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 'Tis the season and I'm thinking about how to give bitcoin as a gift, to non-technical people, without requiring them to do anything like create an account or download software in order to accept it. Paper Wallet Bitcoin paper wallets have been around a long time.  The concept is simple.  Generate a send/receive address pair (private/public key pair) and print them on a piece of paper.  Basic operations: To add bitcoin to the wallet, send some bitcoin to the receive address To check your balance, type or scan the public key into any blockchain explorer  To gift that bitcoin, just hand over the piece of paper To send the bitcoin on the blockchain, type or scan the private key into the bitcoin wallet software of your choice Pros: simple, no fancy hardware or software required for them to receive the bitcoin Cons: No guarantee that the giver didn't keep a copy of the private key Private key could be easy for someone else to see/copy Private key could be easily los...

Stripe announced bitcoin support .  There has been much discussion on hacker news about it .  Lots of people are not seeing the benefits of bitcoin over credit cards for individual shoppers. They talk about the fraud protection that credit cards provide them as customers and the 1% or whatever cash back they get on each purchase from the credit card companies that they would be giving up.  I don't think they fully understand the trade-offs here. First of all, the cash back.  Credit card companies are charging merchants a percentage of each transaction larger than the 1% whatever they are giving you back (how else do they stay in business?).  What people may be forgetting is that retailers are not just eating that percentage cost that the credit cards are charging them.  They are most definitely passing that cost on to all of us consumers in the form of higher prices.  If enough transactions happened with bitcoin that would lower prices for all of us....

Summary: ads are gone, send me bitcoin to say thanks instead. I have always kept notes for myself to remind myself how to do various things. I have also kept a journal since a very young age where I often include opinions and thoughts on various matters. At some point, years ago, I got the idea that I should post some of the notes and thoughts in case they would help someone else. That requires a lot more work than just typing stuff quickly into a text file, though, so I needed a little more motivation. I mean, sharing and helping others is great motivation, but when I read about Adsense from Google, and how Google could show people links to products and services related to my posts, and I could make a few bucks if people thought those links were useful and clicked on them, and how it could help out the people providing those products and services as well, it felt like this great intertwined synergy of helping people out and possibly even gaining some monetary reward as well. An...