Topic: Announcement Regarding State Rep Mark Warden's Bitcoin Strategy (Read 5912 times)

Max Keiser's website mentions Rep Mark Warden and Bitcoin

http://maxkeiser.com/

An in-depth explanation of how Rep. Mark Warden accepts bitcoins, and how other politicians can do the same, is posted on our new blog:

http://www.howtoacceptbitcoin.com/

Very good points.

I would say that at least half of our merchants have tried the "do-it-yourself" way to accept bitcoins before they came to BitPay.   

These businesses are wiling to take a chance on a new technology.

If you want more businesses to accept bitcoin, you have to make it easy for them.  Business owners want to spend time growing their business, not futzing around with learning and automating bitcoind and all the other nuances related to bitcoin.  They are more than willing to pay an expert to manage that for them.

+1

That has been said many times but it requires repeating. Bitcoin by itself will never be convenient enough for everyone. Some organizations and some people will want to use third party services for convenience and other reasons. Bitcoin however enables people to not use third parties if they want to do it themselves. It's a choice that really hasn't existed before.

Bitcoin doesn't require that people forgo third-parties to be successful, it only enables it.  If Bitcoin users, especially ones with high legal liabilities (such as political candidates that can be ruined by the appearance of shady financing practices) want to pay third parties to help them do it right, then let them do it!  The important part is that they have a choice to do it without third parties.  And other candidates can do it.  Don't call it a failure just because someone was willing to pay a fee to simplify their own operations.

He could certainly do it without Bitpay but it would require setting up a form and setting up a Bitcoin wallet etc etc.

Some people don't understand that Bitpay will be here, and it will be big, even if Bitcoin becomes a universal currency. It's a service industry that will have demand even if exchanging bitcoins to fiat no longer has! Exchanges will experience less demand than Bitpay in the very long term if Bitcoin really succeeds.

Currency risk is not the main reason to use Bitpay, I'd say convenience is the bigger reason. That will continue to be the case because sometimes outsourcing simply is better even if it could be done in a do-it-yourself way.

Baby steps...

If it needs intermediaries like bitpay to be "totally-compliant", then bitcoin failed. Bitpay deserves honor for all they are doing for bitcoin and there are many businesses that I guess are better off using their service for now but if you really need this middle man to do a donation (hey, here there is no danger of double-spends or volatility to eliminate.) then I can't cheer for joy.

Edit: I get an "internal server error" when i middle-mouse-click aka open in new window the "Bitcoin order now" buttons.

Also it's slightly confusing that the shopping cart accumulates my several clicks. When I clicked the $10 button and it said "approximately $150" I checked at mtgloxlive if BTC just exploded before I realized my shopping cart was full with other donations. The cart content is color:#666; font-size:.9em;. Why? Why not show the customer what he's buying with #0 and 1.3em?

This is great. Bitcoin IS suitable for just about anything, for some cases it just requires a service to help make it happen in the right way.

Great job!  This is a model that other candidates can follow.  If you support alternative currencies, and you are running for office, you can accept bitcoin and be compliant with campaign finance laws!

UPDATE:

Mark Warden's new, totally-compliant, Bitcoin contributions page just launched:

http://www.markwarden.com/page/bitcoin-donation

Agreed 100%.

Everything you mentioned is crazy corner cases.  It would be extremely rare that someone would lose their private key or somehow lose it in a scam.  Even things like Casascius physical BTC are usually swept to your wallet (or imported) before you can send it on.  

That's not to say that it doesn't happen, but we shouldn't let extreme corner cases dominate what is otherwise a perfect solution.  Put up the appropriate warnings, and if the donor absoloutely insists that the sending coins back to the addresses would result in permanent loss or theft, Mark can donate them to charity.

Update here:

New Hampshire Deputy Secretary of State Recognizes Bitcoin Contributions

sent 0.25 BTC and an email.

Good luck!

Oh, I think I misunderstood you. You mean after he puts up a warning it is ok, I agree. Same as satoshi dice etc.

I was thinking about the situation where they didn't do that and want to get rid of the coins.

I know they aren't black holes, it could be an address assigned to another user (or Mark! as in my hypothetical) or an intermediate/cold storage address of the wallet provider.

Slightly different point also, you cannot in general assume that paying to an address is equal to paying a person unless they explicitly agree it will count as payment because they may have lost the private key or not be looking there anymore or sold it to someone in a foolhardy firtsbits collecting scheme.

Given the situation Mark is in it is impossible to return the coins to the senders, he's not accomplishing the desired undonating. But since he's only trying to convince bureaucrats who won't understand anything that comes with a sentiment of "I'm sorry I did something strange regarding money and I tried my best to undo it" will probably work unless they hate him.

I don't understand.  Those sending addresses are not black holes.  The coins are not lost.  It just has to be sorted out with Gox customer support, etc.  Having a transaction ID and a signed message from Mark should be enough.

Plus, this is a condition that shouldn't happen -- there should be a huge warning on the donation page about it.  If donors don't pay attention to the warning, then their punishment is dealing with Mt Gox support to recover the funds.

Perhaps for donations that happened so far, before people realized this, they can be returned via user-supplied address.  That would be justifiable as "growing pains" of figuring out this process -- especially because it's not a ton of money Mark has received so far.  However, future donations should follow this policy, and there should be some explicit warnings about it on the donation page.

I'm surprised to see MikeHearn and etotheipi saying to send back to sending addresses.

I would be really upset if I used my bitcoins to donate to Mark and they ended up in MtGox or instawallet's slush fund.

There isn't a way to safely return bitcoins and I don't think Mark blasting off what people gave him to who knows where in order to maybe satisfy potential bureaucrats complaints is terrible. Worse than never accepting them at all by long shot.

How about this:

Bureaucrat says: Mark we see what you did, pretending to return all of those coins by sending them to the sending address recorded in the blockchain, now you need to prove to us that you don't own any accounts which are attached to those receiving addresses. For all we know you made deposits to 1000 instawallets and 5000 MtGox deposit addresses before announcing that you were accepting bitcoin donations. You fully knew that some people would be paying from those popular wallet services and chances are that some of the coins would be paid from accounts with addresses associated to your accounts. So you 'returned' the coins to some of your own addresses. It's clever Mark, but not clever enough. The possibility that you retained any of those coins invalidates your campaign for breach of XXXX regulation.

Mark: .......

Don't let the fear interfere with clear thinking. Things you are describing are pretty much already a norm with usd transactions. The awesomeness of Bitcoin is in its openness and symmetry of power: anyone can read and write the blockchain. You could vote for those who will instate watching-only wallets for government accounts. The public could then keep representatives accountable for how public funds are managed. Things that scare you could easily be turned around and used as a weapon against corruption and abuse of power. Transparency is already there today, but only as a one-way mirror, a mass-surveillance Panopticon. I see Bitcoin, Wikileaks, and similar phenomena as tools of restoring the balance of power, making transparency work both ways.

I think this is brilliant.  I'm an Armory user, but I don't know what feedback to offer other than that I've created several offline wallets with watching-only properties on other systems and I absolutely love the functionality of it.