest (Nov 19, 2015)

JayCoDon said:


> With all technologies, there are going to be hiccups. That is fact. But what you have identified is an instance where bad operators screwed something up, not the technology. They did not use multi-sig technology, they allowed one person to control everything, they did not have safeguards, etc. With Target, the data was not stored in an efficient fashion. These are human mistakes, not technological mistakes.


But therein is the problem. You have a technology with almost zero oversight that is operated solely on an honor system. Honor system is great when you know everyone involved and the groups are small. But when you are dealing with thousands or millions of anonymous people on the internet in every part of the world?

The issue isn't the technology. The issues are separate from the technology. MtGox was the biggest issue, but not the only one. And to pretend otherwise is disingenuous. Bitcoin is subject to all of the problems of normal currency: hacking, ID theft, ponzi schemes. The difference is that there is almost no recourse for those who lose their shirts. If my credit card is stolen, I can contact the bank. Who do I contact if my bitcoin wallet is stolen? And what are they legally obligated to do about it?


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## JayCoDon (Nov 19, 2015)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> But therein is the problem. You have a technology with almost zero oversight that is operated solely on an honor system. Honor system is great when you know everyone involved and the groups are small. But when you are dealing with thousands or millions of anonymous people on the internet in every part of the world?
> 
> The issue isn't the technology. The issues are separate from the technology. MtGox was the biggest issue, but not the only one. And to pretend otherwise is disingenuous. Bitcoin is subject to all of the problems of normal currency: hacking, ID theft, ponzi schemes. The difference is that there is almost no recourse for those who lose their shirts. If my credit card is stolen, I can contact the bank. Who do I contact if my bitcoin wallet is stolen? And what are they legally obligated to do about it?


Bitcoin is not run on an honor system; bitcoin is run on code. And code has no honor; it simply exists. It doesn't require human intervention; it simply exists. Further, it has an incredible amount of oversight. The bitcoin exchanges are regulated by the CFTC, FinCEN, Local Departments of Financial Services, etc. The gateways between old finance and new finance are incredibly regulated; that means that they likely have insurance in place so that if someone steals your bitcoin, you are covered. I recommend looking at the individual provider to determine what their insurance is.

Coinbase, for example, who I mentioned above has the following on its website: Coinbase is insured against employee theft and hacking in an amount that exceeds the average value of online bitcoin it holds at any given time. Specifically, Coinbase's insurance policy would respond in the event that bitcoin stored in Coinbase was lost or stolen as a result of a breach of our physical security, cyber security, or as a result of employee theft.

Bitcoin the technology is not subject to hacking, ID theft, or ponzi schemes. You cannot hack the cryptographic code that is Bitcoin. There is zero risk of identity theft with Bitcoin because there is no identification information tied to your private keys. Ponzi schemes happen all the time and the individuals who do them, when caught, are forced to pay back investors irrespective of if the asset is bitcoin, oil, or stocks. So there is tremendous recourse.

Here's the question ... If you had $5,000 in your pocket and someone stole them, will your bank give you a new $5,000? No. If you are irresponsible and lose your bitcoin, no one will help you. If someone hacks the online wallet provider (separate from you holding your own private keys) and steals your bitcoin, you will get your money back just the same as you would at a bank.

Next question?


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## Guest (Nov 19, 2015)

JayCoDon said:


> Here's the question ... If you had $5,000 in your pocket and someone stole them, will your bank give you a new $5,000? No. If you are irresponsible and lose your bitcoin, no one will help you. If someone hacks the online wallet provider (separate from you holding your own private keys) and steals your bitcoin, you will get your money back just the same as you would at a bank.


Not the same thing because cash is a physical thing. I can take personal responsibility for items in my physical possession. The only person responsible for physical items in my possession is me.

A bitcoin is a virtual item, and my use of it is dependent on systems in place over which I have zero control. It is the same issue that existed with credit cards and virtual banking; without regulations to protect consumers, consumers were out-of-luck if the bank "lost" your transactions or your account was compromised. This is why there are special consumer protection laws regarding checks and credit cards, because use of such items requires other people to access the money. And while the initial purchase of a bitcoin with a credit card is a covered transaction, existing law in many cases only covers the initial sale. If I buy cartel coins for SWtOR and someone hacks my Star Wars account and spends them, that isn't credit card fraud and the credit card company isn't going to get involved. If I buy bitcoins and the company fails to complete the transaction, my credit card company will get involved. But once that initial transaction is completed, they aren't going to care.

It is great that some companies are self-regulating and self-insuring. But that doesn't alleviate a lot of concerns. Again, if someone hacks Wells Fargo and steals my money, I am limited to only $50 liability on my deposits. If someone hacks Amex and my account is compromised, I am protected and have recourse. When a bank fails, the FDIC protects my deposits. What happens when a bitcoin company fails?

Again, I am NOT talking about the technology itself. I'm talking about legal protections because where there is a will, there is a criminal. If you are telling me that Bitcoins are moving toward the same type of regulation as my credit card, then that is awesome. But simply telling me that the technology can't be hacked and it is just a matter of human error doesn't actually address the point I am making. I'm not, nor have I ever, argued that the issue was the technology itself. The issue is what is the current, _legal _consumer protection infrastructure in place? Not private insurance or private pledges. What is my legal recourse in the event of a data breach or theft. THAT is the real issue, because here in the U.S. such crypto-transactions are not protected or treated in the same manner as credit card theft.


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

Code has no honor, but it also has no law. MtGox isn't the only business that loaded up on BtC and then skee-daddled with loads of thier customer's money.

And as the OP said, you don't even have to have a storefront (read: a website with a WHOIS entry that lets people at least attempt to find you and jam a subpoena in your mailbox; you can just copypasta that account string anywhere Nigerian Princes are sold and there's no way to deal with it.

Oh! And can we talk about cold storage and the fragility of flash data devices? Oh, let's do! Probably the same amount that's been stolen and lost by third parties disappears right out of the user's pockets because flash drives typically aren't a) indestructible or b) incorruptible.

And seeing as the mining rates are automated to reduce over time, that means this is an economy constantly leaking currency into the ether. This is like the legendary Spanish Treasure Galleons if it was literally inevitable that all those ships would eventually sink and lose their cargo forever.

One can have faith in math, but one should not have absolute faith in planned obsolescence-designed technology doing and retaining the math that gets you paid. There's a reason you don't back-up your books to a single USB stick or cloud app.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Jay, it's pointless trying convince people who have already made up their minds about something they do not want to understand.

For the sake of anyone reading who honestly wants to learn about Bitcoin I'll add the following.

1) Using a service like Coinbase is exactly as safe and secure as using my online Chase account and my debit card. Your money is insured against fraud.

2) If you generate a paper wallet and secure it per the recommended measures (see https://bitcoinpaperwallet.com/) then it is exactly as secure as a paper US dollar. If the dollar in your pocket is compromised by a pickpocket it's gone forever, it's your responsibility to secure your paper money. The private key on a Bitcoin paper wallet exists nowhere else, not even online (unless your computer is virus ridden and insecure, but then you have bigger problems in that case). The cryptography that was used to generate that private key can not be broken ever by anything less than a quantum computer, and even once the first quantum computers exists the computations required to crack it are astronomical (we are talking longer than a human lifespan here). It is simply impossible to have your Bitcoins stolen from a paper wallet, unless the actual piece of paper is stolen from you, or you allow someone to visibly see the key (same as letting someone see the password to your bank account, just don't let it happen).

3) Cold Storage: Using a hardware based wallet device. Yes hardrives can fail. If you choose to use such a device you are taking on a percentage of risk equal to the hard drives theoretical failure rate. That's your decision. Don't want the risk? Don't use a device. It's that simple. Print a paper wallet instead if you have that much fear in hard drive reliability.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

I was selling books for bitcoins via bitbooks.co. It was a good experiment, but the man behind BitBooks discovered that the overhead was higher than he expected and he wasn't making enough to keep it going. I can accept bitcoins, but I need the purchaser to contact me via email to request it.

Right now, there is a huge amount of money tied up in bitcoins. This makes the bitcoin a tempting target to sell books. People gotta spend money, right? The key problem with bitcoins--and why BitBooks failed--is those people who have bitcoins tend to hoard them (waiting for the next $1500=1BTC surge in the market). This is why BitBooks failed. The potential is there, but people with bitcoins just weren't spending them. People treat bitcoins more as gold bullion than as cash. A place to store value until the market swings in a favorable direction. This is why the bitcoin is taking so long to catch on as a payment method alternate to cash.

Julie above made a comment about her concern that someone could just reverse the transaction. They can't. Bitcoin transactions are one-way. Once payment has been made, you can't force it back by any means. Same thing as if you handed someone a $20 bill through a window or dropped a coin into a vending machine. It's gone. You'd better hope that they hand you the item you paid for or you are screwed.

Another concern Julie had was having bitcoins stolen. Yes, they can be stolen as easily as cash can be stolen. All a thief needs is to have access to wherever you store your bitcoins/cash. There are bitcoin addresses that you see all over the place. These are the public addresses for sending BTC, the "coin slots" for bitcoins. You want to make payment, someone sends you this 34-character-long string of digits and letters and you use that address to send the bitcoin value to. There is another number associated with your bitcoin, and that is the actual bitcoin wallet number called the "Private Key". It is 71 characters long. This number is hidden in a file on your computer. This is the number that thieves want because you need this number in order to actually _send_ a bitcoin. All a thief needs is to get access to your computer, find the data file holding this number, and they have your bitcoins. Just like a thief having access to your wallet. All they have to do is slip their fingers inside to pull out your cash and it is over.

Of course, this also means that a failed hard drive can take your fortune with it. Or you could accidentally throw it away. (Ouch!) To really protect it, you could print out this number onto a piece of paper and delete the file from your computer. Then you will always have it-unless your spouse throws away that piece of "scrap paper" not knowing what it is.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

Oof. I got a bit off-topic there...

To answer the primary question of the OP: no, bitcoins are not a game changer at all. The bitcoin is merely another method of transferring value from one individual to another. No different than using coins, paper money, cash cards, goats & chickens, credit cards, or bank transfers.


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## dkersten (Jan 16, 2015)

Few questions/points/observations:

1) Bitcoin is currency, saying Bitcoin will replace Amazon is like saying ApplePay will replace eBay.  Makes zero sense whatsoever.  Bitcoin cannot draw people to your website.  Just because you can post your Bitcoin address doesn't change anything if you don't have a means of getting your product in front of your customers.  The OP's premise here is that she can use other mediums, such as her website, to sell her book.  The currency involved is really irrelevant.  Sure, she gets a better transaction rate.  But then she also has to deal with a tiny fraction of potential customers even being interested in using Bitcoin.  The tradeoff is subjective.  In the end, she is using her website to sell her books, not Bitcoin.

2) There are about 5.9 billion reasons to use Amazon to sell books.  That's the volume of revenue they did in book sales in 2014.  About 30% of that was ebooks, so around 5 million dollars PER DAY are sold in ebooks.  But if her website doing a volume of $15 per day is better for her, there is no need for Amazon.  Personally I will stick to the store where they sell millions of ebooks per day.  If my stuff is good, I will get a piece of that.  Choosing your retail space is a big part of any business.  Sometimes it isn't the best decision to be in the highest traffic retail space because the overhead isn't worth it.  But selling your product out of your trunk when your car is parked on an obscure dirt road miles from any kind of population probably isn't helpful either.  Selling out of your trunk on some obscure road while taking some obscure form of currency that few people know about, trust, or use, is probably even less helpful.

I can understand the desire for a good discussion, so I don't think this thread is worthless.  But let's be honest here.  I'm an IT manager, and I've been involved in technology since the early 80's.  I don't know a single person who uses Bitcoin.  My family business did 85 million in revenue last year, guess how much of that was in Bitcoin?  If you guessed zero you get a gold star.  I am a consumer, I love buying things online, especially books, yet I have never used Bitcoin to buy anything.  Why do you suppose that is?  There's a simple explanation and it doesn't involve lengthy explanations about how Bitcoin works or why it is superior to other currencies.  It's because I don't use it.  Period.  I just don't.  I have no need, no desire, and no motivation to do so.  I have a credit card.  It costs me nothing to use and I even get money back because I pay it off each month.  It's easy to use and even has guarantees that I won't lose money to fraud.  I spend other people's money and then pay it off later when it is convenient and when I know for sure what I am paying for is what I bought.  I then pay for it with currency backed by a multi trillion dollar economy.  Not one backed by math or science, just some good old fashioned greed - hundreds of millions of people who also rely on that currency to stay stable.  Why would I change?  

And if I am not going to change the way I do things, why would I ask it of my customers?


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

Hahahaha, paper wallets.

Yeah, there's a reason you don't carry massive amount of money in raw cash. You keep it in a bank connected to a secure card and that bank should be a place that isn't capable of closing up shop and disappearing into the night... like say every single BitCoin exchange.

So what you've got is a 'currency' that's impossible to secure with a reasonable effort, volatile as all hell and that no one but a handful of businesses take. And they want you to take payment in this crap!


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Vaalingrade said:


> Hahahaha, paper wallets.
> 
> Yeah, there's a reason you don't carry massive amount of money in raw cash. You keep it in a bank connected to a secure card and that bank should be a place that isn't capable of closing up shop and disappearing into the night... like say every single BitCoin exchange.
> 
> So what you've got is a 'currency' that's impossible to secure with a reasonable effort, volatile as all hell and that no one but a handful of businesses take. And they want you to take payment in this crap!


Now you are just arguing for the sake of arguing. If you don't carry large amounts of cash around then why would you on the other hand carry large amounts around in a paper Bitcoin wallet? That doesn't make any sense at all now does it? I keep 99% of the Federal Reserve Notes I own in a bank account. Likewise I keep 100% of my paper Bitcoin wallets in a safe, in my home, and protected by guns (lots of guns). It is not hard to secure your money, no matter what currency it is in, a Bitcoin wallet in my safe is no less secure than a brick of gold sitting next to it. The value of the gold never changes (only the exchange rate to trade it for other currencies changes), 1 pound of gold will always be 1 pound of gold. Likewise 1 BTC will always be 1 BTC (only its exchange rate to other currencies will change). The amount of BTC I own will never change no matter how many exchange companies go out of business. The amount of BTC I own will always be represented in the blockchain, and short of an asteroid hitting Earth or SkyNet killing us all, the blockchain will always be the blockchain. On the other hand, if JPMorgan Chase closed up shop tommorrow, and the CEO made off to Mexico, and all the servers were burned, all my Federal Reserve Notes go poof. The blockchain is never going poof, the private key inside my safe will always have access to the BTC I own until I choose to spend or transfer them. A brick of gold will always be a brick of gold until I remove it from the safe and sell or trade it. The bottom line is, all the risks you are afraid of, people/companies running off in the night, money vanishing from your account, these are all risks/properties of fiat currency. Bitcoin is not a fiat currency. Once a BTC is created it can't be uncreated (once a nugget of gold is mined out of the earth it's not going to rebury itself). The existence of every BTC in circulation is secured in the open source blockchain and can never be destroyed (short of global apocalypse), only moved around from address to address (person to person). The only thing that will ever change is how much $USD (or gold/silver/shiny beads/sea shells/martian rocks/whatever other currency) can be exchanged for a BTC. Right now BTC is not useful or practical for everyday transactions, neither is gold. If I walk into Walmart and try to buy my groceries today with a brick of gold they will look at me like I have two heads and I will be sent out the door empty handed and hungry. Does that mean gold has no value? No, gold still has the value, it's just not a useful/appropriate method of exchange for the current situation. This is why even though I have 100% faith in gold and 0% faith in $USD 90% of my net worth is kept in $USD, because that's what is useful to my situation. It does not matter how much gold I own, gold will not keep my heat on, the gas company doesn't take gold. Bitcoin is the same right now, the technology of transfer has not caught up to make it easy to use everyday. The fact I can't pay my gas bill in BTC does not make it any less of a valuable currency than not being able to pay in gold makes gold any less valuable. No one is ever going to expect you to pay in a non useful medium. I love gold, I'm never going to except gold as payment for my books ever, because that just is not practical. Bitcoin has its place, and it has its value, and one day when technologies of exchange have improved and exchange rates have stabilized it will become a useful method of daily exchange. This is why Google and Microsoft are both investing in Bitcoin technologies. Do you really think the biggest companies are willingly investing in an unsafe/insecure/fallible currency technology that has no future? Or maybe it's just possible that these hugely successful companies have done more research and understand more than you do about how it works and its potential?


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

You guys are the ones that suggested the stupid paper wallet in the first place.

And that is literally the most stable means of keeping BTC because you inherently can't trust the exchanges and cold storage necessarily uses an inherently unstable medium. The best 'security' BTC can offer is the equivalent of hording it in your mattress (With guns. Apparently guns are an important step in this process.).

You keep trying to compare this stuff tot he security of cash and... durr, cash isn't secure. That's why you have banks and laws and regulation--to make sure our actual money isn't as insecure as cash or hilariously ephemeral as BTC! I mean jeez, how low of a bar does BTC need if 'as safe as cash' is the best they can do _for a digital currency_.

Paypal is like 20 years old and they figured out crap BTC is still failing at.

Apple, who can't come up with any ideas without stealing them first, still managed to knock together a secure online transaction platform and you guys are proud of being as secure as physical bills? And I can't get over this... a safe? An actual, metal safe, tech from 1840, is the ultimate security solution for the technology of the future.

And you can go on and on about how bitcoins are magic and can't be uncreated (tell that to MtGox's victims or the guy that threw his way--those are gone, gone forever and are never coming back), but... no. They're data. The best you can hope for is the knowledge of where they left the system but not their status thereafter. Unless the blockchain can be used to reproduce lost units and remember them in cae the originals return to the environment, it insures NOTHING.

If I took a gold nugget and chucked it into a nuclear reactor, that nugget may still exist, but you are never, ever, EVER going to get to spend it. As far as an economy is concerned, it may as well be buried again.

The idea that gold can be taken off the table is so obvious and simple, it was literally a bond villain plan. Now imagine that movie if Auric Goldfinger was a 13-year old script kiddie and you get the idea of how easy someone's BTC are to remove from the game.

Actually, imagine of Auric Goldfinger was a washing machine, or a stiff breeze if you want to pretend paper wallets have any credibility.

Also, Google and MS as investing in the _tech_, not the dumbass currency. Anyone who is anyone in economics knows BTC as a currency is a joke that's going nowhere. The underlying tracking technology has worth in automated chain-of-custody and other data-monitoring schemes such as a means to monitor nanomachines, but the currency is dead--it's just too dumb to lay down yet.

Kind of like the market value of gold right now, really.

But seriously, before this goes any farther, you're going to have to accept that I have read the literature, I know the architecture and the party line, and I am not impressed. I have educated myself on this subject. I have weight it, I have measured it, and I have found it wanting. (Also, a massive scam.)


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

DarkarNights said:


> Now you are just arguing for the sake of arguing.


And your point is? This IS the Internet.

Just sayin'.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> > Now you are just arguing for the sake of arguing.
> 
> 
> And your point is? This IS the Internet.


And this is why I don't participate much here. There is some valuable information and insight in this thread, both for and against BTC and its utility for selling books, but dismissing the entire thing as just a playground for argumentative behavior throws that value away, by encouraging noise that drowns out the signal. And there is plenty of noise, in the form of illogical and false statements (mostly from the anti-Bitcoin crowd). Why bother participating in a discussion if "discussion" itself is held in such low esteem?


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## telracs (Jul 12, 2009)

oakwood said:


> Bitcoin has many problems.
> 1) Poor public awareness / acceptance / trust
> 2) Lack of transaction facilities
> 3) Lack of transparency on rate as governed by virtual production (yes the code etc is transparent but the rate is artificially rigged, sort of like opec.. if you don't get it don't comment)
> ...


Okay, I get the OPEC thing, so not commenting on that, but i am one of the people who don't know how bitcoins are actually made (since i have no current use for them), so can you explain the natural resource hogging aspect?


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Crenel said:


> And this is why I don't participate much here. There is some valuable information and insight in this thread, both for and against BTC and its utility for selling books, but dismissing the entire thing as just a playground for argumentative behavior throws that value away, by encouraging noise that drowns out the signal. And there is plenty of noise, in the form of illogical and false statements (mostly from the anti-Bitcoin crowd). Why bother participating in a discussion if "discussion" itself is held in such low esteem?


Sigh. It was 2AM here, I just finished prep for dinner for 11 family members today (what my brother calls "Faux Thanksgiving".) I was just trying to lighten things up in reference to one comment that I quoted. I didn't believe I was dismissing the entire thread as just a playground for argumentative behavior. Sorry if I gave that impression.

Let me say more clearly, in the light of day, and with a good night's sleep, what I believe--that people can be making good points AND debating because they enjoy debate. And that to dismiss someone's points by saying they're just arguing for the sake of arguing should not be done.

The fact is that it is a discussion forum on the Internet. There's no telling who might post with what knowledge base. As I've said before, not every post needs to be responded to. If one thinks that a post does not advance the conversation, there's no need to respond. Better to not respond than to make a personal comment.

It does seem to me that the discussion has been progressing quite well, overall.

Betsy


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

telracs said:


> Okay, I get the OPEC thing, so not commenting on that, but i am one of the people who don't know how bitcoins are actually made (since i have no current use for them), so can you explain the natural resource hogging aspect?


BTC are generated by 'mining', which in this case means solving complex equations for which the answers can be confirmed. Each solved equation unlocks a 'block' and X amount of blocks solved gives the miner one bitcoin.

The method of solving these equations involves powerful computers, which, in theory, only the nerdy elite would have, but in reality can be faked by stringing together a LOT of videocards (A videocard essentially is a computer CPU all on its own, geared and optimized for graphics handling) and using premade software to combine their computing power to the task.

Running dozens of videocards in tandem does three things: 1) it takes a LOT of power. to the point that the electric bill for most miners is greater than the BTC they produce. 2) It requires videocards: silicon and precious metals that could go into more important things which are rarely recycled, 3) they generate loads of heat (if you look in your computer, you will notice that your own videocard has its own fan and heatsink), requiring more cooling and air conditioning so as not to _kill_ the miner if they're in the same room. That in turn requires more electricity.

And the chances of all that electricity NOT coming from a coal plant is very slim, so every BTW represents tons of coal burned in the pursuit of its creation.


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## Cricket (Nov 4, 2015)

> 2) There are about 5.9 billion reasons to use Amazon to sell books. That's the volume of revenue they did in book sales in 2014. About 30% of that was ebooks, so around 5 million dollars PER DAY are sold in ebooks. But if her website doing a volume of $15 per day is better for her, there is no need for Amazon. Personally I will stick to the store where they sell millions of ebooks per day. If my stuff is good, I will get a piece of that. Choosing your retail space is a big part of any business. Sometimes it isn't the best decision to be in the highest traffic retail space because the overhead isn't worth it. But selling your product out of your trunk when your car is parked on an obscure dirt road miles from any kind of population probably isn't helpful either. Selling out of your trunk on some obscure road while taking some obscure form of currency that few people know about, trust, or use, is probably even less helpful.


If you ask the wrong question, you'll get the wrong answer. Let's look at a phenomenon that retailers calls "showrooming." This is where a customer goes to Walmart, looks at a Lenovo laptop, plays with the model sitting out on the shelf, then, satisfied, opens their mobile phone and purchases it from Lenovo.com. Walmart got cut out. Effectively, for an increasing number of customers, brick and mortar stores are becoming showrooms to explore products which the customers then buy online for cheaper prices. Although Walmart is a huge business, and retailers have no choice but to sell there if they want to earn money, their customers are being snatched out from under their very noses. A few years ago, Target, defiantly said that they aren't willing to "let online-only retailers use our brick-and-mortar stores as a showroom for their products and undercut our prices without making investments, as we do, to proudly *display your brands*." (Remember that last bit--I'll refer back to it later.) But though brick and mortar-based companies can participate in online sales themselves, the fact is that showrooming is increasing. Increasing to how much? Well, that depends on the product in question, but a recent survey of New Zealanders found that 1 in 5 had done it for an electronics purchase. There are new "stores" opening that aren't stores at all. Imagine going into a clothing store and finding that all they had was a set of changing rooms and a single copy each of 500 unique outfits? Aside from the clothes you try on, there is no stock anywhere, and if you want to buy the clothes then and there, you can't. Instead you order them online. This showroom approach benefits the company because a.) they don't have to maintain costly warehouses or expensive, gigantic stores; b.) they don't get scooped by an online competitor; c.) they can focus all their employees on customer service rather than store maintenance; and d.) shipping costs are borne by the customer.

It may be hard to see, but Amazon itself could become a mere showroom if bitcoin becomes prevalent. Yes, they display our authorial brand to thousands of eyes, but how valuable is that service? Consider what Amazon provides for you.

1. They host the files for your book--the cover image, the inner text, etc. For every 1 MB of files (namely pictures) that you include in your book, $0.15 will be deducted from your royalties. 
DeviantArt will host unlimited text and pictures for free. Goodreads will host a picture of your cover and your blurb for free. Innumerable file hosting lockers will host unlimited text and pictures for free. 
_Verdict: Amazon is replaceable. _

2. Amazon keeps a record of reviews and star ratings for your book so that customer can decide whether or not to buy it. 
Implementing this feature on a website is practically just a matter of cutting and pasting in a plugin. Goodreads does it for free. I'll just add that Amazons reviewing system is the clunkiest, most inconvenient thing ever. Compare DeviantArt for an obvious example of how to get reviewing right. 
_Verdict: Amazon is SO replaceable it's not funny. _

3. Amazon has a recommendation system to help customers find books like yours (the "also bought" list). 
Goodreads has a recommendation system to help customers find books like yours. DeviantArt has a recommendation system to help viewers find pictures similar to yours. DeviantArt and Goodreads also have other deluxe features that Amazon lacks: curated user favorites lists, fan-group curated user favorites lists, etc. DeviantArt is definitely the best player here. 
_Verdict: Amazon is replaceable._

4. Amazon provides a search engine so that customers can find your books. 
Goodreads, DeviantArt, and Google have similar search engines that work just as well. 
_Verdict: Amazon is replaceable. _

5. Amazon has ranking categories and top 100 lists so that customers can find your books. 
This is an out of the box feature that can be easily plugged into a shop website. DeviantArt has similar ranking categories for pictures, and if top ranking pictures get huge spikes of traffic. 
_Verdict: Amazon is replaceable. _

6. Amazon is the biggest bookshop on the web. Everyone looks there first, and most people prefer to buy there too. Smaller sites don't have the critical mass needed to compete. 
Size does matter, and right now there are no viable competitors for Amazon. But we've seen other e-giants fall when a competitor offers something better. 
_Verdict: Amazon is not currently replaceable. _

7. Amazon offers a convenient way to download your purchase onto your Kindle. 
_Verdict: Amazon is NOT replaceable. Customer lock-in is their lifeblood. _

8. Amazon provides a convenient one-click buy button. 
*None of the sites I have mentioned have buy buttons that could be used for books. Until bitcoin.* Bitcoin makes it possible to put a convenient one-click buy button _anywhere_. And whereas Amazon requires registration and login, bitcoin does not, making it even more convenient than Amazon's system. Further, an author selling through Amazon must give up a 30% cut, whereas an author selling through bitcoin only gives up a 1% cut. 
_Verdict: Amazon is NOT replaceable...not until bitcoin comes along._

Let us ask ourselves: is the service that Amazon offers worth the money they are charging us? If so, then why are so many other companies offering the exact same services for free? Also, what stops _us _from using Amazon as a showroom? With bitcoin, you can bypass Amazon's "buy" button entirely and sell directly to your customers from their site just by posting a bitcoin address in your blurb. You could write, "Don't hit buy because Amazon takes 30% of my royalties. Use my bitcoin address here (numbers) and I'll get all the money from your purchase. Plus, I've included extra bonus content in the version you download from me. Thank you!" And so Amazon, like Walmart, would get scooped. (Yes, I'm sure that Amazon will make this a bannable offense. But still, the very fact that they would have to resort to digital force to protect their profits raises some interesting questions, doesn't it?) What if some nimble start up decided to create a book showroom where authors can sell directly via bitcoin? Authors would just pay a yearly subscription fee, a la DeviantArt, and then sell as much as they want and take home 99% of the profits. I don't think that this is nearly so far fetched as some of the commentators here think. If there was an ebook retailer the size of Kobo that gave you 99% royalties, would you be selling there? _Of course you would!_ Such a company would be so distinctive in the ebook space that its name would be repeated in every single forum thread discussing the merits of going wide vs. staying with Amazon. Their name would be known to every single self publisher in the business. Soon people would come to realize just how much 30% really is. Instead of looking generous by comparison to the Big Five, Amazon would begin to look selfish. We would begin to ask WHY they have the right to charge so much when they provide no extraordinary services save for being a big fat monopoly that relies on customer lock-in, anti-competitive contractual terms, and sheer size to maintain its position.

One final note on selling direct from your website. In Rocking Self Publishing episode 34 (http://rockingselfpublishing.com/episode-34-traditional-publishing-self-pub-holly-lisle-interview/), Holly Lisle describes how she sells fiction directly from her site and why she recommends that other writers do likewise. From the Show Notes:


> If you are a self-publisher you should have your own shop online, where you retail the products yourself through PayPal or Stripe. You can use a digital delivery program to deliver the books to readers. It is a great alternative revenue stream that will bring in a little extra money each month. It's also a great way to reduce risk should you have a problem with your other retailers. The money is also instantly in your pocket when a sale is made.


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## Cricket (Nov 4, 2015)

*Will people ever use bitcoin? Yes. Here's Why. *
I read an article recently that observed, "Surveys that ask what prevents people from buying products online routinely report that one of the main factors is fear of credit card theft." Bitcoins eliminate this problem completely. Critics will retort, "Yes, but what's stopping your bitcoins from being stolen?" Just this--you don't have to put your entire fortune into bitcoins. You only need to keep $100 worth of it as a sort of online petty cash fund. If getting $100 stolen is too much, then just keep $40 in your bitcoin wallet. It's the same thing as walking around with cash in your physical wallet. You could be mugged at any time, so you take steps to reduce risk to a level acceptable to you. Now you can buy with complete peace of mind knowing that your credit card cannot be stolen and your identity is safe. And because you cannot withdraw more than you actually have, bitcoins make it impossible for a hacker to rack up $30,000 in debt on your card. They can steal your $100, but that's all they'll ever get.

But bitcoins have other things to recommend them. Speed and convenience, for one. I have an e-mail buddy who lives in a country bordering Ukraine, and when Putin moved in I was worried about her. As I was thinking how I could help her if an emergency arose, it occurred to me that I had no way of sending her money fast. Paypal takes _days _to transfer money from their servers to a bank account--how is that going to be useful in a crisis? But then I realized that with bitcoin, I could send my friend money instantly, direct to her phone, and she would have it in 20 minutes. I never did need to send her money, but the fact remains that speed is always valuable. My mom once mailed me a large check and after several weeks, it never showed up. She had to go to the bank and cancel it (thank goodness it hadn't been withdrawn yet), then get the bank to send a secured check to me. With bitcoin, she could have sent the money to me securely and instantaneously.

Bitcoins are also amazingly convenient. Sometimes I feel the urge to make an impulse donation to a site, but the thought of enduring the usual Paypal hassle is just too much to bear, so I pass. Plus, I'm not rich, and donating $1 just feels silly. Well, bitcoin solves both of these problems. I had a little bit of bitcoin that I earned taking online surveys, and a little while later, I stumbled over a site that offered some helpful resources that I was perusing. Now it happened that this site had a thin little one-line banner running along the top that followed you along as your browsed. This banner-strip-thing contained a bitcoin address and a request for donations. So I donated like $0.50 of bitcoin. It was so, so easy. So much smoother than Paypal. So safe. So anonymous. So little hassle. It was as easy as sending an email. Let me just add that bitcoin was _made _for micropayments. It is completely possible to send one penny to someone, and the transaction fee is like $0.0001 cents. So while I wouldn't feel comfortable making a tiny donation with Paypal, which will eat that up in processing fees, I feel fine dropping fifty cents in via bitcoin.

Whenever I'm waiting impatiently for days for the Paypal money to show up in my bank account, I wish for bitcoin. 
Whenever I'm waiting two weeks for my pet insurance company to mail me a reimbursement check, I wish for bitcoin. 
Whenever I endure the hassle of swiping my credit card and jumping through the hoops at a store, I wish for bitcoin. 
Whenever I want to send birthday money to my relatives (via a check, in the mail) I wish for bitcoin. 
When I want to send money to a friend in trouble, I wish for bitcoin. 
Soon I hope to be travelling in another country, where I will have to worry about currency conversion and other monetary hassles. I already wish for bitcoin.

I see a lot of people complaining about bitcoins problems, but these arguments sound like the same ones that have always been used about new technologies. "Cars are unsafe! (Your bitcoin will get stolen!) Cars are unreliable and break down all the time! (Bitcoin has technical issues! Just like every other new technology ever!) Cars are being used by bank robbers and they're so fast that the police can't catch the criminals on their horses! (Bitcoins are only used for illegal purposes!) Cars frighten horses off the road! (Bitcoins will never replace my old, trusty credit card, which people once viewed just as suspiciously as bitcoin is right now!)"

I have no doubt that there are people who will never use bitcoins, just as there are still people who won't use email or cell phones or even those new fangled e-reading devices, which will _never _replace real books because real books have a nice smell and feel good in your hands. (Meanwhile, my friend's kids each have their own tablet, which they read children's books on.) It's called the digital divide, and it's not going away. If you don't want to use bitcoins, no one will force you to do it. But I love them already.


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## Monique (Jul 31, 2010)

Forgive me if I missed it, but do you sell ebooks on Amazon, Cricket?


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

Cricket said:


> _Verdict: Amazon is replaceable._


No, it's not. Not now. Maybe not ever.

Authors aren't being held back by monetary policy, or for want of access to a secure cryptocurrency. Bitcoin doesn't sell books. The two things are completely unrelated. You've written a whole lot of words without managing a single one that's convinced me of your argument. Don't get me wrong, I think bitcoin is rad. Hard to go wrong with bitcoin if you're buying zero-day vulnerabilities on the darknet or ransoming some poor sod's computer that you've encrypted with a virus. Equally hard to see what on earth it has to do with selling books.

I would bet you that there are authors on KBoards who have sold a book to more unique humans than there are unique humans who use bitcoin. Good luck cornering that tiny market. I think most of us will continue taking our chances with more universally accepted and traded currencies.

Amazon's role as a payment portal is one of its least useful features--and yes, that tiny part of their relationship with us is replaceable. The discoverability features are not. Not at all. Not now, and maybe not ever. Almost all of their _irreplaceable_ value is in what they offer as a "mere showroom."


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## Flopstick (Jul 19, 2011)

Cricket said:


> If you ask the wrong question, you'll get the wrong answer. Let's look at a phenomenon that retailers calls "showrooming."


Sorry, but none of this even begins to address the issues around volatility, sales tax calculation, currency conversion, exchange fees, or income tax reporting. As a writer, there just seems to be no good reason for me to encourage people to pay in Bitcoin.


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## Tony_A20 (Dec 8, 2011)

I've been investigating international currency exchange for a new book, and I was led to digital currency by a Google news alert about the movement of banks into this form of value exchange.

First, a link with a simple explanation about how money is currently transferred between institutions. Read the whole thing and expand the diagrams to understand:

https://www.quora.com/How-does-money-transfer-between-banks-and-different-countries-work

For digital currency, a very similar procedure call "Blockchain" is proposed to transfer value. Bitcoins are mentioned as examples, but what's important is the blockchain method. The unit of value could be anything, including present currency.

Blockchain will probably replace current methods/processes of value transaction, and according to the news alert above, several bank are already joining a consortium to put it into effect. I suspect the example of using bitcoin transfer to individuals will soon follow.

Here are some links:
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp
http://recode.net/2015/07/05/forget-bitcoin-what-is-the-blockchain-and-why-should-you-care/
http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/03/the-blockchain-might-be-the-next-disruptive-technology/
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/eb1f8256-7b4b-11e5-a1fe-567b37f80b64.html

To my mind, the only missing link is changing digital value into real money, unless currency you can hold in your hand disappears and all assets are transferred between digital wallets.

Tony


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## Cricket (Nov 4, 2015)

> Amazon's role as a payment portal is one of its least useful features--and yes, that tiny part of their relationship with us is replaceable. The discoverability features are not. Not at all. Not now, and maybe not ever. Almost all of their irreplaceable value is in what they offer as a "mere showroom."


The discoverability features are exactly what I'm arguing can be replaced. There are already perfectly good showrooms in the form of Goodreads and DeviantArt--it's just that in the past they were not sales channels because you couldn't _buy _from them. Imagine you built a "Mallmart" store next to Walmart, with all the same merchandise, prices, and features, but one major difference: You can't buy anything in Mallmart--you can only look at the merch. So naturally the customers are going to go over to Walmart. No matter how good Mallmart is, it's no good if you can't buy things. Right now, Goodreads is a Mallmart. DeviantArt is a Mallmart. Same with Wattpad, Facebook, your mailing list, your website and every other place you can discover books but not buy them. All these sites have the same features as Walmart, but they don't sell the merchandise. Bitcoin instantly changes every Mallmart into a Walmart. Do you think this will not change the marketplace?



> Forgive me if I missed it, but do you sell ebooks on Amazon, Cricket?


Hey Monique, check out page 2 (I think) of the thread--it describes my situation, which is different from that of most authors here.



> Sorry, but none of this even begins to address the issues around volatility, sales tax calculation, currency conversion, exchange fees, or income tax reporting. As a writer, there just seems to be no good reason for me to encourage people to pay in Bitcoin.


/shrug To some people the glass is half empty, to others the glass is half full. You see nothing but shortcomings, inconveniences and dangers. I see unfulfilled potential. We're probably both right. Every new technology is inconvenient and dangerous at first. The difference between us is that I see a future where these problems are solved, whereas you see eternal, unchanging danger and inconvenience. Even now, thousands of likeminded people are working on eliminating bitcoin's faults. It is possible that they will fail and bitcoin will never, ever get any safer or easier to use. But I think they will succeed.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Cricket, the fact is that Amazon moves so much volume on a daily basis for many authors that it just simply does not matter that they take 30% because the volume is so huge it makes the argument obsolete. There are Authors here who make over $5000/month from Amazon alone. Also it doesn't matter how many Mallmarts you can turn into Walmarts. Firstly all of these alternative sites combined do not make up for the numbers of book shoppers that visit Amazon daily. Second, even after you've managed to "Walmart" a site with bitcoin, you have to then rely on the % of visitors who are actually interested in using Bitcoin stumbling upon your book, which is going to be a very small number of people. Instead of opening yourself to a wide audience, you are actually narrowing your audience. That's the best way to go about failing as an author. And I can guarantee you, Amazon will adopt the acceptance of Bitcoin as a payment option long before it ever reaches mass acceptance. So by the time that even 50% of shoppers are interested in spending Bitcoin for their goods, Amazon will already be on the ball. This idea that you are going to make Amazon obsolete just isn't going to happen. And honestly I think that if you actually sold your books on Amazon and spent a year at it you'd completely change your thoughts about it. I do commend your enthusiasm for the future of Bitcoin though. I just completely disagree about your opinion on the need for Amazon in an Author's marketing plan.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

I really dont get this thread.

Who cares how people pay for a book, as long as they do. If bitcoin (which I've never heard of before) was any good, Amazon would be taking it. Maybe they will some day as said.

But to say a payment method will change retail, is absurd!

The only thing which will relegate Amazon to irrelevant status is a site which has twice the traffic. You build that site, you'll seriously challenge Amazon.

A payment method, is not a site. Its a payment method. Only a site can challenge another site.

I am on Amazon because they have the traffic. 

I've done the online retail thing. Unless you can get hundreds of thousands of people through daily, it isn't worth the effort. And it doesn't matter how many different payment methods you offer, if you dont have the traffic, you dont have the traffic, and you dont make any sales.

If accepting bitcoin means an automatic 100k people through your site every day, looking to buy, then maybe what is being said makes some sense. But if that was the case, this argument wouldn't be taking place, because it would already be happening. It isn't.

As far as I can tell, the whole point of this thread is to push bitcoin as the miracle cure all, as cover for an anti-Amazon diatribe. 

Cricket, stop pushing your barrow uphill in a lava flow! The only thing which will change anyone's mind is if you get out there and create a site which takes bitcoin, and come back in 6 months with ebook sales figures that prove it works. You can argue here all you like, but its totally pointless arguing for the sake of arguing. If it works, get out there and do it, and come back with the sales figures to prove it. 

In the meantime, you made your points, you bashed Amazon, so maybe its time to just let this thread die. Its so totally pointless on an Amazon based forum.

I for one am not interested in all this argument for arguments sake. Show me the sales figures which back up your claims. Nothing else matters.


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

I'm pretty sure this thread has an actual negative amount to do with anything Amazon, pro or anti.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Vaalingrade said:


> I'm pretty sure this thread has an actual negative amount to do with anything Amazon, pro or anti.


When you see...



> _Verdict: Amazon is replaceable_


... 7 times in a single post on page 3_,_ it sounds like an anti-Amazon rant to me.

Not to mention...



> *Why Do We Need Amazon?*


... in the OP.

The OP's posts are a mixture of advocating something unproved, and lets get rid of Amazon.

Its pretty blatant anti-Amazon from where I sit.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Cricket said:


> The discoverability features are exactly what I'm arguing can be replaced. There are already perfectly good showrooms in the form of Goodreads and DeviantArt--it's just that in the past they were not sales channels because you couldn't _buy _from them.


Well, I'm pretty sure you've been able to buy from Goodreads even before it was an Amazon company. Yes, the button takes you to Amazon (or, there are different buttons to different stores--including iBooks), but you can buy from browsing on Goodreads. It's two clicks--one on Goodreads and one on Amazon. Pretty sweet.

And as a Kindle owner, I prefer to buy from Amazon even if the books are available elsewhere. If I buy from Amazon, the books are stored for me on Amazon and I can access them from any device, any time. (And I can also back them up to my hard drive, though I rarely do that.)

Finally, any author can have a buy button on their website now--with a link to Amazon. One doesn't need bitcoin for that. And get affiliate sales.

Betsy


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

TimothyEllis said:


> When you see...
> 
> ... 7 times in a single post on page 3_,_ it sounds like an anti-Amazon rant to me.
> 
> ...


It's real easy to circle the wagons in defense of our mercurial and treacherous business partner in Amazon, but trust me, you get BitCoin drop-in pitches anywhere people do things for money. I'm on a forum heavily frequented by RPG designers and you get pitches there about how they can totally abandon DriveThruRPG and use BitCoin instead.

I've got friends who do stuff on BandCamp and they get people trying to get them to 'switch'.

Heck, charities. Whenever someone does a Call To Action for a charity, there will be someone demanding they take donations in BTC or trying to direct people to BTC-only avenues.

The pitch is always the same: abandon whatever you'r using and replace it with you BTC address as if your sig on a forum or on your deviant art account and _manual_ sending of product could replace an automated storefront.

A big part of BTC culture is proselytizing for BTC because that's the only way a 1) keep it alive, 2) artificially inflate the price and 3) because of the sunk costs fallacy.

Edit: Besty, you can also sell prints on Deviant Art. The only 'showrooms' I can think of where you can't sell the work you display are online fiction sites like FicitonPress or Literotica.


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## telracs (Jul 12, 2009)

Vaalingrade said:


> <snip>
> 
> A big part of BTC culture is proselytizing for BTC because that's the only way a 1) keep it alive, 2) artificially inflate the price and 3) because of the sunk costs fallacy.
> <snip>.


it's funny, this is what i was wondering about. call me cynical, but at times this feels more and more like a pyramid scheme. i don't the sincerity of most of the people talking about bitcoin, but it sounds too volatile for me at this point.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

telracs said:


> Vaalingrade said:
> 
> 
> > A big part of BTC culture is proselytizing for BTC because that's the only way a 1) keep it alive, 2) artificially inflate the price and 3) because of the sunk costs fallacy.
> ...


The biggest problem with BTC is the enthusiasts behind it hoard their bitcoins, waiting for another spike in the price. Much like someone hoarding bars of gold waiting for the next price spike so they can sell off their holdings for local currency. That spike may never come. But by hoarding it, they seriously limit the use of BTC as an alternate currency. By hoarding it, they don't encourage retailers to use it. Without customers willing to part with their BTC, there is no incentive for retailers to go through the efforts required to receive it.

My original bitcoins were made the old fashioned way: I mined them. The way BTC works, the mathematics behind proving the hashes becomes more complex the deeper the pool goes. In other words, the first bitcoins were really easy to resolve mathematically. The more bitcoins were produced, the harder it got to work out the math. Think of it this way, if I asked you to list five prime numbers, it's easy: "1, 2, 3, 5, 7." But if I asked you to give me five prime numbers with 10 or more digits, that becomes more difficult.

At this point, the math behind generating the newest bitcoins is so heavy, it does take specialized equipment that is optimized for working out the mathematics. In other words, my laptop is no longer capable of keeping up with the Joneses.

My other bitcoins were made the next old-fashioned way: I sold books in exchange for BTC. I sold three, overall. Not much, you may think, but it showed there was merit to it. I was happier about making bitcoins that way than mining them because I was actually providing the use for BTC that BTC was created for. But selling just three books during that time also showed the problem I stated above: for all the money that BTC holders have tied up in BTC, they aren't willing to spend it. Without spending it, there is no incentive for retailers such as ourselves to take the steps needed to accept BTC and convert it into local currency.

Heck, anyone interested in buying my book for bitcoins need just to email me. It's only .016 BTC! (today, at least; 2015-11-23) 

I use Coinbase for exchanging BTC. Among the services they offer, they will also immediately convert any BTC into USD upon receipt so you--as the merchant--don't have to worry about the volatility of the bitcoin exchange rate. I'm not averse to risk, so I usually take the bitcoins and let them sit until the market swings in my favor. (Though, when BTC is high against the USD, I throw the switch for instant conversion so I don't get stung by the big downswing that will be coming. Volatility can be your friend, but only if you play it right.)

I have always been fascinated by the ubiquitous "Credit" in science fiction. From Star Trek to Star Wars and every other science fiction I've read, the manner of passing value was always given to the anonymous credit. How many times have we read or heard a character say, "Wow! That's a lotta credits!" How do the different races in a galaxy exchange value? Cash in one society might be worth less than used toilet paper in another, and balls of horse manure might be worth 10x their weight in gold in a third. The BitCoin was the first, real life, scientific effort to create just such a credit where value could be transferred anonymously from one party to another without revealing sensitive bank account information.

Is the BTC the way of the future? As the first _Cryptocurrency_ it is currently the most successful. But I know groups that are working on newer versions that work even better than BTC and allow for true anonymity. The BTC could be supplanted over the next few years as these new concepts come into play. One part of BTC that will remain is the concept of the _global ledger_. It has proven to be so stable, error-proof, secure, and successful, many governments and the world banking system are looking to adopt the bitcoin approach for confirming transactions. I find it all a fascinating subject.


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## JayCoDon (Nov 19, 2015)

The question for you, WDR: Is the greatest use case for a cryptocurrency anonymity?


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

> A big part of BTC culture is proselytizing for BTC because that's the only way a 1) keep it alive, 2) artificially inflate the price and 3) because of the sunk costs fallacy.


Ding ding ding. We have a winner.

Bitcoin is about a philosophy (or a cult depending on your opinion). It's a mixture of a bunch of different intellectual threads randomly floating around the libertarian world: anti-government fear, anti-federal reserve fears, an interest in facilitating victimless crimes such illegal drugs and prostitution, and a healthy dose of upper middle class white tech owning privilege.


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## Guest (Nov 23, 2015)

Speaker-To-Animals said:


> Ding ding ding. We have a winner.
> 
> Bitcoin is about a philosophy (or a cult depending on your opinion). It's a mixture of a bunch of different intellectual threads randomly floating around the libertarian world: anti-government fear, anti-federal reserve fears, an interest in facilitating victimless crimes such illegal drugs and prostitution, and a healthy dose of upper middle class white tech owning privilege.


With the caveat that prostitution is quite often not a victimless crime due to human trafficking.


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## Jeff Hughes (May 4, 2012)

I'm not at all against Bitcoin.  I find it a fascinating concept and am open to the possibility that it might someday get some traction and go mainstream.

But it's completely a red herring with respect to the selling of books.  It's (charitably) an investment, a kinda/sorta currency, or a really fugly way to buy things.  

What it ain't is a credible way to buy books.  I'm amazed that Cricket remains wedded to her premise that it is.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Vaalingrade said:


> It's real easy to circle the wagons in defense of our mercurial and treacherous business partner in Amazon,


Not circling wagons. Just pointing out the obvious. I'd be delighted to find something which works better than Amazon. This isn't it though.



telracs said:


> it's funny, this is what i was wondering about. call me cynical, but at times this feels more and more like a pyramid scheme. i don't the sincerity of most of the people talking about bitcoin, but it sounds too volatile for me at this point.


I had the same feeling. It has all the hallmarks of pyramid marketing. And the only people who profit from those schemes are the ones in it from day 1. When you push the mechanism first, and the sale second, the whole argument is suss. imo.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

TimothyEllis said:


> When you push the mechanism first, and the sale second, the whole argument is suss. imo.


Except there's no sale, so your point falls apart.

Sure, you can buy Bitcoins, just like you can buy Euros. And you can label attempts at getting people involved as a "sale" (like people "selling" their religion, without any measurable transaction of value). Those sales have nothing to do with pyramid schemes. You can get involved with Bitcoin without buying Bitcoin. There's no pyramid.

Bitcoin is a tool for exchanging values, same as any other currency where more than one person agrees to use it as a medium of exchange.

Yes, scams have happened, and so has theft, and so has reckless investment, and so has loss from carelessness -- but enough about USD, let's go back to Bitcoin... (In terms of amounts lost to instability, you need go back less than a decade to see how risky USD and government "management" of it is compared to Bitcoin.)

You already indicated that you're just now learning about Bitcoin (yesterday: "bitcoin (which I've never heard of before)"). I recommend learning more before voicing an opinion, but that's my take on things in general, not just Bitcoin. YMMV.



Vaalingrade said:


> A big part of BTC culture is proselytizing for BTC because that's the only way a 1) keep it alive, 2) artificially inflate the price and 3) because of the sunk costs fallacy.


If proselytizing makes something bad, I hope you're ready to paint indie book publishing with the same brush. As with Bitcoin, there's a relatively tiny group proselytizing for something they believe in. That small groups of people promote something that interests them does not, _ipso facto_, make what they're interested in a bad thing.

I "proselytize" for Dwolla, a USD-based payment mechanism that is devoid of fees, can be used for micropayments down to a penny, is integrated with ACH, is ready for developers to build on, and is currently a _much_ better option for direct-selling of books (for those who really want that hassle) than Bitcoin. I'm just a Dwolla user (not employee, etc.), and someone who would like to get the full payment for my services rather than having some of my money siphoned off to a company I literally hate (PayPal) or generally dislike (VISA, etc.). That I'm one of a relatively-tiny group of people promoting Dwolla does not make Dwolla bad -- it's just a mechanism, similar in some ways to Bitcoin (low market penetration, not yet as easy to use as credit cards, etc.) and different in many ways (central control, no blockchain, not a separate currency, etc.). Sometimes a loyal, vocal group of users can push something into the limelight, sometimes not -- but their efforts to do so say nothing about what they're promoting.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

Vaalingrade said:


> A big part of BTC culture is proselytizing for BTC because that's the only way a 1) keep it alive, 2) artificially inflate the price and 3) because of the sunk costs fallacy.


I forgot to finish my thought on this, and am replying separately to avoid post-edit confusion.

Apart from whether "proselytizing" is a good, bad, or neutral mark:

I disagree with #1 because there is already more than enough inertia within the BTC economy to keep it going without bringing in new users who don't understand how the system works or how to use it.

I disagree with #2 because proselytizing to new users is useless for artificially inflating the price. I also disagree with the insinuation that "artificial price control" sets BTC apart negatively, when that is exactly why the USD is in a bubble/collapse cycle, from artificial (government) manipulation of value.

I don't exactly disagree with #3, but it's such a minor point, who cares? This "fallacy" affects such a wide swath of our lives that even bringing it up regarding BTC seems redundant at best.

_Edited to add missing word. {sigh}_


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Crenel said:


> Except there's no sale, so your point falls apart.


No, you just made my point. The sale comes first. If there is no sale, there is nothing.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> With the caveat that prostitution is quite often not a victimless crime due to human trafficking.


Except that it is not, those are two separate crimes, the first one is victimless and the second one is comprised of all victims. The fact that there is a prohibition against consenting human adults doing what they want to with their own bodies behind private doors leads directly to the fact that when these humans become victims of crime they do not seek law enforcement for help for fear of being prosecuted themselves. This creates a demographic of fearful individuals who are then preyed upon by actual criminals. It's the same way that alcohol prohibition led to organized crime, and drug prohibition has actually perpetuated the drug cartels rather than reduce drug use.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Speaker-To-Animals said:


> Ding ding ding. We have a winner.
> 
> Bitcoin is about a philosophy (or a cult depending on your opinion). It's a mixture of a bunch of different intellectual threads randomly floating around the libertarian world: anti-government fear, anti-federal reserve fears, an interest in facilitating victimless crimes such illegal drugs and prostitution, and a healthy dose of upper middle class white tech owning privilege.


Bitcoin is a currency, a method of exchanging value based upon very advanced cryptographic mathematics and an open source system of transfer verification and history. It has absolutely nothing to do with any philosophy or any political opinion. And please remember politics are off limits on kboards. I also happen to be a libertarian, so lets not have this thread devolve into an anti-libertarian (or anti-anyone) discussion.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

TimothyEllis said:


> No, you just made my point. The sale comes first. If there is no sale, there is nothing.


What part of "you can get involved with Bitcoin without buying Bitcoin" did you not understand?


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Crenel said:


> What part of "you can get involved with Bitcoin without buying Bitcoin" did you not understand?


I never said I wanted to. Never in fact said I wanted anything to do with it.

All I'm interested in is how many book sales I make each month.

How they are paid for is irrelevant to me.

The thread title is about bitcoin changing self-publishing. I'm convinced it doesn't. The rest of the argument here is about what it is and how it works and whatnot, and is just thread derailment as far as I'm concerned. It could be the real adjenda behind posting the thread, but if so, the thread title needs to change.

If the aim was to prove to me that bitcoin changes self publishing in any way, I'm firmly convinced it doesn't. Maybe yet, but certainly not now.

Consequently, the thread title gets an answer of NO.

Now I know bitcoin exists and something about it, I'm also firmly convinced I want nothing to do with it. So the thread hasn't been a total loss for me, even if this isn't what the OP wanted to do.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

I'll add this, regardless of what anyone thinks about Bitcoin as being useful to them, I think there is a huge value for any author who writes in sci-fi or cyberpunk to actually learn about the technology behind. Even if it fails as a currency, it creates cryptographic methods of transfer that will surely effect the future uses of all traditional currencies. The science itself holds value in potential storytelling.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

TimothyEllis said:


> I never said I wanted to. Never in fact said I wanted anything to do with it.


I didn't ask you what -- if anything -- you wanted to do with Bitcoin. In fact, I'm pretty sure nobody asked you what you wanted to do with Bitcoin. _Your_ use of Bitcoin is definitely not the topic here. I couldn't care less what want or don't want from Bitcoin.

On the other hand, you made statements (in self-proclaimed ignorance) about Bitcoin, and I'm asking you to back up what you said. You don't seem motivated to do anything other than add noise to a conversation that you were never mandated to join, so apparently this is an example of the "community" here putting a higher value on arguing than meaningful discussion.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Crenel said:


> I didn't ask you what -- if anything -- you wanted to do with Bitcoin. In fact, I'm pretty sure nobody asked you what you wanted to do with Bitcoin. _Your_ use of Bitcoin is definitely not the topic here. I couldn't care less what want or don't want from Bitcoin.
> 
> On the other hand, you made statements (in self-proclaimed ignorance) about Bitcoin, and I'm asking you to back up what you said. You don't seem motivated to do anything other than add noise to a conversation that you were never mandated to join, so apparently this is an example of the "community" here putting a higher value on arguing than meaningful discussion.


Thanks, I needed a good laugh.

I dont know what you are arguing, but I'm talking about the title of the thread and the OP's assertions in it.

I've made no statements about bitcoin other than I'm not in the least interested in it.

The OP claims bitcoin can replace Amazon. The arguments here seem to prove it cant. That is all that interest me here.

Mandated to join? Its a public thread, making a statement that is basically false. ANYONE can join in and say so.

I'm not sure what you're getting upset about. I'm talking about oranges while you appear to be discussing orange pips.

I'm not actually sure why you're having a go at me. I've not had anything to do with your discussion at all. You are the one who picked on something I said, and obviously didn't understand my context. For the record, not being interested in how bitcoin works, I've not really read anything you said prior to dumping on me. There are multiple arguments running through this thread, and I'm only discussing one of them - the OP'S assertions about Amazon and sales.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

TimothyEllis said:


> I had the same feeling. It has all the hallmarks of pyramid marketing. And the only people who profit from those schemes are the ones in it from day 1. When you push the mechanism first, and the sale second, the whole argument is suss. imo.


I believe it was this comment that set Stuart upon you, and I think he read it as being an accusation that Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme. Which I don't think you were saying at all, I think you were just making a more generalized comment about how the thing could appear as such without knowing more about it? I think Stuart just felt the need to defend Bitcoin's honor in light of all the undeserved bashing it has received from others throughout this thread.


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## p.s.w. gear (Nov 20, 2015)

When I was an economist I was very interested in the possibilities for changing the game Bitcoin introduced. However, I got out of the game just when Bitcoin started getting hit with a lot of negative press and has subsequently fallen off my radar. From a recent news survey I see that Bitcoin has been enjoying a few years free of negativity (though there is the Australian regulation brouhaha).

So what's new in the world of Bitcoin?


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

DarkarNights said:


> I believe it was this comment that set Stuart upon you, and I think he read it as being an accusation that Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme. Which I don't think you were saying at all, I think you were just making a more generalized comment about how the thing could appear as such without knowing more about it? I think Stuart just felt the need to defend Bitcoin's honor in light of all the undeserved bashing it has received from others throughout this thread.


Ah.

Yes, that's a fair summing up.

It was just a feeling.

If the whole thing had begun with "I need an hour of your time", well...... 

The thing which put me off Amway, was the insistence on selling the mechanics and not the products. I wanted to automate sales on the internet way back when the net began, but no, they wanted me going door to door selling the pyramid instead. Threw me out when I did a few pages on the net about it. Bad experience. At one stage I printed up a sign which began "The next person who asks me for an hour of my time will get.....", because for years, I was pestered by those people non-stop.

So a lot of things which aren't pyramid schemes, but put the mechanics ahead of the sales, I tend to lump in one big basket labeled "No thank you".

Even a sniff of it, gets a bad reaction from me. And this has more than a sniff, even if it isn't.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

TimothyEllis said:


> Ah.
> 
> Yes, that's a fair summing up.
> 
> ...


I think what sets off the sniffer is people who start off talking about one thing and then wind up talking about something unrelated and then keep trying to push thing number 1 as an example of thing number 2. Which is exactly what you picked up on with Cricket, it really seemed like Bitcoin in the OP was just an excuse for a lets put Amazon out of business rant. And of course when things started smelling sour, that brought out the Bitcoin haters, and that prompted those of us who have actually studied the currency and the technology closely to go on the defensive. You popped in after it was already going downhill and got caught up in the crossfire. Bitcoin got tossed into a discussion that was doomed to failure from the beginning, the thread could have easily been titled "PayPal: A Self-Publishing Gamechanger?" and had the same conclusion (i.e. no it's not a gamechanger, Amazon is not our enemy, and it's not going anywhere), and just as easily devolved into an anti PayPal discussion (although I doubt anyone would come to the defense of PayPal). The reason is Amazon pays the bills, and people will defend the thing that puts a roof over their head. Anything talked about in conjunction with being anti-Amazon will immediately draw an attack. Which is what happened in this thread. Bitcoin deserves a separate discussion of its own without any other baggage being added to it, where people who want to learn about it can do so without the distraction of unrelated topics.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Maybe the Mods should consider tossing this thread into the Not Quite Kindle area, rename the thread to "Bitcoin discussion", and let those who want to duke it out have at it.

It really isn't relevant to either Kindle or Amazon. Regardless of what the OP thinks.

Edit: Or writers either.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

TimothyEllis said:


> Maybe the Mods should consider tossing this thread into the Not Quite Kindle area, rename the thread to "Bitcoin discussion", and let those who want to duke it out have at it.
> 
> It really isn't relevant to either Kindle or Amazon. Regardless of what the OP thinks.
> 
> Edit: Or writers either.


I'd rather see this monstrosity locked or deleted than transformed into a dedicated Bitcoin thread, it's already filled with too much misinformation and negativity to be a usufull place of discussion.


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## Guest (Nov 24, 2015)

DarkarNights said:


> I'd rather see this monstrosity locked or deleted than transformed into a dedicated Bitcoin thread, it's already filled with too much misinformation and negativity to be a usufull place of discussion.


How is that different than half the threads on this site? 

There has been disagreement, but for the most part it has been civil (I mean, Betsy hasn't needed to use the cattle prod, so we're good). I'm pretty sure the mods don't hide and delete threads simply because someone feels there is "misinformation." The majority of threads on this site would be locked if that was the case.

There are folks like you that have articulated support for Bitcoin. There are folks like me who have articulated concerns. I trust most members here are smart enough to read our comments and make decisions for themselves.

But yes, I do think the thread probably should be somewhere other than the Cafe, as it is not actually publishing related.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Hi,

I've been re-reading through the thread, and I think initially it was appropriate to the Writers' Café as the original emphasis was on bitcoin as an option for writers as payment on their sites.  

And yes, there has been misinformation. (I guess--I'm not knowledgable enough about bitcoins to say for myself what is misinformation, but since there are conflicting comments here, at least one version must be misinformation, right?  Maybe?)  But that's what's particularly useful about forums...someone can post with comments or questions and people with more knowledge share theirs.  And sometimes debate.

At this point, though, I agree, having read through the thread, it's about bitcoin itself rather than its use by authors as a payment method.  And the other topic, which kind of resolved to "Amazon, good or bad?" has fallen by the wayside.

So I'm going to agree that it's time to move this thread to Not Quite Kindle  and I invite those of you who want to continue to discuss the viability of bitcoin to join it there.

Betsy
KB Mod


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

Differing opinions are not misinformation.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Speaker-To-Animals said:


> Differing opinions are not misinformation.


No, of course not. But there has been a lot of statement in this thread posted as fact as to how bitcoins are created and used, etc, things that are not opinion in my mind, and some have refuted those statements. I don't have the knowledge to know which is correct, which is why I said "I guess." The ability of knoweldgable people to weigh in is one benefit of the forum, in my mind.

Debates based on one's opinion of a product are the other benefit of the forum. Such debates can help to clarify what the issues are and can assist other members on making up their own minds.

I think this thread has contained both kinds of posts. And hopefully discussion will continue here in Not Quite Kindle.

Thanks!

Betsy


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## Cricket (Nov 4, 2015)

I suppose everyone is gone now and this post will never be read, but I'll just put in a last word for posterity's sake.



> Cricket, the fact is that Amazon moves so much volume on a daily basis for many authors that it just simply does not matter that they take 30% because the volume is so huge it makes the argument obsolete.


I'm well aware of this effect, and I have never that this wasn't true. What I am arguing is that nobody uses MySpace, Internet Explorer or Outlook Express anymore, even though these were once used by _everybody_. What killed them? Why did they die? Simply this--something better came along, a program that did the same thing as them but with better features. Is bitcoin + Goodreads or DeviantArt something better? Is it competition for Amazon? No, not right now. My arguments for bitcoin take place in a future world where bitcoin has achieved at least 40% market penetration. Then, yes, these sites can be competition. As I have already demonstrated, they currently offer equal or superior features. All that they lack is a buy button, which bitcoin will remedy. Nobody thought that the cellphone was a GPS killer or a digital camera killer, either. It just happened that the cellphone reproduced 99% of the useful features of both these valuable technologies.



> And I can guarantee you, Amazon will adopt the acceptance of Bitcoin as a payment option long before it ever reaches mass acceptance.


Then Amazon will either have increase our royalties, or compete with identical sites with better features that offer us 99% royalties. Either way, we win.



> Its pretty blatant anti-Amazon from where I sit.


*I AM NOT ANTI-AMAZON.*
I realize that this is a long thread, but it's difficult to hold a discussion when nobody reads what the other participants have written. Almost everyone insists I'm anti-Amazon because I don't sell my books there, even though I already explained that a.) I have sound reasons not to (see previous pages); and b.) I actually am planning to sell my next book there. That's why I'm on this forum to begin with. I criticize Amazon on the same basis that others criticize traditional publishing--because they pay low royalties, because they are overcontrolling, and because I think there will be better alternatives available someday. I like to talk about such alternatives. Does bitcoin have shortcomings? Sure. Truth be told, this thread can be boiled down to me saying, "Oh boy, Orville and Wright just did their first flight!" and other people saying, "Yes, but look how short the flight was. Airplanes are no good. Trains are good." Then I criticize the shortcomings of trains and explain how much better airplanes would be, thus proving myself to be anti-train.

I'm sorry that this thread has veered off topic, because I find the application of bitcoin to self publishing to be a fascinating topic. Another discussion is in store next year.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Cricket said:


> Another discussion is in store next year.


Do everyone a favour and put it here in the off topic area, where it belongs, AND put your entire set of caveats and belief system in the first post.

You're last post makes points I've not seen before, and you appear to be assuming that everyone knows who you are and what you've posted before, which isn't the case.

Internet Explorer is dead?  What delusion tells you this? Its the default program for people who use Windows and know zero about what else is out there. We wish it was dead, but as long as people only use what comes on their new computer, IE will go on forever. Ditto Outlook. I wouldn't touch either with a forty foot barge pole covered in honey, but most of the people I know dont have a clue there is anything else to use.

If you are not anti-Amazon, then I genuinely DON'T want to meet one. You perhaps want to examine what you say and how you say it, because I've not seen anyone more anti-Amazon than you before. And as I said above, I've not seen your postings before, so I am going purely by your words in this thread.

As for the buy button, they are completely useless without the traffic. You advocate the buy button as the be all and end all, when traffic is the be all and end all, not the button. Amazon has traffic, which is why their buy buttons work.

Lastly,


> Is it competition for Amazon? No, not right now. My arguments for bitcoin take place in a future world where bitcoin has achieved at least 40% market penetration.


THIS needed to be in the first post. It needed to be the first thing said in that post. Without it, nothing you said before it made any sense. It also needed to be stated exactly what bitcoin's market penetration currently is.

Without this statement in the first post, the entire post is immediately out of context, and it explains why everything you argued didn't make any real sense.

There is a lot of difference between posting a discussion which allows good debate, and posting something with so many holes it becomes a battlefield. This thread is a battlefield, because the first post was so badly written. Please try harder to present your argument with all its needed information so those who discover it for the first time next time, get the complete picture first. Get your context straight, get your time line straight, and make sure your arguing NOW, not the future.

I really dont care about some system that may or may not upset Amazon in the future. I'm only interested in what sells my books now.

If you want to argue the future, make damned sure you spell that out in the first post.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

TimothyEllis said:


> If you want to argue the future, make damned sure you spell that out in the first post.


What part of "This is all in the future" did you not understand? That _is_ in the first post. How much more spelled out do you really need it to be?

Days later you decided to participate in the thread, and in one message you offered: "I really dont get this thread [...] so maybe its time to just let this thread die."

Maybe you could stop after realizing that you don't get something, instead of acknowledging that fact and then telling people what it's all about (how can you know if you admit you don't understand it) and then, to really top it off, call for the thing you don't understand to "die." That's... well, to say it again, that's noise. Not discussion.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Crenel said:


> What part of "This is all in the future" did you not understand? That _is_ in the first post.


Please quote exactly where in the first post it says its all in the future.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Crenel said:


> What part of "This is all in the future" did you not understand? That _is_ in the first post. How much more spelled out do you really need it to be?
> 
> Days later you decided to participate in the thread, and in one message you offered: "I really don't get this thread [...] so maybe its time to just let this thread die."
> 
> Maybe you could stop after realizing that you don't get something, instead of acknowledging that fact and then telling people what it's all about (how can you know if you admit you don't understand it) and then, to really top it off, call for the thing you don't understand to "die." That's... well, to say it again, that's noise. Not discussion.





Cricket said:


> Good news, hey?  I'm looking forward to the future.


Actually that is what she said, as the last line of quite a wordy OP about the reasons Amazon is obsolete. That is quite different than saying "This is all in the future" or "Hey this is a debate about what might be possible in the future," or any number of things that could have lead to the discussion focusing on the future.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

TimothyEllis said:


> Please quote exactly where in the first post it says its all in the future.


I just did! Go look at it yourself. This is ridiculous. It literally says "This is all in the future" -- the full sentence is: *This is all in the future, but I think it will start in the next few years.* I'm not going to hold your hand and help you read. You're commenting on a thread where you didn't even bother to read the first post. Nothing but noise.



DarkarNights said:


> Actually that is what she said, as the last line of quite a wordy OP about the reasons Amazon is obsolete. That is quite different than saying "This is all in the future" ...


True, what you quoted is different from _what I already quoted_ which literally says "This is all in the future." Good grief.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

You're right Stuart, I missed it on the re-read, I was temporarily blinded by all the *Present Tense* examples of how Amazon is obsolete.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

DarkarNights said:


> You're right Stuart, I missed it on the re-read, I was temporarily blinded by all the *Present Tense* examples of how Amazon is obsolete.


I stand corrected as well.

So a whole current tense post is suddenly redirected into the future by a single sentence near the end.

I'm so sorry I missed that last minute plot twist. 

No, I'm not. I stand by what I said. The whole first post was badly written. This thread is the result. The post obviously needs a good editor. And the first change which should have happened is the whole future comment moved to the first line. You cant expect people to make a massive shift from current tense into future tense at the end of a whatever-dump. The tense has to come first. The context has to come first. Then you make your case.

edit: We also go back to the title which is PRESENT TENSE. If the title read "Bitcoin: A Self-Publishing Gamechanger in 10 years?" I doubt I'd have even opened the thread.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

TimothyEllis said:


> The context has to come first. Then you make your case.
> 
> edit: We also go back to the title which is PRESENT TENSE. If the title read "Bitcoin: A Self-Publishing Gamechanger in 10 years?" I doubt I'd have even opened the thread.


Bah. How much of the first post needs to be explained?

The _very first sentence_ is: *I've been wondering lately about whether bitcoin could make Amazon unnecessary.* "Could make" cannot imply that it has already happened. Options for phrasing to imply it has happened include "has made" or "makes" or "could have made." The _first sentence_ clarifies -- for those who can bother to read it! -- that this is a discussion about what _could_ happen -- meaning, in the future!

The question mark in the title is ambiguous, it doesn't necessarily imply current or future. However, any market-savvy person will know that the "game" hasn't changed yet, so the only useful meaning of the question mark is to ponder the future.

I was done here, I don't know why I bothered to resume reading the thread. If there's a way to unsubscribe from a thread, I'd be glad to know how. There's no value in a "discussion" (a term I use with hopefully-obvious sarcasm) where the first -- and maybe only -- priority is defending preconceived notions even if they weren't based on facts to begin with.


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## Guest (Nov 25, 2015)

Cricket said:


> Then Amazon will either have increase our royalties, or compete with identical sites with better features that offer us 99% royalties. Either way, we win.


This makes no sense. Why would Amazon increase our royalties based on their adoption of a payment system? How a consumer pays for a product through a retail outlet has no impact on what Amazon pays us.

Please name ONE SITE with better features than Amazon that pays 99% royalties. Just one.


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## Cricket (Nov 4, 2015)

> Internet Explorer is dead?  What delusion tells you this? Its the default program for people who use Windows and know zero about what else is out there. We wish it was dead, but as long as people only use what comes on their new computer, IE will go on forever. Ditto Outlook. I wouldn't touch either with a forty foot barge pole covered in honey, but most of the people I know dont have a clue there is anything else to use.


It's dead in a relative way. From this Wikipedia map, you can see that it is no longer the dominant web browser in any country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers Likewise, Outlook has fallen to the #4 place in e-mail usage. http://www.exacttarget.com/blog/gmail-moves-to-2-in-email-client-market-share/



> If you are not anti-Amazon, then I genuinely DON'T want to meet one. You perhaps want to examine what you say and how you say it, because I've not seen anyone more anti-Amazon than you before. And as I said above, I've not seen your postings before, so I am going purely by your words in this thread.


Well, you have not read my posts before, but I've read yours. And actually, you seem like a pretty nice guy. I don't dislike you, and I don't dislike Amazon (at least not anymore than I dislike the traditional publishers, anyway). I am not anti-Amazon, but I am pro-author. There is no one on this board who thinks it is a good idea that Amazon should be the only place where an author can sell books. When I point out Amazon's flaws--which have all been dwelt lengthily upon by other authors in this forum--and hope for a better alternative, is this wrong? Should we rooting for the monopoly, instead of wishing for healthy competition that would drive our royalties up? When ACX started paying us 40% royalties instead of 50% royalties, what did we do? We sucked it up. There was nothing we could do because ACX is the only game in town for audiobooks. If you don't like it, tough--there's no where else to go. If Amazon dropped your royalties from 70% to 65% tomorrow, what would you do? Why, you'd suck it up. There's no where else for you to go. Not a good situation. And any alternative that offers us reprieve should be investigated. This is one such alternative. 


> As for the buy button, they are completely useless without the traffic. You advocate the buy button as the be all and end all, when traffic is the be all and end all, not the button. Amazon has traffic, which is why their buy buttons work.


Traffic. When you purchase a Bookbub ad, the goal is to drive traffic to your Amazon page to your own website where customers can buy from you directly with bitcoin with 99% royalties. See what I mean?  But yes, I generally agree with the discoverability argument. The only thing I want to point out is that I there are a lot of (unmonetized) places where your book could get traffic outside of Amazon (see previous part of thread). These places are not currently considered competition, but I believe that when bitcoin becomes prevalent, they will be capable of disrupting the marketplace and cutting out a goodly chunk of Amazon's sales. Does Goodreads have no traffic? Does DeviantArt have no traffic? These places are vibrant marketplaces.



> This makes no sense. Why would Amazon increase our royalties based on their adoption of a payment system? How a consumer pays for a product through a retail outlet has no impact on what Amazon pays us.


Amazon has to pay a hefty processing fee for every book they sell, and that fee comes out of your royalties. So, if they were able to reduce the transaction fee to 1% with bitcoin, they would no longer have to take the fee from our royalties and we could conceivably take home more money. There are already companies out there which offer multiple payment services (Paypal, credit cards and the like), but if a customer uses bitcoin, they will give them a special discount. Companies can do that because the transaction fee reduction means savings for them. These savings get passed on to their customers. (Or in our case, Amazon would pass on the savings to the authors, if they chose. Or if they didn't choose to do so, other competitor sites like Kobo would doubtlessly adopt the measure as an incentive for us to sell with them.)



> Please name ONE SITE with better features than Amazon that pays 99% royalties. Just one.


In a previous post, I listed several sites which have equal or better features when compared to Amazon: free hosting, better comments, and more. If you were to pair those sites up with bitcoin, you could make 99% royalties. However, right now, at this present moment, there is no site with better features than Amazon that pays 99% royalties. This is a discussion of the future, not the present.

Re the whole past vs. present thing--I did kind of get the feeling that I was arguing at cross purposes with people. It was like I was trying to talk about the future, except everyone else's vision of the future was one in which nothing had changed at all. *facesmash*


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

JayCoDon said:


> The question for you, WDR: Is the greatest use case for a cryptocurrency anonymity?


No, not anonymity.

The greatest use of the concept and technology behind Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is _transparent confirmation of transactions_.

For this reason, many governments (US, the EU, Russia, Canada, and many others) and banks are looking into using the concept that makes cryptocurrencies work to confirm transactions between governments and institutions. The concept that drives the cryptocurrencies is call the _bit chain_.

The bit chain is the ledger that makes cryptocurrencies work by having a distributed list of all transactions that is available to everybody to look at and confirm. Because this ledger is mirrored on thousands of computers, attempts to hack it fail within minutes because all the other computers negate the corrupted transaction on the one computer. There is no one computer that holds the master file; they _all_ hold it. It's like trying to dig a hole in water with a pitchfork. You will expend a lot of effort to do it, but you won't get very far.

Heck, just the other day, Goldman Sachs announced they were creating a new cryptocurrency call the SET as a tool to confirm stock transactions. Read HERE.

This is what makes it work. Bitcoins aren't real objects, they are transaction confirmations:

_On Date-D, Value-X was transferred from Address-X to Address-Y_.

And you can't just claim that your Bitcoin address suddenly has 1,000 bitcoins put into it. The bit chain is going to ask, "Where did this value of 1,000 come from?" If you can't show where those 1,000 Bitcoins came from, then the claim gets thrown out and your address continues to hold 0 Bitcoins.


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## Chad Winters (Oct 28, 2008)

As a consumer, I'm not sure why I would want to buy a book with Bitcoins instead of with my credit card. Especially if I have to go out of my way to get and use Bitcoins in ways that I really don't understand.

Instead of using a credit card which pulls dollars from my account I have to convert my dollars to another currency entirely, that has a history of massive up and down swings in value in short times compared to my dollar. I may convert 10 dollars to bitcoin (do I have to pay a conversion fee?) and before I can buy the book I suddenly only have 5 dollars worth of Bitcoins?  I don't see this taking off in any near future


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

Chad Winters said:


> As a consumer, I'm not sure why I would want to buy a book with Bitcoins instead of with my credit card.


Privacy, for one. Maybe you don't want a faceless megacorp like VISA, and your issuing bank, and whatever advertisers might get a data feed, to know that you're buying a book about divorce, or an awkward health condition, or a bad life choice from your past, or anything else that might cause embarassment later when related ads show up on your screen when somebody else is with you.

Convenience, for another. Maybe you want to buy a book of recipes from your ancestral homeland but the seller can't take credit cards, can't use PayPal, and doesn't accept your national currency. Bitcoin provides a common ground, like an Esperanto of currency.

Maybe _you_ will never see a valid use case for _yourself_, but that doesn't mean there aren't any valid, legal, and ethical use cases for others.



Chad Winters said:


> Instead of using a credit card which pulls dollars from my account I have to convert my dollars to another currency entirely, that has a history of massive up and down swings in value in short times compared to my dollar. I may convert 10 dollars to bitcoin (do I have to pay a conversion fee?) and before I can buy the book I suddenly only have 5 dollars worth of Bitcoins?


That's not a workable model of commerce, but that broken model is not how you would have to use Bitcoin. The model you describe is one where the buyer is not part of the Bitcoin economy and assumes all risk of joining it temporarily for a transaction based on dollar amounts. This is a pointless straw man; there's no sense in it at all. Here are two alternatives that actually do make sense -- and, in fact, you could replace "BTC" in the following with any currency you want, because this is just basic currency exchange:

1. You see how much something costs in BTC (not USD) and you convert enough dollars to pay for it. And then you buy it for the BTC price you already considered to be acceptable (else you wouldn't have converted your dollars). At that point the exchange rate is irrelevant; you agreed that (x) BTC was a valid price and you buy for (x) BTC. It's only when the transaction is foolishly based in a non-BTC value that you risk loss of buying power within the Bitcoin economy.

2. You could accumulate BTC without converting other currency (work for it, sell things for it, whatever, just like any other currency), and use it for BTC-based transactions. Once again, volatility of the exchange rate is meaningless for amounts within the economy of the currency in question.

Exchange rates only matter when you're actually exchanging currency. Five BTC today will be 5 BTC tomorrow, and next week, and next year. In fact, unlike nationally-issued fiat currencies "backed" only by institutions with long histories of lying, cheating, and stealing, there is no manipulation of BTC value _within the Bitcoin economy_, something that cannot be said of the US Dollar.

You refer to buying $10 in BTC and then suddenly only having $5 in BTC -- but why are you looking at the exchange rate when you're not exchanging anything? You still have the (x) BTC that you bought. If you pay cash for a TV for $500, you've exchanged value. Do you worry that you suddenly only have $300 worth of TV when the price on that model drops the next day? You could go crazy trying to track (and minimize loss of) USD values of everything you buy, or you could simply appreciate the value of what you purchased without trying to normalize it against an arbitrary currency (and one that is managed -- i.e., manipulated -- by people who think inflation is a good thing, guaranteeing that you'll lose value over time).


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## Chad Winters (Oct 28, 2008)

Crenel said:


> Privacy, for one. Maybe you don't want a faceless megacorp like VISA, and your issuing bank, and whatever advertisers might get a data feed, to know that you're buying a book about divorce, or an awkward health condition, or a bad life choice from your past, or anything else that might cause embarassment later when related ads show up on your screen when somebody else is with you.
> 
> Convenience, for another. Maybe you want to buy a book of recipes from your ancestral homeland but the seller can't take credit cards, can't use PayPal, and doesn't accept your national currency. Bitcoin provides a common ground, like an Esperanto of currency.
> 
> ...


You're right, this is totally better than the current system and is totally going to take off!! I can't wait...

Oh wait I just found 3 books from different publishers that I was looking for on Amazon at the price I wanted and bought them while typing this message and they are already downloaded to my Kindle and my iPhone where they will sync my bookmarks...

I'm not trying to be facetious but this future you describe sounds way worse than the present. You might think this would be good for you but would not be good for consumers. In your dystopian future I have to find your website in the haystack, use your arcane currency to pay for your book (blindfolded because I won't have the customer reviews like Amazon), and sideload it to my Kindle. That's just is not going to happen

I guess there are people worried about privacy, but all my books get copied to Goodreads for the world to see anyway (because Amazon does that for me so I don't have to). But I can't imagine an author wanting to limit themselves to customers who would jump through those hoops


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

Chad Winters said:


> Oh wait I just found 3 books from different publishers that I was looking for on Amazon at the price I wanted and bought them while typing this message and they are already downloaded to my Kindle and my iPhone where they will sync my bookmarks...


This is called "moving the goalposts." I answered your question about exchange rates and you find weakness in that answer by discussing convenience. I'm not going to waste my time chasing down whatever objection you have next if you can't acknowledge the value of the answer to your original question.


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## Chad Winters (Oct 28, 2008)

Crenel said:


> This is called "moving the goalposts." I answered your question about exchange rates and you find weakness in that answer by discussing convenience. I'm not going to waste my time chasing down whatever objection you have next if you can't acknowledge the value of the answer to your original question.


You had 3 goalposts in your answer: Privacy, convenience, and currency exchange. Reviewing my answer I feel that I honestly addressed that the average consumer is not hiding their purchases, your way sounds way less convenient than the current way and me the average consumer is not going to try to figure out Bitcoin in order to buy a book. The goalposts are in the same place I just don't think that would be an improvement over the current system. I appreciated your answer but it seems to assume that the average customer is going to start having Bitcoins laying around and I just don't see it happening.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Chad Winters said:


> You had 3 goalposts in your answer: Privacy, convenience, and currency exchange. Reviewing my answer I feel that I honestly addressed that the average consumer is not hiding their purchases, your way sounds way less convenient than the current way and me the average consumer is not going to try to figure out Bitcoin in order to buy a book. The goalposts are in the same place I just don't think that would be an improvement over the current system. I appreciated your answer but it seems to assume that the average customer is going to start having Bitcoins laying around and I just don't see it happening.


You're arguing about something that's not even an issue in this thread anymore. The fact that Bitcoin is not currently a feasible method of buying books was established through the debate back and forth on this thread weeks ago. That fact alone has zero bearing on the current and future usefulness of Bitcoin as a currency and a method of value transfer. As far as money goes, Bitcoin vs USD, it's a leap in technology and theory comparable to the automobile vs the horse and buggy. And just like society had to adjust to automobiles by changing ways of thinking, building new infrastructures, and creating new laws; society will adjust to the new technology of Bitcoin. We are talking decades here, not days. But I guarantee you that within 20 years pulling a Bitcoin device out of your pocket and using it for a transaction will be just as easy, convenient, and common as using your credit card (and it will have an identical form factor as well) is today.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

Chad Winters said:


> You had 3 goalposts in your answer: Privacy, convenience, and currency exchange. Reviewing my answer I feel that I honestly addressed that the average consumer is not hiding their purchases, your way sounds way less convenient than the current way and me the average consumer is not going to try to figure out Bitcoin in order to buy a book. The goalposts are in the same place I just don't think that would be an improvement over the current system. *I appreciated your answer but it seems to assume that the average customer is going to start having Bitcoins laying around and I just don't see it happening. *


The same could be said about another currency called the US Dollar. It took over 150 years before it became widely accepted. Even then, it had to go through several variations (silver note, gold note, legal tender, etc.) before it caught on. Another currency is going through the same growing pains, but at a much higher pace: the Euro.

Bitcoin is a new/old concept. I've often pondered at the ubiquitous "Credit" that is used in science fiction to describe money, and the Bitcoin is the first real world application of this concept. As DarkarNights said above, it takes a while for people to catch on to a new concept. Especially where passing value from one person to another is concerned. Institutions and governments are jumping onto the bandwagon rapidly. Regardless of whether Bitcoin catches on to the mainstream, the technology behind it is solid and lends itself powerfully to many accounting applications (and not just monetary accounting).



DarkarNights said:


> &#8230;I guarantee you that within 20 years pulling a Bitcoin device out of your pocket and using it for a transaction will be just as easy, convenient, and common as using your credit card (and it will have an identical form factor as well) is today.


It's called an iPhone-or any other smartphone for that matter.

The Apple Pay system is based on the concept behind the chip technology used in the world and now being adopted in the US. What this does is use a process called _Tokenization_. Instead of using your actual credit card number, the chip negotiates a new, temporary number to reflect the transaction. This temporary number is called a token. A token is essentially a temporary credit card number that has been encrypted using a Private/Public key pair method and the charge goes to the token. The token is passed between the vender and the bank. The confirmation for the transaction is transmitted by the phone using a different channel and the two meet at the bank where the token can be unencrypted and the transaction completed. It takes about a second or two for the whole process to complete.

What makes tokenization so important is even if the token is intercepted, the crook still needs to decrypt the token to get at the transaction data. By the time this process is completed, the transaction has already been expired and is now useless. Plus, all the crook gets is the temporary number, not your actual credit card account information nor any data that can be used to steal money or your identity from you.

They are already looking into the bit chain technology to enhance this transaction process.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

Chad Winters said:


> I appreciated your answer but it seems to assume that the average customer is going to start having Bitcoins laying around and I just don't see it happening.


You're not the first person in this thread to quickly make the leap from...



Chad Winters said:


> ... I really don't understand.


...to assuming that others aren't going to use the thing you acknowledge you don't understand. I hope you can acknowledge the dearth of logic in "I don't understand it, therefore others won't use it."

As for moving the goalposts, your message that I replied to was about currency exchange, with slight reference to overall motivation for using Bitcoin to buy books. I offered sample scenarios -- certainly not an exhaustive list -- regarding motivation with the acknowledgment that they may not apply _to you_, and then addressed the exchange concerns. Your reply to this dismissed the example scenarios _from your perspective_ and then rehashed the pointless comparison between "what is now" and the point of this thread, i.e., "what the future may hold," with no reference to your original focus of currency exchange. _That_ is moving the goalposts. I did not establish any, I was responding to yours, and you changed -- retroactively -- what I supposedly should have addressed.


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## Guest (Dec 8, 2015)

There is a difference between the _technology_ and the_ currency._ Institutions are interested in the tech behind it to facilitate their own processes, but not "adopting" bitcoins themselves as an alternative currency per se. Bitcoins are not going to replace normal currencies. The TECHNOLOGY behind them will be adopted to facilitate the exchange of currencies and secure transactions, but technology and currency are two different things. We often confuse the two in a lot of places (just like so many people use print-on-demand and self-publishing interchangeably, despite the fact that the former is a technology and the later is a method of publishing.) This thread was originally about how everyone should be accepting bitcoins because it is a 'self-publishing gamechanger." If we are now moving into the "bitcoins will vbe the future in 20 years" sphere of the argument, then we need to at least be honest and agree that calling it a 'gamechanger' is disingenuous considering 20 years is a helluva long time.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> This thread was originally about how everyone should be accepting bitcoins because it is a 'self-publishing gamechanger."


No, it was never about what people should be doing right now, as has been amply demonstrated and discussed already. The original post contained multiple refetences from start to finish that it was about the _future_. Claiming otherwise is just argumentative in denial of plainly-visible facts. As for _when_ (or if) in the future, nobody can say, because nobody has a crystal ball to consult. You can believe it will never happen if you want, you're entitled to your opinion, but nobody is entitled to misrepresent established and demonstrable fact such as by making the claim I quoted above.


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## balaspa (Dec 27, 2009)

I have a hard time believing Bitcoin is ever going to be a thing. The corruption there and the skepticism. No major retailers or merchants will use it. Apple and Android have already created the digital payment methods that retailers will accept.


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## Chad Winters (Oct 28, 2008)

I thought this was a good article that explained my reticence as a consumer to use Bitcoin. Of course that is biased to find something that agrees with you, but I thought he explained it better than I did...
http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2015/06/why-bitcoin-has-failed-to-achieve.html

"While sellers are jubilant, consumers aren't. Tim Swanson shows that bitcoin payments haven't budged in over a year with bitcoin processor Bitpay's transactions volume amounting to a piddling $57.5 million or so in 2014 (not including precious metals and mining). Bitpay controls at least a third of the payments market. That's what failure looks like, folks.

I think that this aborted takeoff can be blamed on the fact that the dominant consumer payments medium, the credit card, leaves the consumer with significantly more resources after each payment than bitcoin does. Consider the fact that consumers are always paid in U.S. dollars (or whatever their respective national currency happens to be). At the same time, sellers price their wares in dollars and accept payment in that unit, the dollar being both the dominant unit of account and medium of exchange. This is highly convenient to consumers. If someone wants to buy an annotated hard cover edition of War & Peace for $100, they never have to leave the dollar ecosystem.

Paying in bitcoin, however, means that the consumer must endure the cost of exiting the dollar ecosystem and entering the bitcoin ecosystem. One portion of this cost is comprised of the fixed non-recurring expense of learning how to set up the dollar-to-bitcoin portal. The next portion has to do with the commission that a bitcoin exchange will extract from the consumer for buying bitcoin, around 0.5%. At the same time, a consumer will have to pay an additional cost as they reach across the spread between the bid and ask price in order to amass the requisite bitcoin. Finally, consumers must bear the cost of coping with the incredible volatility of the stuff. In order to preserve the U.S. dollar purchasing power of the bitcoin up to the point of purchasing the $100 edition of War & Peace, the consumer needs to buy insurance. Either that or bear ghastly bitcoin exchange rate risk.

You can see why credit cards come out ahead. They are easy for the consumer to setup, they do not extract a foreign exchange commission, nor do they force users to bear any exchange rate risk. Let's work out the numbers. If a consumer earns $100 in salary and want to buy War & Peace for $100, a credit card provides them with enough purchasing power to consummate the deal. However, if they try to buy that same item with bitcoin, they won't be able to afford it. Assuming it costs 50 cents to buy bitcoin and 50 cents to hedge the price risk until the point of consummation, they need to earn at least $101 to afford War & Peace. It's out of reach."


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

Chad Winters said:


> Paying in bitcoin, however, means that the consumer must endure the cost of exiting the dollar ecosystem and entering the bitcoin ecosystem. One portion of this cost is comprised of the fixed non-recurring expense of learning how to set up the dollar-to-bitcoin portal. The next portion has to do with the commission that a bitcoin exchange will extract from the consumer for buying bitcoin, around 0.5%. At the same time, a consumer will have to pay an additional cost as they reach across the spread between the bid and ask price in order to amass the requisite bitcoin. Finally, consumers must bear the cost of coping with the incredible volatility of the stuff. In order to preserve the U.S. dollar purchasing power of the bitcoin up to the point of purchasing the $100 edition of War & Peace, the consumer needs to buy insurance. Either that or bear ghastly bitcoin exchange rate risk.


This just continues the same mistaken thinking already addressed, which ignores two basic facts -- that you don't have to exchange currency to acquire Bitcoin, and that once you have Bitcoin the value of that within the Bitcoin economy does not change (unlike USD amounts) -- and assumes that a transaction is (stupidly) transacted in Bitcoin while being valued in dollars.

When you go to a foreign country, you don't keep valuing things in USD -- you obtain the local currency (whether through currency exchange or in any other way that one might obtain funds, e.g., working for it) and then you spend within that economy without reference to the exchange rate. If you walk into a store in a country that uses the Euro, you don't find everything priced in USD and then find out the Euro cost at the counter, you simply obtain Euro and spend it as you would USD in the US.

This "argument" is a straw man, as I said before. Sure, if you do it wrong, it will come out badly -- so don't do it wrong.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Crenel said:


> This just continues the same mistaken thinking already addressed, which ignores two basic facts -- that you don't have to exchange currency to acquire Bitcoin, and that once you have Bitcoin the value of that within the Bitcoin economy does not change (unlike USD amounts) -- and assumes that a transaction is (stupidly) transacted in Bitcoin while being valued in dollars.
> 
> When you go to a foreign country, you don't keep valuing things in USD -- you obtain the local currency (whether through currency exchange or in any other way that one might obtain funds, e.g., working for it) and then you spend within that economy without reference to the exchange rate. If you walk into a store in a country that uses the Euro, you don't find everything priced in USD and then find out the Euro cost at the counter, you simply obtain Euro and spend it as you would USD in the US.
> 
> This "argument" is a straw man, as I said before. Sure, if you do it wrong, it will come out badly -- so don't do it wrong.


While this is true, I have lived in a foreign country for an extended time -- the UK. At the time, the rate was about 1 pound sterling = $1.50. We were still PAID in dollars, so that was our functional currency. When we bought things we did the math. Else we could have gotten into the habit of treating a pound and a dollar as the same. And the problem with that was that if my budget, say for groceries was $150, I couldn't go spend 150 POUNDS at the local grocer. Cause that was going to equal out to more like $225. If I kept on like that we'd have been in the hole money wise pretty fast.

If I were to enter the bitcoin 'nation', the US dollar would still be MY functional currency. When we lived in the UK, the fluctuation was generally minor but, still, we didn't carry around HUGE quantities of cash. I only tended to carry the amount that I had budgeted for whatever spending I was intending to do. I certainly see that I could do the same thing with bitcoin, but, just as when I was living in the UK, I'm still PAID in dollars, so I have to think of my spending in terms of dollars so I don't bust my budget. I wouldn't be living with bitcoin as my functional currency any more than I did when I was in the UK.

And, at this time, for me, there is absolutely no need to even try to do so 

I do think that it is very likely that sometime in the future, there will be, more or less, one world currency and almost everything transaction will be either electronic, or physical barter. But that's not now and, while I can see why some might want to use bitcoin, none of their reasons apply to me. So it is, at best, a curiosity.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Crenel said:


> When you go to a foreign country, you don't keep valuing things in USD... <snip>.


I know Ann has addressed this from her point of view, but I'll say from a frequent traveler overseas that this^ is exactly what I do, at least at first. I have no idea whether something is affordable within my travel budget, which has been set up in US dollars, unless I do that conversion.

Obviously, once I've established a baseline (local currency=$5 US for a Coke), I know when I get a good deal on something, and don't need to do the mental conversions as much.

But I do see a future in something like bitcoin. Don't know if it will be bitcoin, I'm not that prescient.

Betsy


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## telracs (Jul 12, 2009)

i have to smile at Ann's and Betsy's posts and once again realize every person thinks differently....

My story:  a friend and I traveled to Japan for vacation.  I converted dollars to yen, and got some traveler's checks (yes, it was that long ago) and planned on using my credit card for purchases.  My friend converted currency and planned on using that.  However, we had two different mind sets.  I started thinking Yen and examined my purchases that way (I had X number of Yen to use for the week, this cost Y number, I would have X-Y left).  My friend thought in terms of dollars and was constantly converting prices from Yen to dollars.  Not an easy feat when it was something like 35 Yen to the dollar.  But it worked for her.  

Relevance to this thread?  Simple.  Some people will think in terms of bitcoins.  Some people will always think in terms of their native currency.  Some people will embrace and understand the tech.  Some people will embrace bitcoins as a currency without understanding the tech.  Some people will turn away from bitcoins because they do not understand the tech.  Or because they do and think it is not viable.  All of the above are valid.

Eventually there may be a consensus on bitcoins or other on-line currencies (credits, qualoots, whatever).  But even then, consensus does not equal unanimity.  There will always be a guy with jars of coins buried in his garden.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

i'm still working out the script code to do this, but when the Bitcoin price for my book is shown on my website, it reflects the current exchange rate from the price of my book in USD to Bitcoin.

So, at $4.99, the bitcoin price of my book could be anywhere between ฿0.0121-฿0.0212 in bitcoins. It depends on the current exchange rate between USD and BTC on any given day. Heck, it could be different any different hour. This is no different than buying British Pounds or Japanese Yen on the money markets. It can take up to 10 minutes for a BTC transaction to be confirmed by the block chain. So anyone making a purchase may have to wait until the confirmation before the goods (a copy of my ebook) would be delivered.

The primary issue concerning use of bitcoins as currency is there is currently no easy way to use it in day-to-day transactions. VERY few stores are set up to accept direct bitcoin payments. Hence, bitcoins must be converted to local currency before their value can be used to purchase local, daily needs such as food and clothing. I can accept live, in-person, bitcoin transactions via my iPhone. So anyone coming up to me with either the software on their smart phone or a printed out bitcoin wallet could pay me with just a quick scan. But I am willing to accept bitcoins. Not many businesses are.

Credit cards and their ease of use handily defeat the use of bitcoin for the consumer. Particularly now that chip cards are available in the US and payment systems like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, all of which rely on tokenization of the transaction to protect the accounts and identity of the owner.

The incentive to use bitcoins falls mostly on the vendor side: no expensive transaction fees. Many independent business people such as myself use either PayPal or Square to handle credit card transactions. However, both those services extract a fee for that privilege, up to 2.75%. Fortunately, they only charge that fee per transaction. Banks, charge you a monthly fee of about $30 or more to maintain a "Clearing House Account' for accepting credit transactions, plus a fixed rate of around 75¢ plus a 6% of transaction fee. It all adds up fast. Even the 2.75% adds up pretty quickly. I paid an artist $650 for cover art, and PayPal snipped away almost $20 off the transaction. Cost of doing business, but that's still a hit. Bitcoins also have a transaction fee associated with them-it goes into a kitty that rewards 'miners' for working the block chain when they clear a block. But this transaction fee is extremely tiny to the point of insignificance.

Bitcoin as a game changer in selling ebooks? Absolutely not. Doesn't matter whether Amazon accepts dollars, pounds, yen, krugerrands, rubles, rupees, quatloos, bitcoins, litecoins, or dogecoins when they sell something. They sell things and that's it. How they accept wealth in exchange for product is beside the point.


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## Guest (Dec 9, 2015)

Crenel said:


> No, it was never about what people should be doing right now, as has been amply demonstrated and discussed already. The original post contained multiple refetences from start to finish that it was about the _future_. Claiming otherwise is just argumentative in denial of plainly-visible facts. As for _when_ (or if) in the future, nobody can say, because nobody has a crystal ball to consult. You can believe it will never happen if you want, you're entitled to your opinion, but nobody is entitled to misrepresent established and demonstrable fact such as by making the claim I quoted above.


The title of the thread is: *Bitcoin: A Self-Publishing Gamechanger?*. THAT is a demonstratable fact.



> What is Bitcoin?
> If you've never heard of Bitcoin, it's basically the e-mail of money. You get yourself a bitcoin wallet program, which can either be an online program hosted by a company (like the bitcoin equivalent of gmail) or you download a wallet program to your home computer (like Outlook Express). Whichever method you choose, you get to create a "bitcoin address" for yourself which works like an e-mail address, except that you receive money instead of messages. A bitcoin address looks like this: 19v5V5P9infaQyCaRxWWeWoHnRbkX684PS. (This is for a Pet Rescue site.) So if you wanted to send money to this bitcoin address, you would basically just pop open your money-email program and hit send. The money appears in the recipient's "money inbox" in a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the sum you send. As for transaction fees, they are so minimal as to be nearly nonexistent--we are talking on the order of pennies. This makes it practically to send $0.99 to someone and not have the money eaten up in transaction fees.
> 
> The really neat thing about bitcoin addresses, though, is that they are just a line of text. You could post one anywhere--in your forum signature, at the end of your book, in your mailing list, your tweet, or on your author webpage. Anywhere you can put an e-mail address, you can put a bitcoin address. This effectively means that anyplace you can type text becomes a potential storefront.


This entire section is a sales pitch for bitcoins written in the present tense, not future tense. That is a demonstratable fact. It is clear within the context that the OP believes we should be using bitcoins because he believes they are easy to use and can turn any type into a potential storefront. As writers, surely we all understand the concept of _implied meaning_ and don't need someone to explicitly make a statement to understand the intent? Otherwise, all of our books would be dreadfully dull.



> Why Do We Need Amazon?
> Now let's ask ourselves: why do we sell our books on Amazon, and not on Goodreads or Twitter or Wattpad or our website any other site that offers free exposure for your book? Well, duh. Because Amazon has a big, fat "Buy" button and those other sites don't. But with bitcoin these other sites become storefronts--anywhere you can type your e-mail, you can type your money e-mail. This means that readers can buy direct from Goodreads or Wattpad--no need to go to Amazon at all. What's more, bitcoin enables "one click" purchases everywhere. You don't have to go through the hassle of registering up for an account or worrying about giving your credit card information to some stranger--all you need is your bitcoin address. Needless to say, this makes it much more feasible to sell direct from your website. In fact, if you can get your first readers to buy book 1 on Amazon, you could quite possibly get them to buy the next three books directly from your website via bitcoin and it would be just as convenient. Better yet, you could just put a bitcoin address on the last page of your e-book with the message "Buy book 2 here for $2.99 (bitcoin address)" Before customers have even closed your book, they can already have ordered the next book in the series. Now that's direct marketing. You could also sell directly to your newsletter subscribers by including a bitcoin address in your new book announcement. Heck, why not sell from Goodreads or Facebook or Twitter, for that matter? Remind me why we need Amazon, again?


This is clearly a present tense statement, not a statement of the future. This is a demonstratable fact. The OP is not talking about doing this IN THE FUTURE. This section of the message clearly implies we should be doing this now.

Other parts of the OP's post reference future events, but please let's not pretend that the OP's initial post was not a clear argument for adopting bitcoins _now._

What is also argumentative is pulling one line out of context in my post to avoid my greater point. My greater point is that most of the "defense" of bitcoin has been around the technology itself and how large institutions are looking to invest in the tech. My point was that the technology is a separate entity from the currency. The OPs post was about the CURRENCY itself. My point was that just because financial institutions are looking at the technology that doesn't mean the currency itself valid or invalid. I can buy Apple products (technology) without buying Apple stocks. But the OP's initial post was not about how awesome the technology is, but how awesome bitcoins as a currency are. Bitcoins do not exist without the technology, but the technology exists without bitcoins. That is the fundamental differentiation I am making.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

LOL! I have to agree with Julie: this thread really veered off course from the original question posed by the OP.

The only way Amazon is going to become irrelevant in the book market is if someone comes along and out-Amazons Amazon at their own game.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> The title of the thread is: *Bitcoin: A Self-Publishing Gamechanger?*. THAT is a demonstratable fact.


It's also timeless -- it makes no reference to whether "gamechanger" refers to something that could have happened, could be happening currently, or could happen in the future (and it _is_ a question, not a statement). As I stated up-thread, anyone with a reasonably accurate understanding of the market will immediately know that neither the first or second case is a rational position to take, so the only logical way to read the timeless question is by understanding it to refer to the future. It clearly has not happened already, and if it was happening right now there would be no question because we would all be very well aware of it.

What you refer to as a "sales pitch" is almost entirely devoid of opinion, most of it is simple fact. Yes, there is the word "neat" and a briefly stated opinion of practicality, but other than that there is nothing in it to _sell_ anybody anything. It's just an explanation. It could be more accurate, since the email analogy leaves something to be desired, but it could only barely be less of a sales pitch. As for the "why do we need Amazon" part which you refer to as present tense... sure, it's a present tense summary of suggestions for the future ("...you could..."). Other than that, you would need to have a very different sense of "present" to apply it to things being suggested _for the future_ (with the time between _now_ and _future_ never specified).

As to your point about the difference between the currency and the technology, I find nothing to argue with but disagree that it's relevant within the original scope _about Bitcoin_ (not the blockchain) and its use for selling books. My not addressing the currency/technology difference was not a matter of being argumentative, I was simply addressing the one point that seemed relevant to the OP but was blatantly inaccurate as prior discussion in the thread already clarified.



Betsy the Quilter said:


> Obviously, once I've established a baseline (local currency=$5 US for a Coke), I know when I get a good deal on something, and don't need to do the mental conversions as much.


I lived a couple years in the UK and a couple years in Germany -- West Germany as it was known at the time, well before the Euro -- and I was paid in USD. I'm quite familiar with USD/exchange sensitivity in that situation, but that is only when the exchange is actually happening (or at least being contemplated). Choosing to equate _everything_ to the "home" currency unnecessarily results in increasing that contemplation / sensitivity without value, which is why I consider it a bad choice to make. When I exchanged dollars for pounds, for example, and had money (in pounds) left over after a transaction, I would spend those coins or bills in the same way that I would spend USD at home -- because there was no need to think about what the dollar equivalent was. I had the pounds (or marks) and was in the pound (or mark) economy and at that point the exchange rate/USD equivalence was irrelevant.

The thought process was more like "oh, I have a couple marks, and a drink costs a couple marks, guess I'll buy a drink" rather than "oh, I have a couple marks, and a drink costs a couple marks, but WAIT, what is that in USD?" There's little point in the latter unless I had no concept of reasonable market prices in marks -- just as there's little point in having BTC funds, looking at a price in BTC, and then figuring out what the USD equivalent is. Understanding reasonable market prices within the currency's economy -- establishing that baseline of currency value -- can be determined in a variety of ways; comparing to USD is just one method. If I tell you I'll sell you my e-book for 5 BTC you could understand that 0.005 BTC is a more reasonable price for an e-book by simply looking at what others are charging, without reference to USD at all.



WDR said:


> i'm still working out the script code to do this, but when the Bitcoin price for my book is shown on my website, it reflects the current exchange rate from the price of my book in USD to Bitcoin.
> 
> So, at $4.99, the bitcoin price of my book could be anywhere between ฿0.0121-฿0.0212 in bitcoins.


Depending on when you lock in the rate, you're either accepting the risk of exchange instability or forcing it on the buyer. In the former case, great! That will help people accept Bitcoin as a usable payment method, by reducing or eliminating variability and risk. In the latter case, not good at all -- this is what pushes people away from it. I would recommend locking in the rate as soon as the BTC price is displayed, which has the highest risk to you but the lowest risk to the buyer (as long as they're not driving themselves crazy with trying to equate everything to USD). If there's any chance that the price could change between when it is first shown to a buyer and when you accept it for payment (within a reasonable period, such as a few hours), I would recommend using an alternative no-fee USD-based payment system, such as Dwolla, instead of Bitcoin. Even better would be setting prices in BTC and not tying them to any government-backed fiat currency, and manually adjust them when things get too skewed for your or your buyer's tastes.


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## Chad Winters (Oct 28, 2008)

Crenel said:


> What you refer to as a "sales pitch" is almost entirely devoid of opinion, most of it is simple fact. Yes, there is the word "neat" and a briefly stated opinion of practicality, but other than that there is nothing in it to _sell_ anybody anything. It's just an explanation. It could be more accurate, since the email analogy leaves something to be desired, but it could only barely be less of a sales pitch. As for the "why do we need Amazon" part which you refer to as present tense... sure, it's a present tense summary of suggestions for the future ("...you could..."). Other than that, you would need to have a very different sense of "present" to apply it to things being suggested _for the future_ (with the time between _now_ and _future_ never specified).


I will admit my reading comprehension skills could be deficient but the opening post certainly reads to me like you are a Bitcoin evangelist. Combined with the fact that you wrote a book about selling books with Bitcoin and its advantages, that seems a little disingenuous to me...

Which is fine, but I think you should be less hostile to what I feel is an interesting discussion on the pros and cons of Bitcoin, I enjoyed it, learned a lot and it even drove me to do some research of my own.

Don't attack people because they don't agree with you and remember its ok to revise your opinion or expand upon it or go in a different direction, but you can't make a post not say what it says. If most peeople read it and comes to the same conclusion its ok to say "that's not what I meant to say" but not "that is clearly not what it says!!"


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

Crenel said:


> Depending on when you lock in the rate, you're either accepting the risk of exchange instability or forcing it on the buyer.


The rate is locked in once it's displayed. This is normal. You can't show people one price and then charge them another--it's against the law.



Crenel said:


> I would recommend using an alternative no-fee USD-based payment system, such as Dwolla, instead of Bitcoin.


I use Square. Sure, it's 2.75% per transaction. But that is still better than if I was going through a bank to receive credit card payments.

Dwolla is $25 per month for commercial accounts. It is also more tuned to transferring value between bank accounts, not so much being used for online commerce. Up until June, 2015, there was a 75¢ fee per transaction.

If Dwolla is looking to change their business and offer free commerce solutions, then I should take another look at them.



Crenel said:


> Even better would be setting prices in BTC and not tying them to any government-backed fiat currency, and manually adjust them when things get too skewed for your or your buyer's tastes.


Fixing my price to ฿.02 would have the USD price swinging back and forth between $5 and $15 during any given month. It is best to have the price set at the USD price and allow the displayed BTC price change so the customer does not get ripped off.

My ebook is absolutely not worth $15 of someone's hard-earned money. I set my price point specifically to ensure it would never cost more than 70% the retail cost of a paperback. No ebook should be priced above a print version of the book. Period. (Not that I'm against accepting $15 for a copy of my ebook if a reader insisted on paying it voluntarily. But I want happy and satisfied readers far more than I want to be rich.)


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## Chad Winters (Oct 28, 2008)

I don't understand Bitcoin well enough to know if these price swings are going to be standard with it. Seems more like a volatile stock market fund than a currency. I'm not sure how you can price your item as a bargain one day and a luxury item the next with the same Bitcoin amount. Dollars, yen and Euro's can fluctuate but not on that scale..


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

This isn't specifically on the topic of whether Bitcoin is a game changer, but it's about Bitcoin anyway and I found it interesting:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/12/10/the-long-perplexing-search-for-the-creator-of-bitcoin-just-took-another-weird-turn/


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

Chad Winters said:


> I will admit my reading comprehension skills could be deficient but the opening post certainly reads to me like you are a Bitcoin evangelist. Combined with the fact that you wrote a book about selling books with Bitcoin and its advantages, that seems a little disingenuous to me...
> 
> Which is fine, but I think you should be less hostile to what I feel is an interesting discussion on the pros and cons of Bitcoin, I enjoyed it, learned a lot and it even drove me to do some research of my own.
> 
> Don't attack people because they don't agree with you and remember its ok to revise your opinion or expand upon it or go in a different direction, but you can't make a post not say what it says. If most peeople read it and comes to the same conclusion its ok to say "that's not what I meant to say" but not "that is clearly not what it says!!"


You're making a lot of assumptions based on your misunderstanding. I didn't start this thread, Cricket did. I'm analyzing what is in plain text in Cricket's message, not what the original thought was behind that message (because I'm not privy to her thoughts, I can only read what she wrote). As for the book, I started that project before this thread existed, and it is entirely unrelated to this thread -- other than that this thread motivated me to finally move it from "draft" to "published." That's all I'm going to say about that book since we're generally not supposed to discuss our books outside of the one thread each book is granted (and I haven't bothered to create one for that book, nor do I plan to).


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Good morning.  

And let's stop making personal comments about each other and keep the talk to the bitcoins themselves, OK?

Thanks!

Betsy


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

Chad Winters said:


> I don't understand Bitcoin well enough to know if these price swings are going to be standard with it. Seems more like a volatile stock market fund than a currency. I'm not sure how you can price your item as a bargain one day and a luxury item the next with the same Bitcoin amount. Dollars, yen and Euro's can fluctuate but not on that scale..


Think of the bitcoin (BTC) more as a stock/commodity or a foreign currency. If you have an ounce of gold, that ounce of gold will not change in your lifetime. It will still be one ounce of gold tomorrow, next year, and well into the lives of your descendants. However, that ounce of gold could be worth $1075 today and be worth $635 next week. It is still one ounce of gold, but now it isn't worth quite so many dollars. Or, it could be worth $1675 next week. If you sell that ounce of gold, then you will have more dollars. We say that the price of gold "went up", but the reality is the value of the dollar went down. The gold never changes, so it is the dollar that changed. (Einstein was right on so many levels. It's all relative.)

That ounce of gold could be a cup of coffee that is priced at $5. Or an ebook.

An ounce of gold, a cup of coffee, and an ebook are all fixed values. This state of being makes them each a commodity. They are what the are, and that never changes. But what they are worth in price can change from moment to moment. In the same vein, a bitcoin is a fixed unit. It is one thing. But its price can swing up and down.

Right now, people are treating the Bitcoin as a commodity, not a currency. They are buying bitcoins to sit on them and then convert them back into local currency so they can make more local currency. They are not actually using them to buy products. This is the same as investing in a foreign currency. Right now, £1 is worth $1.52. If I bought $100 worth of British pounds this morning, I would have £65.79. But if tomorrow the dollar dropped so £1 was equal to $2 and I sold my £65.79, then I would end up with $131.58. I didn't convert my dollars to buy product. I converted my dollars to buy a commodity and held onto that commodity until it was worth more dollars and then sold that commodity to make more dollars.

The price of my ebook is fixed to the US dollar. So, it's price in other countries is going to swing about depending on the current exchange rate. So, at this very minute, my ebook which is $4.99 in the US costs £3.28 in Britain. But this afternoon, it could cost a Brit £3.32--or £3.24. In one country, my ebook could cost one egg; in another, it could cost one goat. (My great-uncle was a doctor and during the early part of the 20th century, he accepted barter in exchange for his services. He ended up with so many animals in trade, he opened his own farm. That farm made more money than his medical practice did! He hired someone to manage his farm and retired on the income it generated.) (And no, I do not accept animals in payment for my ebooks.) 

This means the biggest problem with accepting bitcoins in payment for ebooks is that the people who are holding them as a commodity don't want to exchange them for products. This pretty much kills the bitcoin as an object to be used for currency. People aren't using bitcoins to buy things; they are using bitcoins to make money--to increase their holdings in their local fiat currency.

Happily, there are some people who are totally dedicated to the concept behind the bitcoin and will use bitcoins to buy things. So, for them, I present the price of my ebook in bitcoins at the going exchange rate. And because the exchange rate is high, my ebook costs ฿0.01152. A bargain for a bitcoin holder. If I had fixed the price of my ebook to ฿0.02 a week ago, then the USD cost today of my ebook would be $9.27--clearly a rip off for the bitcoin consumer. Not a bargain. So, for these people, I go through the effort to ensure that the bitcoin price they pay matches the current exchange rate for US dollars when they buy the book from me.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

WDR said:


> Dwolla is $25 per month for commercial accounts. It is also more tuned to transferring value between bank accounts, not so much being used for online commerce. Up until June, 2015, there was a 75¢ fee per transaction.
> 
> If Dwolla is looking to change their business and offer free commerce solutions, then I should take another look at them.


Where are you getting any of this? *None of this is correct.* Before they dropped their fees entirely, they were charging 25 cents, not 75 cents, and that was only for transactions of $10 or more. (I've been a Dwolla user long enough to know this from personal experience.) A $4.99 e-book would not have incurred a fee then, and it would not incur a fee now. My business has a business account and it is not paying anything per-month. They offer a wide variety of free tools, including a robust API, that make them an excellent service on which to build e-commerce. It's not perfect, the two key problems I see being that it is limited to the US and that people are resistant to setting up their bank accounts to connect to new services, but it should at least be judged with accurate information. What you posted isn't. The pricing page clarifies that _added services_ cost money, but in big, bold letters at the top it states:



> Send and receive money at no cost.
> 
> Open a free account and get free access to our API, MassPay and recurring payments.


Not sure how much more "free" you can get. They don't need to change their service to be e-commerce friendly, it's been that way from the beginning.

As for your books being priced in USD and offering BTC as a payment method, it's certainly a choice you can make, but it won't encourage people to adopt BTC. That was why I said that a better option (if you wanted to encourage people to adopt BTC) would be to price in BTC period and not make USD equivalences. This is operating within the BTC economy, much like a local grocer in the UK operates within the UK economy, rather than straddling and expecting the use of currency exchange that is a hassle, slow, and increases cost to the buyer. OTOH, there's no obligation to "promote" Bitcoin adoption, so there's nothing "wrong" with what you're doing -- it just doesn't help the growth of Bitcoin.


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## balaspa (Dec 27, 2009)

For me Amazon is not the best option because of the big "Buy" button, but because it gets a lot more exposure than my website or other areas. It's having a kiosk in the largest mall on the planet, rather than a storefront in a mall that only a few people go to.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

Crenel said:


> Where are you getting any of this? *None of this is correct.*


Got it directly from the Dwolla Website.

Admittedly, things may have changed since I last looked at Dwolla-but they don't put their price tables in an easy to access spot to assess what they are offering unless you sign up for an account. I was aware that back in June they announced pricing changes. Looks like they went through with it. As I said above, perhaps I should take another look.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

WDR said:


> Got it directly from the Dwolla Website.
> 
> Admittedly, things may have changed since I last looked at Dwolla--but they don't put their price tables in an easy to access spot to assess what they are offering unless you sign up for an account. I was aware that back in June they announced pricing changes. Looks like they went through with it. As I said above, perhaps I should take another look.


Then you must have grossly misunderstood their site when you looked at it before -- and this has nothing to do with them changing anything. I've been a user of their services for years and what you posted was never true. This isn't arguable opinion, this is verifiable fact. Even your statement that they don't put their pricing in an easy to access spot is a bit ridiculous since they link to it from their home page and -- logically, since they're largely competing on price -- have always been up front about their service being free or extremely low-cost (25¢ for transactions $10 and up, until they dropped that too). I am skeptical that anyone could look at their site -- now or at any time I've seen it in the past several years -- and honestly believe such wildly inaccurate things.


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## Chad Winters (Oct 28, 2008)

Crenel said:


> Then you must have grossly misunderstood their site when you looked at it before -- and this has nothing to do with them changing anything. I've been a user of their services for years and what you posted was never true. This isn't arguable opinion, this is verifiable fact. Even your statement that they don't put their pricing in an easy to access spot is a bit ridiculous since they link to it from their home page and -- logically, since they're largely competing on price -- have always been up front about their service being free or extremely low-cost (25¢ for transactions $10 and up, until they dropped that too). I am skeptical that anyone could look at their site -- now or at any time I've seen it in the past several years -- and honestly believe such wildly inaccurate things.


I just went to Dwolla.com and found it vague and confusing. No details on pricing, at least without signing up for an account. I clicked on pricing and again no details. It's possible you see more details as you are logged in within an account. Or we are all dishonest

"Send and receive money at no cost.

Open a free account and get free access to our API, MassPay and recurring payments.

Sign up"


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

Chad Winters said:


> I just went to Dwolla.com and found it vague and confusing. No details on pricing, at least without signing up for an account. I clicked on pricing and again no details. It's possible you see more details as you are logged in within an account. Or we are all dishonest
> 
> "Send and receive money at no cost.
> 
> ...


What part of "free" and "no cost" do you not understand?


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

Chad Winters said:


> Or we are all dishonest


I'm not giving labels to anybody, but the facts are plainly visible for those want to look at them. This thread has had plenty of ignore-the-facts noise about Bitcoin and the thread itself, and now about Dwolla? On one hand I'd like to know the motivation for being so unwilling to look at and acknowledge simple facts, but on the other hand I don't really care what goes on in your head, I just don't want anyone else to be fooled by misinformation. For those who don't want to visit Dwolla's not-hidden-at-all pricing page, here's a screen grab with annotation:



http://imgur.com/giNMl10

(click for full resolution)


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## Chad Winters (Oct 28, 2008)

How about how much do you get for free before you have to move to Plus or Premium or Custom, what are the differences. We are all used to Freemium pricing. Do you get 3 payments per month before you have to move up to the paid version? I know nothing about Dwolla and don't care but these are the questions I had and could not find answers to. Plus is everything you need to get started so is the only difference between Free and $25 per month next day transfers? How long do transfers take if you're free? Premium is for larger amounts so what is the cuttoff amount for a free account?


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

Chad Winters said:


> How about how much do you get for free before you have to move to Plus or Premium or Custom, what are the differences.


So you've gone from "no details on pricing" (your words) to "not enough details about pricing to answer my personal curiosity" (my summary of your later words) -- big difference, given the binary nature of your prior statement and the spectrum nature of your later post. I'm not going to waste time chasing moving goalposts. The information needed to evaluate Dwolla is readily available for those who want it; I'm guessing you want something else, for whatever reasons make sense to you. As I said, I don't care what goes on in your head, I just don't want other people to be misinformed by you or others. I think I've already given enough information for anyone who is sincerely interested to get the facts (as in, the truth, not the misinformation).


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## Chad Winters (Oct 28, 2008)

http://www.wired.com/2016/01/thought-bitcoin-was-dead-2016-is-the-year-it-goes-big/all/1?mbid=nl_1516
Thought Bitcoin Was Dead? 2016 Is the Year It Goes Big"

"We're going to come full circle back to bitcoin," he says. "In 2015, we saw a lot of financial institutions, banks, thought leaders say: 'It's not about bitcoin, it's about blockchain.' That is a mistruth."
---------------------------------------------

is mistruth a word?


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

Chad Winters said:


> http://www.wired.com/2016/01/thought-bitcoin-was-dead-2016-is-the-year-it-goes-big/all/1?mbid=nl_1516
> Thought Bitcoin Was Dead? 2016 Is the Year It Goes Big"
> 
> "We're going to come full circle back to bitcoin," he says. "In 2015, we saw a lot of financial institutions, banks, thought leaders say: 'It's not about bitcoin, it's about blockchain.' That is a mistruth."
> ...


Interesting article. I'm not sure I wholly agree with the premise of the title that 2016 will be the _Year of the Bitcoin_. I think there is still a long way to go. But I do see acceptance of the Bitcoin solidifying at the institutional level. In particular, acceptance of the underlying technology that drives the Bitcoin. And accepting the technology and its use also brings the Bitcoin into use as well.

The quote used above was from Adam White, V.P. of Development and Strategy at Coinbase, a U.S. company that trades and converts Bitcoin to other currencies. Thus, the quote should be taken with a grain of salt as White has a vested interest in promoting use of Bitcoins.

There was a link another article related to this one about CoinBase creating a Bitcoin-based debit card. Both articles point out that most transactions with Bitcoins (80%+) are people who are speculating with it. Coinbase is hoping by offering a card that uses bitcoins rather than local currency they can encourage both consumers and merchants to start using bitcoins directly.

I think this usage is more important to the average consumer because it creates a vehicle by which Bitcoins can be used directly at stores without requiring stores to directly accept the bitcoin and have the technology on hand to receive bitcoin payments. For people wondering how it works, it is the same as using your credit card for purchases in another country. When the transaction in _Quatloos_ is posted, it would already be converted into your local currency. This conversion takes place automatically for the consumer.

Of course, the issue with this is that one still cannot just walk into any store and spend a Bitcoin directly. One still needs an account with Coinbase in order for this transaction to occur. You cannot yet spend Bitcoins from a wallet address for which you alone hold the key. But, this is a step in that direction.

It is an interesting step in the evolution of the process by which we exchange of wealth. I'm looking forward to seeing where this continues.


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