Hey, I just wanted to share this library I put together, because Chain looks really promising as a way to quickly put together a Bitcoin app. I'm particularly excited about it because I'm currently using Coinbase for payment notifications, and it's been a huge pain.
- Trying to making small payments is terrible; the only way to tell whether a transaction requires fees is to try it, see it fail, and parse the error message to figure out the fee amount.
- The "order" abstraction is bad because it assumes customers will always pay the exact order amount, which is false because users make mistakes (especially since the order page instructs the customer to add miner's fees, and if they do, the amount will be wrong and the order gets reported to us as "mispaid"). I had to put a lot of time into writing our own documentation about how order statuses work, particularly mispaid orders - from trial-and-error that unfortunately had to include some bad customer experiences. Perhaps the worst problem is that when a customer makes multiple payments on an order, they show up in the web interface, but not in the API.
- When you request an email address on the payment page, Coinbase doesn't check that it's a valid address.
- choose_price on orders doesn't work.
- The API just needs more consistency. There are entities with statuses named "complete", "completed", and "Complete". There are things called "hash" and "hsh". The order API gives a number of confirmations for a transaction, but the transaction API doesn't.
You'll end up spending an amount of BTC that is equivalent to 90% of the cost of your coffee. So, an example: If you choose the $10 option, and $10 is worth 10mBTC (exchange rate made up to simplify the math), then you'd pay 9mBTC and have $10 available to spend at Starbucks. If you then spend $5 of that at Starbucks, you'll end up receiving a refund of 4.5mBTC (the equivalent of the remaining $5).
So you put USD on Starbucks gift cards, sell the code to be used for a drink and receive the money in BTC. You're amassing BTC from disparate sources but it seems you'd be paying a slight premium, however you wouldn't need to register with any exchange.
You do get a pre-loading bonus of bitcoins to play with and you can use those to generate profits - like 1000 people put $10 worth of BTC on the app, spend $5 on a coffee then you have $5000 in BTC to "play" with, eg to sell on.
Hm... not sure how long we'll keep it up. The discount is a promotion, but I imagine we'll keep it in some form as marketing for the product. 10% is a nice number, but we'll test it. As pointed out in other comments, it beats Starbucks's own program, which I like.
We can afford the discount by saving money elsewhere. No credit card fees, etc.
Someone in Vietnam released software to the world, therefore this is a story about American culture. That's just how Americans think. It's also necessarily about modern American culture, even if you know absolutely nothing about the past.
Rolling Stone isn't going to run an article about the impact of Flappy Bird on culture in Tazmania or Greece; while it would be tangentially interesting, the subject's incredibly small proximity to the life of the average reader of the American version of Rolling Stone means it won't have the same impact.
Not a "just how Americans think" issue, a "what is relevant to our readers' lives" issue.
Aren't you are proving the parent's point there? You say that only articles depicting their own culture are seem as relevant to the american reader, which is what he claims.
That's absolutely not the case in other places of the world. In some cases, even the opposite problem arises (that is, discriminating against your own country/culture and favouring a foreign one)
No, I said an article about a culture only tangentially related to the reader will be less relevant than an article directly related to the reader.
(To note, the article wasn't about American culture, it was a personal interest piece on a person who was unprepared for the effects of the success he experienced.)
If by "other places in the world" you mean areas that are small enough or have an ephemeral-enough regional identity to have developed strong codependent identities with other regions, then I would certainly agree.
Living in a number of places has shown me that, in larger countries/communities with defined identities, internally facing publications will publish stories that are strongly relevant to their reader.
Because, as I said, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to spend that sort of space on an article that wasn't relevant to the reader.
As a transplant to America I agree with the difference in cultures but to be fair, you're comparing "other places of the world," which tend to be much smaller and more homogenous that the US, to a country founded as a loose federation of states divided largely along political and religious lines.
Cultural diversity (and exceptionalism, etc) is all rolled into the DNA of the country.
Facebook in the headline gets readers, usually i would agree that using the name to spread the words is heinous, but the crimes against this kid are worse
How in the world do you fit a scam this big so far under the radar?