On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 12:19, Gary Mulder <flyingkiwiguy@gmail.com> wrote:

One key feature of Bitcoin is that a transaction is non-revocable. Once you send Bitcoins to a Bitcoin wallet address, the Bitcoins are irrevocably

Incidentally, and this is something that needs to be said out of due dilligence, this is what helped kill e-cash in the 90's when some of the cypherpunks came in from the cold and started their own e-cash ventures. We can't forget that chargebacks are how banks make a lot of money, and they still don't know how to act when that's not possible.

Therefore nobody accepts PayPal for Bitcoin purchases. Credit cards also

Paypal also started locking the accounts of people who were accepting currency in exchange for Bitcoins. So far as I know, those accounts are still locked out and the funds in them are still frozen.

have identical issues. Also, get the destination Bitcoin address wrong and the Bitcoins sent can never be recovered by anyone

That is a huge, huge problem. On the desktop/laptop side that's mitigated by cut-and-paste. It's also a good argument for escrow of funds - to catch that problem. On the mobile side, I know a few people are working on QRcodes for exchange of Bitcoin account codes.

If you want to confirm GBP into Bitcoins you need to use a Bitcoin exchange. The guys at http://www.intersango.com accept SEPA and bank transfers to their Lloyds TSB account. The funds usually show up in your exchange account around 1 business day later. I know the guys running Intersango, and they are legit. and are based in London and Poland. Having said that they've had to change from HSBC to Lloyds as HSBC was giving them a lot of problems, so don't make any large deposits. http://www.mtgox.com is the other large exchange which is based in France and Japan. The major weakness in Bitcoin

Also remember that MTgox got pwned but good a couple of weeks ago. Confidence in them tanked as a result.

are the exchanges, as they're they interface between normal currencies and the Bitcoin ecosystem, and so suffer all the problems and risks of both systems, i.e. regulation, security, and technical issues.

On the less legitimate side, there are a number of people out there with fairly high reputation scores on darknet fora who convert one-time-use Greendot codes into Bitcoins in an anonymous manner. They're pretty highly ranked on the Silk Road. On the Third Black Market, not so much, but time will show who's good at it and who's not. What I'm curious about (though I probably shouldn't be) is how the exchangers in question are cashing out their Greendot and Moneypak cards because (in the US at least) they have to be tied to a government acknowledged identity, which torpedos anonymity.

Caveat emptor - this is the Wild Wild West of currency.

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