Sorry I meant currently living in Glasgow, although you expedition is so long it's hard to tell 

Hi crazyearner

I'm one of the organisers of Bitcoin Manchester, maxsan is the other. (He has a profile on here, but like me, doesn't follow this forum any more.)

You are right, we did have a meetup in December, here is our announcement. Jonny Bitcoin was talking about BitShares and we had cake   We put up some photos on our Meetup.com event (this is the first of our events we've used Meetup for).

The biggest obstacle to regular meetups is organising speakers. We've had some good ones in the recent past, including Judith Aldridge of Manchester University talking about Silk Road and darknet markets, and Gulnar Hasnain of the Green Party talking about Bitcoin in politics.  We are limited by the number of potential speakers in (or able to travel to) Manchester. What partly compounds the problem is that I am currently living in Poland, and Max is currently in Glasgow, which makes coming back to run events much more difficult, and unfortunately rules out us filling in when we have no speaker due to the time and cost involved.

In short, we're doing the best we can given our constraints. If you have any ideas for sessions we could run (topics, speakers, etc), please let us know! We can be reached at hello@bitcoinmanchester.org.uk.

I'd just like to request BitBay.net be added to BitcoinWisdom. Their trading platform works well and it's a useful option in Europe – they offer USD, EUR and PLN.

Hey, the link is great, thanks for that. QR code works great too, just scanned it off my MBP screen with my iPhone.

About the mtgox/tradehill accounts… maybe it's already time you need "verified" accounts like Twitter?

I had a thought about PAYB.TC - would it be useful to have a link from an address page to the address's blockexplorer.com page? I just went to look up my own address, it'd save a copy and paste if nothing else

Wow, someone sent me a 0.5BTC tip to the payb.tc address I included at the end of the slides. I'm going to assume it was someone from here… thank you whoever it was

Haha, it's a fun game to play! One of my mates sat down with me in the pub the night before I gave the presentation and came out with the term Quantitative Easing before he'd even seen the slides. I awarded him 10 points :-)

I have bought silver from MJB Monetary Metals http://mjbmonetarymetals.co.uk/

I've never bought silver from Midas Bitcoin as I'm too suspicious of their anonymous nature.

HTH
Ash

Hi all,

This weekend I ran a session called The BarCamper's Guide to Bitcoin at BarCamp Nottingham (that's in the UK, in case there's a more famous Nottingham in the US).

Slides, references, and a little background are on my blog: http://aviewfromafar.net/the-barcampers-guide-to-bitcoin

I only half-know what I'm talking about regarding the Bitcoin protocol (and economics, for that matter), so feedback and corrections are welcome :-)

Quite a few people people turned up to the session. I showed some live trading after, which started a very long discussion about traceability of transactions (we spent a while on the Block Explorer too). I've learnt that once someone is interesting in figuring out what you can do with the information in the Bitcoin network, it's easy to talk literally for several hours about it!

Ash

I've just upgraded to Lion, and switching from the old to the new FileVault has solved the disk access problem. It's now down from several MB/s to on average about 200kB/s.

I think the problem before was that with Legacy FileVault, the large size of the block chain file meant it was repeatedly writing many home folder disk image bands. With the new full-disk encryption FileVault, that doesn't happen.

Yes, I don't expect they will change. Like I say, wasn't suggesting anything would go wrong with payb.tc (I've already got my tip jar name - http://payb.tc/ashmoran - which I've given to friends), just that the principle of address shorteners involves more trust than, say, URL shorteners.

Might put my payb.tc link in my sig, in fact…

Is there any way to make shortened addresses verifiable?

Right now you have to trust the owner of a shortener to not change addresses. Eg the owner of EVILB.TC might shorten http://evilb.tc/yourname honestly for a few weeks (or months, or years) then suddenly change the address (or all of them on the site) to one of his own.

Short, memorable names for Bitcoin addresses are great, but is there any way to achieve them without (or with less) centralised trust?

Note: I'm not saying that PAYB.TC is evil :-)

They do. Unfortunately you still need one to make the computer turn on though!

I can understand anyone reluctant to give away an email address. As my email is plastered over most of the internet it doesn't bother me personally, but everyone is different.

I'm not sure that the way it is worded implies they will give away anything other than the listed information though.

They may have made a marketing error in choosing to disclose email addresses. But applying Hanlon's Razor, I don't (personally) see any reason to suspect malice.

There's a non-EU version on there for people to show their support, but it hasn't attracted many names.

Yes, person-to-person transfers are possible, but have much less liquidity than trading with dealers. And ultimately, at some point VAT will have been paid on it.

Just wondered if anyone here has signed the Say No to VAT on Silver petition?

My first Bitcoin purchase was a Canadian silver maple, and I would like to be able to trade Bitcoin<->silver freely. Sadly, the EU classifying silver as "consumption" damages its investment potential.

The petition only has a few signatories so far, maybe a few Bitcoin users would be interesting in adding their name.

Mick at Mjbmonetarymetals is an honest seller (UK bullion dealer)

I bought a small amount of silver from him, twice, and it was posted the same day both times.

I'm still a newbie so I can't post this in the marketplace. I've got these two items on eBay UK, and I'll happily take Bitcoins for them. Postage is free on the CPU if you pay by Bitcoin :-)

• Intel Core i3 2100 3.1GHz LGA1155 CPU
• Cooler Master HAF X case (almost brand new)

I've had no Bitcoin enquiries about the CPU, but I feel it's a little bit of promotion for the currency offering it, at least...

So I dug into the command line options, and then found this thread: client command line option -wallet= in addition to -datadir=?

Basically there's no easy way to run the standard Bitcoin.app (ie the Mac app) with the data directory in a different location, and even on the command line, there's no way to specify a different location for the wallet.

Does anyone see this as an issue? As it stands, running the app on a Mac with FileVault basically renders the machine unusable. I don't know what it's like on an SSD, but I suspect it could drastically shorten the life of the drive.

I'm trying to imagine getting my mum to use Bitcoin, and having to explain why her hard drive is constantly clicking and her machine slows down when it's open. I'm trying not to imagine telling her how to run the app from the command line with a wallet symlinked to a different location.

One of the problems (or "properties" at least) of online communities is they naturally evolve into monocultures. So while thing like http://www.biddingpond.com/ are laudable efforts to get a Bitcoin economy going, they're going to struggle to ever be as useful as eBay until BTC becomes preferable to fiat currency, assuming eBay itself doesn't allow listing and bidding in BTC.

I just put a CPU up for sale on eBay UK and I've offered to accept payment in BTC (in fact, I've offered to waive the postage costs as an incentive, just to see if anyone will bite!) and it gave me an idea.

A useful website would be one that lets you track eBay auctions that are taking payment in BTC. Some sort of convention (eg embedding a certain URL) could even indicate that it is a BTC auction automatically. This would get over the usual barrier of needing to create a community first. It would allow an auction economy to bootstrap off the back off the eBay community. There's a load of technicalities to worry about (how to handle the exchange rate etc), but it may be worth thinking through.

Maybe this idea has been discussed before (if so, sorry for the noise!) but if not I hope someone considers it useful. I'm actually a web developer myself, but I have too many other things on at the moment to have a go at this. I'm hoping someone else thinks it would useful enough to actually go and make it :-)