The page at https://writelog.com/ordering accepts bitcoin payments for
WriteLog as of this morning.
Why?
Its because I am interested in what bitcoin is, what it can and cannot do;
interested enough that I was willing to invest the week or so of my time to
implement an online store front that accepts bitcoin. I consider myself a
technologist in the old tradition of amateur radio operators that have taken
on new technologies, evaluated them, and figured out how to put them to use.
(some of you have been using contesting software long enough to recall that
WriteLog was the first Windows logger and, as far as I am concerned, remains
the best one at accommodating what Windows users expect in desktop
software.)
Never heard of bitcoin?
Its promotional website is http://bitcoin.org.
To see the negative side of bitcoin, do this google search:
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=why+bitcoin+will+fail
Short summary:
It is a form of money. It is like existing currencies in several ways:
You can accept it as payment like cash, and you can spend it like cash.
Those transactions are (almost) anonymous, like cash.
It is not backed by gold or anything else, its value is what people will
pay for it (just like US dollars)
It is not like existing currencies in that:
It is mathematically extremely difficult--presumably impossible--to
print it or otherwise generate it out of thin air.
It exists only in digital form--a bitcoin is a string of numbers.
You are prevented from double-spending a bitcoin in a very different way
from traditional money. (Two-sentence primer: you can't spend the same
dollar twice because when I pay you a dollar it disappears from my wallet.
If I pay you a bitcoin, I can't spend it twice because my first spend is
published in a public ledger that everyone on the planet can see and refuse
to accept a second spend of it.)
Its security depends on a cooperating network of computers that need
trust each other only in a very limited way, and the economic incentives
designed into the system are such that the computational costs of subverting
the system are (probably) more than the value of the bitcoin's you can
possibly gain should you succeed at subverting it.
Assumption: The security claims above remain true only if the world's
cryptographic standards remain uncracked. (That is, as long as it remains
computationally impossible to derive private keys from public ones.) If/when
crypto standards are defeated, the world will have a lot more serious
problems than a few stolen bitcoins wandering the internet.
I have begun to study the techniques and cryptography behind bitcoin and am
convinced it is not some elaborate scam, but is an honest attempt to create
digital money. I am an interested user (but not an expert), see no
mathematical flaws, and people I trust have studied it and not seen any. Its
success or failure over time will be determined mostly by people's adoption
of it, or refusal to adopt it, which will be based on many, many
hard-to-predict events that can be technical, political, economic, or
otherwise.
If you would like to learn more, there is lots of information on
http://bitcoin.org. If you are looking for references, I will mention the
products I use, but this is NOT an endorsement of them. I manage my own
bitcoins using the wallet software I downloaded from http://multibit.org. I
exchange bitcoin with US dollars using an account I set up at
http://coinbase.com. WriteLog.com uses the services at
http://blockchain.info. I don't have anything particularly good or bad to
say about any of these organizations except to say that all the information
they publish about themselves appears to be truthful, that is, none of them
have lied to me that I have noticed yet.
If you want to delve into this deeper, here is a test you can do that costs
you no money, but will show you something about how the bitcoin system
works.
Download and install a bitcoin wallet. I use the one at http://multibit.org.
After you get the writelog.com bitcoin purchase page as far as it will go
(when you see a QR code--square peppered with smaller black and white
squares) you can test one more step, as follows.
With that writelog.com page on the screen, and with the QR code displayed,
right mouse click in the QR code. Your objective is to copy the QR code to
the Windows clipboard as an image. On Firefox, the menu entry is "Copy
Image". Do that.
Then bring up multibit, go to its "Send' screen, and click its Paste icon.
(The Paste icon is the middle one in the right hand panel). Doing that
should read the QR code you copied above and now you're ready to send money.
You should see some new indicators on the screen about sending (about)
$29.00 for WriteLog. To go any further, you need to own some bitcoins.
Wayne, W5XD
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