"Today we are announcing FiatCoin, a new cryptocurrency that addresses the criticisms of previous cryptocurrencies by employing the best practices of fiat currencies."

https://medium.com/@stevedekorte/fiatcoin-pre-sale-announcement-e2cf5a361629#.lzuxrwpwk

I'm a bit disappointed that in both of the posts I've made about Bitmarkets on the bitcointalk.org forums, most of the responses were about altcoins. Is there a subforum specific to Bitcoin that I should be posting to instead?

Thanks! We're not committed long term to Bitmessage, but it looked like the only practical and working solution at the time. We'd be happy to move to any solid working solution for messaging that's an improvement over Bitmessage and can maintain privacy&anonymity, scale to our needs and address the problem of spam (Bitmessage does that via proof of work stamps).

The seller puts up 1x the price of the item and the buyer puts up 2x (1x for deposit, 1x for payment). These amounts aren't adjustable yet. The white paper explains why we choose a 1to1 deposit ratio.

Basically, Bitmarkets is based on two party escrow and focused on privacy. Other markets rely 2of3 multisig and escrow agents but 1) agents have no means of fairly resolving disputes (as they only have one person's word vs another) and 2) 2of3 exposes the user to exit scams as both other signers may be the same party (this has happened many times in dark markets using 2of3).

This is covered in this slide deck: https://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/slides/Bitmarkets.pdf

It's possible to use this system to exchange cash for cryptocurrencies by physically mailing the cash while being confident the other party will sign the payment once the cash is received as they will otherwise lose their deposit part of the transaction.

There's no profit motive or investment and we work on this for fun so there is nothing to lose.
I'd be happy even if it only inspires people to think about and work on these problems.

Btw, I think you did some nice design work on the Shadow website. Are there screen shots of the app somewhere?

Let me guess, you have some premined altcoins to sell us?

Here's the video:

    https://vimeo.com/135888102

Bitmarkets is an anonymous decentralized market based on two party mutual security deposit escrow.

It's fully peer to peer (no central servers), no fees, no middle men, no altcoin,
built on Bitmessage, Bitcoin and Tor, open protocol and source, working today.

website: http://bitmarkets.org

slides: https://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/slides/Bitmarkets.pdf

white paper: https://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/whitepaper/

I'd be happy to answer any questions and hear your thoughts on it.

No plans for fundraising atm. If there's enough interest in making the client multi-platform at some point, we'll probably look into it.

I'm guessing it wouldn't be difficult to support any altcoin that's a fork of bitcoin but we don't see any good reason to support them. Also, we'd like to keep the client as simple as possible.

We call it a privacy protecting network.

Thanks jcooper. Yes, Bitmarkets has no altcoin. It's hard to tell exactly what BitBay is doing from briefly looking at their site (unclear how escrow their works) so I'm not sure how to compare them. Bitmarkets is an independent project (not based on previous market code bases). I don't recall seeing the bithalo white paper.

Today we're releasing Bitmarkets, a client for private decentralized marketplaces. It's based on Bitcoin two party escrow and uses Bitmessage and Tor for privacy. Open source, free and no fees.

Application, source, white paper and protocol spec available at:

http://voluntary.net/bitmarkets

First version available for Max OS X 10.9 or higher.
Note: This is an early beta. It works but it's not polished. Any feedback would be really helpful.

I think you'll be able find a seller at this event tonight:

http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Bitcoin-Social/

It's also a safe public place with lots of helpful folks that understand how to do bitcoin transactions.

Yes, but not if it had that stock photo and speech bubble on it's site.

"Where do you take the number $500k from? Just imagination, some sort of calculation?"

 The world gold supply is valued at around $12T. Should bitcoin effectively replace gold as the global decentralized ledger of choice, each BTC would be worth ~$550K in 2013 dollars ($15T/21M).

There are other factors like the alternatives and their risks over that period (e.g. the S&P has nearly doubled in nominal value over the last two years and there are many high yield bonds of questionable risk) but I'd guess 0.1% is a fair estimate of what the market considers the likelihood of BTC having roughly the current market cap of gold in 10 years.

Of course, the market is made almost entirely of traders who have no way to accurately evaluate the risk (if they could, we wouldn't have bubbles). Even understanding Bitcoin itself requires a good understanding of computer science and economics - what % of traders have a firm grasp of both? And who can predict the global economic climate over the next decade or what financial regulation and monetary policies will be chosen? Anyone that could might easily make more over that period than even this potential 5000x ROI on BTC.

Might Germany be more hospitable?

Would consider it for 1750 BTC in mutually trusted escrow.

The websocket API is great - thanks for making it available.

I'm working on a tutorial for how the blockchain works that uses real time data and if you could add an optional argument to the ping api:

{"op":"ping_block", block_hash}

it would allow the tutorial to browse some recent blocks immediately after it's opened.

Cheers,
Steve

Imagine that bitcoin becomes ubiquitous and instead of fighting it, government embraces it.

Every business is given a unique tax-id wallet and told that all of the business' transactions must be sent through this wallet. The government owns the private keys for these wallets and takes a cut (taxes) and sends the rest to the business' after-tax wallet which the business owns.

Tax enforcement is as easy as sending agents to make purchases and observing whether the transaction goes through the business' tax-id wallet. The government could also provide a public list of business names and their wallet-ids and make it a crime for anyone to purchase anything from them through a wallet other than these.

Bitcoin would then have provided the perfect means for government to control all economic activity.

Note: I'm a big fan of btc and only mention this in the context of preparing to avoid it.